It used to exist, but not so much anymore. I miss heavily community based FPS multiplayer games. With custom servers and so on. I played Counter-Strike: Source last night, what a breath of fresh air!
Same, I played some Day Of Defeat: Source also a while back. I got onto a server, people were talking about random things and seemed to know each other, there was a sense of community, it felt like a local bar.
It’s 3am and I’m chilling and talking with strangers while surfing on CS:S. God, I miss this.
I miss that in newer games. It’s all matchmaking, all competitive and in many ways, modern games like this feels “no fun allowed”.
Pretty much. It’s always competitive. Always on the grind. You can’t just play for fun, no. You have to be at your best every time, because now, there is this skill-based matchmaking algorithm watching your every move in game and so on.
I feel like I’m starting to get old when I say this, but every time I go back to play one of those old games, I get reinforced in this idea… so many games feel like jobs nowadays. It’s just like the real world, it’s all so competitive. No fun allowed. You can’t ever be goofing around, you have your rank to worry about… every shooter now keeps on getting updated, the meta keeps on changing, and you have to keep up with it constantly otherwise you’ll get left behind.
I can’t put it into words exactly, so excuse me if what I’m going to say sounds odd… But I feel like most of the modern entertainment available to me is really stressful and I can’t explain it. To be honest, it’s the first time I’m voicing this feeling, but I find it really distressing…
I think that I fully understand how you feel. It’s pretty much why I stopped playing online games. I want to be able to not think about being good or absolutly winning every single game. Most of the time, I would rather prefer trying out “dumb” stuff in the game or simply having random conversations while having fun.
Destroyable environment like Company of Heroes but modern rts setting.
Cities Skylines in the latest Unreal Engine.
Stardew Valley in pretty 3D graphics with no tile system. Valheim comes close but the graphics, while unique, is far from highly detailed.
Teardown multiplayer shooter.
General a lot of single player could use a simple coop that’s just playing the game together. It’s very rare that coop is more of an addition than a game focus. While often I just wish I could share the fun with friends together. It’s sadly because of the complexity of adding coop, vs rewards when it’s “just” the same experience but with friends, instead of a competitive like mode where they can sell skins and shit.
I personally always wanted to build a battle ship simulator game with crew system and destructible ships, with harsh survival elements like in the movie Master and Commander. Where you’re very close in the action and ships get real impact holes. Most indie games don’t come close enough on the realism level I’d like to see. Sea of thieves is somewhat there.
Environmental Station Alpha is a good metroidvania IMO, and it has just over 1000 reviews on Steam. It has good platforming, combat, sound design, and chunky pixels. Not the most expansive or complex metroidvania, but it’s surprisingly polished and costs less than $10.
A true modern successor to The Guild (aka Europa 1400). That concept has soooo much potential imo, but the games after the first were notoriously underfunded, half-baked and riddled with bugs!
So, while INFRA already does fully exist, I’d love to see more games like it. It’s really hard to describe what INFRA is without major spoilers, but if you’ve played it then you probably know what I’m talking about.
It’s like… take the new Chernobyl game and remove literally all the death states, then fill it to the brim with easter eggs, lore content, secret rooms and pathways, challenging logic puzzles, stuff like that. INFRA ticked all those boxes for me and I have yet to find a game like it.
Every game that I’ve looked at and been recommended as being “like INFRA” always has some major flaw or some concession that really sets it apart from the original game. INFRA is pretty much all about exploring your surroundings to uncover the plot of the game and even change some of the story if you’re vigilant enough about the puzzles. You can literally complete the game just as a walking sim while doing fuck-all, but I think most players will find the intrigue of the story interesting enough to be almost coerced into going down the other fork in the road, so to speak. Like there are sections in every chapter where you have to use your knowledge in civil engineering to repair some sort of machinery using intermediate logic puzzles, but you’re always able to just skip it. However, completing these puzzles allows you to unlock the story as the puzzles require exploration. Hope that made sense.
I wasn’t expecting to see INFRA mentioned but it’s one of my favorite games for a lot of the reasons you mentioned! It really had a sense for exploration and environments to tell more of the story. And it really is part puzzle game without having any single gimmick like other first person games. It reminds me a lot of Half Life 2’s puzzles (which makes sense since INFRA was also built in Source as far as I can remember).
I’m really itching for more expansions or games like it. Not sure what happened to the DLC they were working on, but there were some groups working on mods.
My new pet theory is that CS:2 came out so that Valve had all their IP sitting at 2. So then at some point, when their audience is too old to play games anymore, and the youth don’t even know that Valve ever made games, they’ll release a 3-box with HL3, Portal 3, LFD 3, CS:3, TF3, and DOTA 3.
Back in the day I playtested this game concept under an NDA, but since it expired I can talk about it.
An FPS game in an open map with buildings, has 12 players playing but when someone dies, they respawn right there but swap to the opposite team. The last person to get shot gets eliminated and then the teams split again. This goes on until 6 players are remaining, who are declared the winning team.
You could mitigate that by coms only being proximity and no indication of how many players each team has. Thst would also make offensive playstyles preferable.
No, I don’t think that the levels become harder. They also gift so many free boosters to the players that it is way easier than 10 years ago when I first played the game.
I also feel like that after failing a level too often, that the game is cheating for you so that you don’t lose interest.
The game is “cheating” all the time. All the successful games with thousands of repetitive levels, go whale fishing and have engagement promoting strategies.
The general strategy is:
Introduce core mechanics “organically” over the first few levels, then keep a periodic “loading screen tip” reminder
Add a harder level every several easier ones
Introduce “boosters” with a few free ones
Dis-associate booster cost from real money cost by having an “in-game currency” (not actual currency) with some non-intuitive conversion ratios
Add a second kind of free-ish in-game currency to keep players used to making in-game purchases
If a player runs out of boosters, give them some free ones after a while
Improve user engagement with regular reminders and periodic offers
Promote FOMO with limited-time offers
Add mechanics with obvious MiniMax-ing strategies, that are however impossible for a person with a normal life to MiniMax, while offering a way to use in-game currencies to correct for that
Keep adding cosmetic changes
Introduce slightly new mechanics once in a while every a lot of levels, combine mechanics together if you’ve run out of ideas
For each level, have a predefined setup that makes it extremely easy to solve, along with normal generators that make them hard to solve
Use the easy setups to showcase new mechanics and boosters
Use the hard setups to make people want to spend boosters, and buy them, and use real money to purchase in-game currency to do that
Ideally, have a level generator with tunable difficulty that can be adapted for every user
Offer whales big spenders exclusive VIP levels, that require a lot of spending to win
Add one or more “leaderboards” for big spenders to showcase how much they spend good they are
Remove real world time clues for big spenders, don’t let them realize for how many hours they’ve been throwing their money away
If a big spender drops their spending or engagement level, shower them with offers, assign a personal manager, offer invitations to real world events… whatever it takes (up to a certain % of their expected monthly spending)
Periodically expand the game with hundreds and thousands of “new” levels… which follow the same rules
Bonus points if you add “seasons” and a “season pass”.
Extra bonus if you place and cross-promote a number of games with the same strategy but different cosmetic themes.
Casino mode: have thousands of “games” all in one, with different cosmetics, complex winning modes, and very simple mechanics (press button to spin, press button to auto-spin 1000 times, etc)… but in most jurisdictions you need to calculate and disclose the exact odds of winning in each mode for every level generator.
They are for providing special hardware for Neural Network inference (most likely convolutional). Meaning they provide a bunch of matrix multiplication capabilities and other operations that are required for executing a neural network.
They can be leveraged for generative AI needs. And I bet that’s how Nvidia provides the feature of automatic upscaling - it’s not the game that does it, it’s literally the graphic cards that does it. Leveraging AI of video games (like using the core to generate text like ChatGPT) is another matter - you want to have a game that works on all platforms even those that do not have such cores. Having code that says “if it has such cores execute that code on them. Otherwise execute it on CPU” is possible but imo that is more the domain of the computational libraries or the game engine - not the game developer (unless that developer develops its own engine)
But my point is that it’s not as simple as “just have each core implement an AI for my game”. These cores are just accelerators of matrix multiplication operations. Which are themselves used in generative AI. They need to be leveraged within the game dev software ecosystem before the game dev can use those features.
it’s not the game that does it, it’s literally the graphic cards that does it The game is just software. It will execute on the GPU and CPU. DLSS (proprietary) and XeSS (OSS) are both libraries to run the AI bits of the cards for upscaling, because they weren’t really being used for anything. Gamedevs have the skills to use them just like regular AI devs do.
By AI here I mean what is traditionally meant by “game AI”, pathfinding, decisionmaking, co-ordination, etc. There is a counterstrike bot which uses neural nets (CPU), and it’s been around for decades now. It is trained like normal bots are trained. You can train an AI in a game and then have the AI as NPCs, enemies, etc.
what is the benefit over just using classical algorithms
Utilisation. A CPU isn’t really built for deep AI code, so it can’t really do realistic AI given the frame budget of doing other things. This is famously why games have bad AI. Training AI via AI algorithms could make the NPCs more realistic or smarter, and you could do this within reasonable frame budgets.
I see. You want to offload AI-specific computations to the Nvidia AI cores. Not a bad idea, although it does mean that hardware that do not have them will have more CPU load so perhaps the AI will have to be tuned down based on the hardware they run on…
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