I played through the game long after it had been patched up. I enjoyed it enough. When Phantom Liberty released I went back to start a new save to play it and after playing through the different character background introductory bit I realized it just wasn’t going to be that different of an experience the second time around. So I just loaded up my endgame save for the DLC. I had fun with that, but going around with a maxed out character blowing everything up with a shotgun definitely trivialized things.
I think there’s not a lot of room for competition, it’s either Gran Turismo on PS5, Forza on Xbox or… um… Mario Kart? On Switch?
You could say the same thing about Football games. There’s Madden and NCAA and that’s pretty much it.
The era of having niche games like Metropolis Street Racer, Project Gotham, Speed Devils, or, heck, go back to the OG Playstation with Wipeout, Jet Moto, Destruction Derby… that’s long over.
Which is a shame because I played the HELL out of MSR/PGR.
Competitive Pokémon tends to go back and forth between times of “stall” (turtling) and hyper-offense (aggression) dominating the metagame, depending on which strategies and team builds players will find. Whenever one becomes dominant, fans of the other will constantly hound tournament runners to change tiering or ban certain pokemon to change it.
As for a “fun” game to go hyper-aggressive with zero HP, max damage, I’ve seen some YouTubers attempt “Danger Mario” runs in the first two Paper Mario games, maximizing FP and BP and never taking HP when leveling, keeping Mario in the “danger” zone where lots of evasion or damage badges will stay activated. They then rely on those badges, items and partner abilities to avoid taking damage.
Initial reviews seem remarkably positive given what we saw in the first gameplay reveal a few months ago. My impression at the time was that about half the voice actors sounded like they hadn’t been given enough context about the scenario and some of the cutscenes had questionable direction, which were bad signs for a curated ten minute slice. I still think it’s ultimately not for me—I don’t really want action combat in my Dragon Age—but I’m glad people are enjoying it.
You don’t want a neural net for your game AI because it’s behavior is unpredictable and therefore cannot be tested.
All of the issues AI companies have now times by a thousand because now the AI have access to a physical presence in the game world. It would cheat and find ways to know things about the game state that it’s not supposed to know, or it would hide in a corner as far away from the player as possible because it’s parameters is to avoid death, or some other unforeseen function of its instructions.
This entirely depends on the quality of the AI and the task at hand. A well made AI can be relatively predictable. However, most tasks that AI excels at are tasks which themselves do not have a predictable solution. For instance, handwriting recognition can be solved by a neural network with much better than human accuracy. That task does not have a perfect solution, and there is not an ideal answer for each possible input (one person’s ‘a’ could look exactly the same as another’s ‘o’). The same can be said for almost all games, especially those involving a human player.
and therefore cannot be tested
Unpredictable things can be tested. That’s pretty much what the entire field of statistics and probability is about. Also, testability is a fundamental requirement for any kind of machine learning. It isn’t just a good practice kind of thing; if you can’t test your model, you don’t even have a model in the first place. The whole point is to create many candidate models and test them to find the best one.
It would cheat and find ways to know things about the game state that it’s not supposed to know
A neural network only knows what you tell it. If you don’t tell it where the player is, it’s not going to magically deduce it from nothing. Also, it’s output has to be interpreted to even be used. The raw output is a vector of numbers. How this is transformed into usable actions is entirely up to the developer. If that transformation allows violating the rules, that’s the developers fault, not the networks. The same can be said of human input; it is the developers responsibility to transform that into permissable actions in game.
it would hide in a corner as far away from the player as possible because it’s parameters is to avoid death
That is possible. Which is why you should make a performance metric that reflects what you actually want it to try to do. This is a very common issue and is just part of the process of making an AI. It is not an insurmountable problem.
Neural networks have been used to play countless games before. It’s probably one of the most studied use cases simply because it is so easy to do.
A little bit of emulation but mostly minecraft. Though a friendly creeper turned my hardcore world into spectator mode. I have a save that is about a day before it but I will probably delete it since I think the point of hardcore is to not save copies. Plus it was before I built the nether portal or got a mending fishing rod. I am thinking of using the beehaw seed that I discovered before to give hardcore another try.
I’ve spent about an hour with “Drova - Forsaken Kin”. The best way to describe it (and I’m not the first person to do this) would be “2D Gothic”. It’s quite neat. Exploration is a bit labyrinthian, but it’s appropriately punishing and bleak, has meaty combat that becomes satisfying once it finally clicks with you. Just like in Gothic, you start out as someone who can barely swing a club and just like in Gothic again, you need trainers to level up your skills. Controls can take a bit of getting used to and I have no idea where the story will take me, but so far, I’m enjoying my time with it. Really the worst thing I can say about it so far is that the music is rather monotonous.
Drova is available on gog without DRM, supporting Linux and MacOS in addition to Windows (also on Steam and every current and last-gen console):
Still playing Metaphor, I’m really enjoying it. I think I’m around halfway through. The story is going in an interesting direction, and the gameplay is still fun, altho I’m always feeling a bit underleveled.
I finished Silent Hill 2 too, the Mannequins made me jump so many times. They always seemed to appear when I least expected them to. The game created such a tense and scary atmosphere the whole way through but the prison area was by far the spookiest and of course I didn’t understand the hanging part and kept getting punished for it lol.
I also played The Last of Us Part 1 it was no where near as scary but the story was so good, I even cried a bit. I’d love more games that focused on keeping quiet, I dont think I’ve played anything with that sort of mechanic before. I really hope they port part 2 to pc soon.
I tried to play Alien Isolation but I kept getting game breaking bugs and when I finally managed to get about an hour in, there were still no aliens?? Just more bugs so I’ve given up on it and maybe I’ll try see if there are any fixes and stuff when I have more time since so many people recommend it.
Ah damn, its an issue on console too, that sucks. I wonder why there are so many recommendations when its so broken. I can’t believe its on gamepass and PS5 when it can so easily be broken in less than 5 minutes
Somehow replied to my own comment. Good thing I am actively drinking coffee. Yeah, although it makes me wonder if the game pass version isn’t basically the console version. They do some weird stuff with required windows processes.
Technically finished out the season journey and "campaign" rewards for Diablo 4: Season 6, now I'm just going for 100% completion and the rest of the battle pass rewards. I'm thinking it might take me a while, since for whatever reason ancestral items don't drop that often for me, and the last thing I have to do is salvage 100 of them. It might have to do with the Torment level I'm on, but since the season doesn't end until the end of January, I'm not too worried.
Speaking of Diablo, I was going to complete Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred with my OG campaign Necromancer, but I was having so much fun with my seasonal Rogue that I started working on and finished the DLC with her instead. Not sure how I feel about the ending of the expansion, since leaves a very big opening for more expansions (or d5?) and doesn't really feel finished as far as the story goes.
spoilersWe don't even get to fight fight Mephisto! Just like a concept of him or whatever. wtf is up with that? And where tf is Diablo? He's the one I'm here for.
Since The Lake House DLC came out this past week for Alan Wake 2, I've decided to replay (most) things Remedy, starting with Alan Wake, of course. I'm playing the remaster, which looks a lot better than I remember playing it for the first time. And while replaying it after having played AW2, I didn't realize there were SO MANY references they stuck in referring to the sequel. Hell, even the QR codes that were just fun little things in the pc port have been turned into straight up references. It's been so fun to replay.
since for whatever reason ancestral items don’t drop that often for me, and the last thing I have to do is salvage 100 of them. It might have to do with the Torment level I’m on
I’m on Torment 4 and yeah, they don’t drop a lot. If you’re on a high enough difficulty, Ancestral Uniques probably drop more, since you can farm the Uber bosses, who basically only drop uniques. I think that objective was the second to last one I finished for the journey (the last are the 5 Helltide Commanders, which I don’t probably won’t do).
Oh, that's good to know that the drop rate isn't just me then, haha. I'm on Torment 2, and thought about moving up, but if the drop rate isn't any better, I'll just stay where I am for now.
You probably know this already, but if you don’t get slowed down that much on T3, definitely move up, but if you’re just getting killed too much or don’t kill stuff fast enough, stay on T2. I farmed T3 for a while, even though I had unlocked T4, because I would just get one-shot too much. After some more upgrades and a Mythic Unique, I was finally able to do T4 efficiently.
That's kind of where I am now: I have T3 unlocked, but I'm not happy with the rate at which I'm killing stuff at that level in the Pit, so I'm upgrading what I can until I'm more comfortable there.
I thought I was done with the latest Diablo 4 season last week, but then I put in a bunch more hours this weekend. While the season and the expansion is generally fun, it feels like the devs took two steps forward and one step back. Progression seems a lot more tedious, compared to before. In earlier seasons, you could basically unlock the highest difficulty really fast and progress pretty quickly to the endgame content. Now, with everything a lot harder and a bunch more difficulty options, you take twice or three times as long, to get to the same point as before. If I didn’t play the Spiritborn, who is completely busted this season, it might’ve taken even longer. I still gotta try the raid, which you can only do coop, although I rarely play with someone else.
Then I started HROT, but have only finished the first level, so I can’t talk about it too much. It seems like it’s basically just Quake with a different skin, I guess? I love the look, and it plays pretty smoothly, so I look forward to playing more of it.
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