These are so reassuring, dear god I hope it’s good. I really really feel like this is the make it or break it for Bioware. If Veilguard does well we could see a new era of Bioware games, refreshing Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
Please god let these positive reviews be paid off. I don’t want this game succeed, it has nothing to do with the series - complete tonal shift, choices barely carry over and not being able to control companions is just… I wish they made a new series, this isn’t the Dragon age I know. Hope it fails
People have guessed that a game that reviewed well, that they didn’t want to review well, has been because of paid reviews for decades. It’s not a thing. If it was, EA wouldn’t have “forgotten” to pay for Anthem reviews, for instance. I get that this may not be what you want, but that happens sometimes. Rainbow Six is now GI Joe for some reason. The best thing you can do is enjoy the ones you enjoyed and then play the next great game that comes out that was inspired by the ones you like. Getting too invested in a given franchise is what allows them to mutate into things you don’t want. At least this game finally did away with the usual EA DRM, so part of voting with our wallets is working.
You don’t have to pay people to generate good reviews. You can also just only choose to give review keys to friendly media outlets you’ve already built a relationship and know will treat you uncritically.
God this, this right here is what I’m sick of in gaming. The negativity and hoping that things fail. Gaming has always been negative but ffs lately it’s just been awful. There used to be a time where people would say “Eh, it’s not for me”, now it’s “I hate the style and everything about it one star bandwagon folks let’s all talk about how terrible and awful this game is and shit it down and out” And I say this as a dragon age fan.
I’m willing to give it a fair shot - and I think real fans are willing to give the benefit of the doubt before shooting it down. Am I fan of the art style? No, not really. The gameplay? How could I I haven’t played it yet. Controlling companions? Personally I never used it much anyway. I would never hope for a franchise I love to fail, that’s such a weird thing to me. I’ll see how it is when it releases, and I hope I have fun.
I don’t care if it’s the dragon age I knew. I want it to be a fun game. I don’t care if it’s spongy, or the fighting is a little off, if they can get me to have fun - that’s my metric. More importantly, I know others do care about those things. What I won’t do is rage online or hope it fails because it doesn’t cater to me.
It’s not just gaming - people had a similar reaction on the trailer for the Megamind animated TV series. I think it’s a difference in mindset, some people don’t care while others see it as disrespect to their beloved franchise.
I’m willing to give it a fair shot
Personally I’m going to trust what the studio behind the game chose to showcase in the official reveal trailer. They’re selling the game as a lighthearted, cartoony, high fantasy romp where a band of constantly quipping misfits save the world, all without a hint of seriousness anywhere. I don’t care whether the game is good, it’s not Dragon Age.
I am not hoping for a franchise I love to fail. What I am hoping for is that this imposter, which wears the series’ skin purely for brand recognition, fails.
It’s not what you think Dragon Age should be. I personally am excited for that. I loved Inquisition and hated Origins, I loved the high fantasy romp with Sera and Varric making quips all day. To me, that was the best story and characters in the entire franchise, and my opinions are just as valid as yours. If you didn’t like it, fine, but I think it’s weird to judge a game negatively because it changed.
To give a reverse example for me. I don’t like where Halo went, but I have a lot of friends who love Infinite’s multiplayer. Now, I could go online and tell people that they shouldn’t play it because 2 and 3 were the best ones - or I could say nothing and let people enjoy things.
I went and checked my copy of Dragon Age Origins, and thankfully I’m not misremembering nor is it “just what I think”, as on the back it says “A Dark Fantasy epic”. That’s what the series was, directly quoted from the creators behind it. Same thing with Inquisition, it was bleak, had tough choices, things were at stake. This new game couldn’t be further from the previous titles - it doesn’t belong.
I don’t think it’s right to keep your head down and say nothing when something you like is being taken in a direction you don’t enjoy. Saying something critical against it doesn’t hurt anyone, worst thing that could happen is not enough people agree and nothing changes.
Would it be better to become a darkspawn or die? Generally I’d prefer a series cater to the heart of the series instead of fuck off into an unwanted and disconnected direction.
Im pretty sure we could make AI in games smarter and/or better than humans for a long time. They are just not fun to play against. You need to have AI that you can win against. What i think should be happening instead of neural networks is the ai should gamble a bit more . The good example is eu4 where on hard difficulty ai will not attack you until its sure it can win… which makes it more predictable than normal ai beacuse you can reasonably guess whetewer it will attack you and try to outmanouver it. Wheras on normal sometimes it will just attack you if there is a reasonable ( or sometimes even unreasonable ) chance to win which makes normal sometimes( very very very very rarely ) harder difficulty. Now hard difficulty is stil generaly ( 99,9% of time ) much harder due to ai cheats but what i said is a thing. Total war Warhammer 3 could use that in particular to spice things up. Currently attacking army will always attack and defending will defend which makes attacking more advantagous , and the army will always wait for reinforcment . They could for example make it so depending on the army composition ( or even just rng ) the defending army will sometimes attack ( for example when there are only melee combatants ) so that you dont have time to deal damage with mage . Or the opposite. Make it so the attacking army will just stay still and protect the artilery and bombard you with canons it it has lots of artilery . Like you know just some basic strategies so the fights arent always so similar at the begining.
Yeah, the easiest thing to implement is omnipotent AI. The code for the AI is executed within the game engine, so you have complete access to any information you want.
You can just query the player position at any point in time, even if there’s a wall between the NPC and the player. It requires extra logic to not use the player position in such a case, or to only use the rough player position after the player made a noise, for example.
Of course, the decision-making is a whole separate story. Even an omnipotent AI won’t know how to use this information, unless you provide it with rules.
I’m guessing, what OP wants is:
limiting the knowledge of the AI by just feeding it a rendered image like humans see it, and
somehow train AI on this input, so it figures out such rules on its own.
The most advanced AI I’ve seen is in Hitman WoA, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Both games don’t have “learning” AI. They just have tons of rules that the player can reasonably expect and interact with, that make them seem lifelike. If a guard sees you throw a coin twice in Hitman, he doesn’t get suspicious and investigate - he goes and picks it up just like the first one. Same for reactions to finding guns, briefcases, or your exploding rubber duck.
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.
The only issue with current systems is that the “AI” is tweaked to the specific game mechanics. You can easily enough build multiple algorithms for varying play styles and then have it adapt to counter the play style of the player. The problems is that the current way that many games are monetized is through expansions, gameplay tweaks, etc., as well as those being necessary when a game mechanic turns out to be really poorly implemented or just unpopular and the mechanics change. If the “AI” isn’t modified at the same time to rake advantage of the changes, then it becomes easy to beat. The other issue is that eventually a human can learn all of the play style algorithms and learn to counter them and then it becomes boring.
Unfortunately, generative “AI” is not a true learning model and thus not truly intelligent in any sense of the word. It requires that it is only “taught” with good information. So if it gets any data that includes even slight mistakes, it can end up making lots of those mistakes repeatedly. And if those mistakes aren’t corrected by a human, it doesn’t understand which things were mistakes and how they contributed to winning or losing. It can’t learn that they were mistakes or to not do them. It doesn’t truly understand how to decide something is wrong on its own, only that things are related and how often it should use those relationships over others. Which means manual training is required, which due to the sheer volume of information required to train a generative “AI”, is not possible in a complex game where the player has thousand of possible moves that each branch to thousands of possible combinations of moves, etc.
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.
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