Honestly, I prefer this, as long as the single player option is unaffected by the multiplayer component’s performance, and the resources allotted to the SP game don’t suffer because of the MP.
Historically, some of the best multiplayer components attached to single player games were done with very few resources in a matter of weeks, like Halo and Goldeneye.
True, but that was before mtx became the name of the game. Nowadays when a game has a multiplayer component with no bells and whistles and just works, it’s an outlier.
And now those games just get shut down with no recourse. Eventually, those companies will realize that they're better off making a multiplayer game that doesn't get 5 years worth of updates to chase after bazillions of dollars that never materialize.
Tack Call of Duty Zombies into that list too, but Moonguide has a point. CoD: BlOps 3 was the last really good zombies experience and that was just as they were starting to turn it into an MTx nightmare.
Sure, and game development in general takes longer than it did 20 years ago, but allocating a proportional amount of resources is all you need. If it's a hit, it's a hit. If you want to patch it up a bit to fix some glaring flaws, go ahead. Expecting it to maintain tens of thousands of simultaneous players is going to end up with the dev putting lots of resources into something unlikely to be the next big thing.
I liked how FEAR did it back in the day. The multiplayer was a separate game you could download for free and play. Then, if you liked the game, you could pay for the single player.
I definitely don’t mind the multiplayer being separate. I typically buy games years after their shelf life and their multiplayer is usually dead, so having that MP component be a separate download would save me space for something I can’t even play
there’s a couple of games that I love from the 90s (Ultima Underworld I & II) that I’ve considered doing this with, but I don’t know nearly enough about game development.
I've also always wanted to understand where one even BEGINS something like this. I assume this is "reverse engineering," essentially? Or does it only really work with games that have leaked/public-in-some-way source code?
Can someone help me to understand the difference between Generative AI and procedural generation (which isn’t something that’s relevant for Expedition 33, but I’m talking about in general).
Like, I tend to use the term “machine learning” for the legit stuff that has existed for years in various forms, and “AI” for the hype propelled slop machines. Most of the time, the distinction between these two terms is pretty clean, but this area seems to be a bit blurry.
I might be wrong, because I’ve only worked with machine learning in a biochemistry context, but it seems likely that modern procedural generation in games is probably going to use some amount of machine learning? In which case, would a developer need to declare usage of that? That feels to me like it’s not what the spirit of the rule is calling for, but I’m not sure
generative ai is a subset of procedural generation algorithms. specifically it’s a procedural algorithm with a massive amount of weight parameters, on the order of hundreds of billions. you get the weights by training. for image generation (which i’m assuming is what was in use here), the term to look up is “latent diffusion”. basically you take all your training images and blur them step by step, then set your weights to mimic the blur operation. then when you want an image you run the model backwards.
From my understanding, AI is the general field of automating logical (“intelligent”) tasks.
Within it, you will find Machine Learning algorithms, the ones that are trained on exemplar data, but also other methods, for instance old text generators based on syntactic rules.
Within Machine Learning, not all methods use Neural Networks, for instance if you have seen cool brake calipers and rocket nozzle designed with AI, I believe those were made with genetic algorithms.
For procedural generation, I assume there is a whole range of methods that can be used:
Unreal Engine Megaplants seems to contain configurable tree generation algorithms, that’s mostly handcrafted algorithms with maybe some machine learning to find the parameters ranges.
Motion capture and 3D reconstruction models can be used to build the assets. I don’t believe these rely on stolen artist data.
Full on image generation models (sora, etc.) to produce assets and textures, these require training on stolen artist data AFAIK (some arrangements were made between some companies but I suspect it’s marginal).
You can use statistics to estimate a child’s final height by their current height and their parents’ height.
People “train” models by writing a program to randomly make and modify equations, then keep them depending on if new accuracy is higher.
Generative AI can predict what first result on google search or first reply on whatsapp will look like for llms.
There are problems. Training from 94% to 95% accuracy takes exponentially more resources as it doesn’t have some “code” you can fix. Hallucinations will happen.
On the other side, procedural algorithms in games just refer to handwritten algorithms.
For example a programmer may go “well a maze is just multiple, smaller mazes combined.” Then write a program to generate mazes based on that concept.
It’s much cheaper, you don’t need GPU or internet connection to use the algorithm. And if it doesn’t work people can debug it on the spot.
Also it doesn’t require stealing from 100 million people to be usable
(I kinda oversimplified generative AI, modern models may do something entirely different)
I don’t know of any games that use machine learning for procedural generation and would be slightly surprised if there are any. But there is a little bit of a distinction there because that is required at runtime, so it’s not something an artist could possibly be involved in.
From what I‘ve heard it‘s a good game and unsurprisingly sex sells. I’m not paying 70 bucks for any digital game but I‘ll check out the demo for now to see what it‘s all about.
Edit: From my first impression it looks competently made and runs well. I just miss an option to turn off the vignette effect it seems to utilize and maybe an option to have the camera slightly closer to read enemy attacks more easily. I‘ll definitely keep this one in mind during sales.
I mean the combat is different. Nier Automata is a hack and slash while Stellar Blade is a Sekiro like with dodging and parrying enemy attacks as the focus.
But yeah everything else is Nier Automata but worse
I couldn’t stand Near A Tomato but have tons of hours in SB. I grant it has nothing amazing in terms of story, but it has enough intricacies of combat to keep it fun, even if none of those mechanics were invented here.
Nier seemed to operate off a single attack button a lot of time, and working off RPG mechanics gave so many opportunities for level disparity that didn’t serve the game at all.
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