I’ve never been into this pc vs console cringe fest of an argument. I’ve always been a pc gamer, but guess what, some exclusives only come to consoles. If I want to play that exclusive enough and I have expendable cash, I’ll buy it. I still prefer to play on pc over any of the consoles, but a ps5 is a solid system.
I haven’t had a gaming-capable PC for about a decade and I’m very happy with my PS5 (and the PS4 before it). Sony bringing exclusives to PC don’t feel like the end times as it’s just a way for them to make more money.
I’m genuinely glad that PC players will get to experience some of the great games that have been on the PS5 in the last few years.
It’s literally brave of you to come to this community and this thread and say that you love your console. And then to express positivity for PC users! You are exactly what we need more of in gaming.
My ghost will haunt GoG’s corporate offices until they relent and transfer my games to the person who’s name I keep creepily spelling with frost on their mirrors & windows.
For basic behaviour and pathfinding, yes. But aesthetics, outfits, dialogue, backgrounds, etc etc was all made by humans. The reason why NPC’s can feel so immersive and part of the worlds they exist in is because they’re made and written by the same people that made the rest of the game.
NPC’s with awkward AI-gen voicelines spouting hallucinated nonsense that has nothing to do with the game or the player’s actions is going to be an absolute dumpster fire.
Pathfinding was an absolute dumpster fire for a long time. Remember dreading any gameplay where you had to lead an NPC somewhere? Things take time to get better. Gotta start somewhere.
Then start it in experimental games. There’s no reason to have garbage AI in production games in order to improve it. Make it functional, then deploy it…
There’s a place for AI in NPCs but developers will have to know how to implement it correctly or it will be a disaster.
LLMs can be trained on specific characters and backstories, or even “types” of characters. If they are trained correctly they will stay in character as well as be reactive in more ways than any scripted character could ever do. But if the Devs are lazy and just hook it up to ChatGPT with a simple prompt telling it to “pretend” to be some character, then it’s going to be terrible like you say.
Now, this won’t work very well for games where you’re trying to tell a story like Baldur’s Gate… instead this is better for more open world games where the player is interacting with random characters that don’t need to follow specific scripts.
Even then it won’t be everything. Just because an LLM can say something “in-character” doesn’t mean it will line up with its in-game actions. So additional work will need to be made to help tie actions to the proper kind of responses.
If a studio is able to do it right, this has game changing potential… but I’m sure we’ll see a lot of rushed work done before anyone pulls it off well.
I think the issue is that games are games; an example that springs to mind is Caves of Qud’s Markov-chain generated books. I don’t mind them, but once I realized what they were, I stopped reading them. Unless it’s written by a developer, it doesn’t matter. They might as well be empty, unopenable items, like books from Dwarf Fortress where they get a description of what is inside but not any text from the passage.
Even random dialogue is interesting in games not only to “immerse” the player, but to receive messages and information from the developers; if they are randomly generated, they have no purpose. The game would only be improved by their absence.
Those are not my ONLY issues, no. They’re the most egregious for a videogame right now, but the entire concept is just … Fluff for no reason other than to list “AI NPCs” on the box.
Paying for more writers is simply better all around.
I don’t get it. Actually well working AI NPCs sound fucking amazing. To have an actual conversation about anything in the game by typing your questions? That’s like the wet dream of an RPG.
Have writers write the background info, some lore stuff, “books” about stuff in the game etc.
I want to have a conversation with all the NPCs and choose from four premade questions about a quest I am on.
And yes, obviously they have to work well or they’re extremely awkward and anti-immersive.
@sugar_in_your_tea proposed this theory the other day, and I think it makes a lot of sense. A lot of journalists are feeling threatened by the onslaught of LLMs so I would expect to see a lot more news attempting to shine a negative light on LLMs in any way possible.
No. Just. No. One is just a complex logic gate with a bunch of if, the other is a generative ia. Those are two VERY different things. It’s like comparing a rc car with a cargo baot, they are simply nothing alike.
Ah yes now that you made a fool of yourself you start acting like one to play it cool. You really out did yourself on the personal development today didn’t you ? :)
I understand them both well enough to implement them in my projects. I don’t see why people are anything other than excited about the implementation of more capable AI in games. Are these initial implementations garbage? Probably, but that’s just growing pains, So what is it about gen AI that actually bothers people?
So what is it about gen AI that actually bothers people?
It’s being used corporate suits to replace talented artists, writers, programmers, and voice actors and make their shareholders happy. Although this is Ubisoft, so they already making substandard products anyway. I mean, how do you fuck up the login system for your online table top games as much as they did?
So I work in a creative industry (video production), and have for like three decades. If A.I. can do a lot of the work I do just as well, no part of me wants to continue to do that work. Most of what I get paid for is not “art” in the sense that it expresses some fundamental drive in me. But I do love collaborating with A.I.s to create things that I would’ve never been able to do on my own (and that A.I. would have never been able to do without me). This is where things are going, and I totally grant that greedy corpos doing greedy corpo shit is not to be lauded. But that’s an Ubisoft problem, not a gen AI problem. People are the issue with A.I.
I will say I can feel the hype train with Manor Lords, which I usually am not a part of. I like that kind of game and already had furthest frontier so I picked it up.
I was pretty… shocked with how much was unfinished and how little soul and love the game felt like it had.
I figured I got duped and someone paid every youtuber on a slow week to hype it up since they missed some publisher deadline or whatever
Yeah, I saw a review where the guy was like "what mechanics are there are really polished" and to me that was saying that they can really feel an absence of the "rest of the game", and so its probably not that far along.
I mean it just released into early access so I mean yeah it makes sense that there isn’t a full game there yet. Personally I like this approach to early access more then the approach a lot of other games take where the full game is there but it’s super buggy and has lots of bad design throughout it. This feels more like a slowly building out and polishing from the start of the game to the end which I think is gonna make a great game once it’s done. And even now while the experience isn’t super long it’s really good and well polished.
This is exactly why I never buy Early Access games. The biggest thrill for me is starting a new game, and if that isn’t as good as it can possibly be, then that opportunity has been wasted.
Sure, it /may/ get better at some undefined point in the future, but there’s just so many games out there that are complete, and won’t require re-visiting at some point because they got better. Once that first play is gone, it’s gone.
Nobody better talk shit about Crate thanks to headlines like this that don’t clarify until you are 2/3 of the way down the article. Crate and Larian restored my faith in game development.
I get that they’re successful, and it’d be fantastic if this became the trend. But Battlefield and Call of Duty sell consistently with much less development effort and a lot lower risk of flopping.
It looks like Call of Duty is typically 3 year development cycles, and one took only 1.5 years. Baldur’s Gate took 6 years.
I wonder what happens when the last whale has been milked dry. With the number of shitty cash grab games out there with heinous monetization, surely the ecosystem reaches a tipping point where there literally just isn’t enough money to go around, both because the whales themselves run out and the remaining number gets spread too thin among too many Clash of Clans, FIFAs and Diablo Immortals. Do you think we’re going to start seeing real effort in those spaces to appeal to players again, or do they just implode because nobody wants to serve a declining market?
I wonder what happens when the last whale has been milked dry.
I have some bad news for you friend.
I work at a casino. There is no end of whales. There are whales that are rich enough to sustain their habits and spend more than you or I could morally spend if we had the means. Then, there are whales that spend outside their means, burn out, and are replaced by a new person who does the same thing.
When a whale (highroller) stops coming, we usually assume they’ve gone to one of our competitor’s casinos.
I see no reason why this wouldn’t apply to real-money transactions in video games. It’s just another casino.
Has anyone played it? I wonder if its any good… I always thought that N64 game was generally considered one of those awful 3d renditions of a 2d classic.
Castlevania 64 was clearly an unfinished game. The first couple levels make their ambitions clear, and the rest of the game is just sort of slapped together. Legacy of Darkness added the rest of the game.
Nobody really celebrates these games. I grew up with them and can appreciate the experience they were offering, but they weren’t exactly my favorites, and I don’t feel they aged particularly well. Maybe take a look through a long play video before committing any real time to it.
All the damn money they make off GTAO and they still can’t afford to keep employees on…? If it was anyone, it’d be them I’d guess last to do something like this considering they effectively found a money printer off idiots who are cool paying for cosmetic bullshit in an 11 year old game.
They only made $1.45 billion last year, just up 56% year-over-year.
They were expecting to make over two billion. Which from the perspective of an American corporation, means they lost half a billion dollars. So the end of year bonuses for the c suites are only half as much as they were anticipating, which from the perspective of American executives is like they lost hundreds of thousands of dollars this year.
So you see, it makes perfect sense why hundreds to thousands of employees must be laid off. The business is in a dire position!
Thanks UbiSoft for rubbing it in my face with this message, “You no longer have access to this game. Why not check the Store to pursue your adventures?”
If nothing interesting happens in the game for 8 or 3 hours, why would you willingly play it? Also, why is Sonic only 2⅔ times faster than a bus, isn’t the point of Sonic that he can run at the speed of sound?
I heard he only hits the speed of sound when he's rollin' around.
But part of the legacy of Desert Bus is that it was a big charity series that kind of set the stage for GDQ later in gaming history. A sort of virtual road trip.
So a lot of people have nostalgia for it.
Desert Bus was released as a protest game. In the 90s video games were demonized for being nothing more than violence simulators. Penn & Teller took that as a challenge and had some developers make the most non-violent game they could think of.
Tiefling Astorion would have put people not familiar with forgotten realms too on edge talking to the refugees. Astarion’s capriciousness would have made people think that was a tiefling thing not an Astarion thing
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