Travel is gonna become boring if you have to travel the same road multiple times in the course of the game even if you have a bunch of cool stuff along that road. Eventually, I won’t give a shit about that stuff since I’ve seen it a million times. So I would hope there is still some kind of fast travel to go between places I have already been if the world is super big. Otherwise it’s just gonna feel like you’re padding the game for time to inflate a 10 hour story to take 40 hours to finish.
I think the better way to help fix this issue is random encounters, spawns, and a world that changes as the game moves along.
Moving along the same road can be made interesting if different things are happening every so often as you come through. New friendly encounters, new fights with different enemies, maybe randomly spawning treasure or scripted puzzle sequences that can appear dynamically around the whole world. Add to that a world that becomes modified by story events, maybe that road gets blocked and a different passage opens up that takes you to the same end destination, but with a new path and things to explore.
It's not an unsolvable problem, but it is something that goes by the wayside often.
One thing to consider too is scheduled events. Imagine a couple towns get together and throw a fair along a route that connects them, and you get to see celebrations and games and vendors who might sell trinkets that are hard to track down otherwise. Perhaps the local monarch goes on a hunt with the massive party of servants and knights that might entail, with different practices for different cultures. A band of cultists clears an area for several days leading up to their yearly ritual. It’s migration season for a certain species of animal/monster. There are so many possibilities!
Even just vendors passing through can be made more interesting. Do they carry their wares via backpack or cart? Are they being attacked by bandits? Wild animals? Are they trying to smuggle goods or services somewhere?
It all has to be programmed of course, which is the main holdup on what makes it so hard to flesh out those parts of the world.
I do also see weight in the idea that, past a certain point, traveling is just boring, especially if the only thing of importance is the Main Story Quest. Travel is also often boring in real life too but we can tune it out, or find little ways to pass the time and entertain ourselves during the more mundane moments. We’re not frequently afforded that luxury in games. When you’re playing a game and dealing with the downtime going from point A to B, often there is literally nothing to do except hold down the movement keys and deal with the occasional path change/obstacle.
The point of games is to be engaging, and if there’s nothing to do while traveling but look at the scenery and surroundings it will eventually get boring. Even if the travel gets interrupted occasionally for an encounter, I think it’s arguable to say that the content is literally not travel anymore and in fact papering over a bad travel system (if the only thing interesting is the stuff you find that you have to stop and take care of). Adding more unique/transient stuff along routes is only half of the battle; work has to be put in to make traveling enjoyable in and of itself for players to want to do it instead of skip it.
But as always, the best solution to our problem is to simply add more trains.
To add to this, DD1 has quite a number of NPC's that travel between regions and you can come across them. As you progress through the game their patterns and locations change.
I actually am ambivalent on the latter mechanic as it really makes it a pain sometimes, but it still has lots of ways that it can work well.
Depends on the reason for traveling. If you are headed down the road to a goal and keep getting sidetracked by random encounters in a way that is distracting you from the thing you want to do then they just make travel tedious.
It all comes down to why am I traveling and why are encounters on the road more engaging than the reason for being on the road in the first place.
And for the record, Itsuno does say that he thinks fast travel is “convenient” and “good” when done right.
Based on Dragon’s Dogma 1’s use of Ferrystones, as well as this mechanic returning along with oxcarts in the sequel, I think this director understands that there needs to be a balance. It’s good when it’s both properly implemented and has a purpose. You’re right that nobody wants to run up and down the same roads countless times, but it’s up to the devs implementing limited fast travel to make sure you won’t have to. Then it’s up to the player to decide whether fast travel is worth it for any given situation. Knowing when to use your fast travel and how to maximize it is a skill that you develop and should be rewarded for mastering.
But it also needs to have a purpose. In more arcadey games, I don’t like worrying about resources like that. But in more grueling games like Dragon’s Dogma, where the journey is often a very intentional part of the gameplay loop if not the main challenge itself, it fits right at home.
So the CEO makes a shit decision, quits and leaves with his millions of dollars and now a bunch of employees get to lose their job. Capitalism is so disgusting.
I watched two of the three, and really enjoyed them. Sure, I'd much rather see more gameplay, and they didn't do anything to sell me on the game itself, but they were enjoyable nonetheless
I’m not much of a Ubisoft fan, but I just want Rayman and Prince of Persia to be saved. Growing up with both franchises since the 90s, ‘Rayman Legends’ and ‘The Lost Crown’ were incredible and these franchises deserve some respect.
How much do you want to bet that most of the things wrong with Ubisoft games are results of bosses ordering a sacrifice of quality to achieve maximum monetization rather than anything the workers have a say in?
How much do you want to bet that Ubisoft massively overhired personnel when they were making money hand over fist, forgetting to take into account how much money they could actually make from their IP?
These workers were fools to join or stay with Ubisoft
The problem is that AAA gaming hasn’t really innovated that much in the last decade while development costs go up to fund better visuals. Worse, consumers won’t pay for the higher development costs.
I’m surprised that the gaming industry is as large as it is.
My concern on it is whether the game leans too heavily into parodying folktales/fables/fantasies and missing out on the simulation aspect of fable. Way stronger tech than a 360 or the OG Xbox. I had hoped Fable would keep building up the world simulation aspect of it. Like a watered down Black and White but in the form of a third person storybook RPG
Without the Lionhead god game elements, I’d think it’d struggle to stand out. Pretty much banking on nostalgia for the first 2 Fables
It wasn’t done well but each Fable game were hyped up about how your actions would change how NPCs and the towns/cities/kingdom would evolve. It never amounted to a lot but Fable wasn’t a complete left turn from Lionheads god games. Super watered down to the point of barely being memorable but that was the hype of Fable. Changing evolving world based on your actions
And changing yourself. Frequent magic users would get old and spindly, I believe occasionally glowing. Axe swingers would get ripped. Your character would be a literal representation of your playstyle and that was cool as hell.
I’m actually pumped the Forza guys are making this. They’ve done a pretty good job with that series, but obviously racing is a whole different ballgame.
And changing yourself. Frequent magic users would get old and spindly, I believe occasionally glowing. Axe swingers would get ripped. Your character would be a literal representation of your playstyle and that was cool as hell.
It was both more and less involved than that. Putting XP into the Strength stats made your character buff, Skill stats made them tall, and Will stats gave you glowing patterns on your body, except in 3 where they made your tattoos glow instead. What you actually did was irrelevant, just how you spent your XP. In Fable 1, buying levels also made your character older, but age became connected to plot in 2 and was dropped as a morph in 3. Moral alignment in all three and ethical alignment in 2 and 3 also affected character appearance, but the specifics varied a lot between games.
You‘re right. I love Fable. The first one that is. I‘ve played two and three as well simply because I enjoyed the first one so much. I probably won‘t play this one. Ever. Microsoft can piss off.
Anyone here given it some serious gametime? I’m really considering getting it and the only thing that’s stopping me is that I don’t know how the game’s looking. I’ve watched videos and it seems cool, but, well, early access and all.
Friend and I have about 6-8 hours in it and I would say that while it is quite fun with what is in it, it’s very much early access. Some things don’t feel fully fleshed out, a lot of structures that do generate just have a WIP sign inside the front door, small bugs here and there. I would give it another few months if you’re still on the fence unless you want to give them some dev funds. I imagine between actual updates and mods a few months from now will feel much different. I think the minimum price was $20, with a $35 and $70 option with some cosmetic bonuses.
If you just want to play a fun game, wait until it’s more complete. Game is so WIP that the whole world gen is expected to change soon (to their “V2” world gen) which might break old saves. There’s very little content beyond the generated structures and terrain and some decorative blocks. Even the current “endgame” can take just a few hours to reach, and there isn’t much there.
There’s a problem in movies that I keep thinking about in relation to this.
Movies often use music from other movies in early cuts to get something rough together. They time the scenes around the music, they work with it for ages, and finally it’s time to make an original track to replace the rough copy.
But they have to use something that’s the same tempo, because of how the scenes were timed around the old music. And it has to fit in the same vibe, because that’s what the old music felt like.
So you end up with a piece of music that’s usually pretty close to the temporary music, and a lot of Hollywood osts sound almost identical as a result. When I see people talk about using gen ai for placeholders and concept art, I see that same problem turning up.
Famously, Stanley Kubrick used classical music as a temporary track for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and intended on having Pink Floyd do the soundtrack. However, he grew to like how the classical music felt so much that he decided to keep it.
I wonder if that’s why so many sequences use “4 on the floor” arranged roughly around a 12 bar pattern, or a specific piece of classical music that the studio could have gotten from public domain
There are many stories from gaming about placeholder music becoming integral part of the game.
In original doom games Carmack and Romero loved Black Sabbath and listened it during testing amd working on the game. That led to now legendary doom ost.
During the development of Max Payne 2 Remedy used Poets of the fall song as a placeholder and in the end they decited they wanted it in to the game, but because they could not get in to agreement with the publisher, and because PoF members are just cool guys, they eventually made song just for the game to get around the licensing debucle. That song was later released as a single.
I remember hearing story about Brutal Legend having some licenced music as a place holder in meeting with investors and it lead that music ending in to the game.
Im writing this while im little busy, so everything is coming from my memory, without fact checking, so who ever is reading this take it with a pinch of salt.
I fucking hate gen AI art and it has made my life more difficult in many ways… suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn’t
seeing as how using genAI even during development is still rare enough that it makes the news, I can’t imagine it’s been as big of a problem for them as they make it seem. this sounds more like a smaller publisher taking a popular public stance for the PR.
As with much discussion of generative AI, the difficulty of Hooded Horse’s position is pinning down what they’re trying to ban. Does an artwork count as generated if somebody used the tech to make a base image of some kind, then fleshed it out and finished it off at length by hand?
A very salient question. Is someone generates a rough outline and then redraws it, fixing errors and making modifications with their human artist eye, is the thing they draw a problem? It will involve a human artist, and human artistic skill.
Tracing is one way to teach children how to draw. If someone generates an image to trace for practice, is all their art problematic because they were trained with AI?
This seems kind of like asking a vegan if they’d eat lab-grown meat… I think the answer depends heavily on why the person believes what they do in the first place.
One way of looking at it is serving a vegan a vegan meal, after you slaughtered a cow for the first couple of tries. Some of the damage has already been done.
Also, we’ve had several kerfuffles already where GenAI “placeholders” were present in a released game, and caused plenty of outrage. It’s far safer to never have those placeholders to begin with. Just draw up something ugly in Paint, at least it’ll be plenty obvious you need to fix it before launching the game.
In order to generate that texture, AI bots have already been attacking every website hosting content on the internet for the past year, to the point that they were basically DDoSed and forced to take extreme measures to stay online. Plenty of copyrighted works have been slurped up without consent from their authors, a massive amount of energy has been used to inference the models and even more energy (far more than all cryptocurrencies combined for example) is used generating things from those models. So yes, a lot of damage has already been done. Far more than killing a couple of cows.
Massive energy is used to give you porn, its the way it is. Humanity needs more and more energy all the time. Making that one thing you don’t like the problem is not sensible.
And in the end, it doesn’t matter. The are tens of thousands of people dying each year to support the living standard you enjoy, but you have focused on ai. Your outrage is a fallacy.
You just made a fallacy of relative privation. While they no fallacious argument. They used hyperbole which is not a fallacy.
So shut the fuck up, if you want to call people out or make an argument. Actually make a point and don’t just drop to attacking people’s character with accusations of fallacy. It’s fucked up and does nothing but make you look stupid at the best of times.
Yes, a lot of datacentres use evaporative cooling, meaning that the heat is taken away as the water evaporates. It’s a cheap and effective way of doing things and the water returns to the water cycle and doesn’t really get locked up anywhere. So it’s not really a problem, right?
Well yes, in a vacuum that’s fantastic. However there’s two caveats to this: evaporative cooling works best in arid areas, because the air can hold more water. Thus they build these AI datacentres in naturally arid areas. Smart, they’re using physics to their advantage!
What’s the second problem then? They’re now using up the ground water in those arid areas to cool their datacentres and thus ruining it for the people that live there, leaving them without safe water to drink.
Also I don’t know how many anti-AI people will be all “bUt gOlF CoUrSeS ArE OkAy, We lOvE ThOsE!!” These things exist purely for rich people that don’t contribute anything, so we could get rid of both and the world would be a better place.
Maybe a better analogy would be the Ship of Theseus - how much of an AI-generated picture has to be replaced by human work for it to not be considered slop anymore?
Or to stick with the vegan/meat analogy - making the perfect vegan sausage patty by making several meat patties, each one with iteratively less meat until a vegan patty is left, as well as several dead pigs.
I’ve seen the argument that if you’re generating an image and making some edits, you’re robbing yourself of original concepts. Even if human hands do the editing you’ve already outsourced one of the most important parts.
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