To your first bullet point, your own example of StarCraft. Rush strategies are usually so all-in that they win or lose in a couple of minutes. If they’re successfully defended, the defender now has such an advantage that the rusher can’t come back from it.
I actually don’t know of a game that’s ruined by an “aggression meta”. I don’t think I agree that it’s a problem. Neither rushing nor turtling is incentivized in StarCraft. The push and pull that the designers wanted from a given match is the optimal way to play, and you’ll find more success chasing that than either turtling or rushing.
I’m heavily invested in the fighting game scene, and the genre’s been getting more and more “aggression mechanics” for a long time now; some might call them “neutral skips”, skipping the part of the game where the two players try to approach each other. There’s a clear reason for why they do this: it’s way more fun to watch. Street Fighter V often devolved into two players left on their last pixel of health, since you can’t kill with chip damage (for the most part), so it was a boring situation of both players fishing for a last hit as the clock ticks down. Now, whether it’s Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, or Guilty Gear, you have a meter that you use on offense and defense. Being offensive rewards you with more and allows you to be more offensive, and being defensive will drain it. You can still have that moment from SFV that was supposed to be tense, but now it’s actually tense, because while that player is defending, the resource that prevents a checkmate situation is draining down, and when it’s empty, it’s basically game over.
Fighting games are a genre where it makes sense to push aggression meta. At times, people have wished that the genre allowed for more defensive counterattacking, but it’s not hard to predict how that would look in effect; two players both staring each other down waiting for the other to make a punishable move.
Basically, fighting games don’t have other mechanics outside of direct combat interactions that allow for fun decision-making. There’s fringe stuff like when someone has power-ups that don’t require landing hits (eg, Phoenix Wright in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3) but they don’t involve much decision-making.
I think the only time rush is an issue in games like Starcraft, thus making it an example, is at the low level of play where people don’t know how to react. So, once players get experience in the mechanics, it’s basically fixing itself. Other games can sometimes have that issue at all levels of play though.
There are tons of decisions to make at any given time in a fighting game outside of trying to be on offense. That’s why it’s more of a recent trend to add mechanics to incentivize aggression. And yes, the fact that rushes tend to only terrorize lower levels of play is why it’s more of a gimmick than a feature.
EA’s been manipulating the review scores, and can still only muster their current metacritic rating. I’m interested to see what the audience scores look like later this week.
I haven’t played Overwatch for a while but for a time there was a notorious meta called GOATS (3 tanks, 3 supports). It was an insanely aggressive meta that focused on rushing straight into the enemy team, tanking them, and killing them before they can react. The only way you can counter it is by also running the same team comp and hoping to kill them faster.
It ruined ranked games for a few months and the devs apparently had no idea how to fix it without nerfing tanks or supports hard - which would make playing them feel terrible. That’s why OW added a role queue and enforced 2 damage, 2 tank, 2 support teams.
That said, I think aggressive metas are way better than turtling ones. Nobody wants to idle around and take pot shots until someone gets bored.
EDIT 2 What the fuck is happening with the Qunari. Origins, 2, Inquisition, and finally Veilguard. This is just sad. In the first 3 games. They were cool, but now they look like shit cosplay.
It’s weird how all of them are saying the same thing.
“Return to form” is just one of those reviewer-isms like “mixed bag” and “fans of the genre”. You’ve probably seen the words “return to form” in dozens of trailers over the years that put the review quotes in their sizzle reels.
The qunari design is the weirdest thing to me. They Bioware spent so much effort solidifying who the Qunari are in 2 and had a great design to reflect that. Then in 3 I feel like they maintained and perhaps even improved the design, but kinda watered down the characterization of the culture. Perhaps I’m misremembering and the group of Qunari present in 2 are a more extreme sect than they are representative of the people as a whole. Now in Veilguard they seem to have really softened everything about the race. I’m just confused about the design direction which is disappointing because I really enjoy the qunari of DA2.
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.
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.
I just bought this after playing satisfactory and I love the optimism in this game.
I’m so into it. Sure you can tell it’s made by a small team but I couldn’t tell it was made by 2 people. I don’t like playing with mods but this one worked well with them to get rid of a bit of storage monotony.
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.
trying to live train AI against your playstyle is both expensive and unnecessary. Hard bots have never really been too much trouble. We don’t really need to use AI to outpace humans in most games. The exceptions would be an extremely long play games like chess and go.
There’s been a lot of use in AI for platformers and stuff like trackmania, but not for competition, simply for speedruns.
It would certainly be nice to have for the fighting games I play. A few have toyed with the idea of “shadow fighters”, but it never really feels like playing against a person. It might get their habits down, but it doesn’t replicate the adaptation of facing a person and having them change how they play based on how you’re playing. If someone could crack that nut, everyone would have someone on their level to play against at any hour of the day, no matter how obscure the game is.
yeah I would like to leverage AI for stuff like RPG NPCs. instead of hearing the same filler lines for 200 hours of gameplay, barely reacting to the context of your game you could have a vibrant array of endless dialog that actually keeps up with your game progress (or lack thereof).
That would be a pretty good use. Llms are a little slow on most home hardware still. Hallucinations could also be a little scary. I wonder if that would affect your ESRB rating, That’s technically it could say anything…
The fear of hallucinations is so great for a commercial company that when square enix tried it on a remake of a detective game of theirs, it became the poster child of how awful LLMs are for videogames, it’s one of the worst rated steam games, it’s like talking to a wall because they nerfed it so hard it’s worse than a normal text parser.
Hard bots have actually been so much trouble, that literally the only way to make them hard at all is to make them cheat by allowing them to operate outside of the ruleset the player is bound by. It’s a humongous issue with every strategy game on the market.
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Aktywne