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.
Technically finished out the season journey and "campaign" rewards for Diablo 4: Season 6, now I'm just going for 100% completion and the rest of the battle pass rewards. I'm thinking it might take me a while, since for whatever reason ancestral items don't drop that often for me, and the last thing I have to do is salvage 100 of them. It might have to do with the Torment level I'm on, but since the season doesn't end until the end of January, I'm not too worried.
Speaking of Diablo, I was going to complete Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred with my OG campaign Necromancer, but I was having so much fun with my seasonal Rogue that I started working on and finished the DLC with her instead. Not sure how I feel about the ending of the expansion, since leaves a very big opening for more expansions (or d5?) and doesn't really feel finished as far as the story goes.
spoilersWe don't even get to fight fight Mephisto! Just like a concept of him or whatever. wtf is up with that? And where tf is Diablo? He's the one I'm here for.
Since The Lake House DLC came out this past week for Alan Wake 2, I've decided to replay (most) things Remedy, starting with Alan Wake, of course. I'm playing the remaster, which looks a lot better than I remember playing it for the first time. And while replaying it after having played AW2, I didn't realize there were SO MANY references they stuck in referring to the sequel. Hell, even the QR codes that were just fun little things in the pc port have been turned into straight up references. It's been so fun to replay.
since for whatever reason ancestral items don’t drop that often for me, and the last thing I have to do is salvage 100 of them. It might have to do with the Torment level I’m on
I’m on Torment 4 and yeah, they don’t drop a lot. If you’re on a high enough difficulty, Ancestral Uniques probably drop more, since you can farm the Uber bosses, who basically only drop uniques. I think that objective was the second to last one I finished for the journey (the last are the 5 Helltide Commanders, which I don’t probably won’t do).
Oh, that's good to know that the drop rate isn't just me then, haha. I'm on Torment 2, and thought about moving up, but if the drop rate isn't any better, I'll just stay where I am for now.
You probably know this already, but if you don’t get slowed down that much on T3, definitely move up, but if you’re just getting killed too much or don’t kill stuff fast enough, stay on T2. I farmed T3 for a while, even though I had unlocked T4, because I would just get one-shot too much. After some more upgrades and a Mythic Unique, I was finally able to do T4 efficiently.
That's kind of where I am now: I have T3 unlocked, but I'm not happy with the rate at which I'm killing stuff at that level in the Pit, so I'm upgrading what I can until I'm more comfortable there.
This has been discussed a lot over the decades (with some VERY good articles written by assholes we try to pretend don’t exist))
The gist of it is: AI cheats because the alternative isn’t “fun” and rapidly outpaces humans.
Because in an RTS? After you get a build order down, the big decider is Actions Per Minute (APM). From a build standpoint, it is the idea of triggering the appropriate research the absolute second you have enough minerals. From a combat standpoint, it is rapidly issuing move and attack orders so that you always win the combat triangle. The former isn’t significantly different than just having cheaper research or faster build times. The latter is actively demoralizing in the same way that we all died inside when we first got permission to go online in Starcraft. Except at a level that even the good players realize they ain’t shit.
For grand strategy games (barring real-ish time ones like Stellaris) you basically have two real approaches. The first is the games with research options (… like Stellaris. Look, I have been playing a lot of Stellaris lately). We try not to acknowledge it but RNG has a massive impact on that when you really want to get torpedoes but no options are popping so you are just doing the fastest research choices you can to get a new pool. And the difficulty option there is… a known order.
The other are the very elaborate fixed tech trees. Obviously this gets back to build order. And the reality is… the benefit gained from rapidly updating the hard mode AI to use the current meta just isn’t worth it. That IS somewhere that an optimizing function can be applied to (and… semi-off-the-record but that has been a thing for over a decade and is why devs aren’t THAT surprised when a “new” meta takes over in a strategy game) but it becomes a question of how much it is worth it.
All that said, we are seeing a lot more effort put into “learning” AI in racing games (driveatars) and fighting games because those tend to be cases where even the best AI is still expected to be “human” and we aren’t TOO demoralized when we realize we are in a pub with Daigo. That said… there is a reason that modern SNK Bosses tend to have super armor rather than frame perfect inputs. Because the former is “bullshit” but the latter is just mean.
APM actually does jack shit. You can spam a button fast and you’ll get 400 APM and get rolled by someone who does 40. EAPM is where it is at. Which is effective APM. How many actions you can do that move you closer to victory. Instead of just spamming two buttons on repeat (which is what a lot of Starcraft players do)
There used to be AI’s integrated into Starcraft 2 and later actually playing the game (like a player would) online. You can put restrictions on eAPM for these bots. You can force them to make human mistakes - delaying upgrades. They can get pretty well aproximated to human skill. The main issue with it is they suck at context. They can’t really “remember” stuff happening. Picked up a dropship and it flew away from my FOV? It’s gone. Oh shit a dropship came from the exact same spot! Oh good it flew away, which means it can’t hurt me no more.
There are also tournaments in SC2 for unlimited AIs - where they play the game without any caps. The only thing that matters is who wrote a more efficient bot. Machine learning isn’t reallly used there, more likely a decision tree. Those do exactly what you are describing. Playing against those as a human is pointless and would get someone who introduced them as a difficulty instantly fired.
Yeah, but it’s not like an LLM or nueralnet thing. The kind of AI used for video games doesn’t need all that to feel smarter/harder.
Making a bot harder is actually easier than making it easier. It’s super straightforward to make one that always wins and is perfect. It’s more involved making a bot that doesn’t always take the best path or the most efficient way of completing the thing. I, personally, could make a Rocket League bot that plays the game better than any human since it’s all just math, and the computer is a calculator. I don’t think I would be able to make one a human player could actually beat though.
L4D has a mechanic like what the OP wants. It’s just not very good (IMO it overcorrects way too hard in both directions). Every time you win or lose or this happens too much, and this happens too little, it keeps track of that and then just adjusts things to change it up. Like if you sprint through one stage without resistance, the next stage will have more infected to deal with. They even gave it a name: the AI Director.
The alien in Alien Isolation is like that; but it is better done.
I played the original back in the day, although not as far as the remake. It’s incredibly faithful to it, almost beat-to-beat, but carefully polished and improved in all the right places, e.g. by improving pacing, creating a more interconnected game world and subtle balancing changes. The nostalgia is still there, but it feels modern nonetheless, not just because of its outstanding presentation.
I actually don’t like horror and jump scare games. The fact that this game managed to draw me in and keep me playing is quite the achievement. This is one of those games that is so good, it’s enjoyable even if you don’t like the genre.
ECHO, the 3rd person action\puzzle game was a fun concept to script in your machine dopplegangers to learn on you (and repeat after you one of the set actions you can do) and reset every cycle.
I don’t think it would work by itself without such limiting.
I always got the impression it wasn’t a learning AI but rather a very limited “Has the player pressed the run button? if YES: AI can use run next cycle”
Yes it is, it’s 100% scripted. And yes, in the environment where you can do like 10 different actions, they start to do their routine adding ones that you used in that cycle before they get reset. In a sense, they act no more natural than monsters from a tabletop game.
But these do make me think that if we talk gamedesign with a LLM as an actor, it should too have a very tight set of options around it to effectively learn. The ideal situation is something simplistic, like Google’s dino jumper where the target is getting as far as it can by recognising a barrier and jumping at the right time.
But when things get not that trivial, like when in CS 1.6 we have a choice to plant a bomb or kill all CTs, it needs a lot of learning to decide what of these two options is statistically right at any moment. And it needs to do this while having a choice of guns, a neverending branching tree of routes to take, tactics to use, and how to coexist with it’s teammates. And with growing complexity it’s hard to make sure that it’s guided right.
Imagine you have thousands of parameters from it playing one year straight to lose and to win. And you need to add weight to parameters that do affect it’s chance to win while it keeps learning. It’s more of a task than writing a believable bot, that is already dificult.
And the way ECHO fakes it… makes it less of a headache. Because if you limit possible options to the point close to Google’s dino, you can establish a firm grasp on teaching the LLM how to behave in a bunch of pre-defined situations.
And if you won’t, it’s probably easier to ‘fake it’ like ECHO or F.E.A.R. does giving a player an impression of AI when it’s just a complicated scri orchestrating the spectacle.
Finished Metro: Last Light last week. Have to say I didn’t really like it. Spoiler warnings below. The good bits were good, to be sure: the populated stations of Bolshoi and Venice were phenomenal and there were parts that harked back to the highlights of the first game - the early parts with Pavel for instance and some nice levels in the tunnels. Playing on Survival Hardcore there were passages that were phenomenally immersive and enjoyable, and I do love the world building around the communities in the metro.
The story just didn’t land with me. The political war left me completely uninterested and the love story with Anna was so half-baked I almost wanted to stop playing right there when the sex scene happened. I also didn’t really like the overly supernatural stuff like the River of Fate. It was also kind of hard for me to follow the logic of the narrative at times as it felt like Artyom was just kind of drifting around and happened to end up where he needed to be regardless. He also should have died like a dozen times, but I guess he’s a superhero.
The moral system left me frustrated more than anything now that I knew about its existence (I played 2033 completely blind). Finally, the boss fights felt terrible and really out of place in a game that should be about tension, loneliness and stealth. Artyom was too much of an action hero here for my taste. There wasn’t really anything like the great Library level in 2033. When he picked up a gatling gun at the end like a russian Rambo and fought off a horde of enemies I was rolling my eyes.
Still, I’m glad to have gotten through it finally - this was my second attempt - and I am interested to see what they did in Exodus as I’ve heard nothing but good things.
For now I’m taking a breather and tackling Bioshock 2, another backlog game to get through before being able to play Infinite, which is the game I’m really looking forward too.
I thought I was done with the latest Diablo 4 season last week, but then I put in a bunch more hours this weekend. While the season and the expansion is generally fun, it feels like the devs took two steps forward and one step back. Progression seems a lot more tedious, compared to before. In earlier seasons, you could basically unlock the highest difficulty really fast and progress pretty quickly to the endgame content. Now, with everything a lot harder and a bunch more difficulty options, you take twice or three times as long, to get to the same point as before. If I didn’t play the Spiritborn, who is completely busted this season, it might’ve taken even longer. I still gotta try the raid, which you can only do coop, although I rarely play with someone else.
Then I started HROT, but have only finished the first level, so I can’t talk about it too much. It seems like it’s basically just Quake with a different skin, I guess? I love the look, and it plays pretty smoothly, so I look forward to playing more of it.
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