Valve has wrapped the banhammer in tinsel, adding a lovely Christmassy flavour to their anti-smurfing actions. Players who have been banned for smurfing are finding a Highly Toxic Lump of Coal in their accounts, a ‘Seasonal Reward’.
that is the best way to interact with the bots, its more fun to just tell them crazy stories. Like the one near the general shrine, i told him that i was there to beat everyone up in the sparring ring and first it insisted there is no sparring in such holy place and in the end we “went in and slaughtered everyone for the emperor for being such heretics”. It would be even more fun though if they could question things more.
That “Solid Snake Method” sounds a lot like the emacs doctor…
In case you don’t know what the emacs doctor is: It’s an easter-egg of the text-editor emacs (it is, however, mentioned in the manual). The doctor is a chatbot based on ELIZA, and meant to portrait a psychotherapist. Since it is a rather simple script, it is very limited in what it can do, and mostly just reformulates user input as questions.
I’m not sure how I feel about AI chatbots as NPCs. On one hand, it does add near infinite dialogue options and flexibility to adapt to what a player does. That’s super cool and immersive.
On the other hand, it feels so damn lazy. Like I want to play games with dialogue/story as an art form, not as a “how much time can I spend here”
I think it’s pretty cool. The game does have a lot of pre-written dialogue as well, so it’s just an additional interaction you can have with NPCs. It also does require a detailed backstory, motivations, personality etc to be written for each NPC you can chat with, so I wouldn’t exactly call it lazy.
you can build systems that allow freely chatting but will always stay in character. it just requires making your own training data, and training your own model. which nobody seems willing to do. mostly because it’s not feasible without bethesda-levels of dialogue.
I’m playing Where Winds Meet and imo the chatbots are one of the weakest points of the game. You are told it’s a bot, it feels like one, and as there is still a rigid game around this interaction, it’s essentially just a weird romancing minigame. The only reason I engage with this system is because it can be easily cheated. Nothing of value would be lost if this feature was entirely cut from the game.
The Solid Snake method of conversation has taken on meme status in recent years, as players noticed the Metal Gear icon simply repeated the last few words of anything anyone said to him as a question. As was discovered by ‘Hakkix’ on Reddit, you can do the same to game the NPCs in Where Winds Meet. If someone asked you, say, to “Find the buried treasure chest,” you’d respond by saying, “The buried treasure chest?” and so on. Eventually, the NPC gets so confused that they express their gratitude and end the conversation. Whether that’s due to confusion or exasperation is unclear, but the effect is the same.
The Solid Snake method of conversation has taken on meme status in recent years, as players noticed the Metal Gear icon simply repeated the last few words of anything anyone said to him as a question. As was discovered by ‘Hakkix’ on Reddit, you can do the same to game the NPCs in Where Winds Meet. If someone asked you, say, to “Find the buried treasure chest,” you’d respond by saying, “The buried treasure chest?” and so on. Eventually, the NPC gets so confused that they express their gratitude and end the conversation. Whether that’s due to confusion or exasperation is unclear, but the effect is the same.
We need laws passed where AI should have to be clearly labeled or the user faces severe fines. Robo calls and AI IVR phone systems should clearly tell you “this is AI”.
Use of AI should be disclosed the same way 3rd party DRM and EULA agreements are. And similarly it should mention some details. People are free to boycott Denuvo if they want, but people are also free to buy it anyways if they want. Disclosure is never a bad thing.
The thing is that it’s kind of voluntary. Game developers could have use AI to develop the game and if they wouldn’t want to disclose it no one would know.
Unless the use of AI is the very crappy “AI art” that’s easy to notice the rest of uses would be very hard or actually impossible to figure it out to audit the legitimacy of the tag.
And this will end like r/art where the mods deleted a post accusing the artist of using AI when it was not AI and the final mod answer was “change your art style so it doesn’t look like AI”. A brutal witch-hunt in the end.
I mean, the term “AI” as it’s used in this context refers to output from Large Language Models (or whatever other complex machine learning systems) that scrape the content of the internet and produce images, text, etc. based on the collective artistic/linguistic work of innumerable uncompensated, unaware human contributors.
Algorithms written by programmers that interpret internal variables and react based on that aren’t the kind of “AI” in question.
I actually would kind of like ai in games. Not slop visuals though. What I really would love would be in a VR game, going up to an NPC, and getting a feel for different cultures of the world I’m in through talking. Maybe you have to have a certain type of conversation to find out the plot for a side quest, or talk to a guard at a bar and work your way to find out the shift rotation as he gets drunk or something so you can infiltrate the castle.
I feel like ai could be useful like that…but getting rid of artists in favor of ai slop is just the worst way to implement this AI thing.
Avoiding slopification seems to be the main priority, and you would have to have the AI be incorporated into a game it would have to do something that AI is already passable at, otherwise it wont pass that barrier and will get shunned like the rest of the slop.
For example, you could have an LLM act as a character or have a neural net incorporated into the game-ai like how tool assisted DOTA2 competitions work.
I see three main problems, first is that you would need the hardware to run it locally, which may be a hard sell to some people depending on what the game it is, only online expirenes should endebt themselves to AWS, if its single player, its going to lose a ton of sales there. Two, its really hard to convince audiences electrons have feelings, remember Final Fantasy (2001)? Thats what happened last time someone tried to personify a digital construct, and well… It went swimmingly (Microsofts Tay, does not count). Lastly, impact, would a narrative focused title have the same impact of an AI wrote the script? How would you feel after playing through a title like “Papers, please” and when the credits roll it says “script generated by CoPilot”? I feel like it would ring hollow, the feelings would be cheapened by it…
I would be interested to see how this plays out, but im content to support the titles and studios that do things the traditional way.
So does Nintendo’s estore and they don’t bother to filter or sort the slop out, it’s a worthless store to search through. At least steam filters out the slop trash and allows refunds if you somehow fall for garbage.
What is your point here? Some niche forgotten game from 12 years weighs that heavily on your mind?
Where do you even find asset flip games? I haven’t seen any in 5+ years and that period only existed because malicious people found the angle, which valve plugged.
Steam dominates the market because all my friends are there and we all have a great experience. Sales on PC games are better than physical console games ever get. Customer support and in general user experience has been phenomenal.
You can look past weaknesses that were addressed and solved my guy. Greedy assholes will always try to game the system and valve plugs those quick.
You do know it’s a market place lil bro and the best marketplace available in general? The only better one I can think of is Costco and their tech return policies are worse than steam.
You do know DRM isn’t enforced right? You can release without it.
You do know the refund policy is MORE consumer friendly than what the legal obligation from EU requires right?
If calling me a sheep helps you feel better about your poorly researched takes (and incredibly outdated). All the power to you. I’ve said my piece now, I have no further will to continue this fruitless yapping.
Yah the more I use AI the more I can detect the absolute bullshit people on both sides spew.
It’s the most amazingly complicated averaging machine we’ve ever invented. It will take the most interesting source materials, the most unique ideas of other people, the most creative materials, and it will find a way to find the safest, most average common qualities between those things. This isn’t a model problem or input problem, it’s fundamental to how generative AI works.
It helps with searching for things online, it helps create guide plans for taking on new tasks like learning some new skill. It’s far better at teaching how to do something like coding than it is left to just code on its own and you copy and paste. It can certainly do that, but you spend so much time correcting it and fixing it that you do far better learning the code yourself and how it works.
Same with art, the people who are using it to best effect are themselves already artists and they use AI to thumbnail compositions or rough layouts, color tests and such, and then just do the work themselves but faster because they already know roughly what direction they’re going.
But using it to write your scripts, to copy/paste code, to generate works of art… it’s literally just giving you other people’s ideas mashed together and unseasoned.
…what calls? No one is calling for this. One dude said it was unnecessary. That’s not a call, it’s an opinion. He’s not out picketing for the end of fucking AI labels.
whether he is or isn’t, they saw a chance to create a huge amount of good PR for Valve while doing and spending absolutely nothing. I mean, look at the amount of upvotes this post has. all they had to do is take what appears to be a principled stand.
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