Hopefully, the delay is to improve the existing experience. Too many times it has been because the original vision was scrapped after a decade of work and they restart development with a different direction in mind, culminating in a mediocre game.
Lol, enshittification came faster than expected. At least Netflix was successful before the price hike, and then decided to be greedy because their user base was willing to pay.
On the other side of the fence, Xbox Series consoles tanked harder than XOne (which was already a colossal failure) and Game Pass subscribers fell short of corporate expectations every year since its inception. And they decide that this is the best time to double the price of the service? Good luck with that decision, Microsoft.
Who is gonna pay $15/month for a catalog of old games? Old games are already cheap enough that you can buy them directly and still “profit” over keeping an ongoing subscription. And $20/month for day one games? At that price, you’re better off just buying the damn game. GP was already hard to justify at its previous price, but this new price point is egregious.
Most obvious use for it would be to have “life-like” npc’s with somewhat believable lives and backstories. Still, it’ll be interesting (and potentially hilarious) to see how they can be manipulated etc.
The diagram proposes it be used in other aspects too, such as in dynamically altering the game narrative.
i.e. you feed into the LLM “okay, this is the current state of the game and characters, what would be interesting to happen next?” and then the game state changes based on that assessment.
Setting aside the feasibility of implementing this typically overreaching and broad tech patent, I can see this eventually being useful in immersive sim games like Deus Ex and such.
In immersive sims the dream has always been to give the player infinite freedom, but games can’t provide infinite freedom because every possibility has to be programmed and accounted for, and dialog written. Would be amazing if the game itself could dynamically adjust based on player behaviour.
But honestly, to your point about breaking it, I think that’s why we still haven’t seen LLMs deployed in big titles apart from some private tech demos - studios and publishers are afraid of the prospect of abuse.
As soon as such a game landed you can bet your ass people will be working immediately to break it and get it to do inappropriate things (because that’s fun!) and publishers are terrified about that, because it will totally happen no matter how many safety rails you try to put in.
I mean the real challenge is you still need to program all the different states. The LLM can help generate narrative, but that doesn’t change interactivness with the world. A great example is the Skyrim LLM mod a while back. In that user’s would “convince” an NPC to join them, but there would need to be programming behind the scenes that allows people to be recruited and the LLM dialouge would need to know to trigger that. There is the possibility of some interesting things, but it’s going to be hard to work it out.
It would be difficult, yes. I’m a software developer myself and have been working with LLMs on personal projects recently, so I’ve got some context on the challenges involved.
The hype around LLMs is obviously all “Yeah just throw AI at the problem! AI can do it!” but the reality is that you will always need a good amount of normal coding to wrap around that and make the LLM inputs and outputs sane and interoperable with the rest of your system. So I’m very aware.
My real wonder is that with an appropriate implementation, how much of the classical aspects of the game could you ultimately and eventually move to LLMs, which is what the patent seems to be suggesting.
For example, if you used LLM only for character dialogue and nothing else, it would go something like this:
You talk to an NPC and insult them
The convo is assessed and it tweaks some hidden classically programmed reputation and faction variables
You go to the base of a faction associated
Those variables determine the faction is hostile
But you could potentially use LLMs to manage more aspects directly, and that could look like this:
You talk to an NPC and insult them
An LLM summary of your actions is written to a world log
You go to the base of the faction associated
The controller LLM parses the entire world log for your actions relevant to the faction and determines the result as hostility, including extracting reasoning for that which members of the faction can confront you on if spoken to
Now that’s already a lot of work and the only bit of classic programming we really took out is how the rep system is managed. But we gained some flexibility in that the source of your relationship with the faction could come from any action anywhere, including ones the game designers never even dreamed up, not just certain things which were pre-known to update it.
Where decisions actually interact with the game world will always need to be classically programmed (like being hostile and what that means and how it causes the characters to act, do they shoot you, what it means to ‘shoot’ and ‘move’ etc) and there will need to be a way to interface with that, but LLMs could introduce some level of flexibility in places where that wasn’t possible before.
A reaulting problem though is that the more you give to LLMs, the more the entire thing is likely to unravel and become incoherent, without doing even more work to prevent that, and there will still be cracks.
Is it ultimately feasible? I don’t know, but it will be interesting for whoever gets to try.
Yeah, that’s exactly how I see it too. The biggest challenge to me is even if you can do it, can you make it feel reasonable and consistent.
In games today you know that there are good/bad options in a given scenario. With LLMs anything you do could cause an impact to a faction.
The other big issue is you run into user input. How many players want to be typing or speaking full conversations? Maybe it works for some games, but you only really get the full “flexibility” if users are fully interacting. This could greatly limit the games where LLMs could make an impact.
You can start to monitor actions, and not dialouge, and process events/actions through an LLM, but not sure how much LLMs would make that easier versus just programming those interactions.
Another big one is generation of inappropriate or sexual content. No publisher will dare to ship something when the next week there’s going to be videos all over social media of their game characters saying and doing wildly inappropriate stuff (as hilarious as that would be for us as players!)
Microsoft is getting a bad rep because they don’t want to let the Series S go. They are not handling these problems very well. The Series X should be the “cheap” platform and they should have a “Pro”, called Series XS (pronounced excess, you are welcome Microsoft), so they are the platform that people want and not the platform that’s holding back games.
The problem is the Series S sold a lot, last I read it was about two thirds of their user base. Microsoft also want to push platform independence using X Cloud, which solves their Series S issues, but with the feature parity requirement in the Series X and S, they keep hitting this issue.
That’s a very bad business strategy, it should be one or the other, X Cloud or in Console parity. The parity being the weak one. I would like to know the defense arguments for this strategy.
The thing is, if a game releases on Series X without any bonus bells and whistles like (pick one) 4K, 60fps, or ray tracing, it’s kind of failed the move to next gen. If it then cannot scale any of those things back for the Series S, then it’s failed at designing scalability.
The new consoles do not exist to serve programmer inefficiency.
Do developers still make different games for different consoles? I thought the Xbox X was just a stronger Xbox One. Does MS disable these high quality graphics options in the menus?
Xbox has a packaged release system designed for that. Since the Series S isn’t really meant to go over 1080p, developers are encouraged to only include smaller versions of textures since anything too detailed would be wasted.
PS5, by contrast, tends to have simplified video settings panels so gamers can prioritize what they want - be that raytracing, 4K, or 60fps. Often, just having the extra power doesn’t necessarily matter if the game is coded against taking advantage of it. (I think Bloodborne is infamous for this - it hasn’t gotten an update, so even on PS5, everyone must play it locked at 30fps).
Similar to how the PS5 had “8K” on the box; it’s only technically capable of that for the sake of videos, but most games tend to go a bit smaller resolution for practical rendering.
I mean…I think yes, at some point a marketing department made that claim, which is unfortunate because that’s ultimately far from reality and most people know it. The claims made of the Series X and PS5 are also usually exaggerated, because most salespeople can get away with prefixing any claim with the words “up to”.
I read that it has nothing to do with the hardware, and is in fact because of Sony having an exclusive deal to release only on their platform the first few months.
I second this. I’m planning to start switching my devices from Windows to Linux in a couple of weeks due to good experience I’ve had with the Steam Deck
I can -sort of- understand cancelling games that have been in development hell but it's insane than they cancelled the Perfect Dark remake. It looked very far along when they showed it last year.
Anytime I see super-smooth transition animations in a demo, or even just gameplay mechanics that seem to work out way too conveniently, it tells me it’s an animated “pre-viz” demo of the game they want to make. That’s kind of the impression I got from Perfect Dark.
I think eat they’re saying is that those type of demos are less a representation of the current state of the game development and more a bespoke product to represent what they hope to eventually make, which in fact likely took time away from developing the actual game
At some point, it will only be worth it, if you either finish games at an alarming rate, or play so many different games, that buying them separately would make no sense
I think if you’re playing 1 new release game every month or two, you’re getting the value. I’m enjoying Avowed and Doom the Dark ages recently, but I’m very glad I didn’t pay for Doom.
Xbox has kind of been on a roll lately with the games they’ve added.
Indeed. I think the last 6 months have been great value for PC game pass. Of course it goes against the OP/thread sentiment that Xbox is ripping everyone off.
I buy on steam/key resellers at heavy discount most of the time, but game pass allows me to play new release games that are in the “looks interesting, but I’m not dropping full price to try this out” category of games.
But right now it is 20 bucks a month. Even at 30, that is “worth it” if you play two or three newly released games a year and random library games beyond that.
The issue is if people have multiple consoles or are in the PC space and also have access to steam sales and bundles and the like.
It’d be pretty sick if after seeing the massive success bg3 was and how they were wildly off with their prediction, Microsoft pushes an order for pillars of eternity 3.
While I’m in this bizzaro world where Microsoft makes good decisions, I’d also like a Ferrari.
I know the first game didn’t, by the time I played the sequel (though I didn’t enjoy that one nearly as much as the first) I did recall it being an option.
Yeah I agree with you on thinking of it as a new game fly. The problem I have is MS’s plan is to make gamers comfortable with only renting games by making it cheap then when there is no other option. They jack up the price.
I still haven’t seen the “no other option” scenario as so many claim. You could say $80 price tags do that, but if all prices are going up, that doesn’t track so much.
They also discount games if you buy them while you have game pass. So there’s some encouragement to try a game, find you want to keep it, and pay for a permanent copy should it be removed from GP (or the player decides to stop the GP subscription).
Still, I’m done with them because they’re done with talented studios, and are active participants in the Palestinian genocide.
It’s more the trend of i have seen in the tech space of a deal too good to be true. A tech company taking a loss to gain marketshare and drive out competition on price or flat out buy them then when they have cornered the market drive up the price for insane profits and customers have no choice because you effectively become the platform.
The video game market is extremely hard to “corner”. It can happen for professional software like document processing, image editing, etc, but far too many startups are interested in making games, and there’s multiple digital stores to sell them. Minecraft and Factorio even sold off their own websites. Clair Obscur recently outsold a lot of big publisher efforts, and definitely didn’t need Game Pass’s visibility.
They can corner one particular audience like Call of Duty, but can only push so many expectations on them before those gamers consider other games. They tried it with Fallout, complete with subscription, and it was massively unpopular.
There are not much possibilities to legally own games left. Physical releases are nearly full gone on PC (physical boxes only containing Steam Keys), and even on Consoles they become less and less common (or turned into something like the Switch 2 Game cards). On the digital release front only GOG comes to mind as as store where one could say that one owns the game after purchase and download. Everything else only sell licenses that can be revoked or removed any moment.
I feel like, though it doesn’t come up much, we should conceptually separate “owning the game” from “having a physical edition”. Some games give you a disc, but barely offer ownership (remember CD keys?) while other games are only sold digitally, but are ultra-permissive with what you do with them.
I get the sense many indie companies would like to give people as much control as possible, but also can’t afford printing box sets.
Hot take: gamepass is preferable to a digital storefront. Any game you “buy” digitally is only somewhat less temporary than gamepass. At least gamepass doesn’t fool you into thinking you own the games you’re playing
Buy physical. If you’re buying digital, only buy from GOG. Pirate everything you can, and seed that shit forever
I agree on GoG, buying physical only gets you the broken unpatched game they shipped. Steam i feel okay with since they are a private company and not all their games are DRMed and it’s clearly marked if they are.
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