The most advanced AI I’ve seen is in Hitman WoA, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Both games don’t have “learning” AI. They just have tons of rules that the player can reasonably expect and interact with, that make them seem lifelike. If a guard sees you throw a coin twice in Hitman, he doesn’t get suspicious and investigate - he goes and picks it up just like the first one. Same for reactions to finding guns, briefcases, or your exploding rubber duck.
I got the impression the writers had read a bunch of niche Marvel comics and wanted to impress with that knowledge. Maybe some fans of those characters actually enjoy that, but it didn’t flow well. I barely had any context for who this Hunter is, who Lilith is, and why they matter.
I’ve known about the gold tokens system, it has made sense as a way to invalidate black market gold sellers, equalizing WoW gold against the US Dollar. Still don’t quite understand why the token would now sell for 170k though…? Unless you didn’t mean to use the dollar symbol.
There’s no exact point in time at which “the aggregated reviews” are one finished article of news. One bootlicking review site will have its review of a game out in the first 3 hours to be the first place people read. Then, another detailed reviewer will spend a week investigating the game’s systems before providing a more nuanced review.
I’ve found that Steam reviews are especially useless for visual novels and games with anime girls. I am open to the concept of a visual novel, and really enjoy the Ace Attorney games, but maintain 99.9% of them are trash, with none of their excess dialog trimmed down. They all have reviews saying Overwhelmingly Positive though, because anyone who would take the chance to try that genre - a small segment of people - will enjoy it.
I also really wish Steam would implement a Helpfulness system for Guides, since most games have Guide pages that are just filled with meme posts, eg; “How 2 win: Pick OP character, enjoy victory”.
I feel like when developers have a good pedigree, they can apply their concepts elsewhere.
Blizzard hadn’t made a shooter before Overwatch, but definitely got it right in so many respects. Bloober team had some mediocre horror games, but was steadily getting better before they made the Silent Hill 2 remake. Valve made just shooters before Portal and then DOTA 2. Heck, easy to forget The Talos Principle, an existential puzzle game is made by the people who made “Uber DUMB MACHO SHOOTER Serious Sam”.
Oh yeah, and survival horror team Tango Gameworks making cartoon rhythm combat game Hi-Fi Rush.
I’m reminded of the techniques Valve used for this type of thing in the Half-Life episodes.
Say, for instance, they have a bit of destruction physics that they think looks memorable and they want people to see. They’ll have a Combine soldier shoot at you from that direction, to force your attention that way. They may also set the event on a “Look Trigger” so that it will only happen while the player is looking at it.
If someone says one thing and does another…people tend to trust the action, not the words. If sales numbers indicate one thing, it doesn’t matter what people say on social media.
I’d say even PC, in terms of hardware, has plateaued. Many PC gamers are staying on Nvidia 1080 and 1070 cards, because gaming just hasn’t moved up past that graphical level - and it really shouldn’t, because quite a few human eyes just can’t see much detail beyond then - and developer budgets quite often don’t catch up to make use of all that excess hardware.
This might mean we effectively stay with the PS5, or even the PS4 generation, for quite a long time, while still generating ideas with what we do in that level. Probably the biggest thing we have to do now is control gaming budgets better. Try watching the credits of any Ubisoft game, and think “Someone approved all of these hires.” Meanwhile, rewind to Half-Life 2 and they played through the entire credits of the game during the opening sections without it taking a half hour.
Sorry, folks. We’re still working on the browser plugin that automatically hides/downvotes all social media content that raises the topic of Sweet Baby Inc. You’ll just have to do it manually for now.
I’m reminded of a required minigame near the end of Star Fox Adventures based purely around button mashing. The requirement needed some dozen attempts when I was a kid and lead to strats involving rubbing a spoon on the controller.
Thing is, it is the same requirement as EA, Ubisoft, and to some extent, Valve.
Granted, I think those others have spread their legal agreements to more countries, which has been the main complaint. But they all get to track player data; I’m sure Sony only got into PC wanting that too.
I’d argue that part of the problem is, gamer culture has approached everything in the industry from a vein of negativity. “Don’t buy this”, “Pirate this”, “XPublisher is damn evil”. Certainly many of those accusations and rejections are valid, but there is now far, far more attention on what sucks than what’s good. A developer puts out an awesome singleplayer game they spent 7 years making, and we’ll give them $60 but…not much more than that. We’ll probably even complain if, due to high budgets, it comes out at $70. Meanwhile, the rest of the world that’s curious about entertainment doesn’t care much about 30 “Don’t” rules and just buys whatever seems interesting when they’re bored - because they got their paycheck and want something.
It’s reasonable a developer is always finding new ways they can pay their staff. I’d even say many singleplayer games we love were NOT the money-makers we wish they were. Granted, quite often now those $60 are going into paying into shareholders and executive bonuses, and I think that’s another valid thing to be negative towards, but once again: If this was an important point to gamers, we could champion studios that grant paid time off and lower their CEO bonuses.
And I’ll even go one further: If a common thread is “Studios ask too much of our money for the full game”…we could even turn our attention to minimum wage laws. We certainly should be.