Certainly some food for thought, but I feel like people saying indies will save us are saying that as consumers and a lot more selfishly. AAA is struggling to deliver interesting games and indies are killing it, so you play indie titles instead. Whether those indie titles are actually produced organically and whatnot is kind of secondary for that purpose. The mass layoffs in AAA are bad, but in the New York Times article, for example, they’re mainly seen as indicative of the business model faltering, which should naturally give more room for indies. But yeah, that these studios are still horrendously profitable kind of shows that this may not be true in the end.
It would certainly be weird, after their recent games were so story-driven. You can’t tell a good story, if you need to always keep the end open for possible expansions.
Yeah, and they often launch with loads of systems where future content could be plugged in, but the actual content itself is typically bad or at the very least incomplete. The publishers try too hard to build a platform rather than a good game…
Yeah, theoretically the exact model for monetization isn’t as important, but many publishers are hoping to get players to pay subscriptions indefinitely.
Fucking hell, man, with how many very publicly visible security problems they had last year, you’d think the stakeholders would be on board with doing security for a bit.
I could never get over how boring the gameplay of Infamous looked. Comparing it to a third-person shooter is pretty apt. Like, you’ve got these crazy lightning powers, but 90% of the time, you just use your hand buzzer to give folks a bit of a zap. Riveting.
Yeah, that frustrates me a lot, too. They almost had it right, that they need to go beyond realism to make truly good-looking games. But in practice, they say that only to show you the most boring-ass graphics known to humanity. I don’t need your pebbles to cast shadows. I can walk outside and find a pebble that casts shadows in a minute tops. Make the pebbles cast light instead, that could look cool. Or make them cast a basketball game. That’s at least something, I haven’t seen yet.
The big problem for these AAA studios is that this is their unique selling point. Hyper-realistic graphics and sprawling game worlds. If they stop doing these, they’re hardly different to the games from five years ago (which you can still buy and cheaply at that). And they’re hardly different from indie titles. They would enter quite the competitive market.
I do agree that we’re at somewhat of a breaking point. The production costs grow to absurd levels. The graphical advances are marginal. And not many gamers can afford the newest hardware to play these titles. But I don’t think, there’s an easy exit strategy for these AAA studios…
Interesting. I almost guessed that variant, too, but figured it would be a bit too wild for a country to auto-adopt most laws that another country implements. 🙃
I’m more surprised that it even got offered there. There’s some legal hurdles to clear for selling in a new country, and I guess, one of their distribution platforms decided it was worth it.
I guess, the Vatican might not have a ton of laws, though…
What I don’t like about the genre, is that I’m bad at it. 🙃
More seriously, I do find it kind of frustrating at times. Restarting ten times in a roguelike, no problem, because it’s always a new challenge.
But if I miss the same jump ten times, or have to retry the same platforming passage ten times, you’ll see me getting impatient, which means I’ll fail the next ten attempts, too…
I’d say, I’m primarily a very low volume gamer, so I don’t play a lot of games, and if I do, I don’t play them for long. And that certainly makes it easy to look at the news of a game releasing and to think, yeah, that’s probably neat, but if I’m buying another game then it’d be Undertale or Baba Is You or such, and it definitely doesn’t look as neat as those…
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.