“The potential here is absurd,” wrote app developer Nick Dobos in reaction to the news. “Why write complex rules for software by hand when the AI can just think every pixel for you?”
“Can it run Doom?”
“Sure, do you have a spare datacenter or two full of GPUs, and perhaps a nuclear powerplant for a PSU?”
What the fuck are these people smoking. Apparently it can manage 20 fps on one “TPU” but to get there it was trained on shitload of footage of Doom. So just play Doom?!
The researchers speculate that with the technique, new video games might be created “via textual descriptions or examples images” rather than programming, and people may be able to convert a set of still images into a new playable level or character for an existing game based solely on examples rather than relying on coding skill.
It keeps coming back to this, the assumption that these models, if you just feed them enough stuff will somehow become able to “create” something completely new, as if they don’t fall apart the second you ask for something that wasn’t somewhere in the training data. Not to mention that this type of “gaming engine” will never be as efficient as an actual one.
Even if it is, it’s a derivation I’ve been sorely missing. Ever since Battleborn got shut down, there’s been a Battleborn shaped hole in my heart. Deadlock fits in that hole really well.
It’s possible that the whole impetus for creating Deadlock came from something like that. Someone at valve, like me, enjoyed the hell out this particular mix of mechanics.
There’s nothing like it. Dota doesn’t do the trick, neither does Overwatch. Of all things, the closest thing might be Titanfall 2’s titan combat.
I’d say yes. But you do have to figure out how to apply the MOBA way of thinking. How to stack the stats of items, abilities and leveling up, into doing a shitload of damage without dying.
That applied to Battelborn, and it does in Deadlock, too.
I’d be very worried if a studio was pumping out several full-scale games a year. Did you mean publisher? I find following publishers to be pretty hit or miss, they usually deal with a multitude of game studios whose output will vary wildly. The days of EA making a bunch of EA games is over, now people care whether it’s Dice, Respawn or BioWare, and what the specific game is like.
Studios still just making games do exist. Kojima Productions, Santa Monica, Guerilla, Remedy, Fromsoft, Square Enix, Larian, Id Tech, Insomniac, Sucker Punch, CDPR…
They’re just relatively fewer and farther between as so many studios have pivoted to spending years and years working on one live service title or another, and the rest of these you only really hear from once in several years, when a game comes out.
For publishers, Devolver and Paradox come to mind.
It doesn’t really even manage that. It’s not bad, there’s a lot to like, but playing it I ran into a lot of stuff I wish was there, but wasn’t.
The story was one thing, but it completely fails at bulding tension. DS1 fills you with adrenaline at regular intervals, but in Callisto Protocol the second I realized the “sound-sensitive” blind enemies don’t react to the noise of melee combat, it was like all the air went out of the balloon.
That’s a perfect microcosm of the whole game. Really neat ideas, really good execution, but only to 90%. And that last 10% matters. A LOT.
The combat system is great, but it doesn’t lean into it at all. The final boss is just a bullet sponge that makes no clever use of any mechanics, and the game is so obsessed with trying to be DS (and TLOU) with boring stealth sections and puzzles.
You end up spending a lot of time wishing combat was happening.
I feel like a Callisto Protocol 2 that leans into the things worked, and fixed just a couple small things that get near working, could be amazing.
It was good in many ways. And it expands on dead space in many ways mechanically, it just didn’t follow through in some aspects.
The guns are cool and there’s a very satisfying melee system.
But the melee system is overpowered, which means monsters are less scary. The sound-based stealth sections where you go through rooms full of blind monsters that allegedly react to sound, have the monsters being completely deaf to melee kills, which means you can just walk up to them one by one and clear the room.
And you’re right about the story. The game should have had LORE, but it’s just the bare minimum generic excuse to have a horror setting.
It does have decent atmosphere, cool visuals, etc. The combat system is very good. Much more action game than horror game. The melee system meant that not running out of ammo and being careful with your shots wasn’t as important as in dead space.
It falls short in several disappointing ways. The “stealth” system is a joke. There’s a level where you have to sneak around “blind” monsters that only act on sound, except you can walk right up to them and just melee kill them, LOUDLY, without any of the others reacting.
So the stealth sections are completely trivial.
There’s a pretty interesting enemy in the form of the automated security robots of the prison, except it literally shows up in just the tutorial, where it shows you how to deal with them, but then they’re utterly absent in the rest of the game.
The whole game is really impressive in a couple ways (graphics and animation, the combat system) but it feels like 50% of what was supposed to be in it was cut, and like several mechanics never got implemented.
Marvel Rivals might be a bit too close to Overwatch, or maybe that’s a good thing?
You might consider just not playing ranked. In anything. Assigning a number to my skill level and that of others had a negative effect on my relationship with games and using them to have fun. Recognizing that and just playing to play instead of to appease the rating system, has led to much more fun coming out of my fun.
It doesn’t mean you can’t get better at the game over time, only that you’ll be the judge of your progress, instead of an arbitrary number that won’t ever feel truly fair.