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Nah. They are detecting the collision in order to push the player, so the engine is doing the work already. They could easily add an on_collision_player event in the NPC controller that fires at that point to handle NPC reaction.
The age of the engine impacts things like loading screens, poor use of modern hardware, etc. The 2004-era NPC handling is simply a reluctance to do any more than the bare minimum.
The problem with translating classical RPG combat into an FPS is that the game already has physical missing based on player skill. The dice roll stacks on top of that. Add in the total lack of communication on whether a miss was you or the dice, and it makes the player think that the hitboxes just suck.
Later games that do something similar tend to move it to the enemy, giving them a chance to parry for reduced damage. It’s mechanically very similar, but it feels way better for the player since they can see the hit still connect.
Neural networks are deterministic. In LLMs, it outputs probabilities, which are picked from via seeded RNG. Image generation tries multiple options based on different seeds, then picks the best fit as identified by a neural network and repeats. For both, if you give a specific model the same inputs, you’ll get the same output.
The public-facing interfaces don’t give seed control, which means they give a different output each time, but that isn’t an inherent property of generative AI.
Not only did they not have access to the original team, the studio demanded absolute secrecy. Potential employees were not told anything about the project until after they were hired.
The game required highly specialized skills to make and they made sure the studio wouldn’t be able to acquire those skills.
- Mirror’s Edge
- Lingo (2?)
- And Yet It Moves
ME has stuck with me as my favorite game for fifteen years now. I love it visually, the soundtrack is incredible, and the gameplay is fantastic.
Lingo and its sequel are a bizzare, unmatched puzzle experience. I don’t know what else to say there.
And Yet It Moves is… something else. An indy platformer from the heyday of Indy platformers. It is an interesting example of how story can influence art style.
There’s a skill tree, equipment (not clothing/weapons like most RPGs, but still equipment), and crafting. That’s enough to make it an RPG mechanically.
There’s also the perspective definition. You are embodying a person separate from yourself and you are expected to make choices as them. Textbook RPG.
Targeting payment processors to force change within a business often leads to overreaction. That’s how we got Onlyfans announcing that it was banning porn entirely. Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal become quite unreasonable when these groups start gaining traction.
This same group pushed to get Detroit: Become Human pulled because it has the player controlling a victim of abuse protecting another victim. There is zero nuance to their target choices. If they get pull with payment processors, they can go “this is a child abuse simulator!” and get something like that pulled with less public support behind them.
Now for the real question: is it actually IRC or just an in-game IRC-like interface?
The greatest hacking game of all time, Uplink, has an actual IRC client that you can buy and install on your in-game systems.
IRC pops up a lot in less obvious places too. The in-game chat in Warframe is IRC, but it handles all the server and channel connecting, locking you out of connecting to arbitrary servers.
The problem with combat in Morrowind is that it simultaneously measures player skill and character skill. Chance-to-hit works when the character does the aiming and gap-closing for you. When you have to handle that with poor depth perception and you have chance-to-hit on top of that, it’s always going to feel like garbage.
Summary: They were seeing a disconnect between Arkham Asylum player stats and sales, indicating a large portion of the playerbase blasting through the game then selling it back to retailers. WB studios were directed to explore ways to lengthen player engagement, preferably enough to keep the game forever.
The nemesis system gives some light procedural flair to an otherwise-deaigned experience. I don’t think it did what they hoped it would, but it was still a great mechanic.
Lingo ($6.99/$9.99) is an incredible exploration and word puzzle game. It also has a few excellent custom maps such as Duolingo and Liduongo.
A sequel (Lingo 2 $9.99) just released and is also excellent. It changes how puzzle rules are presented, making them playable in either order. It’s a more polished experience though, so playing the first game after would probably feel like a step backward.
That’s likely true, but we can write a fair contract that allows for that.
- A pay rate for the time spent recording, slightly lower than the normal rate
- A pay rate per minute of generated vocal content using user telemetry. For users that opt out of sharing, pay out based on averages applied against their total playtime.
The handheld PC market is still small. Nobody else in the digital space has taken it seriously yet.
If you look at iOS, you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s effectively two products, a piece of hardware and a digital store. To beat it, you have to beat both the hardware and the store at the same time. It took the entire mobile hardware industry forming an alliance with one of the largest software companies in the world to even try to compete with it.
If SteamOS comes to dominate the handheld market, I could see them being forced to make an API so that other stores like Epic and GOG can have the same quality of integration in the non-desktop interface.
If you have two products that are both the best at their respective thing and you tightly integrate them, it makes it incredibly difficult for a competitor to match you. That is abusing a monopoly in each space to benefit the other.
The article references a clip from that channel that was uploaded in 2019 and taken down via a DMCA claim in 2022.