He/Him Jack of all trades, master of none
Proudly banned from lemmy.ml for a) being critical of the CCP and b) being against the unlawful deportation of American minorities
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Complexity in move-set must also be decreased.
No? Increase time between moves that are difficult to dodge or parry, reduce damage that those moves deal. Difficulty is reduced while complexity remains the same.
Also in the game world enemy placement and quantity must be adjusted to lower dificulty. Otherwise it’ll be, mostly, just as hard
I’ve never met anyone who actually has trouble with normal enemies in these games, it’s always bosses that give us trouble. But also, see my first point.
I almost added this to my reply to them, but it was already getting kind of long-winded. Yes, actually, accessibility settings in horror games is amazing. If the point is to achieve a certain level of scary, and the game is too scary for me to play, then giving me the option to reduce the scary will make the game the right amount of scary for me. Accessibility settings don’t give me an easier experience than yours, they give me an equivalent experience to yours.
Lies of p has a difficulty slider that decreases damage from the enemies and increases the party window. That really doesn’t do much. You still need to “memorize” the moves no amount of button mashing saves you even on easy.
It sounds like that’s a happy medium between “Mash attack until victory” and “memorize every attack pattern and still get stomped.”
Do we argue horror games should have options for low horror so we can enjoy it without the horror? puzzle games should have a second set of easier puzzles for those who find them too hard? Story centric games should have low-story varients for those who still want to play? That dating sims should have aromantic varients for those who just like the comedy?
None of these are analagous to the accessibility options people want in soulslikes. None of these are literally unplayable for people who simply don’t like the genre. If you don’t like the horror aspects of a horror game, you can look up when jump scares will happen. If you can’t figure out a puzzle, you can look up hints. There’s nothing preventing you from sitting through a story you aren’t interested in. Contrast all of these with Remnant: From the Ashes, which I desperately wish I could play because I like the story and the gameplay, but I can’t because there isn’t a single boss I can beat. I can’t just look up the answers to a puzzle online, I can’t just sit through a story that I don’t find interesting, there is literally nothing I am able to do to progress. Giving me the option to reduce the insane health pools on bosses would take nothing away from the people who like chipping away at a brick wall for half an hour.
The intense strategic combat where numbers change little and skill changes everything is the point. That’s what these games are built around it’s their fundamental concept.
What an insult to the writing teams. The only game I can think of that this actually applies to is IWBTG. Numbers change little? The game you’re describing is Sekiro. Every single other soulslike in existence relies heavily on boss enemies having really big numbers and the player having really small numbers. What “strategic combat” is involved with killing the Orphan of Kos? Hit enemy, don’t get hit, repeat.
Looks like I’m not playing The First Berzerker: Khazan then. If the only draw to your game is how hard the combat is, then everything else probably sucks. Maybe make a good game instead of a hard game. I had no problem dropping the difficulty on Clair Obscur or Horizon or Mass Effect.
Mortal Kombat’s approach is flawless and every game needs to copy it. Keep the game at full difficulty until a particular enemy kills you a few times, then gradually make that enemy slower or reduce its damage output or make it use easier attacks. Give the sweatlords an option to disable that difficulty adjustment so they can die to the same boss a thousand times, as is their wont
This is a more complex question than just “what is your favorite video game,” or “what games do you consider works of art?”
If I’m putting a game in a museum, it’s because there’s something about it that warrants preservation on a greater level than other games. To that end, my candidates are
- Pong (1972)
The first commercially successful video game.
- Tetris (1985)
Arguably the most influential game of all time
- Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999)
Handcrafted in assembly, serves as a lesson both in optimization and harnessing the players’ penchant for finding intrinsic value in simplistic game mechanics
Edit: I just realized this comment looks like an infernal machine wrote it. I want to make it clear that I’m a human, with skin and blood and stuff
So join a team. I would say that the guy who makes the spray pattern doesn’t deserve to make his game if that was all he made. Literally nobody is suggesting that you should have to develop your game 100% by yourself, what I’m saying is that a) you could develop the art yourself, and b) if you don’t, you should work with someone who can. What you shouldn’t do is contribute to the industry that’s putting those people out of work.
But why do you want these things? Does a painting have value only as an aesthetic placeholder, with no regard to the person who made it? Does it have the same utilitarian value as a bed and food? Does the trivia in your hypothetical game have that same utilitarian value?
I repeat myself. If you take the creativity out of the creative process, you’re left with just a process. It’s the equivalent of injecting nutrient slurry directly into your veins because you want a meal.
They’ve been able to generate hands for years now. AI image and text generation has basically passed the Turing test at this point. Any media you consume could have been entirely AI generated. That’s the main reason I avoid talking about how AI slop is necessarily technically inferior to anything a human made. It’s possible for it to make high quality shit, and that doesn’t make it okay to use
But you do have four years to learn the whole of the skills from scratch. Who’s forcing a deadline on you? What’s the point of engaging in a creative process if you’re offloading the creativity onto a machine? When you take the creativity out of the creative process, you’re left with just a process.
The point of a welding is to join two pieces of metal together. The quality of the work is quantifiable, and there is no artistic input. Unlike the creation of art, there is no value in the human input. Woodworking is a different story—I would pay more for a piece of art that was carved by a human than a chunk of wood that was cut by a robot, even if they were indistinguishable to me. The human input is what gives the art meaning. Unless all I’m buying is, like, a bedside table. That shares my welding take
I credit Kerbal Space Program for my ability to think in three dimensions. Without KSP, I would have been some kind of dumbass. I thought getting to orbit was just a matter of going up until I was like 18 years old
Have you ever pulled up an old save file to look at the stuff you used to design? I did that the other day and found out that I used to be good at this game. Folded space stations, massive mining rigs, Apollo Style landers, a beautiful SSTO that’s braindead easy to fly, an interplanetary module that can dock to the back of said SSTO, I made fancy shit. Nowadays I just slap boosters and docking ports on fuel tanks and call it good enough
I gotta post pictures from that save file sometime
For real, it was legitimately a fun game. I still love the Interceptor. I should redownload it and take some pics before the servers die.
I have the same feelings toward Outriders. It’s fun, it has an interesting premise and serviceable story, and the player character is a cocky bitch (or son of one) who knows they’re the main character in the best possible way
My only gripe is that the game gave me all kinds of freedom choose my character’s backstory, but I had to treat Owen like he was some kinda moron. Motherfucker let me give him my Colossus, I never use it and he will be impervious in it
No, he’s not ready, and my character does everything in her power to ensure that he never will be. Owen did nothing wrong. He “stole” the Javelin of Dawn, and surpise surprise he’s a competent pilot. I only wish I could have supported him the entire time
Damn, guess I’m writing a whole response anyway
Nope. Procedural generation requires a lot of creative and technical input on the part of the developer. It’s not used to offload creative or intellectual work, it creates creative and intellectual work. The intellectual work is something I forgot to mention in that reply, but the loss of the intellectual effort is just as bad as the loss of the creativity.
Let’s compare the topic of this discussion with the game I’m currently playing, Kerbal Space Program.
Contracts in Kerbal Space Program’s career mode are (for the most part) procedurally generated. There are a few mission types, usually asking the player to bring a part or set of parts to a particular location and perform some action with them. Attach a part to a satellite in orbit around Duna, take pressure readings in flight over Kerbin, plant a flag on the Mun, etc. This is not offloading creativity onto the machine, this is using procedural generation to provide the player with an endless variety of objectives. Producing this system of procedurally generated missions required creativity and forethought from the developers. I don’t work at Squad, but I imagine it took a number of manhours to set all of the parameters and limitations for the system, and to test it to make sure it works, and that it doesn’t generate any missions that are impossible to complete.
Contrast that with the AI generated text that is the topic of this discussion. The creative input for that text up there was something along the lines of “generate some sci-fi technobabble that would fit in a starship’s event log” and “do it again, but don’t talk about the ship, just talk about astronomical data.” I know this for certain, because I generated a nearly identical passage using those two prompts exactly. They could have gotten a freelance sci-fi author to write these few bits of text, or even just sat down for 10 minutes and wrote it themselves. It would cost them nearly nothing, and in exchange they would have a piece of text that fits within the world and was written by a human. Instead, they offloaded that creative work onto a machine. They didn’t make more work for themselves like a developer that uses procedural generation, they made less work for themselves by asking a machine to do it instead.
I could make a similar contrast between this and basically any procedurally generated system in games. Minecraft, Daggerfall, Borderlands, FTL: Faster than Light, Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, all of these games use procedural generation to complement the creative and technical work they put into the games, not to avoid having to do that work in the first place.
I’m willing to grant literally all of this. I have a deep-seated hatred of generative AI that clouds my ability to have productive discussions about it. It turns me into an asshole, specifically to people who defend it.
When did I demand an equivalence? That’s what I asked 37 minutes ago, and what you’ve spent several replies now pivoting away from answering
I was about to type out a whole response, but I need to learn when to cut it short.
Generative AI is demonic, using it offloads your creativity, humanity, and soul into an unthinking, unfeeling machine. Anything that uses generative AI is inherently worse because it was not made by someone with agency or creativity. You’re advocating for putting artists and writers out of work.
If it doesn’t make games bad, then the complaints are simply invalid and bandwagoning, and developers cannot be faulted for using it. LOL
“If slavery doesn’t harm the economy, then the complaints are simply invalid and bandwagoning, and plantation owners cannot be faulted for using them. LOL”
I know Lemmings have a lot of trouble reading, so I’ll get this out of the way now: no, I’m not saying that generative AI is slavery, nor am I saying they’re equivalent. I’m drawing one similarity to make a point. That’s called a simile. The point being, that one supposed criticism isn’t valid doesn’t mean that no criticisms are valid.
There’s a number of reasons, not least of which being that generative AI works by processing vast amounts of prior work (without their creators’ consent) to make a facsimile of it, while procedural generation only manipulates assets the developer creates. Procedural generation isn’t putting artists and writers out of business. Procedural generation isn’t making Idiocracy a reality, with fucking English majors unable to read Dickens without asking OpenAI to interpret the text for them. “They do similar things” doesn’t mean they’re equivalent. My point being, it’s not inconsistent to be okay with procedural generation and not okay with generative AI.
I feel like it does. theunknownmuncher thinks it’s somehow inconsistent to be against generative AI while being ok with procedural generation, which implies that they think they’re equivalent in some way. As if the reason people don’t like generative AI is because it makes bad games.
Edit: throughout this discussion, my opinion has evolved somewhat. Procedural generation is fine, because it only uses things created by the developer, and it will necessarily generate a better product than a generative AI, because the developer is the one who tunes it. An AI will generate any text that might fit within the genre, with no consideration for what’s canon to the work it’s being inserted in.
Edit to clarify: what I meant was, if you don’t understand why procedural generation is acceptable, and generative AI is not, you are not qualified to have an opinion on the subject. Leaving the original text for context.
If you don’t know the difference between procedural generation and generative AI, you are not qualified to have an opinion on the subject
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
Judging only by their job titles, the COO & producer Francois Meurisse, marketing & release producer Benjamin Demanche, associate producer Vincent Constantin-Turki, admin and office manager Emilie Perez, and happiness manager Monoco might not be considered “developers.” Even if only 27 of the Sandfall team are devs, the main point of this article is that there were also many many external developers from outside Sandfall working on the game
I was just pointing out my frustration at their team size
See you in a few days for the anniversary of its shutdown