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almost nobody has put an actual maximiser in a game.
Turn based games would certainly have one. Generally it’s easier to create an AI that maximizes utility for the AI, it’s more difficult to tune it to not trounce the player lol.
This reminds me of how L4D does have that sort of indirect dynamic AI that spawns zombies based on the player’s behavior. If the players have a lot of ammo and health, or are going too slow, the game cranks up the threat. If you’re barely hanging on, the game holds back. I guess that’s not quite adversarial though, more like the AI is trying to maximize the players’ perception of a fun/fair challenge.
Yeah, certainly, sorry if that wasn’t clear. Up above I tried to stipulate that I was speaking from a game theory perspective.
And yeah, you can model the AI in a game in whichever way is most useful. I said as long as they have utility functions that differ from the player(s), but then you also can recursively define games in terms of winning games.
Ex. the famous case of the US deliberately losing battles to not give away that they had cracked the German cipher. Each battle could be modeled as a game, and the war could be modeled in terms of battles.
Similarly, a single room in wolfenstein could present an contained “game”, the outcome of which is applicable to which ending you get in the larger “game” (I haven’t played it), and thus the AI would be agents at one level, but state/strategy at another.
Depends if you define game ais as “agents”, otherwise your definition of game only allows multiplayer games.
AIs are agents when they have their own utility to maximize that differs from other agents (including the player).
their “win condition” is overwhelming you with dirt and hiding it in weird places.
Is that a thing? Does the map create more dirt as a function of the player’s actions? Does the player need to account for this and adjust their strategy to counter it? That would change my categorization, yes.
coop breaks your definition too
It depends. If all players have the same motive and there are no competing agents, then it’s a simulation. If players have different motives, then it’s a game. If players compete against AI agents, then it’s a game.
Maybe a better definition of “game” is needed
The formal definition of a game is:
K_a, {x_K}K∈K_a, x,K_i, {≻K}K∈K_i
$
I’m arguing that if the size of K_a==1 then it’s not a game, but that page is generous:
For games with a single coalition of action, the set of all situations may be taken to be the set of strategies of this unique coalition of action, and no further mention is made of strategies. Such games are therefore called non-strategic games. All remaining games, those with two or more coalitions of action, are called strategic games.
Which would include a person standing in a room doing nothing as a game. I’m saying that’s not a game, hope we agree lol.
Well that’s not a good argument lol. That’s like saying doing quantum physics is just writing a bunch of shapes on paper and using words that most people don’t understand, so it’s basically the same as what a toddler does every day.
Most FPS games require developing a strategy or skill in order to reach the win condition. If it’s multiplayer, then the strategy development and execution require social interaction or deduction. It fits the definition of a “game” from a game theory perspective. There is more than one agent, they each have win conditions, and their actions prompt reactions from each other.
But this doesn’t, it’s a simulation. I assume it has an end condition, but the strategy is just “move towards it”. Maybe a game like Satisfactory is a more appropriate comparison. In both games you are making optimizations to move toward the end condition faster. You take actions, but there’s no competing agent with its own win condition responding to your actions.
Maybe there’s a compelling story to be had that the trailer is underplaying, idk. I don’t think Powerwash Simulator is hooking people with its story, though.
How does one even accidentally steal a texture someone else made?
The fact that you’re asking this is almost like…maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about? And should defer to an actual creative who does?
First off, it is a famously non trivial problem to compare every texture to every piece of art on the internet. It is trivial to add a bit of impercievable noise to deliberately foil even the best reverse image searching methods.
I think you may be taking for granted the number of artists and the level of autonomy they are given over their craft for a project of this complexity.
It’s actually more weird to me that you don’t understand why this is easy for a single dev to get away with. This is what happens when a studio trusts its artists to create something. No one is excusing it, but stop acting like Bungie did it on purpose. There’s no evidence of that. The only thing they’re guilty of is making a mediocre extraction shooter.
Steam hardware has so far been pretty niche, though. If the user experience is smooth enough, a SM could replace many people’s xbox/playstation.
We’re like 5y into the PS5/XBSX, new games are jumping up to $70-100 each, and hardly any are platform exclusives. Msft have all but canceled the next Xbox, and if Sony tries to push the PS6 in a few years, I think there’s a world where a good chunk of people say nah.
And with the amount of attention Linux is getting from the win10 eol, we could be at the beginning of an historic inflection point in gaming.
Yes, and the best jokes are famously the ones you need to explain. Sometimes the audience is wrong and they need to be set straight.
Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.
Can you explain why you would play a TTRPG if you’re not interested in role play? Seems like a battle sim like warhammer, or just a video game might be the thing you’re looking for.
As a DM, the cooperative story telling IS the interesting part. D&D has never been an airtight game system, it’s a bunch if hand waving to give just enough illusion of structure and randomness so you don’t feel like you’re just arbitrarily deciding everything yourselves. But at the end of the day, you are. The characters and story you’re left with is the only thing of value.
There are space games with procedural large scale galaxies to the point that the entire playerbase can only ever hope to see ~15% of the systems, but that’s why I put the >50% qualifier in there. That’s TOO big. Anyone can generate an effectively infinite procedural world, I want a large world.
When I had originally conceived of this, it was in the context of a pokemon MMO. You would have your home town, and as a trainer, or researcher, or rocket member, etc, you’d travel at a real-time pace akin to the show.
Alternative IP that it could work with are dragonball (imagine the playerbase on a months long search to find/fight over the dragonballs so they could awaken the dragon and make a wish to the devs), or Avatar (each player would have a chance to spawn in as a random bender. One player at any given time is the Avatar. Events happen to strengthen some benders and weaken others. Players make war and peace at will).
There would obviously be challenges in running these types of experiences, but currently it feels like the cost of standing up an MMO is so much that no one ever does anything interesting. Instead they just copy WoW.
I don’t think that means it didn’t work, I think that just means it’s not for everyone. I’m a firm believer that, “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. Small indie games take firm stances on their gameplay all the time, not every game is for everyone, and that’s ok, that’s how you get unique and interesting gameplay experiences. But that’s easy for and indie game to do because making an indie game is cheap.
MMOs have the unfortunate reality that they’re architecturally complex, and expensive to operate, and thus need to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible to justify their existence to investors. They don’t have the luxury of making the experience they want, which is why they all end up just copying WoW’s enshittified gameplay, but with less polish.
My hope is that this indie revolution we’re in expands to “large scale” multiplayer games. Not so massive that it’s prohibitively expensive to run, but not so small that it’s a ghost town. I think that’s when we’ll start to see interesting MMO experiences again.
WoW is objectively huge, but they made it feel tiny by putting fast travel options everywhere. I would guess that any two points in the world are no more than 5m from each other if routed perfectly.
I want there to exist one MMO where you “live” in a city, and traveling to another city is actually so inconvenient that you only do it if you have to. Not because I want to make the trek, but because I want there to be a world just large enough that any one person has usually seen only ~1%, but the playerbase in entirety has seen >50%. I don’t know if any such game exists.
Hah, I had thought, well it’s not quite reincarnation, because you don’t come back as something new, you come back as yourself with the same memories. But I’m just noticing that it does seem like “the Big Problem” is very similar to what [my rudimentary understanding of] the Buddhist quest for transcendence is.
Rainworld
spoiler
All living things are trapped in “The Cycle”, and no one likes it, they all want to die and be free of the burden of living. They called this “The Big Problem”.
To try and find a solution to “The Big Problem”, people* built 3 AI that would constantly be running to try and compute a solution to The Big Problem. This requires a ton of energy, and an ocean’s worth of water to keep them cool. The AIs are generating so much heat that it evaporates oceans worth of water, resulting in periodic violent rainstorms (thus the name of the game). People moved to structures built above the clouds to be safe from the rain.
One day, one of the AI finally solved The Big Problem, notified the other AIs that it was solved…and promptly died before sharing it. The remaining two AI (named “Looks to the Moon” and “Five Pebbles”) continue to iterate on solving the problem, but both have all but given up hope.
You play as a Slugcat, a species specially evolved by the AI to squeeze through pipes and keep their systems clean.
*I said “people”, but I don’t think it’s ever established what planet you’re on or what race of creatures built the AI.
There is a ton of detail I’m skipping…
…but when you start the game, you are merely trying to survive and explore a living ecology full of hostile creatures. The game doesn’t care if you understand any of the lore, it doesn’t care if you “finish” the game, it’s just there to be experienced.
And you can build your own PC and peripherals, yet every aspect of the gaming industry is funded and driven by corporations. Always has been, and Linux gaming is no exception.
I specifically acknowledged the FOSS efforts to eliminate depenence on valve, I think it’s great, but even Bazzite uses the SteamDeck UI. Do you know if there’s a FOSS deck UI replacement that unifies all storefronts/repos, and works as smoothly? I want that to exist.
Steam is just objectively the smoothest linux gaming experience for the largest number of people right now. It’d be awesome if that wasn’t the case, but for now it is.
I’ll be the first to say I don’t like Linux gaming’s dependence on valve. I wish steam wasn’t the best experience, and I applaud all the effort that the FOSS community puts in to keep them honest.
But for the “gambling” monetization in particular, this is really a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” situation. It’s on people/govts to regulate this. If Valve said tomorrow, “you’re right, we’re not going to monetize gambling anymore because we think it is unethical”, they would just lose to a competitor who is less ethical.
It’s the same as saying, “if you’re rich and are pro higher taxes, why don’t you just choose to pay more? Nothing is stopping you.” Because that’s not going to fix anything, it’s just a losing strategy. What you need is a system where everyone is required by law to behave in a way that benefits the society.
To that end, Valve’s most ethical move would be to lobby the govt to ban unethical monetization. I know they’re making bank, but whether they’re making enough to out-lobby all the others who are also doing this, I don’t know…also we all know the US is not exactly positioned for effective FTC policies right now…
I replayed through Red Alert 2 and Yuri’s Revenge recently. The live action cutscenes are beautifully campy. Top notch. In the Soviet campaign, you steal the Allied time machine and use it to go back to stop Yuri; but you quickly learn that “our Soviet power supply is too efficient, and it sent us back 65 million years!” You then spend a minute defending against an onslaught of T-Rexes before it recharges to send you to the correct time period. A whole “level” for that one-off joke! They don’t make em like they used to…
AW2 was incredible, but I knew it wouldn’t do well when I played it, because it’s too niche. I love the Weird Fiction universe they’re building, but it’s just not pulling the Resident Evil audience.
Firebreak I think was their attempt to monetize the IP, but oof, it’s just not fun. I feel like they could have gone more “friend slop” in tone and been much more successful. Imagine a game loop like Repo or Lethal Company, but set in the Oldest House, interacting with weird, goofy phenomena. Instead it’s a very dry shooting experience wrapped in a very dry upgrade system. I want to support them, but it feels like work to play this game…
The “paid more to work less” part is not tenable. The games that fit that bill that you’re thinking of represent less than 1% of their peers. They are outliers, not a sustainable industry; the exception, not the rule. For every Silksong there are maybe 100 that make just enough to make ends meet, and 1000 duds that will never pay for themselves that you’ve never heard of.
What you’re saying is you want fewer steady incomes and more lottery winners. Sure, that’d be nice, but it’s not a sustainable strategy.
Ex. Wildgate launched recently. They deliberately opted to sell the game for a flat $30 rather than going F2P/P2W. As a result, they regularly get reviewed negatively by people saying “dead game, greedy devs won’t lower the price to compete with F2P games” and “the cosmetics you unlock by playing look better than the ones you can buy” (yes, there are people unironically posting those as negative reviews).
So at least understand why the most common strategy is often exploitative, and why it’s actually not a simple solution that a bunch of armchair experts have figured out in a comments section.
How are you defining “live service single player” game? This is a narrative adventure game. I will be surprised if you ever actually interact with another player directly at all. The dev has said that it supports completely offline play.
Edit: the devs have also specifically said you won’t interact with other players in real time. It’s about as “multiplayer” as the bloodstains in dark souls, but if they had a bigger effect on your narrative.
These comments are severely overestimating the level of autonomy players are given in this game. It’s just a branching story, where the branches one player is presented with are dependent on the branch another player chose. I imagine if only a single person plays this game, it will just make stuff up to make it seem like there are other players affecting the world.
Also, also the cynicism on Lemmy is a stale meta at this point. Be the change you wanna see or stfu.
Pausing in StarCraft allowed any player to pause, and any player to unpause. Additionally, each player could only pause a finite number of times (like 5 per game). I think this could work in nightreign.
The hard part is that there’s no chat in nightreign, so someone will pause and you have no idea if it’s legit or they’re just griefing.
There’s so much competition in gaming right now, and good AAA games are so few and far between, that I don’t see a need for piracy. For every $90 piece of garbage there are ten $20 diamonds (don’t forget Devolver in your list of good small companies). I don’t ever buy dlc/deluxe/etc editions unless the company/game has earned it (almost never).
I will admit, Rockstar creates some high quality experiences, but their monetization practices are down there with the worst of them.
I can’t justify not pirating, I just think for me the motivation isn’t strong enough right now. Too many affordable good games to choose from.
If it’s the one I’m thinking of, I barely consider that one a run back. It’s like 40s to get to the boss from the bench. And at that point I the game, I noticed myself start hitting the bounce plants much more consistently after having to do this run many times. Up until then I hadn’t been forced to repeat the same small section yet.
And (staying vague to avoid spoilers), the bench itself was particularly “surprising” specifically because of the long gap without any benches leading up to it, forcing you to repeat the same long platforming/combat sections over and over. Players would not have been “surprised” by it if they weren’t so desperate for a bench.
I will need to play more of silksong to be able to comment fully, but I felt that, even though you could understandably say all the same stuff about Hollow Knight, I still do think that the only times I struggled in HK (on required content) I later found out about an upgrade that was available if i had looked that would have made the fight much easier (nail upgrade, ability, charm, more hp, etc).
No, not to the same degree as Elden Ring, i agree, but I do think HK’s exploration played a very similar role as it did in Elden Ring. In both games i would tell people to only bash your head against a boss if you want to hurt yourself, otherwise go explore.
Do you believe DS and Megaman could have been even more iconic if they had listened to players and made their runs back shorter?
My point is, it’s not like the designers didn’t know what they were doing, this is a very obvious aspect of their gameplay. And regardless of how minor inconveniences like this make us feel as players, we don’t know that it’s not precisely those lows that contrast with the highs to create the intended experiences which made those games cult hits to begin with. You wouldn’t look at a Rembrandt and say, “look how much of the painting is just black! You’re wasting all this space! You could add so much detail and context in there!”
I’m a firm believer that “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. If players weren’t complaining about the run back, then they would be complaining about the empty flask drinking animation. Inconvenience is not a convincing argument to me. Just like any art, games are free to evoke any and all emotions. It only becomes a problem if the emotion they keep evoking is boredom lol. But even then, boredom is a valid tool on the artist’s palette; sometimes the only ones who are getting bored are the boring people.
Have you considered that the run back is trying to tell you something? The game doesn’t want you to bash your face against the same enemy the same way. It may not even want you to fight that boss yet at all.
The run back is meant to be an incentive to think about your options. Do I have other areas to explore? What do I keep dying to? Am I overlooking an obvious weakness during a particular boss mechanic, or am I not using an ability as effectively as I could be to stay alive?
If you let the player immediately run back into a boss, they will veg out and do just that until they eventually get lucky and barely down a boss by the skin of their teeth. But that’s not how you should be approaching these fights.
Sometimes the most productive run back even involves a good night’s rest.
This is to be expected. Silksong gained so much hype that now you have a bunch of people trying it who are finding out it’s not their thing.
I know people these days are used to early access garbage being shoved out the door as a full release, and are ready to rush to the comments to explain why the game is wrong, but I promise you this is not one of those cases.
So far, every run back I’ve experienced in silksong has a purpose. If it’s not something you enjoy, I recommend not playing the game. But don’t be in that overlap of the Venn Diagram between people who are enjoying the game and people who are complaining they aren’t enjoying the game. Either stop playing, or finish it and then we can talk about its design.
Adding a reboot button is ONLY necessary if the game isn’t made correctly. There is otherwise no reason to ever need to restart the game. I would see the addition of a restart option as lazy or an admission of failure by the dev.