I imagine what many people mean when they ask for "advanced AI" is opponents who behave like human beings, as opposed to opponents who behave like human beings playing a video game.
By that I mean that the NPC's will be as crafty and aware as real people would, but won't try to exploit features like clipping through terrain, using lag, circle-strafing and bunny-hopping, aimbotting and wall-hacking, etc. Challenging opponents, but not ones that exploit the technical limitations of the virtual world that the game is played in.
However, games designed to be played by a mass audience must be fairly easily "beatable" by 2/3 of the players at least. Otherwise the average player loses interest and wanders off in search of different stimulation.
We're not seeing new ideas in MMO's because of the same reasons we are seeing re-makes of B movies(seriously a robocop remake?).
The cost/benefit of making something predictable and average is greater than taking a chance on something new and interesting.
If your going to have to drop 100-200 mil on a AAA mmo. It's way easier to convince your investors to make a game you can guarantee is going to sell 500k boxes at 60 bucks each. with a 15$ sub that's will slowly trail off over the next 6 months. It'll pay for itself in a year and if enough players stay it's profit, if not you can switch to F2P and mooch off the microtransactions. Looking at 20% ROI within 18 months.
If they do something new and crazy they have no idea what they will end up with... Players are after-all a rather finiky lot. Great games tank while COD46: the next generation sell 10 million copies on opening day, with nothing but updated graphics and fast-drawing multiplayer.
So it's take a gamble and risk losing a quarter of a BILLION dollars. Or make A quest hub based wow-clone with hybrid action combat, set back make your 20-30 mil and smoke a cigar feeling proud of yourself.
Why don't we have people controlling the monster AI? You could have a system were other players play the monsters in kind of a left 4 dead thing, or maybe just have people payed by the company control them. Not every monster that would be too costly, but maybe the big important raid bosses. You also wouldn't need a human to micromanage the boss. Just have them pop in maybe once or twice a fight do something unexpected. You could have just one person applying randomness to dozens and dozens of encounters at a time.
Well, what you're describing is PvP with loot. There is an allure to beating the scripted events, I did it for years, it's just a different style of play. Now I'm back to not knowing what you're really wanting (that doesn't already exist).
Kind of PVP in that the monster is controlled by a player, but also not PvP because the other player isn't a player character and that changes things a lot. The monsters are playing off of different rules then the players. If your controlling the boss, you likely can't leave the boss room or pick and choose what groups you want to fight. You are always outnumbered. (Asymmetrical; PvP is kind of a new thing. See evolve and nothing else.) The battle might even be balanced for the monster to almost always lose. So there are lots of aspects of it that make it different then PvP.
I came up with this idea of people controlling the bosses when I was trying to think of how you would do a EDF mmo. The idea I had was for the game to be about nothing but epic raids. Every night Godzilla or some other massive kaiju would come from the sea and the players would have to try to drive them back or kill them. The kaiju battle would be the only content for this game (Linearly the only content. The mmo wouldn't even be up outside of these battles), so it would be important that the battles be dynamic, inserting, and unpredictable. You have a hard time doing that with even the most advanced AIs, so just have the devs drive Godzilla.
Originally posted by CaldicotI remember 10-15 years ago how I was longing for "future" games that would blow my mind when it comes to AI, scope, features, longevity etc. Still here I am with the same longing about to give up on the whole industry. Why is everything the same and why arn't we seeing the progress and evolution of gaming as we should have by now? The resources are there so is it something to do with capitalism? I'm not sure.We got OR and Project Morpheus around the corner. Could it become the next revolution in gaming? All I know for sure is that MMOS are currently dead and Watch Dogs is crap.
I think the next 'revolution' of gaming is going to come from a hardware technological revolution. I'd say display technology is going to be the next big step in gaming technology. We can already run any game on just about any mid-range computer as it is. Oculus is probably on the front edge of this but still rudimentary.
If not display technology, maybe input technology. Voice and gesture based input might be the way forward. Microsoft Connect, while very experimental and rudimentary (more so than Oculus), it's still another way forward that might allow games push the input focus from keyboard and mouse to eye tracking and gestures.
If you're waiting on hardware to bring the next revolution, you could be waiting an awfully long time, as I don't see anything revolutionary coming in the foreseeable future. To be sure, there are hardware improvements coming; I just don't see them as revolutionizing gaming. For example:
New graphics APIs will reduce the CPU load in rendering. This is the major focus of DirectX 12, and something OpenGL is adding piecemeal. Games running as well on four slow cores as two fast ones will be nice, but hardly revolutionary.
Adaptive-sync will allow smoother animation at a given frame rate by allowing monitors to refresh when a new frame is ready rather than at fixed intervals. This will be a nice improvement, but not change game mechanics at all.
Widespread SSD adoption will allow games to assume that clients can load assets much faster. This could lead to seamless words in MMORPGs becoming more common, but it's hard to see how it will do anything beyond that.
Stereoscopic 3D (e.g., Oculus Rift) might matter eventually, but it's dramatically easier to do it right in television than in games, so it's unlikely that it will be relevant to gaming before it's ubiquitous on television.
We've had audio input controls for many years, but it's not used in gaming because it's so wildly inefficient. Keyboards have been around since the nineteenth century and are still the undisputed champion at letting you input a lot of information quickly. Motion sensing controls need to be more precise before they're a viable input method for gaming outside of some gimmicks.
I agree that we could be waiting a long time for a true technical revolution thus I don't really see us having some revolutionary leap in gaming technology for a time.
Despite the graphics improvements, the very general mechanics of gaming haven't changed. You still sit in front of your mouse and keyboard looking at a screen waiting for visual queues to offer input and receive a response. There have been changes to the more specific mechanics but we're still in that same 3rd party view with hot-keys and action bars. That's not saying we can't have great games because of that, it's just an observation that things aren't likely to change all that much without a hardware jump.
I agree with the SSD sentiments. It allows me to load up BF4 levels in 10 seconds but beyond that it doesn't do much. You can still have seamless worlds without SSDs through game engine technologies that are able to pre-load data if it's predicted to be seen/used. We see this in the newer MMOs where there aren't the loading screens between major zones or continents like we have in WoW (inter-continental travel).
I think stereoscopic tech will be accepted in the PC gaming industry far before it's accepted in the home movie and television realm. We have that tech in theaters and it's getting a luke warm reception if the movie is directed properly and, imo, if the director/editor doesn't go out of their way to throw 3d elements into the movie because "IT'S 3D".
As for the inputs, the point was not that audio or gesture based input WAS the way forward but that input technology in general could be the way forward with improving game technology. The Connect failed because it's resolution or ability to distinguish gestures is very primitive and there are better technologies being developed that might have a better impact. Audio input is hard because as a technology, it really needs to understand speech patterns and the nuances of the speakers speech patterns to be able to discern what the user wants. If it's simple voice commands then the user is probably going to feel more comfortable using the K/M or joystick as there is an efficiency gap between speaking the command and pushing a button (namely the time it takes to speak the command vs the time it takes to push a button). There are other issues with audio commands in MMOs such as me liking to speak to my buddies on TS while playing would kinda suck if I had to speak some commands for actions.
Because it's just to easy to make generic MMO #X and have people pay for Alpha, Beta then the release and subscription for 1-3 months and make all the money back you invested. Quality does not matter any more. People will buy anything if it is hyped long enough.
I remember 10-15 years ago how I was longing for "future" games that would blow my mind when it comes to AI, scope, features, longevity etc. Still here I am with the same longing about to give up on the whole industry. Why is everything the same and why arn't we seeing the progress and evolution of gaming as we should have by now? The resources are there so is it something to do with capitalism? I'm not sure.
We got OR and Project Morpheus around the corner. Could it become the next revolution in gaming? All I know for sure is that MMOS are currently dead and Watch Dogs is crap. Where is the AI that actually behaves like real people??
Players don't want it?
WOW tried a more realistic approach to AI back in WOTLK in an encounter called Champion Faction. The NPCs will cc players. They will not follow an aggro table and take out healers first. They will use all kind of player abilities?
What happened? Players complained. They nerfed it. And it was never tried again.
More realistic AI does not mean players like it more.
Tank don't have any skill to hold the enemy down ?
When i tanking in PVP , i don't tank by aggro but using CC skills.
My armor make me hard to kill while my skill keep enemy from attack healer and allies .
If you give tank enough of skill , one tank can hold 3 players to one full party as same time , mob even easier
If the game don't use aggro to hold mob , but don't give player skill to hold mobs down then it fail design .
Not failed design. Failed players. They weren't able to think outside the box themeparks have molded for them and adapt to something new.
That is the whole point. The encounter can be beaten .. i have done it with my old guild. But you cannot use trinity, and have to use a lot of cc.
The point is that players QQ it is too hard .. so they nerf it. So don't expect good AI because most players don't want to deal with it.
Originally posted by CaldicotI remember 10-15 years ago how I was longing for "future" games that would blow my mind when it comes to AI, scope, features, longevity etc. Still here I am with the same longing about to give up on the whole industry. Why is everything the same and why arn't we seeing the progress and evolution of gaming as we should have by now? The resources are there so is it something to do with capitalism? I'm not sure.We got OR and Project Morpheus around the corner. Could it become the next revolution in gaming? All I know for sure is that MMOS are currently dead and Watch Dogs is crap.
I think the next 'revolution' of gaming is going to come from a hardware technological revolution. I'd say display technology is going to be the next big step in gaming technology. We can already run any game on just about any mid-range computer as it is. Oculus is probably on the front edge of this but still rudimentary.
If not display technology, maybe input technology. Voice and gesture based input might be the way forward. Microsoft Connect, while very experimental and rudimentary (more so than Oculus), it's still another way forward that might allow games push the input focus from keyboard and mouse to eye tracking and gestures.
If you're waiting on hardware to bring the next revolution, you could be waiting an awfully long time, as I don't see anything revolutionary coming in the foreseeable future. To be sure, there are hardware improvements coming; I just don't see them as revolutionizing gaming. For example:
New graphics APIs will reduce the CPU load in rendering. This is the major focus of DirectX 12, and something OpenGL is adding piecemeal. Games running as well on four slow cores as two fast ones will be nice, but hardly revolutionary.
Adaptive-sync will allow smoother animation at a given frame rate by allowing monitors to refresh when a new frame is ready rather than at fixed intervals. This will be a nice improvement, but not change game mechanics at all.
Widespread SSD adoption will allow games to assume that clients can load assets much faster. This could lead to seamless words in MMORPGs becoming more common, but it's hard to see how it will do anything beyond that.
Stereoscopic 3D (e.g., Oculus Rift) might matter eventually, but it's dramatically easier to do it right in television than in games, so it's unlikely that it will be relevant to gaming before it's ubiquitous on television.
We've had audio input controls for many years, but it's not used in gaming because it's so wildly inefficient. Keyboards have been around since the nineteenth century and are still the undisputed champion at letting you input a lot of information quickly. Motion sensing controls need to be more precise before they're a viable input method for gaming outside of some gimmicks.
I agree that we could be waiting a long time for a true technical revolution thus I don't really see us having some revolutionary leap in gaming technology for a time.
Despite the graphics improvements, the very general mechanics of gaming haven't changed. You still sit in front of your mouse and keyboard looking at a screen waiting for visual queues to offer input and receive a response. There have been changes to the more specific mechanics but we're still in that same 3rd party view with hot-keys and action bars. That's not saying we can't have great games because of that, it's just an observation that things aren't likely to change all that much without a hardware jump.
I agree with the SSD sentiments. It allows me to load up BF4 levels in 10 seconds but beyond that it doesn't do much. You can still have seamless worlds without SSDs through game engine technologies that are able to pre-load data if it's predicted to be seen/used. We see this in the newer MMOs where there aren't the loading screens between major zones or continents like we have in WoW (inter-continental travel).
I think stereoscopic tech will be accepted in the PC gaming industry far before it's accepted in the home movie and television realm. We have that tech in theaters and it's getting a luke warm reception if the movie is directed properly and, imo, if the director/editor doesn't go out of their way to throw 3d elements into the movie because "IT'S 3D".
As for the inputs, the point was not that audio or gesture based input WAS the way forward but that input technology in general could be the way forward with improving game technology. The Connect failed because it's resolution or ability to distinguish gestures is very primitive and there are better technologies being developed that might have a better impact. Audio input is hard because as a technology, it really needs to understand speech patterns and the nuances of the speakers speech patterns to be able to discern what the user wants. If it's simple voice commands then the user is probably going to feel more comfortable using the K/M or joystick as there is an efficiency gap between speaking the command and pushing a button (namely the time it takes to speak the command vs the time it takes to push a button). There are other issues with audio commands in MMOs such as me liking to speak to my buddies on TS while playing would kinda suck if I had to speak some commands for actions.
No game has loading screens between zones just because they think it's fun to sit and look at loading screens. Rather, if you want to make a seamless world, you have to be able to reliably load the assets that need to be loaded in time while never needing to load faster than the hardware can handle.
You can make assumptions about this is how fast hard drives can load assets. It takes some real sacrifices in game design to ensure that a game will never need to load data faster than that. If you decide that you do need faster loading for your game, you put in a loading screen so players can sit there and wait for things to load. But if you can assume that everyone has an SSD, then the threshold of how fast you can load stuff without needing loading screens is much, much faster.
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As you say, there are reasons why stereoscopic 3D has not caught on well in television and movies. Every single one of them applies more strongly to games than to television. Until television can work out the issues, there's no real hope for gaming doing so.
Stereoscopic 3D has been done in movies since the 1950s. So just because there are some movies that do it today doesn't mean that it's about to catch on. Nor does that mean much in games; we've had stereoscopic 3D in games at least since 1987. And yes, that game is obscure for good reasons--and among the reasons why Square was on the brink of bankruptcy before Final Fantasy saved the company.
As much as it pains me to say but most players do not want to fight an advanced AI. Its no fun when the AI constantly shows you your shortcomings. A good AI will always abuse those. The game would suddenly be about player skill and actually be difficult. Thats why the developers only implement dumb AIs.
Programming a good AI is NO problem. We already have automated cars in real life that can react to any of the thousands of possible disturbances on the road. Actually you don't even need an advanced AI. A simple script is enough to crush most casual groups:
Loop {
If ( $Healer is attackable ) { Focus fire $Healer }
Else if ($Enemy_with_highest_DPS is attackable) { Focus fire $Enemy_with_highest_DPS }
Else { Focus fire $Random_enemy }
}
--- Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
A "good" AI is one that makes for interesting gameplay. Similarity to what humans would do is irrelevant. Smartest possible is usually problematic, too, as that would typically mean everything in the zone attacks you at once.
I remember 10-15 years ago how I was longing for "future" games that would blow my mind when it comes to AI, scope, features, longevity etc. Still here I am with the same longing about to give up on the whole industry. Why is everything the same and why arn't we seeing the progress and evolution of gaming as we should have by now? The resources are there so is it something to do with capitalism? I'm not sure.
We got OR and Project Morpheus around the corner. Could it become the next revolution in gaming? All I know for sure is that MMOS are currently dead and Watch Dogs is crap. Where is the AI that actually behaves like real people??
It is partly because making MMOs takes so long time which slows the evolution compared to games that takes only 20% of the time to make.
The other problem is that the tanking mechanics drags down the AI, as long as you have tanks any mob will be incredible stupid no matter what you do.
We do have seen many new features and questing is rather different from early MMOs that usually had a few rat killing and FEDEX quests only, now quests are often complexed and we have things like dynamic events but it takes time due to the long development time.
Another problem is development cost and the still rather limited memory of modern computers. Making a huge living world today is very expensive and can only be played on computers with loads of memory. The last thing will be fixed as there are new kinds of memory coming out that eventually will mean that your entire harddrive will be as fast as the memory is but there is still the development cost that only rises.
Originally posted by Quizzical A "good" AI is one that makes for interesting gameplay. Similarity to what humans would do is irrelevant. Smartest possible is usually problematic, too, as that would typically mean everything in the zone attacks you at once.
That is true, but it also depends on what your opponent is. Fighting a huge nasty animal, a not that smart ogre and a brilliant evil sorceress should be very different. That in itself should be more fun, far from all opponents should try to outwit the characters in combat but the smarter actually should instead of acting like stupid animals.
Similarity to what humans should do actually matters if you fight a human, but not when you fight a wywern or drake.
A good AI should actually be several AIs used for the type of creature you fight. A stupid animal will just try to use raw strength to take you down but a smart opponent needs to react to what the players do and change tactics after that while still delivering a fun fight to the players.
The fun part in PvP is that there you actually outwit your opponent when you win using superior tactics (at least in good PvP, in bad you win because of better stats) and that experience is always fun. But in PvE you shouldn't have all fights more or less the same with a few special attacks.
When I first started to see the potential for MMORPG's I was in the group that played D&D, Worked in IT, knew what the Internet was, owned a home computer, had watched the D&D cartoon, wanted Lord of the Rings to be a proper film and not just a half arsed cartoon...you get the picture....
An MMO back then meant a world to explore, a complex character to interact with the world, many options of how to interact with the world, a place where other people would be the ones you interact with mostly not AI, a place to be part of and one amongst many.
Then WOW became popular and you suddenly got a massive influx of people that were...
Socially 'cool' enough to hate computer games when they were only played by geeks but also socially 'cool' enough to play them when they because 'cool' at the same time facebook became cool, had no idea what a computer really was but knew consoles let you play fighting games, thought the Internet came on a CD, wanted to live in MTV cribs, thought Lord of the Rings was the one with all those kids on an island and generally didn't have an attention span past a 90 second Mortal Combat fight and where totally lost in a 'virtual world'.
Then a big MMO came along, WOW, and provided all the 90 second attention span kids with a big fat carrot that was 'cool'. I mean it must be 'cool' because they have adverts on TV...
And it made lots of money and so what followed was 10 years worth of 'design' and 'development' on the MMO to incorporate endless streams of WOW copies for 90 second attention span, facebook loving, 'games are cool', leet gamers who haven't got the slightest concept of what an MMORPG is but thinks it is something where getting the high score (or the highest level first, or the most kills....)is the point.
The people that want to play MMORPG's the way they should be are in the minority and are probably a dying breed. The next generation of gamers will probably not even have MMORPG's to play having long ago lost the need to the RPG part as you will just be playing a virtual self trying to get the high score as long as it doesn't take too long to do so.
Originally posted by Quizzical A "good" AI is one that makes for interesting gameplay. Similarity to what humans would do is irrelevant. Smartest possible is usually problematic, too, as that would typically mean everything in the zone attacks you at once.
That is true, but it also depends on what your opponent is. Fighting a huge nasty animal, a not that smart ogre and a brilliant evil sorceress should be very different. That in itself should be more fun, far from all opponents should try to outwit the characters in combat but the smarter actually should instead of acting like stupid animals.
Similarity to what humans should do actually matters if you fight a human, but not when you fight a wywern or drake.
A good AI should actually be several AIs used for the type of creature you fight. A stupid animal will just try to use raw strength to take you down but a smart opponent needs to react to what the players do and change tactics after that while still delivering a fun fight to the players.
The fun part in PvP is that there you actually outwit your opponent when you win using superior tactics (at least in good PvP, in bad you win because of better stats) and that experience is always fun. But in PvE you shouldn't have all fights more or less the same with a few special attacks.
A good AI should:
1) Force players to react to what is going on in combat and adapt accordingly.
If you can close your eyes in combat without losing much effectiveness, then the combat system is bad. There have been combat systems ranging from fast action to purely turn-based that did this well, but MMORPGs sometimes manage to botch this.
2) Strongly encourage players to adopt wildly different tactics when fighting different types of mobs.
This is where trinity combat typically fails. Every single mob is send the tank in to grab aggro, have the healer heal the tank, and have damage dealers pour in damage while the mobs are ignoring them because they're attacking the tank. Some games admit only minor variations on this. Ideally, a game would make it so that if you pick some fixed strategy ahead of time and try that strategy in every single battle, it will fail a substantial fraction of the time--and fail in a lot of different ways.
3) Naturally guide players toward successful strategies and give feedback on why they failed.
A system of "and now you randomly fall over dead for no apparent reason in particular" is a bad one. It should be clear what went wrong and how to improve next time.
That said, while it's okay for combat to kill a lot of players the first time, it shouldn't be a case where you need magical foreknowledge to have any chance. Combat shouldn't make it so that if you stand in this spot, you instantly die without warning exactly 19.2 seconds into the battle. If something is going to kill you, players need to be warned about in time to react--and not just from knowing what happened in a previous run.
4) Never, ever leave players completely stuck and unable to progress until players are very far into the game.
This is for commercial reasons, as nothing pushes players to quit faster than the frustration of being completely stuck. It's okay if players get stuck on something in endgame and quit at that point. But you don't want people to get completely stuck on lower level stuff, though it's okay if players occasionally have to set something aside, gain a couple of levels, and then come back before they can succeed at something.
The MMORPG mechanic that most commonly fails on this point is actually grouping. Too many games made the assumption that players would have balanced groups for content without putting any thought into where the groups would come from. AI that requires solid groups in games where grouping mechanics make it a major pain to get such a solid group is bad AI. There has been a lot of improvement in this regard over the course of the last decade or so.
Originally posted by Quizzical A "good" AI is one that makes for interesting gameplay. Similarity to what humans would do is irrelevant. Smartest possible is usually problematic, too, as that would typically mean everything in the zone attacks you at once.
And interesting is subjective. Obvious just simple scripted combat is interesting enough for many. As such, AI is just fine in today's game. In fact, take chess as an example. No normal human can beat even a phone now .. the work is to dumb it down to the human level.
I don't think games need to progress in AI, they need to progress in putting in more fun stuff .. like physics based combat (or puzzles).
Numbers. It was hard to justify doing anything but WoW like games. Time has shown that they largely do as well as other games on average. But the problem is that the previous western king was 26x smaller than WoW. WoW made all other type of MMORPG look tiny. Thus all of the developers funds were to that brand of gaming.
But its looking like 2 generation of MMORPG's later that the themepark quest hub games have been shown to be just another MMORPG and WoW a fluke. Progress hopefully will happen when Sandboxes and other type of MMORPG are successful.
Originally posted by Quizzical A "good" AI is one that makes for interesting gameplay. Similarity to what humans would do is irrelevant. Smartest possible is usually problematic, too, as that would typically mean everything in the zone attacks you at once.
And interesting is subjective. Obvious just simple scripted combat is interesting enough for many. As such, AI is just fine in today's game. In fact, take chess as an example. No normal human can beat even a phone now .. the work is to dumb it down to the human level.
I don't think games need to progress in AI, they need to progress in putting in more fun stuff .. like physics based combat (or puzzles).
Making the smartest chess AI possible doesn't provide interesting gameplay for most people. But neither does an AI that chooses its moves uniformly at random from all possible.
Certainly, interesting is subjective. But it does focus the debate on what actually matters.
Originally posted by Quizzical A "good" AI is one that makes for interesting gameplay. Similarity to what humans would do is irrelevant. Smartest possible is usually problematic, too, as that would typically mean everything in the zone attacks you at once.
And interesting is subjective. Obvious just simple scripted combat is interesting enough for many. As such, AI is just fine in today's game. In fact, take chess as an example. No normal human can beat even a phone now .. the work is to dumb it down to the human level.
I don't think games need to progress in AI, they need to progress in putting in more fun stuff .. like physics based combat (or puzzles).
Making the smartest chess AI possible doesn't provide interesting gameplay for most people. But neither does an AI that chooses its moves uniformly at random from all possible.
Certainly, interesting is subjective. But it does focus the debate on what actually matters.
No random moves are not interesting.
But hey, just look at all the successful games (including those with stealth & detection), you don't need much more than a few lines of scripting (like if the enemies shoots, hide behind a cover, if he is in range, shoot ....) to make it interesting.
What actually matters? Certainly AI is a small part of it. If you look at why a game like Diablo or Dishonored is good, AI has very little to do with it ... they don't have AI much more sophisticated than 10 years ago but they have lots of other stuff, like combat abilities, or different ways to accomplish a mission, ....
But its looking like 2 generation of MMORPG's later that the themepark quest hub games have been shown to be just another MMORPG and WoW a fluke. Progress hopefully will happen when Sandboxes and other type of MMORPG are successful.
It may be a fluke, but i highly doubt sandbox and other types of MMORPGs will be the future. It is more likely to be focused pve or pvp games like MOBAs, instanced pvp games, or other types of online games like Destiny.
Now the label "MMO" will probably broaden to take claim to the newer game types, but the classical MMO they won't be.
Originally posted by Kaledren Because as long as the lemmings are buying what they are making now, why would they move away from the model that is raking in the money.
How are they lemmings if they are choosing the games they want? Are you suggesting that everyone (except you, of course) is a mindless zombie that just buys what EvilCorpCo markets to them, despite them wanting something different?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Originally posted by Kaledren Because as long as the lemmings are buying what they are making now, why would they move away from the model that is raking in the money.
How are they lemmings if they are choosing the games they want? Are you suggesting that everyone (except you, of course) is a mindless zombie that just buys what EvilCorpCo markets to them, despite them wanting something different?
Well it seems to me that is what they are doing. They are choosing games they hope will be somewhat different and hope will change the way things are...but in the end aren't. And keep doing it over and over and over and over......
Not to mention it seems most (Not all, but the larger portion) LOVE the competition of gathering achievements, being on top of leader boards, getting to level cap first, and getting the best gear so they can stand in major hubs and show off said gear while complaining there isn't enough content because they raced to cap and skipped tons of content in the process.
Originally posted by Kaledren Because as long as the lemmings are buying what they are making now, why would they move away from the model that is raking in the money.
How are they lemmings if they are choosing the games they want? Are you suggesting that everyone (except you, of course) is a mindless zombie that just buys what EvilCorpCo markets to them, despite them wanting something different?
I'd like to know why he's still trying to perpetuate a myth started by a "big business" to sell a bullshit documentary while bashing people for not thinking for themselves and seeing through their crap.
Originally posted by Kaledren Because as long as the lemmings are buying what they are making now, why would they move away from the model that is raking in the money.
How are they lemmings if they are choosing the games they want? Are you suggesting that everyone (except you, of course) is a mindless zombie that just buys what EvilCorpCo markets to them, despite them wanting something different?
Well it seems to me that is what they are doing. They are choosing games they hope will be somewhat different and hope will change the way things are...but in the end aren't. And keep doing it over and over and over and over......
Not to mention it seems most (Not all, but the larger portion) LOVE the competition of gathering achievements, being on top of leader boards, getting to level cap first, and getting the best gear so they can stand in major hubs and show off said gear while complaining there isn't enough content because they raced to cap and skipped tons of content in the process.
If they love those features, how are they "lemmings" for buying games that have them?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Comments
I imagine what many people mean when they ask for "advanced AI" is opponents who behave like human beings, as opposed to opponents who behave like human beings playing a video game.
By that I mean that the NPC's will be as crafty and aware as real people would, but won't try to exploit features like clipping through terrain, using lag, circle-strafing and bunny-hopping, aimbotting and wall-hacking, etc. Challenging opponents, but not ones that exploit the technical limitations of the virtual world that the game is played in.
However, games designed to be played by a mass audience must be fairly easily "beatable" by 2/3 of the players at least. Otherwise the average player loses interest and wanders off in search of different stimulation.
We're not seeing new ideas in MMO's because of the same reasons we are seeing re-makes of B movies(seriously a robocop remake?).
The cost/benefit of making something predictable and average is greater than taking a chance on something new and interesting.
If your going to have to drop 100-200 mil on a AAA mmo. It's way easier to convince your investors to make a game you can guarantee is going to sell 500k boxes at 60 bucks each. with a 15$ sub that's will slowly trail off over the next 6 months. It'll pay for itself in a year and if enough players stay it's profit, if not you can switch to F2P and mooch off the microtransactions. Looking at 20% ROI within 18 months.
If they do something new and crazy they have no idea what they will end up with... Players are after-all a rather finiky lot. Great games tank while COD46: the next generation sell 10 million copies on opening day, with nothing but updated graphics and fast-drawing multiplayer.
So it's take a gamble and risk losing a quarter of a BILLION dollars. Or make A quest hub based wow-clone with hybrid action combat, set back make your 20-30 mil and smoke a cigar feeling proud of yourself.
Kind of PVP in that the monster is controlled by a player, but also not PvP because the other player isn't a player character and that changes things a lot. The monsters are playing off of different rules then the players. If your controlling the boss, you likely can't leave the boss room or pick and choose what groups you want to fight. You are always outnumbered. (Asymmetrical; PvP is kind of a new thing. See evolve and nothing else.) The battle might even be balanced for the monster to almost always lose. So there are lots of aspects of it that make it different then PvP.
I came up with this idea of people controlling the bosses when I was trying to think of how you would do a EDF mmo. The idea I had was for the game to be about nothing but epic raids. Every night Godzilla or some other massive kaiju would come from the sea and the players would have to try to drive them back or kill them. The kaiju battle would be the only content for this game (Linearly the only content. The mmo wouldn't even be up outside of these battles), so it would be important that the battles be dynamic, inserting, and unpredictable. You have a hard time doing that with even the most advanced AIs, so just have the devs drive Godzilla.
I agree that we could be waiting a long time for a true technical revolution thus I don't really see us having some revolutionary leap in gaming technology for a time.
Despite the graphics improvements, the very general mechanics of gaming haven't changed. You still sit in front of your mouse and keyboard looking at a screen waiting for visual queues to offer input and receive a response. There have been changes to the more specific mechanics but we're still in that same 3rd party view with hot-keys and action bars. That's not saying we can't have great games because of that, it's just an observation that things aren't likely to change all that much without a hardware jump.
I agree with the SSD sentiments. It allows me to load up BF4 levels in 10 seconds but beyond that it doesn't do much. You can still have seamless worlds without SSDs through game engine technologies that are able to pre-load data if it's predicted to be seen/used. We see this in the newer MMOs where there aren't the loading screens between major zones or continents like we have in WoW (inter-continental travel).
I think stereoscopic tech will be accepted in the PC gaming industry far before it's accepted in the home movie and television realm. We have that tech in theaters and it's getting a luke warm reception if the movie is directed properly and, imo, if the director/editor doesn't go out of their way to throw 3d elements into the movie because "IT'S 3D".
As for the inputs, the point was not that audio or gesture based input WAS the way forward but that input technology in general could be the way forward with improving game technology. The Connect failed because it's resolution or ability to distinguish gestures is very primitive and there are better technologies being developed that might have a better impact. Audio input is hard because as a technology, it really needs to understand speech patterns and the nuances of the speakers speech patterns to be able to discern what the user wants. If it's simple voice commands then the user is probably going to feel more comfortable using the K/M or joystick as there is an efficiency gap between speaking the command and pushing a button (namely the time it takes to speak the command vs the time it takes to push a button). There are other issues with audio commands in MMOs such as me liking to speak to my buddies on TS while playing would kinda suck if I had to speak some commands for actions.
Why arn't [sic] we seeing any progress in MMO design?
Because it's just to easy to make generic MMO #X and have people pay for Alpha, Beta then the release and subscription for 1-3 months and make all the money back you invested. Quality does not matter any more. People will buy anything if it is hyped long enough.
That is the whole point. The encounter can be beaten .. i have done it with my old guild. But you cannot use trinity, and have to use a lot of cc.
The point is that players QQ it is too hard .. so they nerf it. So don't expect good AI because most players don't want to deal with it.
No game has loading screens between zones just because they think it's fun to sit and look at loading screens. Rather, if you want to make a seamless world, you have to be able to reliably load the assets that need to be loaded in time while never needing to load faster than the hardware can handle.
You can make assumptions about this is how fast hard drives can load assets. It takes some real sacrifices in game design to ensure that a game will never need to load data faster than that. If you decide that you do need faster loading for your game, you put in a loading screen so players can sit there and wait for things to load. But if you can assume that everyone has an SSD, then the threshold of how fast you can load stuff without needing loading screens is much, much faster.
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As you say, there are reasons why stereoscopic 3D has not caught on well in television and movies. Every single one of them applies more strongly to games than to television. Until television can work out the issues, there's no real hope for gaming doing so.
Stereoscopic 3D has been done in movies since the 1950s. So just because there are some movies that do it today doesn't mean that it's about to catch on. Nor does that mean much in games; we've had stereoscopic 3D in games at least since 1987. And yes, that game is obscure for good reasons--and among the reasons why Square was on the brink of bankruptcy before Final Fantasy saved the company.
As much as it pains me to say but most players do not want to fight an advanced AI. Its no fun when the AI constantly shows you your shortcomings. A good AI will always abuse those. The game would suddenly be about player skill and actually be difficult. Thats why the developers only implement dumb AIs.
Programming a good AI is NO problem. We already have automated cars in real life that can react to any of the thousands of possible disturbances on the road. Actually you don't even need an advanced AI. A simple script is enough to crush most casual groups:
Loop {
If ( $Healer is attackable ) { Focus fire $Healer }
Else if ($Enemy_with_highest_DPS is attackable) { Focus fire $Enemy_with_highest_DPS }
Else { Focus fire $Random_enemy }
}
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Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
It is partly because making MMOs takes so long time which slows the evolution compared to games that takes only 20% of the time to make.
The other problem is that the tanking mechanics drags down the AI, as long as you have tanks any mob will be incredible stupid no matter what you do.
We do have seen many new features and questing is rather different from early MMOs that usually had a few rat killing and FEDEX quests only, now quests are often complexed and we have things like dynamic events but it takes time due to the long development time.
Another problem is development cost and the still rather limited memory of modern computers. Making a huge living world today is very expensive and can only be played on computers with loads of memory. The last thing will be fixed as there are new kinds of memory coming out that eventually will mean that your entire harddrive will be as fast as the memory is but there is still the development cost that only rises.
the AI in Star Citizen will blow everything else out of the water
http://kythera.ai/
That is true, but it also depends on what your opponent is. Fighting a huge nasty animal, a not that smart ogre and a brilliant evil sorceress should be very different. That in itself should be more fun, far from all opponents should try to outwit the characters in combat but the smarter actually should instead of acting like stupid animals.
Similarity to what humans should do actually matters if you fight a human, but not when you fight a wywern or drake.
A good AI should actually be several AIs used for the type of creature you fight. A stupid animal will just try to use raw strength to take you down but a smart opponent needs to react to what the players do and change tactics after that while still delivering a fun fight to the players.
The fun part in PvP is that there you actually outwit your opponent when you win using superior tactics (at least in good PvP, in bad you win because of better stats) and that experience is always fun. But in PvE you shouldn't have all fights more or less the same with a few special attacks.
When I first started to see the potential for MMORPG's I was in the group that played D&D, Worked in IT, knew what the Internet was, owned a home computer, had watched the D&D cartoon, wanted Lord of the Rings to be a proper film and not just a half arsed cartoon...you get the picture....
An MMO back then meant a world to explore, a complex character to interact with the world, many options of how to interact with the world, a place where other people would be the ones you interact with mostly not AI, a place to be part of and one amongst many.
Then WOW became popular and you suddenly got a massive influx of people that were...
Socially 'cool' enough to hate computer games when they were only played by geeks but also socially 'cool' enough to play them when they because 'cool' at the same time facebook became cool, had no idea what a computer really was but knew consoles let you play fighting games, thought the Internet came on a CD, wanted to live in MTV cribs, thought Lord of the Rings was the one with all those kids on an island and generally didn't have an attention span past a 90 second Mortal Combat fight and where totally lost in a 'virtual world'.
Then a big MMO came along, WOW, and provided all the 90 second attention span kids with a big fat carrot that was 'cool'. I mean it must be 'cool' because they have adverts on TV...
And it made lots of money and so what followed was 10 years worth of 'design' and 'development' on the MMO to incorporate endless streams of WOW copies for 90 second attention span, facebook loving, 'games are cool', leet gamers who haven't got the slightest concept of what an MMORPG is but thinks it is something where getting the high score (or the highest level first, or the most kills....)is the point.
The people that want to play MMORPG's the way they should be are in the minority and are probably a dying breed. The next generation of gamers will probably not even have MMORPG's to play having long ago lost the need to the RPG part as you will just be playing a virtual self trying to get the high score as long as it doesn't take too long to do so.
A good AI should:
1) Force players to react to what is going on in combat and adapt accordingly.
If you can close your eyes in combat without losing much effectiveness, then the combat system is bad. There have been combat systems ranging from fast action to purely turn-based that did this well, but MMORPGs sometimes manage to botch this.
2) Strongly encourage players to adopt wildly different tactics when fighting different types of mobs.
This is where trinity combat typically fails. Every single mob is send the tank in to grab aggro, have the healer heal the tank, and have damage dealers pour in damage while the mobs are ignoring them because they're attacking the tank. Some games admit only minor variations on this. Ideally, a game would make it so that if you pick some fixed strategy ahead of time and try that strategy in every single battle, it will fail a substantial fraction of the time--and fail in a lot of different ways.
3) Naturally guide players toward successful strategies and give feedback on why they failed.
A system of "and now you randomly fall over dead for no apparent reason in particular" is a bad one. It should be clear what went wrong and how to improve next time.
That said, while it's okay for combat to kill a lot of players the first time, it shouldn't be a case where you need magical foreknowledge to have any chance. Combat shouldn't make it so that if you stand in this spot, you instantly die without warning exactly 19.2 seconds into the battle. If something is going to kill you, players need to be warned about in time to react--and not just from knowing what happened in a previous run.
4) Never, ever leave players completely stuck and unable to progress until players are very far into the game.
This is for commercial reasons, as nothing pushes players to quit faster than the frustration of being completely stuck. It's okay if players get stuck on something in endgame and quit at that point. But you don't want people to get completely stuck on lower level stuff, though it's okay if players occasionally have to set something aside, gain a couple of levels, and then come back before they can succeed at something.
The MMORPG mechanic that most commonly fails on this point is actually grouping. Too many games made the assumption that players would have balanced groups for content without putting any thought into where the groups would come from. AI that requires solid groups in games where grouping mechanics make it a major pain to get such a solid group is bad AI. There has been a lot of improvement in this regard over the course of the last decade or so.
And interesting is subjective. Obvious just simple scripted combat is interesting enough for many. As such, AI is just fine in today's game. In fact, take chess as an example. No normal human can beat even a phone now .. the work is to dumb it down to the human level.
I don't think games need to progress in AI, they need to progress in putting in more fun stuff .. like physics based combat (or puzzles).
Numbers. It was hard to justify doing anything but WoW like games. Time has shown that they largely do as well as other games on average. But the problem is that the previous western king was 26x smaller than WoW. WoW made all other type of MMORPG look tiny. Thus all of the developers funds were to that brand of gaming.
But its looking like 2 generation of MMORPG's later that the themepark quest hub games have been shown to be just another MMORPG and WoW a fluke. Progress hopefully will happen when Sandboxes and other type of MMORPG are successful.
Making the smartest chess AI possible doesn't provide interesting gameplay for most people. But neither does an AI that chooses its moves uniformly at random from all possible.
Certainly, interesting is subjective. But it does focus the debate on what actually matters.
No random moves are not interesting.
But hey, just look at all the successful games (including those with stealth & detection), you don't need much more than a few lines of scripting (like if the enemies shoots, hide behind a cover, if he is in range, shoot ....) to make it interesting.
What actually matters? Certainly AI is a small part of it. If you look at why a game like Diablo or Dishonored is good, AI has very little to do with it ... they don't have AI much more sophisticated than 10 years ago but they have lots of other stuff, like combat abilities, or different ways to accomplish a mission, ....
It may be a fluke, but i highly doubt sandbox and other types of MMORPGs will be the future. It is more likely to be focused pve or pvp games like MOBAs, instanced pvp games, or other types of online games like Destiny.
Now the label "MMO" will probably broaden to take claim to the newer game types, but the classical MMO they won't be.
How are they lemmings if they are choosing the games they want? Are you suggesting that everyone (except you, of course) is a mindless zombie that just buys what EvilCorpCo markets to them, despite them wanting something different?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Well it seems to me that is what they are doing. They are choosing games they hope will be somewhat different and hope will change the way things are...but in the end aren't. And keep doing it over and over and over and over......
Not to mention it seems most (Not all, but the larger portion) LOVE the competition of gathering achievements, being on top of leader boards, getting to level cap first, and getting the best gear so they can stand in major hubs and show off said gear while complaining there isn't enough content because they raced to cap and skipped tons of content in the process.
I'd like to know why he's still trying to perpetuate a myth started by a "big business" to sell a bullshit documentary while bashing people for not thinking for themselves and seeing through their crap.
If they love those features, how are they "lemmings" for buying games that have them?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I dont like PvP and yet i play EvE.
why is that? because there isnt a space sim that is that deep that is PvE.
the meal I want isnt on the table so I eat what I can find and tollerate
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me