Are you kidding me? What’s next, entire stories that just play out in front of you?
It could be a good idea! Maybe we should create rooms with big screens for people to watch it together. We could make them pay for it and it would be a great opportunity to sell pop-corns and Coca-Cola!
Next thing you know they’ll remove the graphics and make you read the story instead…
Didn’t Nintendo do this in the New Super Mario Bros.? If you died enough times, it asked you if you wanted Luigi (or some other character?) to show you how to do the course.
Yep. Stadia also had a feature like this (that no one ever used).
Just another example of why software patents should not exist.
Stadia was a Squandered Opportunities masterclass. That platform had SO much potential; the tech was there, and the tech worked, but Google hired the worst possible person to run the project.
And the next patent will be about a controller, not actually being plugged into the console, but merely giving gamers the illusion of affecting the gameplay…
I also made my little brother player 2.
Wait until they discover some remote controller, where you can switch the games that are played according to some schedule. Like some form of game stations. Maybe they could broadcast them for the whole population somehow, so that everybody can talk about the games they
playedwatched last week on their next town hall gathering or Sunday church with Aunt Lizzy.You’re on an entirely different plane of reality mate, my brain just can’t fathom a forward-thinking concept as such ;)
There is a small bit of intrigue here, imagine you get to a boss and think, ‘this is impossible’ but there is an ability to observe a ghost of your character taking the boss on in your gear.
Bare in mind as well that ‘AI’ has existed as a word in gaming for decades and has nothing to do with LLMs, surely this is achieveable purely with the gaming definition of ‘AI’ simply coding the PC also as an NPC that reacts to things.
Yeah, it really annoyed me that the author of this piece doesn’t understand the distinction between AI as a concept (always around in computing) and AI as in LLMs and the other stuff.
Every game is an idle game now… ?
Sure, why not.
Player counts is all Wall Street is looking for.
Vibe gaming
“But games are so booring nowadays.”
This feels like it’s going to incentivise developers to either make bad puzzles, or bad hint systems. Why bother with a good one if the platform has a “complete this for me” feature? It is basically impossible for players to get stuck or struggle, when they’re either shown the solution, or the game completes it for them.
Nintendo has been doing this since the Wii era.
New Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Super Mario Maker 2…
Technically all the Rhythm Heaven games also have this feature.
Oh boy, the darksouls community is doing to be very funny to read
So… What’s the point of playing then?
Games are expected to pose some sort of challenge, of difficulty, to keep the player interested. Even if it boils down to pure frustration at some point, making some turn from it, even learning how to deal with it is useful. Games are some of the oldest teaching tools we stumbled upon.
This another move on human and individual agenda, on learning how to exist, to an extent.
This isn’t funny.
Cheat codes and difficulty settings have existed for forever. Dynamic difficulty is common, and used to great success in beloved games like left 4 dead. Just a different option to get past the part you’re stuck in is really nothing bad.
Cheat codes are one thing. You can abuse those to even smoth your learning curve to later beat the game clean.
The same logic can be used for difficulty settings: you play it, in harder and harder settings, to have a new/added challenge.
Dynamic difficulty I’m unaware of what it migh actually be buy I risk I have an idea.
The game playing itself? Sounds like a movie.
But I hope you are right.
Dynamic difficulty is the game adjusting the difficulty based on how well you’re doing, e.g. in the mentioned l4d (or maybe it was only l4d2 idk) if you have more health and healing, it will spawn more/harder enemies, and vice versa.
It’s sometimes also used in other ways, e.g. boss fights get easier after failing them a bunch, which I really don’t like because I want to decide myself whether I want to make the game easier. Though roguelite progression systems like in hades in effect do a similar thing, but the player is actually aware of it (though this is why I don’t really like roguelites).
Mainly I think whether this is a fine feature or shit will just depend on the ability to choose if you want the AI to beat the boss for you or not.
Why would you play the same game again just because you used a cheat code?
You already know the story. Time for something else.
That is like claiming you have to rewatch an entire movie because you missed a scene while going to the bathroom.
It’s more than obvious we are completely opposite individuals.
Yes, I would - and have - replayed a game after using cheats. It’s not about knowing the game; it’s about knowing if I can actually beat the game without resorting to cheats.
And, yes, I will rewatch an entire movie if I’ve missed a scene for any reason and the movie was somehow catching my interest. Not on that moment but I will rewatch it again when I have the opportunity and see how much the one scene I missed adds or not to the entire movie.
That’s quite the take. You seem to be the exact audience for this up and coming “feature”. Why play a game when you can just watch AI play it? TONS of people replay games and rewatch movies ALL THE TIME.
No, that is how you expect to play a game.
Not everyone plays games the same as you or even for the same reason.
If I get frustrated with a game, because I have to repeat the same part over and over, I just quit and go play a different game. Doing the same thing is boring. And life is already frustrating enough, I play games to relax and enjoy myself.
I am not on a quest to prove you wrong over me being right.
Do as you will, it is your life.
But it is through learning from small, inconsequential things like games, of any kind, to deal with controversial or unpleaseant feelings that many kids acquire coping mechanisms to handle real life situations. Situations with no cheat code, dificulty setting or pay-to-win mechanisms.
Wanting an escape, a tension release valve is fine. Just pick the right one.
You get it. The people I know who refuse to learn small things to get ahead are always the ones who have bad coping mechanisms.
Then don’t play dark souls. It’s inherently a frustrating game series, on purpose. I like to get gud and if some asshole puts AI into the game that takes over when I am stuck for a while I’d be upset. But tbh I wouldn’t even buy the game that has this in it. I’m not interested in training LLMs with my gaming skllls.
it’s not about playing, it’s about paying. The sooner you finish the game, the sooner you buy another one.
Games are already too expensive and it has been made known. That is a sure way to make people abandon platforms.
Exactly, I don’t play my games to finish them. I gnaw on them for hundreds of hours like a dog with a dinosaur bone. I’m the bane of the game industry and proud of it.
So a bot? Those have been in gaming for fucking ever.
This patent is so dumb.
Sometimes I like to play a game on max difficulty, sometimes I choose easy chill mode so I’m all for games having a wide difficulty scale of options.
This just seems stupid, and more like they can’t be arsed to balance a bunch of difficulties so just slap some AI slop in there and call it done.
I don’t know if you can describe it as “can’t be arsed” when their proposed solution is so much harder to implement.
Is it? What’s so fucking hard about it?
The main difficulty is in how many hyperparameters are involved in training an RL agent, high sensitivity of RL algorithms to those hyperparameters, and not having a good understanding of how to select them based on the properties of your task. This problem is exacerbated by the high sample complexity of RL. If something doesn’t work out, you don’t know if it’s because you chose the wrong set of hyperparameters or if you just haven’t trained for long enough.
I don’t know much about game design, but I do know that it’s a much more mature field than RL, so surely they have better tools than guessing and praying.
this just in the next generation of video games will play themselves. Due to rising costs though play time for most run-throughs will top out at about 90 minutes.
How is this new or original in any way!? This has been a feature in many kinds of games, for ages
GTA5 let you skip sections that were too hard for you (or too badly designed) and I am sure so did many other games. From a game design perspective this is nothing new whatsoever and won‘t change the medium in any way.
Except your GPU fans will start screaming when you press skip.
This stuff will be for cloud gaming only. So unless you have a really funky phone with giant fans that won‘t be the case. The data centers that are making your energy bill explode will do the heavy lifting.
I can already imagine articles of Americans dying of thirst because all their water has been taken to cool datacenters that use terribly inefficient algorithms to solve Candy Crush levels for me.
