I wonder when CDPR announce their other AAA RPG as they stated they want to release another RPG besides cyberpunk in the next 6 years
Currently playing Bard's Tale. Quite entertaining little game 
Had a bit of problems to get it working properly (it was running in "slow motion"), but it's working now.
I wasn't compatible with the bow at first, but now that I have gotten used to it, I actually like it quite a lot.
EDIT: Is it worth buying those expensive map pieces from vendors?
Had a bit of problems to get it working properly (it was running in "slow motion"), but it's working now.I wasn't compatible with the bow at first, but now that I have gotten used to it, I actually like it quite a lot.
EDIT: Is it worth buying those expensive map pieces from vendors?
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Sunsibar;n9211231 said:Currently playing Bard's Tale. Quite entertaining little game
I wasn't compatible with the bow at first, but now that I have gotten used to it, I actually like it quite a lot.
EDIT: Is it worth buying those expensive map pieces from vendors?
Do you mean the satirical one? Fun game
I think I bought those maps - they can lead to some useful stuff.Wrapped up things in Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice last night, and, yeah... I'd say the 'Indie AAA' experiment has been successful.
The PC version - although running more or less flawlessly and without any noticeable hiccups on downsampled WQHD/everything cranked to 'Very High' - feels a bit half-assed and if done by someone who hasn't got much of a clue how to implement graphics options properly. No adjustable FOV, no individually toggable post-processing effects like motion blur, chromatic aberration, etc, no individually scalable anti-aliasing, texture filtering, etc, the list goes on.
Editing the shit out of various .INIs is currently the only way to have the game produce something that's at least not as blurry and washed-out as with the limited in-game settings and presets.
Controls surprisingly decent with keyboard & mouse as well, although it'd have been nice if ALL the keys (including all of the numpad, for instance) were unlocked for rebinding and there was an option to turn off mouse smoothing without having to go through input.ini.
All in all, I'd say it's still worth the controversial €30/$33/... it's currently selling for, even if at first it might feel like 8-10 hours of puzzle-solving, sword fighting and quite a bit of walking about is somewhat too short for such a price tag.
I think it's not much going out on a limb for guaranteeing the narrative and the overall experience to make up for that. The way the in-game cutscenes are presented and how they've been achieved with cutting-edge motion and facial capturing technology and with such fidelity is nothing short but impressive. Also thanks to the outstanding performance by Melina Juergens (who turns out is not even a professional actress) as Senua that's definitely worth the praise it's been and still is getting.
Also I'd imagine that anyone who's just a sucker for the celtic/pictish, pre-christianity iron age setting might get quite a kick out of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice as well. Ninja Theory did a hell of a job with their relatively authentic and unique take on it, extrapolating and depicting what a PTSD-ridden warrioress' struggle with severe mental illness could have looked and played out like back then.
Last but not least it's worth to point out again that Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is Ninja Theory's first self-published title without a major publisher breathing down their neck, and that alone is already applaudable and worth supporting. As is having the guts to not have it shackled with DRM and release it day 1 on gog.com. These guys got it.
The PC version - although running more or less flawlessly and without any noticeable hiccups on downsampled WQHD/everything cranked to 'Very High' - feels a bit half-assed and if done by someone who hasn't got much of a clue how to implement graphics options properly. No adjustable FOV, no individually toggable post-processing effects like motion blur, chromatic aberration, etc, no individually scalable anti-aliasing, texture filtering, etc, the list goes on.
Editing the shit out of various .INIs is currently the only way to have the game produce something that's at least not as blurry and washed-out as with the limited in-game settings and presets.
Controls surprisingly decent with keyboard & mouse as well, although it'd have been nice if ALL the keys (including all of the numpad, for instance) were unlocked for rebinding and there was an option to turn off mouse smoothing without having to go through input.ini.
All in all, I'd say it's still worth the controversial €30/$33/... it's currently selling for, even if at first it might feel like 8-10 hours of puzzle-solving, sword fighting and quite a bit of walking about is somewhat too short for such a price tag.
I think it's not much going out on a limb for guaranteeing the narrative and the overall experience to make up for that. The way the in-game cutscenes are presented and how they've been achieved with cutting-edge motion and facial capturing technology and with such fidelity is nothing short but impressive. Also thanks to the outstanding performance by Melina Juergens (who turns out is not even a professional actress) as Senua that's definitely worth the praise it's been and still is getting.
Also I'd imagine that anyone who's just a sucker for the celtic/pictish, pre-christianity iron age setting might get quite a kick out of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice as well. Ninja Theory did a hell of a job with their relatively authentic and unique take on it, extrapolating and depicting what a PTSD-ridden warrioress' struggle with severe mental illness could have looked and played out like back then.
Last but not least it's worth to point out again that Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is Ninja Theory's first self-published title without a major publisher breathing down their neck, and that alone is already applaudable and worth supporting. As is having the guts to not have it shackled with DRM and release it day 1 on gog.com. These guys got it.
So in the recent dota TI (The International - the dota world championship, basically), between the matches there was this small match between an AI and one of the old pro players. It wasn't a "real" dota match, it was 1v1 with limited items. The AI won. Later on, amateur players beat the AI, because they realized its limitations.
This developed into a discussion in an Israeli group of mine, where one guy commented sarcastically "A computer beat a player? I'M SHOCKED!"
The thing is, as a gamer who's been following competitive gaming more and more, this is, actually, kinda shocking. And it got me wondering - how many games out there, if any, have yet to be mastered by players? I'm particularly interested in multiplayer oriented, competitive games, but even single player works. Is there a game where the computer is still better than the players? I know it's not the case in dota, SC, CS:GO, and I'm assuming that it's the same for almost any other game.
This developed into a discussion in an Israeli group of mine, where one guy commented sarcastically "A computer beat a player? I'M SHOCKED!"
The thing is, as a gamer who's been following competitive gaming more and more, this is, actually, kinda shocking. And it got me wondering - how many games out there, if any, have yet to be mastered by players? I'm particularly interested in multiplayer oriented, competitive games, but even single player works. Is there a game where the computer is still better than the players? I know it's not the case in dota, SC, CS:GO, and I'm assuming that it's the same for almost any other game.
Considering that in almost every game (at least in 8 or 9 out of 10 cases for sure) the AI is still intentionally designed to be a dirty cheat and able to abuse and exploit the respective game's mechanics to compensate for the opposing human player's advantages (abstract, out-of-the-box-thinking, deliberate conscious decision-making against logic and reason, etc.) I'd say yes, there will 'always' be a game where the computer is still better than the players.
For instance, KINGArtGames' upcoming RTS 'Iron Harvest' (which just got its first teaser trailer) just might be that one game:
For instance, KINGArtGames' upcoming RTS 'Iron Harvest' (which just got its first teaser trailer) just might be that one game:
Interesting discussion, EliHarel and schinderhannes.999 . I had an AI thread in the Cyberpunk forum that got derailed with speculative fiction and all sorts of nonsense and misinformation.
The reason why VIDEO game AI is often so bad is mostly because game programmers are not AI researchers. Their knowledge and understanding of AI is limited and, often, outdated. Some games do include interesting AI techniques: I think Doom 3 used some kind of neural networks to react to the player's movement patterns and Total War Rome II used Monte-Carlo Tree Search in the single player campaign. However these implementations are often lightweight, dirty and do not use all the resources they potentially could. Mostly, because it is after all a video game and there are a bunch of other things to keep the hardware busy (i.e graphics, sound, etc.).
A game, technically speaking, is a closed system that is completely understood: it has states, transition rules, intermediate and terminal rewards, etc. This means that even games with many possible "configurations" or states such as Chess or Go can be theoretically solved by something as simple as a search tree. In practice this takes way too much time, so it's not fun to play against a machine unless it can respond quickly. Recent progress in game-playing AI has made it possible to solve even Go, however. Video games are not very different, with the possible exception that unlike these board games, they are not games with Perfect Information. It is also possible to optimally solve large decision processes with uncertainty, but this can also take a very, very long time even on high-end, gaming PC hardware.
Most tasks that can be represented as games have optimal solutions, and a computer CAN and WILL find these solutions given enough time. Humans are particularly good are finding decent solutions somewhat fast, and we can be very good at quickly incorporating new evidence into our existing knowledge and generalizing from a few significant examples. We currently do not have the math to efficiently solve these problems, so even the complicated problems are solve naively: assess many or all possible options, estimate their value, choose one and move on. Expert chess players, for instance, are especially good at reducing their pool of available moves to only a handful of really useful ones. But even intermediate players are terrible at finding optimal strategies, often settling for good, suboptimal strategies.
Consider what's possibly one of the simplest games out there: tic-tac-toe. It's so well understood mathematically, that every possible board is known and every good move can be known in advance. Losing in tic-tac-toe only shows you're unaware of the winning strategies. Any other game follows a similar principle, only they have more states, their states become more feature-rich and may include partial observability or uncertainty (eg. not knowing, only estimating, the true position of an enemy troop). Under partial observability, actions are taken to reduce uncertainty and gather information about the true state of the world, eventually leading to better action choices and ultimately, winning.
So while this is an interesting discussion that I am willing to continue, it does have a short answer: all games can be mastered by a "computer", but computers are limited by 1) resources and time available for computation and 2) having sufficiently advanced AI methods. Because in video games (1) is very strict and (2) is almost never present, they often resort to letting the computer-controlled player exploit loopholes in the rules, abuse the game engine, or outright cheat.
The reason why VIDEO game AI is often so bad is mostly because game programmers are not AI researchers. Their knowledge and understanding of AI is limited and, often, outdated. Some games do include interesting AI techniques: I think Doom 3 used some kind of neural networks to react to the player's movement patterns and Total War Rome II used Monte-Carlo Tree Search in the single player campaign. However these implementations are often lightweight, dirty and do not use all the resources they potentially could. Mostly, because it is after all a video game and there are a bunch of other things to keep the hardware busy (i.e graphics, sound, etc.).
A game, technically speaking, is a closed system that is completely understood: it has states, transition rules, intermediate and terminal rewards, etc. This means that even games with many possible "configurations" or states such as Chess or Go can be theoretically solved by something as simple as a search tree. In practice this takes way too much time, so it's not fun to play against a machine unless it can respond quickly. Recent progress in game-playing AI has made it possible to solve even Go, however. Video games are not very different, with the possible exception that unlike these board games, they are not games with Perfect Information. It is also possible to optimally solve large decision processes with uncertainty, but this can also take a very, very long time even on high-end, gaming PC hardware.
Most tasks that can be represented as games have optimal solutions, and a computer CAN and WILL find these solutions given enough time. Humans are particularly good are finding decent solutions somewhat fast, and we can be very good at quickly incorporating new evidence into our existing knowledge and generalizing from a few significant examples. We currently do not have the math to efficiently solve these problems, so even the complicated problems are solve naively: assess many or all possible options, estimate their value, choose one and move on. Expert chess players, for instance, are especially good at reducing their pool of available moves to only a handful of really useful ones. But even intermediate players are terrible at finding optimal strategies, often settling for good, suboptimal strategies.
Consider what's possibly one of the simplest games out there: tic-tac-toe. It's so well understood mathematically, that every possible board is known and every good move can be known in advance. Losing in tic-tac-toe only shows you're unaware of the winning strategies. Any other game follows a similar principle, only they have more states, their states become more feature-rich and may include partial observability or uncertainty (eg. not knowing, only estimating, the true position of an enemy troop). Under partial observability, actions are taken to reduce uncertainty and gather information about the true state of the world, eventually leading to better action choices and ultimately, winning.
So while this is an interesting discussion that I am willing to continue, it does have a short answer: all games can be mastered by a "computer", but computers are limited by 1) resources and time available for computation and 2) having sufficiently advanced AI methods. Because in video games (1) is very strict and (2) is almost never present, they often resort to letting the computer-controlled player exploit loopholes in the rules, abuse the game engine, or outright cheat.
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Don't feel like quoting a post from July, so I'll just Sunsibar instead.
Bought that "The Bard's Tale" game, played for an hour and fell in love with it at the 10-minute mark. Very, very, very few games have ever managed to do that to me.
Bought that "The Bard's Tale" game, played for an hour and fell in love with it at the 10-minute mark. Very, very, very few games have ever managed to do that to me.
