"The Future of written gaming content is [AI]"

[Taf the Ghost]

51 minutes ago, StDragon said:

The Infocalypse could turn out to be a good thing; a final push that shoves everyone off the ledge. For awhile now, people have been spammed with crap and slammed with fake news and click-bait articles. Now that will be amplified x 1000+.

So what will the internet become? Rather than wasting time blacklisting content and feeds, the internet culture will turn to whitelisting instead with the presumption almost everything will either be fake or exaggerated.

We're speed running Frank Herbert's Dune cycle and we're probably 20 years from basically being at the Mentat point. I sort of hope we avoid the whole multi-planetary genocidal war part of the cycle.

[Quackers101]

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

The Infocalypse could turn out to be a good thing; a final push that shoves everyone off the ledge. For awhile now, people have been spammed with crap and slammed with fake news and click-bait articles. Now that will be amplified x 1000+.

So what will the internet become? Rather than wasting time blacklisting content and feeds, the internet culture will turn to whitelisting instead with the presumption almost everything will either be fake or exaggerated.

if you haven't gotten into the previous rabbit holes on social media or youtube, there is already an issue with spam.

generating videos, stealing from others to create a new video, generated by AI, and bots ruining a lot of areas, from fake news channels to hype channels, some have maybe been reduced... but still a few that sucks and ruins the search results.

[oali24]

20 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Yes, I have considered that. I also think that the writers would still push out mostly trash even if they were paid higher because they would try and maximize their own profits.

What is needed is a restructuring of the salaries to begin with. No more pay-per-article/view. No more freelancers and instead have actual employees that get paid by the hour. But that business model doesn't work. We had that business model and it died out because it was too costly to run. Gaming journalism is not a prestigious job that makes a lot of money.

Maybe some of the video game journalists are actually you know, passionate about their job? Maybe not all people are obsessed with trying to "maximize profits" when they are actually passionate.

20 hours ago, LAwLz said:

It seems like it's a job for people who tried to get a different job (for example news journalists) but failed. That probably isn't true for all gaming journalists, but it seems to be true for at least a fairly significant portion.

I don't remember where I heard it, but I heard someone once say: "It's a shame that 99% of journalists ruin the reputation of the entire industry". I think there is some truth to that, at least for gaming journalism.

I don't know, I have never gotten the impression that video game journalists don't really care about their job, I think they might be biased towards writing in a way that is too soft on AAA game publishers, but I don't think that they were really trying to be some other kind of journalist before they became video game journalists.

[Taf the Ghost]

3 hours ago, Quackers101 said:

if you haven't gotten into the previous rabbit holes on social media or youtube, there is already an issue with spam.

generating videos, stealing from others to create a new video, generated by AI, and bots ruining a lot of areas, from fake news channels to hype channels, some have maybe been reduced... but still a few that sucks and ruins the search results.

 

The fake science ones ruined one of my feeds for a couple of weeks. It went from Anton waving and saying "hello wonderful person" to a chain of videos about black holes and dark matter.  YT has apparently been trying to do something about it, but that was... annoying.

 

2 hours ago, oali24 said:

Maybe some of the video game journalists are actually you know, passionate about their job? Maybe not all people are obsessed with trying to "maximize profits" when they are actually passionate.

I don't know, I have never gotten the impression that video game journalists don't really care about their job, I think they might be biased towards writing in a way that is too soft on AAA game publishers, but I don't think that they were really trying to be some other kind of journalist before they became video game journalists.

 

The post 2008 explosion in Gaming Media has a lot to do with the issue. There was no journalism jobs available outside of Gaming, which saw the big move that direction. It's been going down for a while, but that's more because all of the money is gone. The problem is a lot of bridges were burned while they didn't build a new audience, since so much of it was just fake bot traffic. Gaming has high SEO rankings and, related, very high bot traffic. Every iteration of bot smashing hurt their bottom lines, which lead to even deep dives into listicles and the Buzzfeed model.

 

At the same time, games have also gotten much, much longer. While there are some very long, older games, even through the PS3 and into the PS4 era, main line games were generally "short" compared to more modern types. Skyrim & Witcher turned everything into 40+ hour RPG fests. (We can probably blame Ubisoft for this, somehow.) This has an effect on making reviews unprofitable for the way the current Internet business model works. Any major title is probably 2 weeks of a reviewer's work to actually manage. And that doesn't include the cost for the entire Media production to go with it.

 

The big site model is dead and has been for a while. It's been kept a float by Investment Firms and near 0% interest rates. (A lot of other stuff has as well, which is why the change in interest rates to a more normal level is going to cause carnage.)  The future of gaming sites is a holding company in Hoboken and a manager that manages contracted out reviews from established, independent reviewers. 

 

[Stahlmann]

On 6/28/2023 at 5:55 AM, oali24 said:

Why should he need to be good at literally one game for him to be good at his job, I don't know what he has written but I assume his job title was not "cup-head analysis specialist".

Why should people pay any kind of attention to a game review from someone who struggles with basic 2D side scroller mechanics that are literally written on a wall next to the mechanic.

 

I actually get mad when i see people suck at a game and they still decide to ignore any tutorial the game provides. That just means they're deliberately ignorant and i instantly lose interest in their content.

[Stahlmann]

9 hours ago, StDragon said:

The Infocalypse could turn out to be a good thing; a final push that shoves everyone off the ledge. For awhile now, people have been spammed with crap and slammed with fake news and click-bait articles. Now that will be amplified x 1000+.

So what will the internet become? Rather than wasting time blacklisting content and feeds, the internet culture will turn to whitelisting instead with the presumption almost everything will either be fake or exaggerated.

Generally avoiding social media saved me from most spam i would've encoundered otherwise. Always knowing about everything happening in the world is genuinely bad for your mental health. If you know about every bit of drama, you will likely have a much more negative view on the world.

 

Twitter is the best example with people getting mad at literally anything even though it has zero impact whatsoever on their lives or their surroundings, and even if the thing they're mad about is a primarily positive thing. Just look at the reception of some of MrBeast's videos where he helped hundreds of people with severe disabilities. Twitter spent more time being mad that he is farming disable people for content than discussing that he cured blindness for hundreds of people and they didn't have to pay a dollar for it.

[DeScruff]

Finally I have free time again.

I had a feeling there would be some negative opinions on games journalists (or whatever you want to call them)

Their jobs aren't always to just regurgitate game news and do reviews, part of their job is also to facilitate a community with the readership which I dont think an AI can really do.

 

Also if anyone didnt catch. The ammount of articles per week they were expecting from the AI editor was 250.

That is beyond astronomical. I dont doubt its possible with 0 effort. But thats... zero effort.

and I really dont think we need millions more AI generated articles for how to do very basic things. - All those posts you might see of "How to catch a Weedle in Pokemon" are the exact stuff that GAMURS seems to want to create.

 

If you really want an idea of how pointless and bad these websites can get look no further then: https://thetruthfacts.com/big-o-ending-explained/

... Feel free to scroll down to the FAQ section. Im sure even people who never watched BigO will recognize how nonsensical it is.

[ravenshrike]

On 6/27/2023 at 7:23 AM, MageTank said:

Finally, some intelligence in gaming journalism!

Hey now, there's plenty... some... a few spots of intelligence in gaming journalism. At least three... two. And if you include youtube reviewers that number balloons quickly.

[Stahlmann]

To be fair the written game journalism industry was dying either way. Idk when i last red one of these articles. I pretty much only hear about them when insanely dumb takes end up in drama. I probably wouldn't even notice when these people just didn't get replaced and no one is writing anything.

 

Anyone looking for a decent game review can just go to YouTube.

[Jerakl]

Good to know the average game news article quality will go up once this starts to spread.
No shade towards the good ones (of which there are likely some), but the average tech/games "journalist" is terrible.
The articles I've seen as of late are either mediocre or can be classed as "thinly veiled whining about x-thing author couldn't do/understand because they are a talentless hack".

I've also read some great ones, but unfortunately those are definitely the exception.

[Mark Kaine]

So no change.  At all?

[Kisai]

On 6/27/2023 at 2:22 AM, Taf the Ghost said:

 

Quick Edit: Anyone remember Maker Studios? Disney paid 500 million USD and it was basically a massive money pit.  Video content, much like web content, doesn't generate large corporate revenues without a very structured advertising system involved that can keep production budgets within range for profitability.  This was an obvious in 2010 as it is in 2023, but it took billions wasted in acquisitions for anyone to understand this.

The entire "Maker Studios"  self-destruction was the proverbial writing on the wall to not join MCM's, Agencies, etc unless you really know what you're giving up.

 

For those who maybe didn't have an interest in that content, a lot of the content that went up under "maker studios" was documentary level content, mixed between some pretty low-effort stuff. Twitch poached the biggest creators and the rest pretty much drowned maker studios.

 

Remember, as I've said many times, usually there are only a small handful of people within a publisher/agency that actually are 90% of the profits. If that person is poached, then the entire thing collapses.

 

On 6/27/2023 at 4:54 AM, Sauron said:

In reality they want an excuse to pay writers less by claiming the AI is doing the work. This will likely fall on its face, after all why would you bother reading stuff that is inevitably going to be trash? The quality of e-publication articles is already pretty low due to writers being expected to put out an unreasonable amount of pieces and sometimes being paid on a per-article basis. This would just pump massive amounts of spam nobody wants to read in an already exhausted space.

 

Why would anyone bother to read something generated by ChatGPT when they could just use ChatGPT themseves. This is the question you have to ask every time you see "something generated by AI", because why would you, pay money, or visit a website full of ads, only to see content you can get from ChatGPT yourself?

 

ChatGPT also, doesn't know anything after 2021, so trying to use it as journalism, let alone a reviewer of new games and hardware, just isn't going to work. At best you can use it to maybe re-write cheaper ESL writers work to have the polish of a native speaker, but that's about it.

 

The most novel uses for AI will not be for replacing people, it will be for filling in spaces that you otherwise didn't have the time/money to finish. So I can see AI voices being all the unique NPC's in a MMO instead of a wall of text. But if you could program an AI with the entire world's lore, you could theoretically create consistent conversations from otherwise one-trick-pony NPC's. You could never hire enough voice actors to do all this, especially at that personalized level. You'd save the voice acting budget for the cinematic and main story elements, and leave the AI to generate the pieces of content that "need something that fits the lore"

 

A MMORPG could do this. But most single-player games have no reason to. If you're algorithmically generating the game, so can someone else. Why would I want this AI-generated game over another, when I could get access to the same AI's and generate it myself. 

 

People are deluded if anyone thinks there is a market for "AI worthsmithing"

 

 

On 6/28/2023 at 1:51 AM, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

I agree, it's hard to monetize good journalism, especially because so many will copy the same primary source very cheaply, diluting potential AD/sponsorship income across countless news organizations. It's a self reinforcing cycle that prices out journalists from doing proper investigative journalism.

Cue Quickbits.

 

A lot of youtube content ("react" videos most notoriously, but also things like "daily dose" and such) just recycle things from one video platform to another. So tiktoks end up on youtube, niconico content ends up youtube, youtube content ends up on billibilli, etc.

 

I do not fault people for making "recycled" content, because sometimes you really really do want to share stuff you find fun and exciting. But at the same time, I have a "cringe" reaction to people who's entire personality is "screaming reactions to videos/games/news/etc"

 

There are endless people streaming, live, that can pretty much do hours of content without resorting to react videos or reusing someone elses video/game/news footage. But this is a skill that involves being in tune with your audience, much the same way a talk show or late-night comedy show does. These live, televised shows jokes are WRITTEN before the show starts, and much of the stuff you see from the guest is the "react" part of the show. 

 

I wish there was better content out there than recycling existing content, but sometimes someone streaming the same game for a year is entertaining for people who like that game (apparently COD is quite a monster and people who play COD, only play COD, and people watch COD only want to watch COD and nothing else.)

 

On 6/28/2023 at 1:51 AM, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

It's a systemic problem of our civilization that would need a radical change in how news is compensated, i don't have good solutions. News being a central component to a working democracy, I think is a strong argument that taxpayer money should compensate journalist that follow primary sources, though I have no idea who should be in charge of the payout so that the system is vaugely efficient in promoting good primary sources, and not just a money farm to pay connected bad journalists.

  

The way news should be compensated is through licensing. That is literately on the page of AP.

 

The trouble comes from the inability of independent journalists being able to license materials in a timely manner. Go look at newspapers from the 80's, 90's and 2000s. You will find as the newspapers ownership consolidated, and the papers became smaller, more of the content was just licensed materials from AP.

 

The reason "news is dying" is because the owners don't want to pay journalists, nor put in any effort. Fundamentally, the "entire internet" is the competitor for written news. If you aren't taking your own photos or video for a news segment (which requires editing and such), then a column in a newspaper is pretty much worthless.

 

I remember when the local paper was acquired by a media company, the local reporters went on strike, and were on strike for months before they just started their own paper, and then the original local paper just closed and sold off the assets. These "big media" companies are not interested in local news, at all.

 

The "local" paper here, is apparently just one guy who makes nothing but clickbait titles. You know what is more popular here? a separate website called "daily hive". Cause good luck trying to read "The Vancouver Sun" or "The Province", a paper that used to be like 1cm thick and like 200 pages in the 80's, which is now like 20 pages.

 

On 6/28/2023 at 1:51 AM, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

100% agreed. I believe you should have a basic level of competency in your job, any job. I declare that a gaming journalists need competency in journalism (interviews, writing, investigation) and gaming (being able to play games, knowing games mechanics, and knowing what gamers look for in a game.)

 

Gaming journalism is really a joke, and has always been one. Gaming journalism has the same problem that tech journalism has. Where the people who make the products/software only want you to say good things that they approve before publishing, otherwise you aren't ever going to be getting review copies.

 

For all practical considerations, a game requires you to complete the game to actually review it properly, good luck doing that when a game takes 20hrs to to make any headway into the story.

 

Like, and I mean this facetiously, I'd love for there to be a "reviewer difficulty" setting in games where the entire first chapter of the game plays like the retail version, and then it offers a "Reviewers optionally Skip this" button where whatever combat/story bit is in play just skips to the end to get reviewers to other novel game mechanics faster or important story beats but then cuts the game off before the final boss/ending.

 

Cause, honestly, so many games out there either spend far too much time in "tutorial" land, dumping far too much info on the user they won't process, in the first chapter of the game, or they do too much lore-dumping in the first chapter that they user won't understand the significance of.

 

A controller may have 4 active buttons (eg ABXY) but the game shouldn't need a tutorial explaining what each button does in nauseating detail. Just put the button image on the screen when the user is near something that button can be used on and let them try it. That is far simpler and less annoying then having to wait for a character explain everything before you use it.

 

[Taf the Ghost]

@Kisai on the Game Journalism bit, one thing that's noticeable is they tend to very much gush over games that appeal to their obvious Journalism / Literature / English degree study fields. For some reason I was thinking of Limbo (which is a solid game) when this thought came to mind, but anything that can put them into the mind to "talk about the themes!" gets an automatic boost.

 

I also think they only think, en mass, that Bloodborne is good because every game dev they've talked to loves the game. (It's a design master work, this isn't a criticism there.) If the BB remaster does drop, watch the actual analysis of the game. It's have some layered hilarity to it.

 

As for "Big J" Journalism, there's a bit of some historical context needed. "News" was always viewed as a loss leader to TV companies. It existed on public Airwaves, at least in the USA, because that was the agreements put into law because it used public radio frequencies. (Frequencies are treated as a property right in most places, thus it has to be licensed "from the people" to be allowed to use it.)  There was only a small time frame, somewhere I believe in the 1960s, where it became actually profitable, which was something of a problem.  It meant Producers were now expected to be For Profit rather than For Public Good.  And then it went into Hyper Drive once CNN launched. (Who unironically really got big when the first Gulf War happened by having a few people in Baghdad and faking being attacked at their studio in the Gulf. If you have ever wondered why "Fake News" hurt the major media so bad, a bit of digging into their history will tell you why.)

 

Newspapers are a little different and their history is a lot longer than Video. The main thing to understand is that "Newspaper Y is owned by rich guy Z" is basically the history of it since the rise of the printing press. But, Newspapers are a Medium, they're not a product. The product is information (to the end user) and eyeballs (to the newspaper itself). But they were always the part of a wealth family's empire that was left to be run by the moderately competent child.  This is still true for a couple of major ones, haha. But, post-WW2 or so, their primary revenue generating approach was Classified Ads. Craig's List ended all of that. In about 2 years. It wasn't the Internet; it was Craig's List. At that point, the normal advertising couldn't keep up. Newspapers actually entered crisis financial situations before their readership dropped off, then the Dot Com bubble burst and canceling a newspaper subscription was an easy choice.

 

Unironically, at least in the States, there's a big resurgence in news print. It's all regional stuff. There's still a market and utility, it's just no longer a dominant form.

 

All that said, the structure for revenue simply doesn't exist anymore for the older form of "Big J" Journalism. 1 Youtuber with a camera guy, some plane tickets, videography equipment and an editor somewhere in the world can produce more than the industry types can. It really helps when you don't have to pay for accountants, janitors, print presses, broadcast equipment and all of the other stuff that was part of the old way.  The downside is "hard hitting" stuff gets even harder. Local officials can put the squeeze on a YT a lot easier than they can a journalist at a big company.

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

But if you could program an AI with the entire world's lore, you could theoretically create consistent conversations from otherwise one-trick-pony NPC's. You could never hire enough voice actors to do all this, especially at that personalized level.

Meh, this isn't really desirable anyway. If you give people theoretically unlimited NPC dialog generators they'll just find ways to break it and say stupid stuff... and for what, anyway? I don't think anyone plays something like elden ring and thinks "man, I wish instead of this carefully crafted dialog with layers of meaning I could just have autogenerated NPC interactions". There might be a place for AI text generation in games in some capacity but I think overall its usefulness will be limited and not game changing.

[Kisai]

19 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Meh, this isn't really desirable anyway. If you give people theoretically unlimited NPC dialog generators they'll just find ways to break it and say stupid stuff... and for what, anyway? I don't think anyone plays something like elden ring and thinks "man, I wish instead of this carefully crafted dialog with layers of meaning I could just have autogenerated NPC interactions". There might be a place for AI text generation in games in some capacity but I think overall its usefulness will be limited and not game changing.

Have you ever played a game, and had basically "three" things you could say, and that's all the dialog you would ever get ?

 

Wouldn't it be more fun if you could just talk to any NPC about "X" topic and they can point you in the right direction, and not have to spend an hour trying to find the dinglehopper to open the cave of wonders? So many games switched to this "leading you by your nose" mechanic that players are completely lost if they play anything older than Oblivion.

 

Like I replayed Ultima 7 and 8 over the last month, and these games would make anyone born after 1990 cry with the lack of maps, destination markers or even quest logs.

 

You can spend a lot of time just side-tracking without ever figuring out what you are supposed to be doing, which is actually a GOOD thing, but eventually you want to know how to tick the next box on the plot, and if you're half way across the game world where the fast-travel stops working 25% of the way into the game for plot reasons, then you don't even know how to get back on track.

 

Part of the fun, at least in Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and 4 is side-tracking without necessarily destroying the main plot line, but unfortunately all those games can brick the storyline by triggering things early. Or simply triggering bugs because Bethesda infamously buggy core game mechanics.

 

To me, Ultima 7, and Skyrim share the right philosophy. The NPC's have a schedule, they will always be in the area you expect them to be, at the same time of day, and they are always able to provide some useful piece of information. Where they always let me down, especially in elder-scrolls games is that they run out of contextually useful information. If I'm on a quest for an object, the quest list just puts the next object on the map. Don't need to talk to anybody to find it. Just as soon as you get the quest marker, ignore everything, run in and get it, and run back out. Forget having any lore reason for the object being there in the first place.

 

I guess what I'm saying is that AI could possibly back-fill conversation topics for NPC's rather than just adding a quest marker and skipping everything about figuring out where it is. If I'm looking for a thing, I should be able to ask ANY NPC about it, and if it's an important enough item they'll know the lore about it and can point you in the right direction. "Where's the holy grail?" "Well, back in my day we talked about the holy grail being in the temple of the saints, it's up yonder hill..." ""Thanks buddy" (run off.) "... you know, people don't go there any more because of it being haunted..." stick around a few moments and you might learn how to disarm the traps.

 

I don't think AI writing will ever replace human writing, but it can fill spaces in games where the developer maybe didn't consider the player would do something. If I'm looking for the holy grail, and I'm already three cities away from it, nobody should know about it, but might point you back toward the city with the temple. The point being that a lot of games in the past and present, just put the player on a rail, and if you ever decide to hop off the rail, the plot grinds to a halt, and nothing you do before you get back on the rail has any consequences.

 

You know, instead of a lot of "I don't know about that" being the default response.

[Sauron]

29 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Have you ever played a game, and had basically "three" things you could say, and that's all the dialog you would ever get ?

 

Wouldn't it be more fun if you could just talk to any NPC about "X" topic and they can point you in the right direction, and not have to spend an hour trying to find the dinglehopper to open the cave of wonders? So many games switched to this "leading you by your nose" mechanic that players are completely lost if they play anything older than Oblivion.

That's just a matter of game design, it's not really solved by throwing a can of prompts at an npc. It would also be highly impractical and awkward if you were playing with anything other than keyboard and mouse (and no, I don't want to have to speak to the game). Most games that feature this kind of npc interaction don't really center around trying to finesse NPCs into giving you clues so it might just end up forcing players to play some sort of minigame that has nothing to do with what they actually wanted to play the game for.

 

And sure, some modern (and not so modern) games railroad you along, but others don't (i.e. elden ring as mentioned) without the need to autogenerate any dialog.

37 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Where they always let me down, especially in elder-scrolls games is that they run out of contextually useful information.

That's going to happen no matter what, why would the random cabbage farmer have any insight about parts of the plot that have nothing to do with him anyway? In my opinion it would be worse to have new answers every time and never knowing whether you've gotten everything useful out of him yet or you're missing the one magic prompt that will get you to the quest. It might be cool the first few times but I'm sure I'd just end up looking up the list of prompts to get along with what I actually play the game for.

41 minutes ago, Kisai said:

The point being that a lot of games in the past and present, just put the player on a rail, and if you ever decide to hop off the rail, the plot grinds to a halt, and nothing you do before you get back on the rail has any consequences.

AI text generation can't fix this problem... it's one thing to create new lines of dialog, it's quite another to have your unforeseen actions actually affect the rest of the story.

[MageTank]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

I don't think anyone plays something like elden ring and thinks "man, I wish instead of this carefully crafted dialog with layers of meaning I could just have autogenerated NPC interactions".

I don't know. If I were playing Elden Ring with AI enabled while wearing the sunbro armor and all of a sudden Solaire invaded, yelled "420 Praise It" and defeated a boss with me, that'd be pretty sweet. I'd sacrifice some British melancholy for that.

[Sauron]

47 minutes ago, MageTank said:

I don't know. If I were playing Elden Ring with AI enabled while wearing the sunbro armor and all of a sudden Solaire invaded, yelled "420 Praise It" and defeated a boss with me, that'd be pretty sweet. I'd sacrifice some British melancholy for that.

key here is that you'd just get dialog. chatgpt can't generate character models or mechanics. maybe you'd get some npc to comment on your armor but that's about it.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

That's just a matter of game design, it's not really solved by throwing a can of prompts at an npc. It would also be highly impractical and awkward if you were playing with anything other than keyboard and mouse (and no, I don't want to have to speak to the game). Most games that feature this kind of npc interaction don't really center around trying to finesse NPCs into giving you clues so it might just end up forcing players to play some sort of minigame that has nothing to do with what they actually wanted to play the game for.

It would be more like talk to the NPC and you could point to something in your inventory or quest log to get contextually relevant info, and the game would intentionally avoid "useless" dialog. Eg if you point to a gold coin at a merchant, they'd want you buy something, if you point to armor, they'd comment on the condition of your armor, unless they were able to improve it or sell you a new one, point to that holy grail note topic and they'd tell you what they know.

 

Most games with a conversation tree, tend to follow the lucasarts philosophy where they just repeat things until you exhaust every conversation option and then loop back to the beginning of the tree. Wastes a lot of time repeating the exact word-for-word conversation. When you could instead go "do you want me to repeat that again or summarize it?"

 

I was never super fond of that kind of design philosophy where you have conversations to unlock more conversations with other characters. If I already know what I want to ask them, then skip the foreplay.

 

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

And sure, some modern (and not so modern) games railroad you along, but others don't (i.e. elden ring as mentioned) without the need to autogenerate any dialog.

 

I'm less offended by "railroading" so much as the difficulty of getting off and on the rail. If I sidetrack off for a few hours, and then suddenly realize hunting 420 rat tails isn't going to be worth the time, I'd like to go back to the main plot without having to complete the task, or having to backtrack hours. Like having the random NPC you walk by maybe comment that "I heard (main plot line point) is happening" , "yeah it's over in (place name)." when you aren't engaged in something.

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

That's going to happen no matter what, why would the random cabbage farmer have any insight about parts of the plot that have nothing to do with him anyway? In my opinion it would be worse to have new answers every time and never knowing whether you've gotten everything useful out of him yet or you're missing the one magic prompt that will get you to the quest. It might be cool the first few times but I'm sure I'd just end up looking up the list of prompts to get along with what I actually play the game for.

No, i think "talking to the NPC three times to get all the dialog trees" without having to read it is the worse design.  If the AI could say the right things when prompted with the right subject, it would feel more organic and not as rail roaded.

 

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

AI text generation can't fix this problem... it's one thing to create new lines of dialog, it's quite another to have your unforeseen actions actually affect the rest of the story.

No, AI generation could fix this, it just requires play testing for things that players try, even if it's something illogical, like asking every NPC about a crafting material to try and figure out what it's used for. Surely the NPC that can make something with it would say "I'd like to purchase that from you" where as other NPC's would say "maybe you should talk to (npc name)" and then mark that inventory item as "(npc name may have a use for this)" so you don't need to keep asking more NPC's about it.

 

At any rate this is not an advocation for using AI to create dialog, just to backfill the conversation topics so you don't need to write text or record audio for conversations that are not plot-relevant, and would be wasteful to record unique text and conversations for when only a few players might actually try doing that.

 

There are still games, made decades ago, that people are finding secrets in, because certain combinations of things unlock things somewhere else, and would have been difficult to discoverable organically, only from reverse engineering or playing the games in emulators have people found them.

 

[Sauron]

11 hours ago, Kisai said:

No, AI generation could fix this, it just requires play testing for things that players try, even if it's something illogical, like asking every NPC about a crafting material to try and figure out what it's used for. Surely the NPC that can make something with it would say "I'd like to purchase that from you" where as other NPC's would say "maybe you should talk to (npc name)" and then mark that inventory item as "(npc name may have a use for this)" so you don't need to keep asking more NPC's about it.

 

That's a looong shot from meaningfully affecting the main story.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

That's a looong shot from meaningfully affecting the main story.

I'm going to take some potshots at some "filler mechanics" so hold your comments till the end.

 

My most hated mechanic in video games "crafting to progress". Not in a "minecraft" way, but in the way Farcry does it. Where you have to waste hours of time off the plot rail grinding just to hit some minimum threshold to make the next rail reachable.

 

Sure, you could avoid all the crafting, if you want the game to be painfully more difficult.

 

I've never been fond of the "Mix and match minigame" aspect of game design, this goes back to like early 90's sierra titles, but I've hated it ever since. Where the game is presented as one type of game play (inventory / conversation puzzles) but then throws in an twitchy arcade sequence, once, and it impedes the progress of the game.

 

I can point to things in Sierra games, like the skimmer sequence in space quest 1 (which most sierra games after that thoughtfully included "skip this stupid minigame" option,) and the Nintendo Zelda games (Zelda OOT has a bunch of these, that mostly just impede access to the heart containers) 

 

And most JRPG's simply have a "too hard? Grind in place for an hour or two"

 

A properly balanced game, should not impede your story progress behind material presented as optional. Most JRPG's, if you are following the game's breadcrumbs, lead you to more powerful gear so you don't have to grind in place. I can think of a few games where you pretty much had to grind 3 steps outside the starter city just to get money to get weapons and armor, and once you bought everyone in the party the real starter gear, now you can get on with the game.

 

Western CRPG's have this different attitude where you are supposed to find all the gear, and shops only carry gear that is barely better than the starting gear. Merchants make stuff to survive, not to adventure.

 

Which leads me back to how much I hate crafting "gear" in CRPG's and FPS. When did every single game add this time wasting crafting mechanic? Oh Minecraft mechanics in every game? Open world systems with absolutely no depth or creativity? Yep, that's every game that's been put out since minecraft. Despite that, crafting gear is actually something that Ultima pioneered. For for some reason the way minecraft crafts things (paper-leather-copper-silver-gold-platinum-obsidian) type of gear upgrades where you just incrementally make a better item but you have to make EVERY SINGLE item in between to get there, and spend hours finding the materials, and if you didn't make one of the incremental items, you can't even mine the material.

 

Like don't get me wrong, Minecraft and Terraria's mechanics work for their respective games because those games have no story. They are only about base building.

 

But just because it works there, doesn't mean I want it in every game. Like I thought it was neat that Fallout 4 let you craft a shelter... the problem is that "that" part of the game is completely optional irrelevant, even if you manage to build something, the way the game engine builds that part of the game is different (completely dynamic) from the rest of the world (Which is mostly static and contains very little destructible material.)

 

So going back to why I think "AI" might work in a few cases, such as backfilling dialog or conversations where something changes in the game world that is otherwise a pointless timewaster (eg minigames, crafting gear, or basebuilding in a story game) because the developer didn't want to invest much time into what was always intended to "filler" between story beats.

 

For example, that base you can build in fallout 4 would feel like an actual base if the NPC's you recruited and anything to say and could be assigned to jobs that would actually be relevant. If you assign 4 npc's (eg food farming, doctor, maintenance, defense) and talk to them, they should be able to tell you everything relevant to you within the context of the base. There is no way for a developer to "pre-bake" this information, and subsequently have voice acting in advance because you might not build things the way the developer intended.

 

But as the basebuilding isn't even a core mechanic of fallout4, most players might ignore it. Heck the fact that there is so much "base building" options in FO4, actually causes the game to become unwinnable at some point (which is what happened to me) because you build all the bases, and the game just is unable to cope with it. The game starts having all your bases be attacked that you never manage to get back onto the main story. Cute, the developer found a way to keep a player perpetually busy, but all these attacks are so identical, that all you have to do is show up for a minute and the NPC's will take care of it. Ignore them though? somehow they fail, even though the situation hasn't actually changed.

 

Wouldn't it be more interesting if the NPC's could defend themselves, and tell you about it, instead of "oh we fought off the enemy without you, thanks."

 

Again, this is not advocating for replacing human writing with AI, this is advocating for having the option for emergent gameplay to actually not be confined to the developer's voice acting/writing budget.

 

Nothing makes a game feel "cheapened" more than playing a game that has voice acting throughout the main story, and then every side character is unvoiced and has one baked message, while they are glued to the floor. Why does the character even exist, they can be replaced with a desk lamp and it has the same result.

 

Again, I don't want to play a game where the story has been written by AI. That will feel creatively bankrupt and while there are opportunities for emergent play by letting the AI generate something, it has to be trained only the game's lore and not suddenly have information it couldn't possibly know. So letting ChatGPT write a game is absolutely barking up the wrong tree. 

[Thaldor]

24 minutes ago, Kisai said:

A properly balanced game, should not impede your story progress behind material presented as optional. Most JRPG's, if you are following the game's breadcrumbs, lead you to more powerful gear so you don't have to grind in place. I can think of a few games where you pretty much had to grind 3 steps outside the starter city just to get money to get weapons and armor, and once you bought everyone in the party the real starter gear, now you can get on with the game.

 

Western CRPG's have this different attitude where you are supposed to find all the gear, and shops only carry gear that is barely better than the starting gear. Merchants make stuff to survive, not to adventure.

I stop you right there just because you are now pretty much comparing two completely different game genres: JRPG or as I like to say it Visual Novels with Grinding (as they are more often roleplaying just as getting prewritten character and you can gear it) and RPGs as build your own character (while the story is pretty much the same you are not given prewritten character to play as but you are creating your own character and how they live in the world).

Both today are completely guiding player through the game while holding hands so the player doesn't stray from the point too much, which is kind of loss of actually making interesting roleplaying games where point as much isn't walking by the paths but forging your own path.

 

Personally I am not against using AI to write a game BUT the amount of hand holding needed to make the world realistic is going to be so much it's pretty much better to just write everything and use AI as the voice actor. Like how the hell fisherman on the otherside of the world would know anything about skull of Raoul that you found from a temple inside a cave that was blocked for thousand years? Some traveling merchant could have a possibility to have heard that some thieves made their lair to the cave but even that is a slim chance unless the thing was something extremely important and shook the whole world. And soon you will be at the level of Morrowind where basicly only the quest giving farmer and the town hunter can actually give you more than "bears live in the forest, I think" answers regarding the quest of lost honey and only some historians could give you more info on the skull of Raoul while 99% of the world could tell you that they think it's made from gold.

Also with AI on the fly writing the dialogs would also kind of require the NPCs to remember what they have said and your interactions with them so, yay, more bloat that could be bypassed by just making 90% of the NPCs as interesting as 90% of the realworld people, just commenting the weather or the last big happening and carrying on.

 

But on the topic.

When it comes to game reporting there's so few people who have either the required connections to really get deep into the stuff going behind the curtains or the insight that their opinions on games would be more important the normal reviewer community. Following 10,000 game news sites is pretty useless since almost everyone of them recycles the whole articles from the couple sites who have reporters with the connections to really dig deep into the matter or get the scoop as fresh. Reviewing generally has always been more or less stupid, you either get the chill guys of IGN who take the money and 5/5 stars it is or you get the movie review guys who have seen so much that for a game to be great for them, it's going to need be something really special that flies over everyone else's heads. Then there's also the general consensus that the game media is completely unable to change and they don't even want to change, that the company is all that makes the games, going deeper than that would actually need someone to read the credits and do some work rather than "Hurrdurr Rockstar is making GTAVI and it's going to be awesome because Rockstar!" (to which I can say that GTAVI will be either stamp copy of GTAV or something completely different because there's hardly any of the creative force behind the past 3 GTA's in the Rockstar anymore).

 

That majority of game news going to turn into AI written stuff really doesn't change anything because majorly, it's already just reposting the same stuff with different words with zero original input.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Thaldor said:

I stop you right there just because you are now pretty much comparing two completely different game genres: JRPG or as I like to say it Visual Novels with Grinding (as they are more often roleplaying just as getting prewritten character and you can gear it) and RPGs as build your own character (while the story is pretty much the same you are not given prewritten character to play as but you are creating your own character and how they live in the world).

Both today are completely guiding player through the game while holding hands so the player doesn't stray from the point too much, which is kind of loss of actually making interesting roleplaying games where point as much isn't walking by the paths but forging your own path.

JRPG's and Western CRPG's originally started off the same, and then diverged around 1988, with JRPG's taking a pre-built character/party approach and CRPG's taking a "build your own character" approach. Generally the story structure has been the same. Do things in X place and then venture into Y dungeon. 

 

The endgame is vastly different however, with CRPG's usually having more than one way to actually get there, but JRPG's typically having a railed story that requires you to do certain things to trigger the "next town/dungeon"'s availability.

 

But the entire being led by the nose has bothered me for some time, if you're being pointed to where you need to go next, then you're not really playing an RPG anymore, you're playing a visual novel.

 

2 hours ago, Thaldor said:

Personally I am not against using AI to write a game BUT the amount of hand holding needed to make the world realistic is going to be so much it's pretty much better to just write everything and use AI as the voice actor. 

And AI Voice acting is something that can be reasonably done on the CPU, the difficulty at present is getting AI "voice actors" to sound like anything other than early 20th century americans or british e-books. The core data sets everyone-without-exception uses is libritts and ljspeech. A game would need to have all the dialog voice acted in the accent and speaking style intended, and then use that as a data set to produce 100 other characters that speak the same way but one-shot trained off people who want to "sound" like they are in the game. Like the player themselves.

 

At any rate, I don't, at present, see "AI Voice acting" being used in a fantasy or historical fiction genre right now, because the data just doesn't exist to do that, and real voice actors don't want this. It'll probably end up being "staff" contributing the additional voices.

 

2 hours ago, Thaldor said:

Also with AI on the fly writing the dialogs would also kind of require the NPCs to remember what they have said and your interactions with them so, yay, more bloat that could be bypassed by just making 90% of the NPCs as interesting as 90% of the realworld people, just commenting the weather or the last big happening and carrying on.

Wouldn't it be cool to find "the guy" in the city who knows where the digdong-of-hope is and recruit them into your party until you get to the mysterious-cave-of-plenty and then they become a useful companion for a while? 

 

Like again, a lot my complaints at existing game mechanics is the lack of variety. When games started having companions that can grunt and whine when hit, I knew that would be off-putting, and it turns out I'm right, a lot of people don't like hearing the same 3 sounds over and over.

 

 

2 hours ago, Thaldor said:

But on the topic.

...

That majority of game news going to turn into AI written stuff really doesn't change anything because majorly, it's already just reposting the same stuff with different words with zero original input.

I just see game news taking some press release from the game developer, feeding it to chat GPT, some minor re-arrangement for the site's personal style and then publishing it.

 

No, I've generally not trusted games journalism for quite a while, and have pretty much taken streamers  I share things in common with who have already completed the game's (but I didn't actually see the game play) opinion as a way to justify if I should play it or not.

 

Like there are piles of shovelware/fake games out there, on steam and itch.io where they only continue to exist because streamers like to rip on them.