This Hated Tech Is The Future of Games



Procedural generation and artificial intelligence in gaming. #gaming Channel Membership …

source

47 thoughts on “This Hated Tech Is The Future of Games

  1. the future of gaming is AI bots playing procedurally generated slop conent. they don't care. humans may join for a little bit but it's gonna be like the "dead internet" today. lots of lifeless non-human action that makes it look like the game is sucessful when there's actually nothing under the hood.

  2. Thank you for finally getting it right on Starfield, like you I was tired by the endless critic missing the key problems of the game.
    And thank you for this video, I'm currently working on various projects of procedural algorithm and AI generators and this video is very interesting for me.

  3. I wish they would revisit Spore. I hate AI and everything it stands for, but for a new better realized Spore game it could actually make sense to make it part procedurally generated.

  4. You know what im missing the most? Where did the awesome music go? Nowadays you have to buy AAA games for good music ingame and its still very rare. In the last years i only saw in few games like Cyberpunk and in Dying Light 1-2 were the music set u in a special mood – sad or happy not matter. The type of music who let you feel you done sm wrong but also not and u have to move on. Or like in Skyrim or Minecraft hopefull and epic at the same time were you just done the long walks who anyone hates nowadays just to listening to the music and then did find sm special. Or in old cod games. I could go on and on. But i think you guys know what i mean.

  5. Is this idea good?

    • Couch co-op for up to 12 players. No microtransactions.

    • Once a new controller is connected, it creates your character. Once customization is complete, a new controller can also be connected to create your character or the game can be started.

    • There are no classes, instead the player chooses between 12 distinct personalities for their character. The character freely uses any equipped weapon: stick, slingshot, shotgun, bazooka, machine gun, sword, lightsaber, plasma cannon, magic wand, energy shield, wooden shield and much more. Characters collect materials or buy from NPC's and craft or improve their equipment. This requires recipes and practice with the possibility of error in execution, which damages or even destroys the equipment.

    • In one scene, all the characters created are born, one at a time, from the cocoons of a giant tree.

    • 12 unique kingdoms to be explored freely, no minimap, no main quests, no side quests, no markers. Each Kingdom has a unique culture, legislation, economy, government and religion. Each Kingdom has a Dominant Race divided into ethnicities with unique history, political positioning, traditions and racial traits that divide them socially in distinct ways. Each Kingdom is built with a unique mythology, unique aesthetic, unique retrofuturistic technology, and unique gameplay style. Example: Kingdom One is dominated by Celtic elves with solarpunk technology in an Art Nouveau aesthetic with hack n slash gameplay to defeat its bosses, while Kingdom Two is inhabited by Asian Atlanteans with oceanpunk technology with Bajau-sama aesthetic with sandbox gameplay to explore the depths of the oceans. All bosses have a difficulty level inspired by the Souls series. Just like in Demon's Souls you have to look for rare healing herbs and there is no checkpoint or safe room. 12 mythologies, however, without gods. You can see altars, temples and religions, but the gods themselves do not appear. Monsters, however, infest this vast world. NPC's live their lives independent of the characters. So it's possible for characters to be walking through a metropolis, for example, and run into a street fight or hear screams coming from a house where a drunk is attacking his wife. No choice is offered to the player. The player will react however he wants and will have to deal with the consequences. This involves the reputation system that affects each character on the team individually. The reputation of the entire group is also taken into account and can range from Charitable Angels to Lords of Chaos, for example. Each character has their own personality. Different personalities with different characters in the same group will conflict. This seeks to reproduce in the game what happens on the couch between players, creating an emotional connection between player and character, adding immersion to the narrative created by the players themselves.

    • Single screen. Camera control with third-person view, so characters need to walk in groups.

    • Characters accumulate experiences and react to situations, dialogues and combats according to the personality selected by the player on the customization screen. Example: the Brave character will advance alone without the player's command towards a dragon that stealthily attacked the group while the Intelligent character will hide, evaluate the dragon, set up the strategy and lead his companions trying to protect everyone from a possible unnecessary fight or that they cannot win.

    • There is no skill tree. Instead, character evolution depends on the evolution of the player's skills. The more the player uses certain equipment or magic, the faster that equipment or magic will level up naturally. The more effective the player uses a given skill, the less energy the character will need to use it, thus being able to use other skills and evolve them naturally. This means that the precision of the character's action is very relevant. If you miss the target of a spell too many times, for example, it won't level up. If you get it right 100% of the time, you will level up very quickly.

    • There is no system of numbers, statistics, percentages and the like to quantify damage, resistance, attack and other things. Instead, precision makes the difference, ensuring the player develops their own combat style and constantly improves it throughout the game. All these complicated numbers discourage many people who just want to enjoy a simple but remarkable experience.

    • Players can combine their characters' abilities in any situation, from camping to combat, for unique effects. Seemingly opposing spells can be combined in combat, creating useful devastating effects such as a desperate attack, for example.

    • Each skill affects, acts and reacts to the environment in which it is used, thus requiring intelligence to use it in a way that harms the player characters as little as possible. Example: if the character is in a river and uses Blizzard magic, the river will freeze and, consequently, the parts of the character's body that are in contact with the water will freeze (Final Fantasy XV). This example can be used to attack an enemy, immobilize monsters to escape or even create a shortcut while traveling.

    • It doesn't matter the size, strength, number, level or appearance of the enemies: the characters can defeat anyone if they work together with intelligence, strategy and persistence. This is the message of the game: united we are invincible.

    (Google Translate. Sorry for the long text.)

  6. Honestly, I have seen some amazing games like Unexplored 2 the wayfarers Legacy and Jotunn Bad North where it uses some of the most clever Procedural Generation to do genuinely novel things. However I've also seen games where they use it as a shortcut. So it'll take time for the tool to be used correctly I think.

  7. I've been told about a thousand times now that Left 4 Dead was so great because those games had the director system that constantly tweaked the game to "feel great at all times." And I certainly believe it had a system that intended to do that, but apparently, like basically all forms of behind-the-scenes automatically adjusting difficulty, it never really understood my personal idea of what felt great. It seemed built for people who think that opening village part of Resident Evil 4 was the best part, but personally, I love RE4 for the slower paced, much less surrounded rest of the game, and that frantic village enemies coming from all directions at all times part the least. And L4D's director seemed incapable of comprehending that.

    Also, the orc generation from Shadow of War is indeed pretty rad for the most part, up until late game when it really starts stacking Captains with resistances and gets super stingy with the weaknesses. To me the game was at its best when you're interrogating Worms to find the captains' weaknesses, and then hunting those captains down while formulating a plan to best use your abilities and the available options in their location to exploit those weaknesses. And that pretty much falls apart when Captains stop having much in the way of fears and weaknesses to use in the first place. Why interrogate Worms when there are no weaknesses to learn? And a well earned instant kill that weaknesses made possible was far more satisfying than just wailing on them like damage sponges.

    So yeah, it's not the same thing as the L4D Director, but the Nemesis system is another example of dynamic generation that, in my opinion, wasn't good at hitting and then STAYING at the sweet spot for optimal fun, but rather had to reach it and just keep going. Aside from the many other refinements needed for procedural generation to be truly good, it'll also need to be better at understanding what any given individual player's personal fun zone is in the first place.

  8. Very well, i finished watching your video and, while i'll get to the AI image you used as a title card and how just that immediately irked me, i want to address your final thoughts, at the very end and why i fundamentally disagree with them.

    First iw ant to let you know that i really enjoyed the video and in a way, it has challenged my initial views on procedurally generated content in games and how those algorithms can affect games in a positive way. In fact i hardly ever felt that was a problem, i welcome some of it, for sure, to enhance the gaming experiences one can have. I should point out that my favorite games are story-driven games, specially RPGS. I'll give the example of ENDERAL: FORGOTTEN STORIES – a mod made game, from Skyrim, but because instead of benefitting from the emergent gameplay and stories, that the original Skyrim provides, with its procedurally generated dungeons, the devs and writers at SureAi (an ironic name, given what im about to say, i know) made sure to hand-craft Everything, to make a story so complete and deeply involving that you can't help but be touched by it. Enderal has a very specific set of stories that become one grander thing, but the hand-crafted nature of each narrative and how it all ties together makes it, For Me, a much better narrative and thus gaming experience, than Skyrim, the game whose engine is based on.

    I genuinely do not think that Baldur's Gate 3 would have been better in any way shape or form, if the randomness of its systems (carefully set to acknowledge almost anything a player my try, in order to tell even More interesting stories – and All of it hand crafted) were procedurally generated.

    I want to now focus on your final thoughts – "..but on the other hand, it also is, in my opinion, a key factor in what could be the future of games that has me more excited, than ever before. A future where entire universes can come alive and provide us with new ways to play and endless fun. Because truthfully, the real key to making a fun and memorable game is designing systems and encounters that really stick with us, and despite what you may hear from the naysayers online, procedural generation can do that, too. It all just comes down to algorithm and systems behind it, that make it happen. And while for now that means designing systems where all the ART is probably made by HUMANS and then constructed and compiled by computers, maybe one day, all of the art itself as well, will find itself in the "hands" of computers. And as scary as that sounds, as i guess what you could call an artist myself, i welcome that future. Because at the end of the day, it's not about the person or the thing behind the art it's about the intrinsic beauty of the object itself. If a computer can, one day make youtube videos, or make videogames that truly inspire and help others, Better than Any Human Can, who am i to be selfish enough, to argue, that I, for some reason, should be that person, doing it, instead. Procedural generation, Artificial Intelligence, all of it is scary, but also, so awe-inspiring and exciting, too. EVEN IF THAT MEANS THAT I WOULD LOSE MY JOB, doing this here, for you guys, every single month. And That's why i think it's one of the Best things out there, that could happen to games. And maybe, it could make making games even cheaper and require less of a workforce to create things that are so Beautiful that we all want to experience, in the first place. Cause let's be honest, most of you aren't buying games to fund developers salaries, you're buying them because you want a truly Beautiful experience and if that can happen cheaper in the future, because of procedural generation and artificial intelligence, that's where we should go. Games aren't about paying the higher ups or the developers, or making sure everyone has a high salary. It's about providing a quality product of ART, that we all love – and the same goes for my videos and anyone on youtube or doing anything, for that matter, by the way."

    I wrote that very last sequence here because, honestly, outside of one minor thing, i fundamentally disagree, with pretty much everything there.

    I want to mention that Im an Artist myself, im a traditional painter, a writer and a comic book creator, working in comics since 2006 and for the big guys (Marvel/DC/IMAGE/etc) since 2008 – and the thought of having AI procedurally generate stories and Art not only fundamentally upsets me, it boils my blood. Because it is happening, Right Now. And the immediate consequence is something you mention as an hypothetical: people are losing their jobs. For what? For heartless and empty substitutes, for literally cheap labour, in the form of AI.
    Art is the ultimate expression of the HUMAN SOUL – it is the manifestation of the Human Experience, through the eyes of those, heck anyone that decides to do it, from Scratch, anyone that puts a finger in the sand and draws a line that means something to them, they are creating Art, that is meaningful to them AND whomever looks at it.
    Art is in the eye of the beholder? Yes, but it was made by Someone, who felt something and was compelled to do it. A stick figure can mean many things or nothing at all, to anyone who regards it, but it meant Something to the one who did it.

    Unfortunately we live in a system where one can't just do Art for the sake of it and go chill after that – one has bills to pay and Artists lives are intrinsically connected to the money they make, it IS their Job, after all.

    Thus if by buying a piece of art, i am helping an artist produce more of this Beautiful thing, all the better – if by showing Larian Studios that by making a game true to Their heart and their ART, they can get LOADS of and thus make Even more of that Beautiful art, i Will do it.

    Which finally gets to that AI image as your title card – like, that image was not ai "generated" it was scraped from someone or a ton of someones out there, who didn't see a dime, from the company owning the program who scraped it, will never get the credit they deserve and thus, not the the support they need, to keep doing such beautiful art, in the first place. AI doesn't "Generate" ART out of thin air. Inf fact AI CANNOT generate Art – it generates content. Based on art that already exists.

    For that reason i prefer to stick to supporting Artists and creators and developers who actually need that support.

  9. I think the difference between good procedural generation and bad procedural generation is all about what it is meant to overcome.

    Good procedural generation allows developers to create tons of content, then algorithmically give the player slices of the bigger whole. This means that, essentially, all content the player sees has been hand crafted by talented individuals, the only thing that is novel is how it is being given to you. Shadow of Morder/War is a great example of this. All the orcs you meet in the game have been individually crafted by talented writers, but which personalities you get, what the orcs look like, and what traits they gain as you interact with them are all procedural. This allows for you to have meaningful conflict with a well written character that also reacts to you actions. In addtion, it means that you can play the games several times and get different interactions and types of enemies to play with. Many of the best Rouge-like/lite games follow this same principle as well. All the content you see in the game has been hand crafted and balanced to be interesting. All the algorithm does is serve up these discrete chunks of content in randomized ways (following rule sets also created by developers). Every good example of procedural generation I can find is serving a smaller portion of greater content to the player.

    On the other hand, bad procedural content is attempting to take not enough content and spread it over a game to make the game bigger, leading to the player seeing the same thing over and over again. Starfield is a great example of this. None of the content in Starfield is bad (depending on who you ask), if you like bethesda style open worlds, you're likely to enjoy this game. However, bethesda wanted to make their game bigger, they wanted to make the space you play in as big as they could, and this meant that if you decided to explore, you would encounter the same slices of content over and over again. Much like Bilbo, it's too little content spread over too much game. Starfield would have been a better game if it had forgone procedural generation, because all the good, hand crafted content would not become repetative and boring. Exploration games can succeed despite this because the point of the game is to see new things, but these are exceptions to the rule.

    If game developers are hoping to use procedural generation to create interesting content, they will fail. If developers want to use procedural generation to serve up interesting content in novel ways, they can succeed. Luckily, it seems that the current game dev environment is proving this to be true.

  10. I have a problem with what most people consider procedural generation…true procedural generation would be new content being generated as needed. What all these so called procedural generation games are actually just changing the order of predefined things…

  11. Rockstar mastered procedural generated random events and animations way back in 2008/2010, and nobody has come close yet

    I think it’s exciting stuff until BGS ruined it

  12. Im half-way through the video and while it presents interesting points i keep reverting to the main image, the one use as title card for the video. IF that image is AI generated, then i see a problem. In that, the image is stolen art, plain and simple. Ai did not "generate" that, out of nothing. Did not "create" that out of thin air. It scraped it. I will come back to finish the video, i just wanted to put this out there.

  13. This opened up a larger view on the subject for me, especially with the example of Dwarf Fortress. At the same time, emergent narratives are great and all, but they'll never replace something hand-crafted by a genius mind. An AI is never going to randomly spit out the next NieR: Automata or Planescape: Torment. Developers have been using proc-gen as a replacement for design, rather than using it as a tool to give themselves more creative freedom and possibilities. Parts of Skyrim were proc-gen sure, but it's the hand-crafted environments and soundtrack that people remember about that game, not the 60th copy-pasted dungeon they went into. When proc-gen is used as a tool to create a baseline that can be iterated upon by designers, then it will be used in a positive way, but at the moment, it's being used as a replacement for design, which will always result in soul-less worlds and stories, no matter how advanced AI gets.

  14. Alarmist clickbait. The thing about the future is nobody can know exactly what will or wont' happen. Sure, procedural generation may be used more often, but it may even be used to great effect. I stopped watching stuff like this, but it came up in my feed and I clicked it. Maybe after I dislike it YouTube will stop sending me this stuff.

  15. A tad harsh on Elite Dangerous I think. Frontier Games did an amazing job crafting markets, political powers and community goals around what the generated galaxy gave them. I think its fair to say most fans of the game including myself in the first few years went on amazing adventures with meaning and lore. Rant over great video as expected.

  16. Saying Starfield has no technical issues is disingenuous.
    Sure, it could have been a better game even with those issues present if game was designed differently, but it would still had those issues.

    It'd still run like shit, be mostly about watching loading screens and being annoyed that a game from 7 years prior (NMS) managed to get seamless flying between planets even in it's horrendous 1.0 release.
    Even if the game went the route you described, it'd still had technical limitations due to usage of an engine completely not fit for the purpose (like the way cells are working)

    You could really argue in the same spirit that even if the game was designed (I'm talking about creative design) exactly like it is but it was a technical marvel, it'd still succeed if only for mods – as it is, modders are rather uninterested in anything big simply because the engine is held up by duct tape as it is.

  17. Great vid, but ngl when you said "The ocean full of monsters" when speaking about valheim, when it's literally the only one biome in the game to have a single mob in it made ma laugh!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Optimized by Optimole