soulmata

The thing is, a lot of good AI can be developed through mimicking. If the player performs a behavior over and over, it's likely a successful behavior - one the AI should try to emulate. It can sometimes break suspension of disbelief, but other times can be incredible. Look at Unreal Tournament, and the ability to tell AI bots to bunny hop. Completely ridiculous for an AI to do, yet it was much more effective at making it feel like the bot was an actual player - because it was doing something absurd and unpredictable.

Permanent wounding I'm not such a fan of, since that would generally imply a character is permanently disabled - and if it's the player's character, some might consider that a game killing event, and just reload or reroll. Long-term wounding gives you the punishment and realism of bad decisions or brutal combat, but also allows you room to learn and grow. If your party has shattered limbs and fractured skulls because you decided to send your whole group into a melee free with a bunch of kobolds wielding maces, you'll adapt.

For anyone who has played both PnP D&D and D&D-based PC games, you've no doubt seen the discrepency between the devastating effects of diseases and serious wounds on the tabletop vs in a game. It's something that's always bothered me, and is strongly related to the long-term reward/punishment system for players who are careful vs reckless. It's also something I think is worth discussing, and wonder what other people's opinions are. I, for one, am strongly in favor of things like long-term wounding systems, which includes crippled limbs and illness - neither of which have been a prominent feature in the majority of modern RPGs. - First, how it is today - Compare nearly any computer RPG, new and old. For this example, let's look at Baldur's Gate II and Skyrim. I pick them as they are both immensely popular RPGs representing different approaches to the genre. Both provide a mechanism for players becoming wounded, poisoned and diseased. Wounds are represented via the HP system, and all wounds can be healed through that same system. Both provide a mechanism for being poisoned - which corresponds directly to losing HP. Poison can be cured or reversed - and is generally never a problem after combat. Pop a potion, receive a spell - you're back on your feet in moments. Lastly, disease. Both have mechanisms for this in play, a variety of curses and diseases levied by enemy casters or creatures. The effects range from mildly annoying to downright frustrating, but the end result is the same - pop a potion or visit a temple and you're back to 100%. Ultimately, wounding, poison, disease and curses are rarely, almost never, a problem after a single encounter is over. - Why that sucks - That sucks because of what the HP system was originally intended to represent. It was not a character's "physical hardiness", but a measure of their liklihood to survive. Get stabbed through the gut by a spear, and your liklihood of surviving was... slim. Due to conservation of detail, though, this definition of HP became lost and ended up being "Here's how much 'life' you have". That's why getting stabbed by a sword or punched in the face or infected with a virulent poison all end up hurting your HP - and you can't really abstract anything else from that. To counter that, you have to make the punishing effects of poison/disease/curses very immediate - poison is instantly lethal, diseases produce symptoms within seconds or possibly minutes, curses take instant effect. Otherwise, once is over, the player uses the one cure-all and goes on their merry way. It doesn't really add much when a Fireball spell and a Poison spell are ultimately the same mechanic, just with different graphics or different resistances. - How it can be done better - Take a look at the Fallout series, which featured per-limb wound tracking and limb crippling and disease (via drug addiction). These sorts of injuries were long-term and truly debilitating. You couldn't heal a crippled limb through stimpacks, you had to visit a doctor or be a trained doctor yourself. Broken legs meant you hobbles long, broken arms meant using weapons become nigh-impossible. You had to fight through your addiction. Poison, unfortunately, was the same - a short-term, HP-attacking mechanism. This system can easily be applied to PE. How about a disease you pick up that has a long incubation period and can't be so easily cured - you need some sort of special remedy or a particular type of therapy. How about a curse that does more than just make you slower for five minutes, but perhaps atrophies your skills for weeks at a time. How about a festering wound that, while no longer bleeding, can become infected? How about if your wizard breaks his arm, he can't weave incantations and needs to be taken to a bone doctor. Dying because you are stabbed in the foot repeatedly makes little sense. Becoming ill because you were stabbed in the chest and survived but are now prone to infection makes more sense. - How it can be overdone - Take a look at dwarf fortress. Wounding is tracked down to the skin, nerve and hair level, long-term wound management is crucial in keeping a dwarf alive and sickness can spread. That's over the top - but it's a simulation game, not an RPG, and designed with that in mind. I'm not suggesting it needs to be taken that far. -Why this improves gameplay - Combat shouldn't be just about the instance. It should be about your party's staying power and the long-term ramifications of making good or bad decisions. If your tank is constantly taking blows to the head and never improving his ability to dodge said blows, perhaps he gets a fractured skull or brain damage that requires a qualified doctor in a major city to really help him. Perhaps that nerve toxin your Rogue was nicked by when opening a chest doesn't actually seem that bad at first - until the next day, when he becomes paralyzed. Perhaps that curse your priest is suffering from is actually contagious - and no NPCs will let you come anywhere near them until he scrubs away his sin in a river. These sorts of things can make planning your fights, skill load outs and more appropriately. If you know you're doing into a dangerous forest with a lot of poisonous Asps, maybe you'd better stock up on anti-venom. If you're facing a lot of humanoids known for using crushing weapons, bring some splints along. Who knows? I know a lot of this is just pipe dreaming, just fantasy, just too much to ask. But it's fun to think about, and I really want to know what others think. So, please vote and please comment.

With the amount of memory and CPU power at our disposal today, there's not much justification for separating indoor/city/wilderness/dungeon areas into separate maps, which are loaded/unloaded via some arbitrary transition. The only "real" justification would be conservation of detail when it came to scale - if there's 200 miles between town X and Y, the player doesn't neccesarily want to actually walk through 200 miles of wilderness, and would rather click on "Go to next map." That sort of problem, though, is easily solved through fast travel mechanisms or other sorts of transit systems - like slit striders in Morrowind or the trains in Arcanum. If it was being done as far back as Ultima 6 & 7 (at least as far as the overworld was concerned - all above-world areas shared the same map with no transition, though underworlds and basements were separate maps), it can be done today. All of this, though, is largely unrelated to camera work.

Co-op in Baldur's Gate could be amazing, especially if you were playing with friends. It added a lot of replayability for me. However, if MP were to ever come, I would always want it to be an after thought - PE is pitched as a hardcore, old-school RPG, and I backed it as such. If it ends up being watered down because they decided to add in MP and had to dliute other components as a result, I would be very disappointed.

As long as it feels intuitive, what does it matter what camera system is used? "Fixed" camera is also a loaded term - "Fixed" can mean it is centered on the main character at a specific angle and cannot move from that point, or it could mean it is at a fixed distance/viewing angle, but can freely move along the X and Y axis. I believe the intention for PE is for the camera to behave like Infinity engine games - a fixed angle (and perhaps fixed distance), with no rotation available, but free movement along X/Y. I personally prefer a free-rotating camera, since it lets you explore things from any angle you want and is just plain fun. The camera systems in DA:O, Rome: Total War (most of the Total War series actually) and others are examples of great use of a free camera - but that's not always feasible, particularly if you're using isometric rendering, or if you aren't actually using a fully three-dimensional environment.

If I look over the history of my own gaming experiences and try to isolate those moments which truly made a game memorable, I find most of them come down to a small handful of categories: 1) Some plot hook or compelling story element that made me want to keep playing just to see how it ends. (P:T comes to mind) 2) A combat system that made me strive to improve my tactics, rather than just iterate through every combination of tactics to see which broke the AI the worst. (X-Com comes to mind) 3) A sufficiently dynamic world that made it feel alive, but not random and repetitive. (Heavily-modded Skyrim comes to mind). Aesthetics never seem to be something that makes me want to play a game again, nor music or even character customization. It ends up being how much the game makes me think, and how much it forces me to react, rather than me fully dictacting the course and pace of the game, and expecting it to react to me. That's why I want, very badly, to see AI get a decent focus in PE. Because that's where the hook will be - that's what will keep you coming back, that's what will convince you to play again and again, to buy DLC or expansions, to spread the word to your friends, to stay up for 36 hours straight because you can't put the game down.

A convincing and competent AI is a challenge. However, too many games today cater to the lowest common denominator - if the game is pretty, relatively bug-free and has good music, AI can be shuffled into the trash and all opposition can resort to a suicide march against the player whenever spotted. I want PE to go beyond that - to consider that for a story to be truly compelling, there have to be elements of danger and surprise. There has to be incentive to plan your future battles, and there needs to be a reason to think on your feet, rapidly. And those pressures shouldn't just exist solely in the temporary space of an individual encounter, but should spread throughout the game. Take too long trying to find a cure for a disease plaguing a town? Well, most of that town's population is now dead - or perhaps someone else found the cure, and the reward goes to them.

Rather than focus on them being "good" or "bad", you should consider them on a contextual basis and ask how well they mesh with the rest of the game. Cooldown abilities work great in RTS scenarios, where the action relies heavily on two or more opponents which have access to, relatively, the same resources - and it comes down to who can use them in a more tactful fashion. Let's take the RPG approach, though, and compare some common elements. When you say "Cooldown", you usually refer to a combat ability which can be used either for free or by consuming resource X, and then cannot be used against for a short period - generally measured in seconds or more rarely minutes. But "cooldown" as a mechanic exists pretty much everywhere, it's just not as obvious. In an FPS, cooldown can be a weapon overheating and forcing you to delay firing. It can also be the time it takes you to reload when a clip or magazine is spent. It can be the time needed to reload a bow or crossbow, it can be the time needed to recover from swinging a 2-handed weapon versus a 1-handed weapon. It can be the delay between casting two successive spells. D&D largely uses the round/turn system to implement moment by moment cooldown. Each individual ability can be used as many times as you have resources available for it, whether it's a bunch of scrolls or the same spell memorized multiple times, but you still have that 6-second or X-second "cooldown" between successive uses. Then you get into an even bigger gray area. Think of all the "X use per day" abilities you get in many games, particularly RPGs. If you have 1 use of "Lay on Hands" per day, that's technically a skill that has a 86,400 second cooldown. As a developer myself, I can tell you it's not that often the focus is going to be on expecting the player to have an *exact* set of skills available at any given moment - it's going to be very generalized. Not "does this player have this awesome show-stopping abilitiy available right now", but "given the potential range of player capacity at this point in the story, would the player be reasonably expected to survive this encounter?" I don't think it's as simple as saying "cooldowns make it so all you care about it surviving each combat by any means possible, even if it means expending all your resources and using all your cooldown skills and letting your companions die, because all is forgiven when combat is over".

And it's concerns like that we should voice now. Sometimes the AI has to rely on trickery - there are aspects of the human experience that it just can't emulate - but there are other cases where it's obvious the developers simply didn't have the time or inclination to make the AI strong. BG is a great example. The vanilla AI in BG was pretty weak and quite easily abused. However, after-the-fact improvements, such as BG1TuTu and Sword Coast Stratagems, demonstrated that the AI was not nearly as constrained by the engine as some believed. SCS made the AI much more challenging, and did such largely within the confines of the game - by making casters focus on disabling your party more rapidly and making the AI much more aggressive about using potions, et cetera. Any time the AI can play by the same rules as the player and still win occasionally is a great thing. Any time you are playing and actually believe, if only for a minute, that you're competing against an intelligent agent working in direct opposition to you, the developers deserve a round of applause, because that's incredibly hard to pull off. And it's why I'm really, really hoping PE takes the time to make it happen.

Short preface: I've long been a die-hard fan of many BioWare, Black Isle, Interplay and Obsidian endeavors. Thousands of hours wittled away while I stomped through Durlag's Tower, assassinated Yxunomei and developed a crush on Stale Mary. I've even got a tattoo of the rune of torment. True story. So, in my wildest fantasy, Project Eternity produces a piece of work with epic gameplay from start to finish, telling me a story so complex I need Ritalin just to sit down and comprehend it, offers me a combat experience so intense I swear I feel my characters bleeding out and gives me aesthetic engagement so rich I get vertigo just looking at the splendor before me. I can already tell PE's going to have an amazing story, an engagine engine and probably a beautiful soundtrack. Out of that, there are two components I'm interested in most that I haven't heard much about - artificial intelligence and 'fake difficulty'. As PE is at this point mostly player-backed, I have a lot of faith, but also hope I can get at least a small word in the developers ears. I'd like to hear their plans for PE when it comes to these two facets. Now the details: -Artifical Intelligence- AI is the crux of most games, because of the compounding effect it has on replayability. Many advertising campaigns go out of their way to tout how deep and sophiscated the AI is (use F.E.A.R as an example), but players are often left disappointed. Sometimes that's our own fault - if the AI can be abused, it will be abused, and as a software engineer myself, I know there's only so far you can think ahead. Details so far on what sort of attention the AI's going to get in PE have been sparse, so I'd like to hear from the PE team on what some of the plans are, if any at this point. Some questions I think about (I don't expect answers, they are just things I like to think about): Will the AI receive at least as much attention as, say, music and art components? This is in terms of raw hours of development. Will it be designed with varying degrees of difficulty in mind? Adapting to the player's skill is an example. Will there be an entropy system in place designed to ensure (or at least attempt to ensure) a player never finds the "golden rule" of Player vs. The World that always favors the player? Examples are an AI'S chance to do something completely stupid and/or unexpected, just to catch the player off-guard. Is it being modeled after older Infinity engine games, or is an entirely new approach being taken? I'm very interested in hearing what the developers want to do with AI. -Fake Difficulty- I really do like the difficulty-enhancing options mentioned in previous updates, such as making creatures do more damage and giving the player only a single savegame (I actually maintain a site dedicated to playing games on a single run, and Baldur's Gate was the first I catered to). Some of the options fall under the scope of fake difficulty, such as increasing/decreasing the amount of damage a player receives/gives. Those aren't neccessarily bad - they can add an element of danger where it might have been a cakewalk before - but I'm wondering if other aspects of difficulty enhancement are being considered with them. Examples: Rather than just making a particular spawn point have every possible low and high level enemy spawn, how about also making those same enemies be much, much more aggressive? They'll focus on killing as fast as possible, rather than being elegant. Rather than spawning and sitting, waiting like cattle for the player to come and slaughter them, how about making them actively hunt the player down once the player is in "their dungeon" or in "their territory"? Rather than having quests and other objectives which are aimed solely at the player, how about competing adventurer groups which might come claim a reward, honorably or dishonorably, or perhaps come after you in revenge for stealing their bounty? I don't expect answers on many, or even any, of these, but it is something I hope others on this forum are interested in discussing. What are your opinions on engineering a solid AI? What are you expectactions from an epic game? How heavily does AI factor into replayability for you?