Do you think AI can be more difficult than a human opponent?

Celia Wagar2 Comments

Easily. Most multiplayer games can easily be dominated by AIs through simple routines. The classic example is SF alpha 2 akuma, who would walk up to you and if you did anything that wasn’t invincible, he’d throw you, if you tried to throw, he would dragon punch, and if you dragon punched, he would block. This an unbeatable option select that is completely unbeatable, but no human could ever do it because you’d need intensely fast reaction time. The computer is already capable of processing everything going on on every frame, having the AI decide based on that is a light load.

In Starcraft there are a ton of build orders that are incredibly hard to counter, requiring specific timing pushes, but they’re so hard to execute that human players can’t even bother with them. Brood War AI tournaments are dominated by these. It’s so much more effective to program for that, that the designers of those AIs don’t bother to have the AI scout or react to anything their opponent does, they simply program a routine where it sweeps every corner of the map until the opponent is destroyed.

In Chess or Checkers or other turn based games of perfect information, the usual routine is simply to simulate every single possibility as far into the future as is reasonable, and weight the possible moves this turn that lead into scenarios that take more pieces in more possible futures more highly than those that lose pieces or take none.

The real question is, in what field can a human opponent compete with an AI? What are AIs still poor at?

An obvious one is object recognition. So they’d probably do bad at pictionary. They’re also pretty shit at Go, mostly because simulating possibilities for go or scoring different outcomes as more/less advantageous is incredibly difficult. They’re also pretty terrible at predicting human behavior (Yomi), which lead to me beating one pretty hard in rock paper scissors. They don’t really know how to write jokes or things that we’d find aesthetically appealing. Still pretty terrible at translations. Pathfinding algorithms are still too rigid to really produce effective use of movement in combat situations. They have a tendency to be indecisive or switch routes up frequently or to be too committed to a route that becomes blocked. AI are good at finding the shortest path between two points, better than humans, provided they have all the data, but it becomes harder as movement mechanics for a game become more complex and link together more physical spaces, not to mention that computation time becomes prohibitively expensive for searches like that, where humans can parse wider fields of possibilities more easily using heuristics (a good enough solution). Computers can have algorithms modeled like heuristics but don’t have the same self awareness of when an operation would take up too much time to take an estimated result. All estimations made by computers are the designers realizing in advance the scope of the estimations to be made.

Depth and Balance in Luigi U

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you think a timer being too short can be a flaw? For example, the timer in New Super Luigi Bros. is a mere 100 seconds and the levels are filled with hazards and platforming gimmicks, but is it now a massocore platformer? If there a reduction in player agency because the levels are now short?

Answer to the first question is, “No duh.”

The key thing with difficulty is, you need to give players some room to breathe. Difficulty is supposed to bring out the depth in a game by constricting and balancing different elements. Too little difficulty and anything is permissable, too much difficulty and everything has to be perfectly optimal. The timer exists in mario to keep people moving along in the level, so they can’t tackle every problem at their leisure, they need to keep up some semblance of a pace. However people dislike harsh time limits as a psychological thing. So when a timer is implemented, it’s better to keep it as something on the backburner, give people enough time that they don’t have to worry about running out as long as they keep moving.

The key aspect with difficulty is balance. All the different elements need to be in a semblance of balance with each other so that the player is pressured to make a selection between them. If the time is too high, players will ignore it like it’s not even there, if the time is too low, then there’s such a hard dropoff point for success that most people will give up. If you give someone too much health, if the lethality is too low, then they’ll just walk through all the enemies and hazards, if you give someone too little health, if the lethality is too high, then nobody is going to work their way up to actually completing anything. These factors are going to work differently based on every game design, every level design.

I have no idea if NSLBU is a masocore platformer or not, though I’d place my bets on not really.

I have no idea what player agency is even supposed to be. It’s like the fuzziest of fuzzy concepts that I hear tossed around, the concept of agency in games. I don’t know whether there’s a reduction in player agency or not because the time limit is short.

What I do know is that only a few players are really willing to stick with a game designed in such a flat way. The Thief reboot had some custom difficulty modifiers that made the difficulty astronomical, but they didn’t really bring out the interest in the game because they made it about executing one specific solution instead of finding a viable solution among many possible ones. Difficulty in a game like Devil May Cry, or Bayonetta, or Ninja Gaiden Black, or God Hand, focus the player to perform better using a variety of tactics available to them. Difficulty in a masocore platformer or a low depth game focus the player to repeat the same few tactics until they work. In Vanquish you try all sorts of different things on god hard difficulty until you come out on top, in Call of Duty, you repeat the same few seconds until you move along or go insane.

The key thing is that without depth, without balance between different competing options, difficulty makes games exercises in frustration instead of interesting problem solving affairs.

What’s your ideal game? Like if you were to make one what would you personally put and make sure is in there?‎

Celia WagarLeave a comment

I have like a dozen different game ideas I would like to produce. I can’t say any one of them is really ideal.

One thought I had was what if there was a 3d beat em up with a chain combo system along the lines of guilty gear? Where you have a set of moves that are available at any time and cancel into each other, pushing the enemy further back with each one, costing you the ability to combo into some options because of your distance from the target.

What if there was a beat em up game controlled by mouselook where you could glide between a fleet of different airplanes, fighting enemies on the wing, and using rocket boots to zip along the surface of each wing or for boost jumps and such? I made an animated film based on that idea.

 Another one was what about a multiplayer third/first person arena shooter where you selected distinct characters that all had unique movement options and were basically as differentiated as fighting game characters between their attack and movement choices. One character I could include would basically be a super charged version of a modern military shooter character and a quake 3 arena character. One could be based on the movement and attack styles from Gunz, except more fleshed out. I could give some characters double jumps, air dashes, teleports, etc. Then Overwatch came out and seems to be an implementation of this idea except as a team shooter.

I had a design doc written for a metroidvania, which I would probably redo from scratch and combine with another idea I had about making a fairly complex 2d platformer crazy action game, I figured out a way of making the command inputs used in fighting games more natural in that interface by taking a page from Symphony of the Night.

I had a thought about working on an RTS that focused more on unit micro by diversifying the movement patterns of each individual unit more based on schemes that are rather absurd from the perspective of simulating a little warrior down there but make total sense from an abstract perspective (like every time you issue a command, the speed is set to 0, and it gradually speeds up in movement as it follows its order, so you want to directly control those units as little as possible, or other units that could only move in straight lines of a certain fixed distance). Additionally having it so sending orders to units would temporarily buff them, and this buff was stacked for non repeating orders, akin to a style meter in DMC.

I have a tabletop RPG idea based on having no levelups for characters or dice rolling or random factors of any kind. I’m looking to flesh this one out and get it published when I have a chance.

I have an idea for a perfect conglomerate of mario style RPG mechanics.

I’d really like to produce any of these, but I don’t have the means or time right now.

What makes the Souls series so appealing to you compare to other action RPGs?

Celia Wagar21 Comments

Other Action RPGs have shitty combat. The vast majority of them do. How many games have better 3d melee 3rd person combat than the Souls series? Not very many, and the few that exist are not in the action RPG category, except maybe severance blade of darkness which I heard people say was better than Dark Souls and Dark Messiah but I haven’t been arsed to play yet. Finding good melee combat is a hard thing to do in the first place.

Beyond that, Dark Souls (and the series in general) is like that Gesamtkunstwerk thing people like to talk about, and I’m not just saying that because Mr B Tongue said it, I’m saying it based on different principles for different reasons.

Souls doesn’t just have a combat system that works on totally flat terrain with one on one enemy encounters, it has a combat system that varies significantly based on the terrain and structures surrounding the player. It varies significantly based on the number and type of enemies fighting the player. And it uses these as an opportunity to create level designs where enemies ambush you, surround you, fight you in conditions that favor them more than you, like tight hallways or from the high or low ground, with ranged reinforcements, and more.

Souls has level designs that are branched and interconnected, yet have a clear progression, beginning and end. It makes use of the Z axis to thread levels back through themselves in a number ways. On a higher level, it has a nonlinear progression between the whole levels, in the case of dark souls it has a multithreaded design that folds back in on itself in a number of places, so you can reach nearly anything in the areas before sen’s fortress with a skip and a jump. That and they just flat-out let you go to places you didn’t really need to early on, like new londo and the catacombs. New Londo even linked into the valley of drakes which links into everywhere else. They have shortcuts in the levels which get unlocked over time to interconnect areas and make runbacks shorter. This creates both a challenge to explore the world, and to route different paths across it to grab the shit you need to get other stuff done, and I like that type of backtracking.

Each game has a ton of different weapons that make the game all different and the courtesy to add massively varied enemies as well. Even the hollow enemies can be devastating, even if they’re a bit weak at higher levels due to more damage resistance. They’re all made in a way where it’s tricky to avoid their attacks, not just caring about doing a ton of damage or having a ton of health.

Not to mention they capitalized on a really unique netplay scheme before anyone else could, and it had the fringe benefit of preventing people in the single player from taking a degenerate strategy and ruining the difficulty curve of the game for themselves.

The Souls games did a lot of things right, they were just each crippled by a few things they critically fucked up.

On Game Reviews/Critique

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Why do so many people think that those who strive for journalism to be more objective want every review to play out like food ingredients label, i.e., to be completely devoid of subjectivity or personality. Furthermore, what’s the best way to respond to that people who make said judgement?

I find it funny how people equate something devoid of subjectivity or personality to read like a food ingredients label. I find it funny how one would think that objectivity necessarily segregates expression of personality from objectivity. For example, the Animator’s Survival Kit. It was written in a very personality-driven way, but the things it describes are accurate. They correspond to a truth about how animation works. That’s the place where I come from in artistic criticism.

Continue reading →

Begin Blog Here:

Celia Wagar1 Comment

Hi, I’m Celia Wagar, and I write a lot about video games publicly and privately. A lot of my content is stored privately, maybe 70% of it. This blog is an attempt to get more of that content public and in a presentable format.

Don’t expect stuff here to be my final word on a subject, a lot of my writing goes through various edits or gets completely scrapped as I refine ideas. Some of the posts here are going to be harvested from conversations or articles I’ve written elsewhere. I hope to produce more video content in the future, so writings here may serve as the basis of a video.

My first project here will be migrating a lot of my more interesting/worth remembering answers on my ask.fm.

I have a lot of information on assorted video game related topics, please ask me if there is something you would like to know more about. It may end up with me amending the article in question or writing a new article as an answer.