Isn’t this already done with Mario game(s)? I think it was Super Mario Deluxe, where if you die enough times, Luigi shows up and will be doing the entire level for you including the ‘boss’ fight.
On Super Mario Wii U this happens. My daughter used it to see how to get through levels she was having trouble with. It’s frustrating to watch, though it showed me I was wrong that levels basically needed the run button to be held to make it across the gaps.
And then you can either accept that the ghost beat the level for you or go back to trying.
But, the thing is it’s not very difficult to do this with specific games. You can just record the inputs as they come in and replay those, which is how replays or saved games often work.
Seems like they want to be able to do this for arbitrary games, which requires a much more sophisticated system that can understand what’s on the screen, what the goals are, and how to achieve them using just video and audio feedback (and maybe hint documents from the makers).
Reminds me of the Gran Turismo days when an elastic band around the trigger was free money on Test course.
I’m not sure how I feel about games that are easy enough that AI can play them, and that people might need help with them.
People want to do things with their friends and gaming is the acceptable addiction that is forcing non gamers to play anyways. So now games are… not games so much as they are just time wasters to fill in for experiences.
The games we play are that easy though. Dark souls with eyes = hard, dark souls to an entity which has no eyes, but can read RAM states = easy.
Most singleplayer games (so the opponents are clockwork) are easy to enough to play with heuristics, why do we need a whole ass neural network?
You’re right. We don’t need a whole ass neural network. I’m throwing mine out right nowwwwwwwwwwjdjfjcmxn;&:@, jsi2@29394
There is a small bit of intrigue here, imagine you get to a boss and think, ‘this is impossible’ but there is an ability to observe a ghost of your character taking the boss on in your gear.
Bare in mind as well that ‘AI’ has existed as a word in gaming for decades and has nothing to do with LLMs, surely this is achieveable purely with the gaming definition of ‘AI’ simply coding the PC also as an NPC that reacts to things.
Yeah, it really annoyed me that the author of this piece doesn’t understand the distinction between AI as a concept (always around in computing) and AI as in LLMs and the other stuff.
Remember when the way to beat hard bosses was to either git gud or input a built in cheat code? Pepperidge Farms remembers
MMO veterans might be very interested in this kind of totally never seen before type of play automation
Why would you single out MMO veterans in this scenario? I’ve been playing MMOs since 2001 AND I git gud. I am the older sibling/cousin that you hand your controller to when you don’t want to git gud to pass a boss.
Overall… I hate this idea that Sony has. If this becomes the norm I might never play a new game again 😭
Why would you single out MMO veterans in this scenario?
Not op, but I took it as being because MMOs are the only modern games where anyone really cares if the player cheats. So MMOs tend not to leave developer cheat codes lying around.
MMOs are the only modern games where anyone really cares if the player cheats
…what?
Ahh that makes sense, I totally misunderstood it. My bad. Also there are auto playing programs that exist lol. People use programs to create bots that farm gear, materials, and currency. EverQuest has one called MacroQuest that has the ability to do literally everything for you 😹
Remember when the way to beat hard bosses was to either
git gudhand the controller to an older sibling/cousin/friend or input a built in cheat code?
Oh boy, the darksouls community is doing to be very funny to read
So… What’s the point of playing then?
Games are expected to pose some sort of challenge, of difficulty, to keep the player interested. Even if it boils down to pure frustration at some point, making some turn from it, even learning how to deal with it is useful. Games are some of the oldest teaching tools we stumbled upon.
This another move on human and individual agenda, on learning how to exist, to an extent.
This isn’t funny.
No, that is how you expect to play a game.
Not everyone plays games the same as you or even for the same reason.
If I get frustrated with a game, because I have to repeat the same part over and over, I just quit and go play a different game. Doing the same thing is boring. And life is already frustrating enough, I play games to relax and enjoy myself.
I am not on a quest to prove you wrong over me being right.
Do as you will, it is your life.
But it is through learning from small, inconsequential things like games, of any kind, to deal with controversial or unpleaseant feelings that many kids acquire coping mechanisms to handle real life situations. Situations with no cheat code, dificulty setting or pay-to-win mechanisms.
Wanting an escape, a tension release valve is fine. Just pick the right one.
You get it. The people I know who refuse to learn small things to get ahead are always the ones who have bad coping mechanisms.
Then don’t play dark souls. It’s inherently a frustrating game series, on purpose. I like to get gud and if some asshole puts AI into the game that takes over when I am stuck for a while I’d be upset. But tbh I wouldn’t even buy the game that has this in it. I’m not interested in training LLMs with my gaming skllls.
Even if it boils down to pure frustration at some point
…the point where many people simply give up and refund? Maybe they’re trying to avoid something like that
That’s really funny. It never stops to amaze me how convenience replaced well considered options.
You spend the money, you get to keep it. The logic of guaranteed satisfaction is non-sense. Unless it is defective, what other reason is valid to return anything?
it’s not about playing, it’s about paying. The sooner you finish the game, the sooner you buy another one.
Exactly, I don’t play my games to finish them. I gnaw on them for hundreds of hours like a dog with a dinosaur bone. I’m the bane of the game industry and proud of it.
Games are already too expensive and it has been made known. That is a sure way to make people abandon platforms.
Cheat codes and difficulty settings have existed for forever. Dynamic difficulty is common, and used to great success in beloved games like left 4 dead. Just a different option to get past the part you’re stuck in is really nothing bad.
Cheat codes are one thing. You can abuse those to even smoth your learning curve to later beat the game clean.
The same logic can be used for difficulty settings: you play it, in harder and harder settings, to have a new/added challenge.
Dynamic difficulty I’m unaware of what it migh actually be buy I risk I have an idea.
The game playing itself? Sounds like a movie.
But I hope you are right.
The same logic can be used for difficulty settings: you play it, in harder and harder settings, to have a new/added challenge.
I can absolutely guarantee that 99.9% of players do not ever replay a game they’ve beaten. You’re generalizing your own values and goals and they’re absolutely not as common as you think they are
Why would you play the same game again just because you used a cheat code?
You already know the story. Time for something else.
That is like claiming you have to rewatch an entire movie because you missed a scene while going to the bathroom.
It’s more than obvious we are completely opposite individuals.
Yes, I would - and have - replayed a game after using cheats. It’s not about knowing the game; it’s about knowing if I can actually beat the game without resorting to cheats.
And, yes, I will rewatch an entire movie if I’ve missed a scene for any reason and the movie was somehow catching my interest. Not on that moment but I will rewatch it again when I have the opportunity and see how much the one scene I missed adds or not to the entire movie.
That’s quite the take. You seem to be the exact audience for this up and coming “feature”. Why play a game when you can just watch AI play it? TONS of people replay games and rewatch movies ALL THE TIME.
Dynamic difficulty is the game adjusting the difficulty based on how well you’re doing, e.g. in the mentioned l4d (or maybe it was only l4d2 idk) if you have more health and healing, it will spawn more/harder enemies, and vice versa.
It’s sometimes also used in other ways, e.g. boss fights get easier after failing them a bunch, which I really don’t like because I want to decide myself whether I want to make the game easier. Though roguelite progression systems like in hades in effect do a similar thing, but the player is actually aware of it (though this is why I don’t really like roguelites).
Mainly I think whether this is a fine feature or shit will just depend on the ability to choose if you want the AI to beat the boss for you or not.
this just in the next generation of video games will play themselves. Due to rising costs though play time for most run-throughs will top out at about 90 minutes.
Already previous gen if you look at the mobile landscape, Sony’s just getting on with the times
This feels like it’s going to incentivise developers to either make bad puzzles, or bad hint systems. Why bother with a good one if the platform has a “complete this for me” feature? It is basically impossible for players to get stuck or struggle, when they’re either shown the solution, or the game completes it for them.
If its an opt in feature that helps you when you are stuck it could be nice. Knowing Sony tho they’ll make sure it sucks and gets shoved down your throat
And the next patent will be about a controller, not actually being plugged into the console, but merely giving gamers the illusion of affecting the gameplay…
I also made my little brother player 2.
Wait until they discover some remote controller, where you can switch the games that are played according to some schedule. Like some form of game stations. Maybe they could broadcast them for the whole population somehow, so that everybody can talk about the games they
playedwatched last week on their next town hall gathering or Sunday church with Aunt Lizzy.You’re on an entirely different plane of reality mate, my brain just can’t fathom a forward-thinking concept as such ;)
I’m just gonna end up being an old man in my basement, staying warm with the radiant glow from my CRT monitor while playing SNES, Genesis and NES games.
I’m already there. It’s peaceful.
-inserts Aladdin geneses cart- “Then the fire nation attacked.”
I wonder if this is a step toward them self-purchasing game micro transactions, too. …
GTA5 let you skip sections that were too hard for you (or too badly designed) and I am sure so did many other games. From a game design perspective this is nothing new whatsoever and won‘t change the medium in any way.
Except your GPU fans will start screaming when you press skip.
Wow that’s depressing. I guess the main solace is that if Sony patents this then we’re unlikely to see this practice on other systems.
A lot of times companies will patent things that they don’t necessarily intend to ever produce. Sometimes to obscure the patents that they actually do want to produce. Sometimes to reserve it in the case that they do want to later. And sometimes so that no one else can.
This. Sony patented the stand up and say something to skip ads.
This was a decade ago, and it’s not a thing, and won’t be a thing.
Also, the OP article is an accessibility thing, sometimes people just can’t physically do stuff, fuck them for their disability I guess is what top level comment is saying.
I love that patent. Whoever made it was really trolling.
As someone who does have a cognitive disability, there is a genuine difference between augmented input/level skip vs. what is effectively an integrated TAS.
Mario Kart 8 is a good example of accessibility that still empowers the player, as the player still needs to hold an input and retains control of the character - it’s just that massive errors that would result in loss (IE: falling off the track) are prevented by corrective steering taking control.
An automated TAS gives no empowerment to the player - it’s no different that running a lengthy macro script. If I wanted to watch the characters have an adventure without my ability to have influence in the journey, I’d just watch a movie instead.
Why are you assuming everyone will use it for the whole game? While that’s a possibility, those would be edge cases. The article specifically talks about it helping with CERTAIN parts. If you just ignore a major point of an article, of course you can embellish and look foolish.
Having a TAS to beat certain sections or a hard boss would be awesome, having it play the whole game? Well some people will have a benefit from it, but not for me.
And physical disabilities exist too!
Ai is not, and cannot be considered an accessibility feature. If anything it’ll just stifle any genuine attempts to create something accessible because why bother trying to make the game fun for everyone when the ai can just play the game for you when you’re stuck
What a horrible take.
I get “screw ai” but this doesn’t even need to use ai to work.
But go off I guess, people like you are just the worse. Decrying Ai, doubly so when it’s not even relevant to the story.
Also, this isn’t possible with current or even next gen tech, unless they literally script the “AI” responses to all available situations which would be infeasible.
LLMs can’t reason or handle complex situations. They are text auto complete programs or image generation programs.
Game playing is not LLM. They’re game-specific reinforcement learning models. It’s not easy, but definitely doable with existing tech. Sony’s GT Sophy is a good demonstration on what they’re capable of.
Machine learning is not viable for anything other than simpler 2d games or small segments of more complex games. The training required to get good results on that is intense already.
It is expensive, but it does work. We’ve already seen things work to a limited extent on StarCraft 2, Dota, and Gran Turismo, and those are all multiplayer games. The article seems to be talking about single player games, which simplified things a lot.
Still, on the long list of shit we need to fix with America, fixing the patent system is a big one.
Large corps buy them like lotto tickets and try to patent anything and everything they can.
Look how long WB has sat on the Nemisis system because they got a patent a decade ago on it. It wasn’t really a unique idea, but thousands of games have been prevented from doing anything similar.
They patented a very specific algorithm for a very specific kind of game. You can still do knock-offs of the system in the same way you can make RTS games without asking Blizzard’s permission or platformers without asking Nintendo’s.
I would suspect that SoM’s system is complex enough that nobody’s been eager to try and replicate it. But they high level concept of randomized enemy generation isn’t something you can patent. Neither is randomizing story elements between NPCs.
Digital Extremes was going to do something somewhat similar with their nemesis system in Warframe but had to scrap it because of that patent. So now we have the mediocre Lich/Sister/Boyband systems in place instead.
The Lich system was pretty close to the mark. Possible that developers gave the underlying features of SoM a wide berth out of caution, but so much of this seems to boil down to “we don’t want to risk the possibility of a lawsuit” rather than “we can’t just do our thing and see if WB’s lawyers care enough”.
So long as you’re not directly ripping off the code from another system, patent courts have been pretty generous in interpreting overlapping abstract concepts.
But any kind of suit is scary, particularly for studios that aren’t geared up to fight them.
It wasn’t complex at all. It’s incredibly simple
What is your problem with it? Just seems like an accessability feature to me. The one issue I see with it is folks who don’t need it using it in lieu of walkthroughs and wasting energy. I don’t expect that to be that big an issue though, generally people buy games because they want to play them.
Just screw disabled people eh?
Somethings aren’t possible for people to do, this would allow them to enjoy playing games still.
Are you really playing the game if the game is just playing itself?
Can’t I use this to skip the unwanted sections? MJ missions in Spider-Man, for example.
Depends how they implement it. Older option was to use cheats to skip parts and maybe watch a video if you want to see what happened in the part you skipped.
Just certain sections. You could get it to do the whole thing I guess.
You would still be experiencing the story as it’s meant to be told. Why do you think you have to “play” to fully enjoy something?
Why do you think “let’s play” videos exist? Now instead, they can support the devs by buying the game and experiencing it themselves.
Why do you think you have to “play” to fully enjoy something?
Where do you think I said or even implied this?
Why do you think “let’s play” videos exist?
Entertainment
Your previous comment says exactly that. Your own words.
Entertainment
So now they can support the dev and actually participate! Even better! Except for according to you.
Please go ahead and quote where you think it says either of those things.
Are you really playing the game if the game is just playing itself?
People enjoy different things, and you don’t need to play something to enjoy it. Your words.
People love watching sports, they aren’t playing are they?
Hell even point and click games exist, and those “play themselves” while you merely interact with the screen.
You don’t need an AI to skip, bypass, or cinematic your way through a difficult section. That’s a game design issue, not a patentable AI issue. This does not support disabled people, this will be used to ignore disabled people during game design and fire people who are actually competent at supporting disabled people.
This doesn’t prevent the other from happening. Why are you assuming that? Both can work hand in hand to deal with different issues
Of course, if you just want to come in and see a company as evil, you won’t ever see the other side.
Sony is pretty good with their accessibility program, I don’t see why things would suddenly turn 180. Unless you just want to I guess. But that’s not reality.
Because I work in software development and I see first-hand exactly what executives are currently doing with AI. That’s what they’re doing. That’s the reality. What other side is there? That we’re going to get more games at lower prices thanks to AI? Sure, if you believe that I’ve got a real nice bridge to sell you too, get out your wallet and just hand it to me.
If given all the evidence of the entire fucking economy of the world you think companies aren’t focused exclusively on short-term, short-sighted profits by minimizing costs and maximizing revenue, you’re so delusional you must be smoking capitalism like a drug.
