So I've picked up Elden Ring again cus I never finished it and I'm fighting the Death Rite Bird. I've died about 5 times now and the first few tries I always had time to throw out my mimic and cast some protection spells before I have to deal with it. But all of a sudden it has become super aggressive and even though my runes/dead body is closer than usual, the bird is way more aggressive and I can barely survive long enough to even grab my runes that I need to save up.

So my question is, does anyone know if the devs wrote in some behavioral changes to the AI of each boss/enemy that would explain this change in aggression?
Maybe is has to do with the change in distance from my death to it's spawn location.

Just curious.

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Posted by22 hours ago

My thoughts on computer graphics and photo realism

I rememeber vividly when I played Gabriel Knight 3 back when I was young (for context, I am 42 now). This was one of the first 3D games that I played and I remember how turned off I was. By the poorly looking environments but especially the character models. They looked absolultely hideous, even for the time period I would say.

I knew then that graphics would likely get better, but I was also positive that character models would never get good enough to not turn me off. Back then I greatly preferred seeing live actors (FMV) because they actually looked like real people.

So fast forward to now. I recently finished playing Rise of the Tomb Raider and just started Plague Tale: Innocence. Both games looks absolutely breathtaking, the latter being the best looking game I have seen as of yet (yes, I don't play that many games). Lara Croft looks like a real person, very convicingly portraying human emotion and her trademark pony tail follows the laws of physics as she jumps around... It all looks just fantastic.

However.... I can still tell that this is a game and that Lara is not a real person.

I believe both these games run on the Unreal engine 4. I recently watched this video showcasing the Unreal engine 5. Now this world actually does look real. Not the character, but the world is photo realistic. I also looked at the video of the Amsterdam section in the newest Call of Duty (I am Dutch so I know the city well) and that too absolutly does look like the real thing.
I haven't seen fully photo realistic characters yet, but I bet they are possible or will be in the very near future.

But this... I don't like.

While I admire the technical possiblities these days and I can surely enjoy seeing what the Unreal engine 5 has to offer, I think photo realism goes too far for mainstream use in games. Why? There is a few reasons.

First and foremost: I think it is unnecceary. While photo realism might look great, we will get used to it and at a point it will be nothing special. But it adds nothing to a game. What is wrong with a game that looks like Rise of the Tomb Raider? It isn't photorealistic but it still looks stunning and super detailed and Lara looks like a real character even if you can still see she is still a game character. Adding even more detail and realism to that adds nothing, at least not after the novelty of the first game that does this wears off.

Which brings me to my second reason: cost and resources. Modern games cost a huge amount of money to make and I'd rather have that money be spent elsewhere. Already games focus too much on graphics whereas I think at this time (because I DO like good graphics) the money can be better spent on better writing, better voice acting and better AI... all aspects which definitily DO need improving.

And finally, I think photorealism will make a game less enjoyable because it no longer feels... like a game. This may be more phsycological but if I can no longer distinguish a game world from the real world, then I think it will actually become less enjoyable. I might even feel less immersed.
Games are a form of escapism for me. But if a game looks like the real world, I won't feel like I have... escaped. Or in other words: I think the real world is best enjoyed... in the real world. This may not apply to fantasy worlds as they would still obviously look fantastical but humans should not look photorealistic either. There's something unsetteling about an artificial human that you can't tell is artificial.

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Posted by2 days ago

Why are "western AAA" games the only ones that seem to get flack for "hand-holding"?

Truth be told, I'm already not a huge fan of this supposed dichotomy between "Western" and "Eastern" games. Sure, there will be some cultural trends based on where media is released but I feel like it's being used less as a descriptor of these trends and more of just a blanket insult.

For instance, I've been seeing a lot of comments about how "western" AAA games are way too handholdy and explain mechanics too much. If only western developers learned from our Japanese gaming gods about real game design. This sentiment begs the question: Do you play any Japanese games besides FromSoft games? And why does this dichotomy even exist?

Just thinking off the top of my head, I think about something like Persona 4 and 5 in which the first solid 10 hours are pretty much an extended tutorial section in which the game needs to stop and explain to you the litany of mechanics you need to remember. Persona 5 Royal (my favorite of the series) has some serious pacing issues in this section too because they have to explain the mechanics from Vanilla P5 and the new mechanics they added for Royal. So characters are constantly halting everything to shout how the new mechanics work at you. Again, not a huge deal but it's definitely noticable.

Death Stranding is an "Eastern" game and an excellent one at that. Die Hardman, Mama, Deadman, Heartman, etc. call you constantly to verbally explain how every single newly introduced item or mechanic works. Supposed to redundancy. Die Hardman will brief you on a delivery and then call you again 30 seconds after the briefing to remind you about what he said at he the briefing. I imagine this game gets a pass because the gameplay loop itself is so freeflowing and open to exploration.

Yakuza is another game that I genuinely like but would sometimes find it annoying to play because there's so many mini games, mechanics and activities that are zany and not particularly intuitive. So what does the game do? It goes into a hard stop and you read text bubbles for about three minutes about how to accomplish whatever you need to do at that time. Whether it be in combat or in mini games. The game is constantly stopping to tell you what to do.

Or you have something like Pokemon Scarlet where you're not even able to meaningfully explore the open world until after a 3 hour tutorial session of meaningless dialogue where you're railroaded onto a certain path and the game will literally go into a hard stop to tell the player, "Hey. You can't go that way right now."

I suppose I could go on. I don't want to bring up old shit. But, "Get up on the Hydra's back!" is still a meme when it comes to this complaint and that's distinctly from a Japanese game. But I guess I'm not seeing this dichotomy where awful Western devs think their audience is stupid but Japanese devs think their audience are geniuses. Nor am I seeing this massive chasm in between an NPC explaining some game mechanics to you vs. the game pausing and being forced to read a text box for a couple minutes. Why is the latter inherently better designed? Obviously, I do think there are valid complaints about hand holding but I also don't think there's Western then Eastern on their respective sides of the spectrum on this issue. I think there's handholdy Japanese games and there's vague, figure-it-out-yourself Western games. To me, it just feels like everything that isn't taking a specific and deliberate FromSoft approach gets lambasted as "handholdy", and God forbid, let that game be made by people that aren't Japanese.

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Posted by5 days ago

The over-reliance on Discord is doing more harm than good.

Don't get me wrong, I love being able to communicate with friends on the fly and be able to keep up with all sorts of news surrounding games and other pieces of entertainment, but my biggest concern is how Discord is being used to replace other tools. People are turning this app into messy versions of what are supposed to be Forums, Guides, Wikis, Community Events, Mods, you name it... Plus, there's a ton of gatekeeping out there.

I can't be the only one who has took noticed of this, right? It doesn't matter what kind of game it is or what kind of content it's trying to fill, there's gonna be a Discord for literally anything.

Instead of interacting with a guild/community you're part of in-game, you're essentially forced to stick to a Discord server even if the game has all the perfect means of a proper in-game communication;
Instead of keeping up with fan-made events that take place in-game or in other social media platforms, you need to stick to a server that might just do the opposite and draw all attention away from what is actually taking palce inside the game;
Instead of using websites and proper launchers for fan-made games or Private Servers for now defunct MMOs, you're stuck with a Discord server in order to even handle account creation, troubleshoot issues and even contact Support;
Modding as a whole has been shifting from organized websites like the Nexus and the likes to Discord servers instead, which furthers divides these kinds of communities and makes it harder to find things in general;
Any sense of RP has been killed due to the excessive amount of Discord servers trumping games, guilds, forums and chats;
Discord servers are still to restrictive and obscure when it comes to finding them.

There's a whole lot of more examples, but it's getting ridiculous that I have to join well over 20 servers just to keep up with the modding scene for FINAL FANTASY XIV.

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Posted by4 days ago

Is it OK to make AI opponents look like real people?

In many games, Companies pretend like Bots are real players.

Examples:

Fortnite your first few games,

Marvel Snap your first few games,

Stumble Guys,

Battlefield games, especially the latest one...

The list goes on and on.

These games pretend like the opponent you are fighting is a real player, with real portraits, with "human like reaction times", with stereotypical name tags. All they can do to fool you into thinking you are fighting a real human.

To me, this almost sounds like it should be illegal. The companies are giving you the illusion that the game is more popular than it is, and you are winning against a human.

I really don't know if I am fighting a human when I play a game of Hearthstone these days.

Should there idealy be a law that requires gaming companies that Bots/AI characters are CLEARLY MARKED that they are indeed Bots/AI? And is that something you could see something like EU union require in the future?

What's your take?

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