No Man's Sky, the comeback of the generation? NMS v2.0 reviews

[Chazore]

SvennoJ said:

People aren't really interested in complex AI. A couple games have tried and it either inconveniences the player (radiant AI from Oblivion, where has my quest NPC gone off to now) or makes encounters too hard for most players. Complex AI mostly goes unnoticed. The human mind is very good at detecting patterns, but sucks at noticing complex interacting systems. A lot of work for developers with little pay off.

It's the same reason climbable ledges are subtly or less subtly marked, resources always look the same and environments stay predictable. (got to have those chest high walls :/)

What games need is an AI director to notice what keeps you interested and dynamically adjusts the game based on that. Procedural games that read your mind and provide the right variation and challenge for each player. We are still far away from that though.

I'm all for living enduring worlds though. If you settle on a planet it should at least have seasons and react to the effect of multiple suns. Rivers swelling after rain, tides coming in, tidal bore, snow, ice jams and trees actually growing. There's still so much to do to make worlds fully interactive. Yet it mostly comes down to data storage and speed of storage. From dust is what I want for entire worlds, yet our current slow and limited data storage makes that impossible. Static procedural worlds is where we are at. SC's city planet looks very cool but is ultimately the same. I want the landscape to change when I fly over a planet, not be the same wherever you land. Exploring an alien planet should involve more than checking out a square kilometer before moving on to the next planet.

I'll keep dreaming for now. SC is not going to revolutionize living worlds either. For now I'm happily playing NMS again. I'll get bored of it again, fire up ED again for a while, get bored, go back to GTS sport mode.

People are interested, otherwise we wouldn't be making strides to create different AI that serve different purposes at this time.

The only people not interested are those who either do not care for interacting with AI, or seeking new technological advancements. 

The AI in Oblivion was more or less devised to appear as if it was something complex, when really it was pre-coded random paths for which the game chose to present you. I don't really see Bethesda, the most incapable of devs, having creating some "living" AI, since the radiant didn't even display much complexity, outside of appearing random, but when you look at it, it was the game jumbling different choices/paths, to then have said choices/paths find the player and interact, but only you, since you were the agent that could control what was going on within the game.

AN AI director also serves a similar function, in that it observes your progression, and is then instructed to interact with you, via making your life difficult or easier, never really reaching out to you personally, in a more meaningful way, that isn't "X enemies are stronger/more in number". Take L4D's Director, it simply chose to make things more hectic or sparse for you, that was literally all it could do, and nothing more.

Have you ever thought as something so complex, as an AI that becomes self aware?. We dream of it via films like Terminator, and that's the sort of AI I want, not some director that's told to do only two things, or one that is jumbled like some rubix cube, in order to appear different on the outside, but static in nature on the inside.

Personally, I find what SC is doing as a small step, but a bigger step than what other AAA games are offering, especially in terms of interaction types and massive worlds. At least leaving an entering a planet in that game looks and feels more immersive, while NMS's one is simply a transition moment, but one that is very brief.