Videogames - Meanwhile in Poland.

[Werthead]

25 minutes ago, C.T. Phipps said:

Made a Cyberpunk 2077 thread:

 

Ha, I was just starting one as well.

[Luzifer's right hand]

14 hours ago, RumHam said:

I have not, but I returned my Xbox One copy and am doing the GeForce Now thing. It's like night and day. I could have actually lived with the terrible graphics but it runs so much smoother and loads so much quicker. Have yet to encounter a queue here in the northeast US. 

If you have decent internet I think that's the way to go if you can't find a next gen console. 

Might be the best approach. I found a few videos form the XBox One X and while it looks ok unlike the base console versions performance seems rather bad even with the tiny crowds of NPCs. Too bad you can't install Gefore Now on the Xbox.  I'm playing on the PC myself but I got a console gamer in the house who wants to play the game.

I got the first side quest with  really strong enemies and sneaking/hacking to avoid them worked really well. A real fucked up quest to...

Spoiler

Some guys were selling the internal recordings of child murders. I avoided to enemies because they were too strong for me but I did kill the two guys in charge. My next mission involves a monk that was forcefully modified with implants. 

 

 

[Corvinus85]

Need the hive mind of computer experts.

I installed my new PC parts, but ran into a snag for now. So I installed a new AMD Rzyen 3700X + the required motherboard from MSI + RAM DDR4. I kept my GPU for now, a GTX 970, and my SSD which is Samsung 850 Evo. Plenty of storage on it. It would not recognize the SSD, couldn't boot from it, couldn't even do a clean Windows install if I wanted to; until in the BIOS Setup menu I found the option to switch the SATA mode between RAID and AHCI. No idea what that was, so I did a quick search. So it was on RAID, but prior to all this I was using an Intel CPU, therefore I decided to switch to AHCI. And bam, booted at the next reset, Windows loaded, no issues. I've updated drivers.

But I'm wondering if I should do something about that RAID/AHCI mode thing. Maybe there is a driver I need to install.

[Ran]

@Corvinus85

RAID is for using multiple drives concurrently in various modes. With just one drive, AHCI is the only appropriate choice. Not sure why the BIOS would default to a RAID array.

[A True Kaniggit]

Meanwhile in Poland...... 

It makes me want to start a Hearts of Iron IV game and attack. 

But as who?

Germany or the USSR. 

[Jace, Extat]

1 minute ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Meanwhile in Poland...... 

It makes me want to start a Hearts of Iron IV game and attack. 

But as who?

Germany or the USSR. 

Danzig or War

[A True Kaniggit]

11 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

Danzig or War

It seems my choice has been made for me.

The exciting part is the later game when my German fleet takes control of the Atlantic in preparation for an American invasion.

Don't mess with German Carriers.

Edit:  Aaaaahhhhh! An update. Enjoy this time of peace while it lasts fictional video game Poland!

Edit 2: Holy shit! 1600 hours played! Is that too much? Naaaaah. I’m just getting my money’s worth.

Damn video games are a good investment entertainment wise. 

[RumHam]

11 hours ago, Werthead said:

You can also do a side-job during this mission where you free, kill or ignore a prisoner, which also has big implications down the road (free him and he'll owe you a big favour, which makes a later mission easier).

That is unfortunate. 

I found a detonator and hit it figuring it'd kill some bad guys or be a nice distraction or maybe even blow the door to his cell open. Yeah he's dead now. 

Also in that mission the Militech lady gave me some credits with a virus and there was a popup about hacking into to to learn its secrets but I couldn't figure out how? It was obvious when she insisted you pay with her credits that it was some kind of trick but I couldn't figure out how to hack the credits card and have my character realize that.

 

[Werthead]

12 hours ago, RumHam said:

That is unfortunate. 

 

  Hide contents

12 hours ago, RumHam said:

That is unfortunate. 

 

  Hide contents

I found a detonator and hit it figuring it'd kill some bad guys or be a nice distraction or maybe even blow the door to his cell open. Yeah he's dead now. 

Also in that mission the Militech lady gave me some credits with a virus and there was a popup about hacking into to to learn its secrets but I couldn't figure out how? It was obvious when she insisted you pay with her credits that it was some kind of trick but I couldn't figure out how to hack the credits card and have my character realize that.

 

 

 

Answered in the CP77 thread.

[Proudfeet]

I'm trying out the $1 trial of game pass for Xbox Live on Windows and I just got struck by the Steam controller refusing to work as a game pad outside of Steam. Not sure if the problem lies with Microsoft or Valve, but its another annoyance I have to deal with that has made me regret my purchase. 

The current workaround is to either download a third party app for easy management or to rebind my Steam controller desktop keys to the default keyboard keys in the game. Neither is particularly difficult but its still an extra effort that I could have done without. In fact, I'm irate just from having to troubleshoot. It just feels so unnecessary.

 

[Werthead]

Codemasters are in a bidding war between Take Two and EA, which is a nice place to be in (as the bidding has gone over $1 billion already).

A bit of a shame though as Codemasters are just about the biggest, last remaining independent UK studios and publishers. We still have some big studios (the biggest of all being Rockstar) but they're owned by US or Japanese firms. Codemasters, who started in the 1980s with games like the classic Dizzy series, were really the last men standing from that era.

I think Take Two sounds like a better fit. After EA gutted and burned Bullfrog, not to mention their more recent handling of BioWare, I think they can go jump out a window.

[Luzifer's right hand]

I was wondering if the "stupid" AI in most open world games is an intentional design decision? Do people even want enemies that are difficult to predict? There have been shooters with interesting AI. F.E.A.R comes to mind(they even downgraded the AI and added a lot of screaming to make it more predictable). Sneak games tend to have enemies that are much better at noticing that something weird is happening too. Bethesda style sneak gameplay needs stupid AI to work in the other hand.

If all enemies in an area gang up on you things can get pretty difficult in such games. You can experince that if you install AI mods for Bethesda games.

Just some thoughts I had while playing Cyperpunk which seems very Bethesdaish when it comes to AI.

[Fez]

4 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I was wondering if the "stupid" AI in most open world games is an intentional design decision?

Yes. There's a fair amount of evidence that most gamers don't want actually smart enemies. They want patterns that they can recognize and beat.

And open world games need stupid NPCs for the players to be able to actually do all the content. I remember reading a story about one of the Bethesda games, I think it was Oblivion, how at one point in development it had "smart" AI for the NPCs. It led to stuff like skooma addicts killing off the skooma dealers when they ran out of skooma to sell; which wasn't great since one of those skooma dealers was supposed to be a quest giver. And vampires would regularly leave their caves/castles/dungeons and kill off villagers. Everything was too chaotic for the player to still complete designed objectives. So the AI was dramatically dumbed down. Granted, that's 15 years ago, but I suspect its still a problem.

[Werthead]

9 minutes ago, Fez said:

Yes. There's a fair amount of evidence that most gamers don't want actually smart enemies. They want patterns that they can recognize and beat.

And open world games need stupid NPCs for the players to be able to actually do all the content. I remember reading a story about one of the Bethesda games, I think it was Oblivion, how at one point in development it had "smart" AI for the NPCs. It led to stuff like skooma addicts killing off the skooma dealers when they ran out of skooma to sell; which wasn't great since one of those skooma dealers was supposed to be a quest giver. And vampires would regularly leave their caves/castles/dungeons and kill off villagers. Everything was too chaotic for the player to still complete designed objectives. So the AI was dramatically dumbed down. Granted, that's 15 years ago, but I suspect its still a problem.

The logic chains in games are quite impressive. In Oblivion I accidentally released Umbra (the high-level psycho living in a cave right across from the Imperial City) at around Level 3 and had zero chance of killing her, so I legged it along the lakeshore to find her still chasing me. Fortunately I ran into an Imperial patrol and let them fend her off whilst I scarpered and fast-travelled out of the area as soon as I got clear.

30-odd hours later I was headed back to the city to face the final confrontation along with Lord Boromir Stark and decided to head overland. We found the entire lakeshore littered with corpses. There must have been hundreds of them. I was trying to work out WTF was going on where Umbra came screaming down the hillside and attacked. Being much higher in level and with Ser Eddard Sharpe at my side, we defeated the creature. Clearly the game's AI had just had her roaming the lakeside for the whole intervening period murdering the shit out of everything in sight. I'd been fast-travelling back and forth so had never actually really passed through the area again.

I remember GTA3 had codes that allowed you to fiddle with the AI. I activated the cheat code which 1) increased pedestrian aggression by 500% and 2) randomly gave every pedestrian in the game a random weapon. The result was complete and total insanity, trying to do street races and random passers-by would whip out missile launchers, or standing on a roof and watching 200 civilians engaging in their own deathmatch in front of you. It was proper bananas.

[Luzifer's right hand]

It does feel like game developers gave up on the smarter AI approach in the late 2000. Fear and Stalker are the last FPS games the impressed me in the regard and Skyrim did feel like a downgrade from Oblivion in some ways.

[Kalbear]

I did a graduate study on AI in gaming and for the most part the answer is that no one really wants AI which is emergent in the game. They like some AI (like pathfinding or squad work) but the time spent on making even vaguely decent ai is so far beyond what the effort is to make it just procedural and good enough. 

The one main exception is often strategy games, which can have very complex ai at times. Because if you don't have a decent ai there the game is too easy. 

[Heartofice]

4 hours ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

I did a graduate study on AI in gaming and for the most part the answer is that no one really wants AI which is emergent in the game. They like some AI (like pathfinding or squad work) but the time spent on making even vaguely decent ai is so far beyond what the effort is to make it just procedural and good enough. 

The one main exception is often strategy games, which can have very complex ai at times. Because if you don't have a decent ai there the game is too easy. 

I remember back when Half Life came out and everyone wet themselves because the AI actually hid behind crates and threw grenades at you, instead of standing out in the open and shooting. I don't know if we've advanced massively since then. 

I mostly play strategy games and it really does seem like the AI is hardly what you call smart. Usually they are given an objective, a series of tasks are weighted towards what they should or shouldn't be doing and then you'll add in a level of aggression and player bias. Unfortunately in pretty much all the games I play, like Total War, Civ 6 etc, the only real way to counter the human is just to give the AI buffs.

CIV 6 is a real case of this where the harder difficulty levels are defined by how much of a head start the AI gets, and rarely are there any other factors involved. Once you get past that initial section you can steam roll anyone. I think that is a bit of a theme with a lot of games.

[Fiddler]

I was able to pick up some new games this past month.

Picked up Black Ops Cold War and am loving it.  I am a huge CoD fan and I love the multiplayer of Cold War.  While it feels a bit light when it comes to the maps to play on, I am still really enjoying the game itself.

Also finally grabbed Mortal Shell.  A souls-like game that is quite fun.  The difficulty is a bit higher than in Souls game, IMO, because at least in souls you can grab a help for tough parts.  Overall a very enjoyable experience with some nice tweaks to the set up.

Started playing Cyberpunk this past weekend.  Very enjoyable experience overall.  Only major bug I ran into was a lot of crashes early on.  Since the patch a couple days ago, it has been much better.  Like the overall style of the game, just wish the driving was a bit better.

Still playing Fallout 76 also.  Took a couple of weeks off after fishing the season 2 board, but now it looks like season 3 starts today, so I will be back at it, doing some dailies and playing through the newish Brotherhood of Steel questline.

[RumHam]

This controller/mouse hybrid looks awesome and I want one. 

Edit: I just remembered I can do something very similar using a program called Joy2Key to map WASD and some other buttons to a left switch joy-con while using the mouse with my right hand. I did that the last time I played a PC FPS but totally forgot about it. 

[Soylent Brown]

On 12/14/2020 at 1:03 AM, Werthead said:

Codemasters are in a bidding war between Take Two and EA, which is a nice place to be in (as the bidding has gone over $1 billion already).

A bit of a shame though as Codemasters are just about the biggest, last remaining independent UK studios and publishers. We still have some big studios (the biggest of all being Rockstar) but they're owned by US or Japanese firms. Codemasters, who started in the 1980s with games like the classic Dizzy series, were really the last men standing from that era.

I think Take Two sounds like a better fit. After EA gutted and burned Bullfrog, not to mention their more recent handling of BioWare, I think they can go jump out a window.

It's funny to me how big Codemasters ended up getting, given my memory of them from the early 90s is they were churning out shitty game after shitty game. I stayed well away from anything with their name on it. Did they just manage to coast along on the goodwill Dizzy brought them in the 80s?

Ubisoft are another I remember from the Amiga days as not being especially good, though they had a slightly dodgy tennis game that was at least fun.

 

I'm leaving Cyberpunk alone for a good while yet, but I've been rooting through the sales for bits- played Heavy Rain, which despite the stupid as shit story, dodgy voice acting and having to fight the stupid camera the whole way through, was still kind of fun. Super dark and depressing though, so I decided to go a little brighter for my next game and have started Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, which is great; like being in a Studio Ghibli film.