If you're looking for the perfect 4-course meal at a fancy restaurant, you need to match flavors, textures, and colors from a lengthy menu, weigh the transitions from appetizer to main course(s) to desert, and fit in the perfect glass of wine and the ideally sized, shaped, and sweetened dessert.
Only it's a 100-course meal, the menu is 1000 items long, there's a cellar full of wines (most of them are unpronounceable) and it takes months to find a sequence that people will even TRY to eat all the way through.
And even then, they probably won't be satisfied enough to tip you very well, so you keep making slight tweaks to the courses until someone finally gives you the tip you want. At that point it's good enough, but everyone knows it's never perfect. (And they call you on it, too.)
As soon as someone notices that you're making a decent tip, the owner invariably decides they're going to serve Chinese food instead, so you start over.
AI isn't currently fun. It's used mostly as a difficulty slider. And when it's doing its most impressive things, I don't see it happening, so I don't care. So I want two things from AI: I want to know what it's doing, and I want to be the cause of what it's doing.
1) If I've got a bunch of bots on my team, and I rush out like a madman, I want them to be completely suicidal as well, or maybe cover me. And I want them to say "covering you" as they do it, so I don't go sit behind a rock as soon as I hear gunfire.
2) If I'm sneaking up on some AI enemy, I want the AI to recognize that I'm sneaking up on it, and then LET ME SNEAK UP ON IT. Maybe it notices that I'm right next to something I can duck behind, so it shuffles its feet and slowly looks around back towards me, giving me just enough time to respond.
3) If I'm in a deathmatch, I want clever, flawed, fair bots. Bots that know good spots to fight from, but get up and move after a kill or two. Bots that aim poorly when I get the jump on them they just picked up their mouse in panic.
4) If I'm fighting a squad of enemies, I want to overhear their communication somehow so that I don't think they're looking through walls waiting for me. And I want them to react slowly to what I'm doing, not instantaneously.
I want my AI to be fun, and I want it to be pretty obvious it's being fun.
"I don't think a controller should have that much influence on the enjoyment of games."
This man clearly never played his own game for more than 5 minutes. Either that or his thumb is just one giant callous.
The main problem with these cutscenes is that they were created with the intention of being used for ads.
It's bad design to put in cutscenes that look more fun than the game actually is, because the player is disappointed by the game they're playing. That's why you rarely get gameplay-styled CG cutscenes (in-engine cutscenes yes, because that's actual gameplay). But contrary to that rule of thumb, these cutscenes look like they're gameplay straight out of a next-gen army game that the PS2 can't hope to live up to.
If the cutscenes aren't being designed to improve the user experience, then they're being designed for something else. So when they're used in ads that confuse the viewer into thinking it's actual gameplay, then it's pretty clear that from the beginning they were ads, not cutscenes. And at that point it's false advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
would ASCII art count?
Just convince them to modify the code a little bit. Then they become part of the liable party.
If you're looking for the perfect 4-course meal at a fancy restaurant, you need to match flavors, textures, and colors from a lengthy menu, weigh the transitions from appetizer to main course(s) to desert, and fit in the perfect glass of wine and the ideally sized, shaped, and sweetened dessert.
Only it's a 100-course meal, the menu is 1000 items long, there's a cellar full of wines (most of them are unpronounceable) and it takes months to find a sequence that people will even TRY to eat all the way through.
And even then, they probably won't be satisfied enough to tip you very well, so you keep making slight tweaks to the courses until someone finally gives you the tip you want. At that point it's good enough, but everyone knows it's never perfect. (And they call you on it, too.)
As soon as someone notices that you're making a decent tip, the owner invariably decides they're going to serve Chinese food instead, so you start over.
AI isn't currently fun. It's used mostly as a difficulty slider. And when it's doing its most impressive things, I don't see it happening, so I don't care. So I want two things from AI: I want to know what it's doing, and I want to be the cause of what it's doing.
1) If I've got a bunch of bots on my team, and I rush out like a madman, I want them to be completely suicidal as well, or maybe cover me. And I want them to say "covering you" as they do it, so I don't go sit behind a rock as soon as I hear gunfire.
2) If I'm sneaking up on some AI enemy, I want the AI to recognize that I'm sneaking up on it, and then LET ME SNEAK UP ON IT. Maybe it notices that I'm right next to something I can duck behind, so it shuffles its feet and slowly looks around back towards me, giving me just enough time to respond.
3) If I'm in a deathmatch, I want clever, flawed, fair bots. Bots that know good spots to fight from, but get up and move after a kill or two. Bots that aim poorly when I get the jump on them they just picked up their mouse in panic.
4) If I'm fighting a squad of enemies, I want to overhear their communication somehow so that I don't think they're looking through walls waiting for me. And I want them to react slowly to what I'm doing, not instantaneously.
I want my AI to be fun, and I want it to be pretty obvious it's being fun.
"I don't think a controller should have that much influence on the enjoyment of games." This man clearly never played his own game for more than 5 minutes. Either that or his thumb is just one giant callous.
I can't help but think that if he'd played Sim City he would have arrived at this conclusion a lot earlier . . .
This is the Berlin Wall of our century.
The main problem with these cutscenes is that they were created with the intention of being used for ads. It's bad design to put in cutscenes that look more fun than the game actually is, because the player is disappointed by the game they're playing. That's why you rarely get gameplay-styled CG cutscenes (in-engine cutscenes yes, because that's actual gameplay). But contrary to that rule of thumb, these cutscenes look like they're gameplay straight out of a next-gen army game that the PS2 can't hope to live up to. If the cutscenes aren't being designed to improve the user experience, then they're being designed for something else. So when they're used in ads that confuse the viewer into thinking it's actual gameplay, then it's pretty clear that from the beginning they were ads, not cutscenes. And at that point it's false advertising.