• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Sony could soon automatically play portions of games for you (the feature is often already used in many MMORPG games)

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Pretty much almost all mobile games have an auto play feauture. Very commom in RPGs, MMORPGs, and many other genres. For example Black Desert Online has an auto play feauture on mobile, not sure if also has it in the console/PC version.
I dont play mobile games. I didn't know they could have autoplay features.
 
Last edited:

rm082e

Member
Isn't it obvious by now that Sony patents a lot of shit that will never see the light of day?

I was just coming to say this. There's a story like this about Sony every year or two. They have people who dream up dumb shit and they patent the idea in case anyone else actually tries to use that idea in the future. It's a way to lock in those ideas for them, just in case. They don't actually put these into production products.

I remember a few years ago there was one where the console had a camera sitting on top of the TV and they would show you a video commercial, like for McDonalds. The way to skip the add was to stand up and say "McDonalds!". People had a field day with that one online.

Edit: Here it is.
 
Last edited:

panda-zebra

Member
Modern games let you buy the unlocks to save you bothering having to play and now we have this kind of auto-play nonsense where we burn the world's resources to make numbers go up, crypto-style, but without pretending the end result is worth anything.

Grampa Simpson Meme GIF by MOODMAN
 

TGO

Hype Train conductor. Works harder than it steams.
I wish this came out before The last of us 2.
Ai is logical.
So I think even that would struggle to finish it because it can't believe what a shit show the story is.
Imagine if it had comments whilst playing it for you.
That would be something 😂
 
People getting angry at patents again I see (another to the pile of 'will probably never come to anything')

People getting angry at the focus of companies not being where it should be.

It's the same when the next-gen talk is all about buzzwords like raytracing instead of making better games.
As I remember Sony already patented this a while ago, this must be an update of the patent.

You have no idea what you are talking about.


Funny you say that considering that you didn't address my main point.

A game, a book, or a movie should not have useless filler. An entertainment product with an excess of filler is poorly designed by definition.

So making an app that helps you skip content that should not be there in the first place doesn't fix the real issue: why so many games have become dull, why so many open worlds are empty spaces with nothing of interest, and why most side quests are uninspired chores.

This is the same stupidity as the patent of removing NPCs talk. If they were quality, they wouldn't need to be removed.
 

midnightAI

Member
People getting angry at the focus of companies not being where it should be.

It's the same when the next-gen talk is all about buzzwords like raytracing instead of making better games.
They do patents like these all of the time, its not like you are getting developers not working on games instead just thinking up patents, it was probably someones natural 5 minute thought process, came up with the idea and told management and then it was passed to their own patent people. A lot of these patents are just ideas done so that they can beat everyone else to it, most never amount to anything.
 

yurinka

Member
Funny you say that considering that you didn't address my main point.
Yes, I addressed it explaining why it has nothing to do with bad designs or the autobattle feature from gatchas. It's a different thing in terms of concept, goals, possible usages and internal behavior.

A game, a book, or a movie should not have useless filler. An entertainment product with an excess of filler is poorly designed by definition.
This has nothing to do with fillers. Applies to games who both have or don't have them and doesn't try to address, remove or skip them. It's for different things.

So making an app that helps you skip content that should not be there in the first place doesn't fix the real issue: why so many games have become dull, why so many open worlds are empty spaces with nothing of interest, and why most side quests are uninspired chores.
This feature doesn't help you to skip content. The content is still there, but the game plays a portion for you following your gameplay style instead.

So you can go to pee or to have lunch in a game that can't be paused. Or allows to play to disabled players, or people who got stuck, or is lazy, or simply somettimes prefer watching gameplay in Twitch or Youtube than instead of playing.

It has nothing to do with level design in open world games or the many areas related to sidequest content design. This isn't to skip, fix or improve that. It's to let the device play a portion of the game for you, even if the best, well designed and most balanced and engaging game ever.

People will continue being disabled, will continue needing to pee, or will continue being lazy or sometimes prefering to watch instead of playing with that game that wouldn't have anything to "fix".

This is the same stupidity as the patent of removing NPCs talk. If they were quality, they wouldn't need to be removed.
No, it has nothing to do with that other patent. And well, that oher patent doesn't remove anything.

Ai is logical.
So I think even that would struggle to finish it because it can't believe what a shit show the story is.
Imagine if it had comments whilst playing it for you.
That would be something 😂
Well, we have AIs that play videogames, chatbot AIs and multimodal AIs that combine different types of AIs.

So make sure this would be doable, to have a fictional AI companion character that plays with you, makes comments or suggestions and eventually can play some portion of the game for you. In fact, I'd bet Sony already patented that too in another patent.

Edit: seems Sony has a patent for an NPC AI companion, plus another one to help you manage inventory via AI companion. I'd bet there was another one more specific regarding gameplay suggestions and comments.
 
Last edited:

LordCBH

Member
The Spiderman games would be better if they’d auto play the shit MJ sections that nobody asked to be in the game.
 

nial

Gold Member
People getting angry at the focus of companies not being where it should be.

It's the same when the next-gen talk is all about buzzwords like raytracing instead of making better games.
The thing is that you're assuming that game developers are the ones making these patents, and not the engineers working inside their R&D departments. Also, this is definitely not a big focus for SIE.
 

Hudo

Member
Walk-and-talk sections that play themselves genuinely sound like an improvement. Can't wait to watch the next God of War game.
 
Isn't it obvious by now that Sony patents a lot of shit that will never see the light of day?

I don't think that's the issue here.

I think the issue is that Sony's patent here is a tacit admission that so many games are such a chore to play that there's now value in creating a system for the game to play itself on your behalf....

It's a pretty fucking sad commentary on the current state of AAA game design.
 

Kamina

Golden Boy
Crazy, but then again, some people are willing to pay for it. Mainly the same people who are also willing to pay on shady websites that sell these services.
 

Evolved1

make sure the pudding isn't too soggy but that just ruins everything
The illuminati and annunaki won't collect any personal data of you. The game just get that the user number 2394829 likes to kill orcs with a long sword while rushing and elves with a crossbow behind a cover, and approach enemy camps using stealth. And will use that to create an average and different player behaviour types etcetc
I wasn't really referring to personal data. Rather gameplay data -- this is potentially high value data, as one of the frontiers of AI research atm is training on videogames, and they have to curate those data sets by having humans identify and tag everything to ensure high quality training sets. This seems like (possibly, I was only half-serious) a way to use experts' (gamers) gameplay in specific scenarios/ contexts to train models on those tasks. Maybe not. Might be a reach.

However... framing the notion of companies trading on our personal information as some kind of conspiracy theory? That is not a reach. That is reality.
 

yurinka

Member
I wasn't really referring to personal data. Rather gameplay data -- this is potentially high value data, as one of the frontiers of AI research atm is training on videogames, and they have to curate those data sets by having humans identify and tag everything to ensure high quality training sets. This seems like (possibly, I was only half-serious) a way to use experts' (gamers) gameplay in specific scenarios/ contexts to train models on those tasks. Maybe not. Might be a reach.

However... framing the notion of companies trading on our personal information as some kind of conspiracy theory? That is not a reach. That is reality.
The current games already collect withou AI -annonimous, aggregate- data (known as metrics) from how you play: how long are your game sessions, how many days did you play, which level do you have, the amount of money you spent, which weapons you equip, how many times each enemy type killed you, which level you reached, until which stage you played, your accuracy with this or that weapon and a ton of things more.

This simply produces some graphs of these things showing the behavior of all the players.

This info helps devs to identify bugs, stuff that players don't understand, or places where players get stuck so there may be an unexpected difficulty spike, or something frustratting that make players quit, help them to rebalance weapons or enemies, or improve level design fixing parts that are too boring or too frustrating, etc. They also help them know which items are more popular on the store or the least popular ones (so they take note for the fuure ones introduced there).

Basically this data, which are only statistics of the whole playerbase, is used to improve the game. This kind of data is very unique for each game, and even for a game keeps changing as the game gets updated, expanded or fixed. So can't be used anywhere else, only in some cases as rough reference (like to compare if people play on average more days than other one, or if pays more money on average, etc).

And well, other than the game designer who has to work in game updates or the sequel of the game, nobody cares if you prefer to use the fire sword against orcs or the ice crossbow against elves, or if the difficulty curve of the game seems to have an issue in level 23 because there are more players stuck there than expected.
 
Last edited:

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
If it’s so bad people don’t want play it and it’s of so little value they don’t have to, then why is it even in the game at all?

Might serves as a clutch for developer to not improve the bad parts of the game.
 

cireza

Member
Sony wants to take back market share from its main competitor, youtube.

Some Nintendo games have this already, by the way.
 
Last edited:

tibia

Neo Member
Ok...but just cut out the bs, go a few steps further and bring back game sharks. Let players be outrageous and explore their own ideas of fun. Developers be like "we created this world for you to run around for 300hours to collect meat and fish shells" to upgrade your bicycle to level 1.1/20.

Modern day Shit games like Star Ocean can be fun (and thus finally have a purpose) if you can use a machine gun with unlimited ammo and ignore spending hours collecting a laundry list of items.
 
Sony certainly has some data how many hours of rubberbanding and stuff a lot of people did in the past to get a final trophy or something. I rather see them remove those parts from games, not autoplay them more conveniently.
Games should better know how long they are fun and cut the filler bs before that point is reached. Artificially adding play time through insane 5000miles driving, 50000 kills, 1000 janky purchases and all the other random shit is never fun. Games keeping you busy can be okay entertainment, but only to a certain extent. Once it's just repetitive with obnoxious goals, many gamers will finish that nevertheless but think twice before touching that franchise again.
 

Impotaku

Member
Sony wants to take back market share from its main competitor, youtube.

Some Nintendo games have this already, by the way.
Yup this is indeed in Nintendo stuff so journalists and younger players are not excluded from been able to join in or complete games.

Not just nintendo as it’s in nier automata you can turn auto battle on and let the game do it for you however some input is needed as you still have to walk into enemies to start the battle. Same with dragon quest 11 I’m guessing Sony’s system automates everything.
 
Top Bottom