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Ironically, Kotaku doesn't understand the concept of NPCs at all; or further proof that their staff doesn't really know much about games.

Fuz

Banned
Kotaku , the click bait masters since forever......

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wat
 

dirthead

Banned
You're wrong, OP, if they had used machine learning and the power of the Cloud™, the NPCs could have been interesting and amazing. Also, I have many tattoos and wear earlobe stretchers to show how proactive I am.

QUVYRz3.jpg
 

Kamina

Golden Boy
We tip our hat like a proper gentleman, and we kill anyone we want. The game rewards those masculine impulses without fail.
So murdering is a masculine impulse?

God those weird people these days.
 

joe_zazen

Member
While there's some low quality flavor of the moment thinking in that piece I think it's a valid criticism of open world games to point out the limitations of the game world. As far back as Ultima npc have had schedules with set activities. There are of course severe limitations to this because it's not practical for good game content to have even an on rails Westworld "simulation". That would make the player a bystander more often than not - however there are better and worse ways to handle the illusion of spontaneity. Randomly spawning in events out of nowhere can kill the illusion of an unfolding world. Processing power is such that there probably won't even be a simplified a-life simulation any time soon but it's still possible to have some tracks for characters with random events happening to them in the cone of the players interaction

Agree. And thats why I shake my head at the hyperbole some games get: ‘feels like a living, breathing world’ type stuff. It is all smoke and mirrors, poke a little and the illusion is broken.

I want AI infused games that can create an on-the-fly collaborative narrative, like having a DM running your video-game.
 

JORMBO

Darkness no more
RDR2 has some of the best NPCs from what I have played so far. I don’t know what more to expect with technology at this point. They are more interesting then most of the writers over at Kotaku.
 

nkarafo

Member
This Heather Alexandra person... He/she gets paid for this drivel? That's the worst thing from all this IMO.
 

Cybrwzrd

Banned
https://archive.fo/baK5q (archived link as to not give this trash any clicks)

This is what passes for "games journalism" these days. Somebody complaining that NPCs are scripted and not powered by some incredible (non-existent) AI. How little do you have to know about games and how they are made to even suggest such non-sense is beyond me. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised that an NPC doesn't understand the concept of NPCs, they're not created to think for themselves after all, but only to regurgitate the narrative they've been fed.

Yeah I saw Tim Pool's video on this.



Heather is one of the worst journalists in gaming. So are many of Kotaku's hires this decade though, like Patricia. That is why I pretty much stopped reading the site.

I used to love Kotaku back in the early days of the site. Back in the 00's. Then these hires started. Now you have people writing about games who are not there because they are gamers. It goes back to that other topic - people who are getting hired are not going into games media out of love of gaming. Sure, they may play games, but that isn't who they are.

Imagine if ESPN started hiring commentators who were not big sports fans, but were instead, fashion and style commentators. You'd start getting articles interjecting their interests into articles. Comments on why a team's uniform isn't fashionable, or about a player's fashion choices off of the field. This would piss off sports fans, right?
 
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makaveli60

Member
Yeah I saw Tim Pool's video on this.



Heather is one of the worst journalists in gaming. So are many of Kotaku's hires this decade though, like Patricia. That is why I pretty much stopped reading the site.

I used to love Kotaku back in the early days of the site. Back in the 00's. Then these hires started. Now you have people writing about games who are not there because they are gamers. It goes back to that other topic - people who are getting hired are not going into games media out of love of gaming. Sure, they may play games, but that isn't who they are.

Imagine if ESPN started hiring commentators who were not big sports fans, but were instead, fashion and style commentators. You'd start getting articles interjecting their interests into articles. Comments on why a team's uniform isn't fashionable, or about a player's fashion choices off of the field. This would piss off sports fans, right?

It's so sad seeing what it has become. When I read Kotaku back then I got the impression that it was a site made based on respect and love towards videogaming. I suppose nobody gets this impression now.
 
It's so sad seeing what it has become. When I read Kotaku back then I got the impression that it was a site made based on respect and love towards videogaming. I suppose nobody gets this impression now.

I have actually blocked Kotaku via hosts file so I don't visit that site, even by mistake. That's the level of contempt I have for them.
 

Geki-D

Banned
"Players aren't necessary for gamers to exist" is literally the worst sentence written by a gamer journalist ever. It requires a whole new level of unthink for it to make sense.
Nah, it makes perfect sense. Gamers Are Dead, after all.
 
Fuck right off, if this has the most puppet like NPC's you ever experienced, I question how many games you've played.



Wrong, you will be punished for killing anyone you want. You are not rewarded for it unless we're talking about looting the corpse, you are in fact made more evil with each murder.



There is no other alternative you fucking absolute worthless hack. Tell me how you have a game with NPC's that exist for another purpose other than to be there waiting for me to interact with them. It's infuriating that we're in a place where you have to tell a professional games journalist that games are entertainments products made with the primary, in fact I'm going to say only, goal of giving the person who bought it a good time. Go make a fucking grievance game where I have to sit in a chair and have no agency, and must listen to NPC's lecture me, make them exist not for my entertainment but to shame me and educate me on all the ways I and people like me who might enjoy a game like Red Dead are problematic members of society. Go make that game, please.



Sounds like a pretty cool little NPC side-mission, how can she find this problematic?




If he existed persistently, how would you know? This woman does not understand the medium she writes about.



No, it's not true "to a certain extent", it's a fundamental aspect of videogames. They exist for the player. Everything in it exists for the player, and I would be curious to hear their description of a game that wasn't built for the player.



One wonders how she manages to live in a modern city with all the NPC bugmen.



Actually I think you've had your head up your own Idpol ass for so long you are unable to even see the game for what it is anymore. You focus on the puppeteers and the strings to the detriment of all else.



NPC wants respect and freedom for all NPCs.
This is a really great post imo
 
Kotaku , the click bait masters since forever......

DGDNsfp.png

Please tell me this isn’t real. This is going way too far. People wonder why I think modern gaming journalism is a absolute, bonafide joke. Also, those tweets......

Edit: Ah, so it’s fake? With the way things are going now, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was real lol.
 
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zenspider

Member
From what I’ve seen and experienced in more recent times, seems like there are a fair share of journalists are not too knowledgeable or really are passionate about gaming.

I feel some people who get these type of jobs are just there for money or to make a political statement and not because they genuinely love gaming. I’m sure that applies to practically any industry though.

I too am starting to suspect that 'gaming' is just the low-hanging fruit of journalism.
 
There are some legitimate arguments against the implementation of the NPCs in RDR2, but they're overall pretty great for the type of game Rockstar was trying to make.

I do wish we would move away from RPG-style "Here's a handful of nodes on a map. If you're in a town and go to any building that isn't a node, there probably will be absolutely nothing to do." and start moving towards immersive sim (Deus Ex, VTMB)-style "Here's a city, every building will have someone or something interesting in it. The former does make the world feel like a stage play, where the buildings you can't enter are props.

Maybe that's what the author was feeling, and they misunderstood the cause?
 

Mr Nash

square pies = communism
This reminds me of stories from the Elder Scrolls' developers from either when they were making Oblivion or Skyrim and were introducing a new AI system for the NPCs. They actually had to dial it back because of the shenanigans they were getting up to. Apparently one NPC turned into a skooma addict that got into all sorts of trouble. XD
 

Lightsbane

Member
I have nothing else to say about the content itself, I just wanna say that you're doing God's work for putting that archived link in the OP.

Doesn't even matter which God, because none of them would support that stupid article.
 
I read the article and although I am not exactly sure what the purpose of it all was I think (?) that the author was either:
a) Trying to explain that although the RDR2 world seems so alive and rich that the NPCs inhabiting that world seem to not be as 'alive' in comparison? In other words, Rockstar crafted a very credible simulation of an (albeit still mythical and stylized) "Wild West" world but the author seems to think that the NPCs aren't quite as "lifelike" as the rest of that world and thus stand out much more than NPCs in a lesser video game world. In other words, the RDR2 world is so realistic that the immersion is somewhat broken when interacting with the NPCs.

b) Suggesting that Rockstar exaggerated or mislead how the NPCs would react to in-game situations and ended up being more scripted than Rockstar originally had stated they would be in the game.

Not saying I personally hold to either of these readings as the article; I am trying to explain what perhaps the author was maybe trying to convey.

But that was one meandering, SJW agenda pushing piece of trash article regardless. A bad article is one in which you have no idea what the author was really trying to explain or discuss.

Kotaku is going to Kotaku. Nothing more to see here...

EDIT: Thanks OP for providing the archived version - I would have avoided reading it otherwise as I usually avoid Kotaku.
 
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Xaero Gravity

NEXT LEVEL lame™
I don't think I've ever genuinely despised a website more than I do Kotaku. I can't believe people are actually getting paid to be this fucking stupid. What the fuck kind of world are we living in?
 
What's the difference?
One group can operate an elevator.

The other group question the masculine impulses of pushing numbered buttons whilst being confined to a man-made metal cage that is designed to operate in a binary fashion in an overtly phallic tube housed in an erected statement of man's inflexible and indelible impression on the natural world.
 

HotPocket69

Banned
I'd appreciate it if the author put a little more effort into convincing others that he's a chick instead of just dying his hair pink and looking like a Culture Club reject.
 
I don't think I've ever genuinely despised a website more than I do Kotaku. I can't believe people are actually getting paid to be this fucking stupid. What the fuck kind of world are we living in?

Unfortunately, although the rise of the world wide web and the internet has led to a great many things, it hasn't done journalism and news any favors. News is mostly complete and utter shit now. Mostly gone are the days when newspapers could publish well written and thought out articles on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and has been replaced with shitty quick-to-publish low brow controversial so-called "articles" with little oversight or editing in this age of ad-directed click-bait. And it doesn't help that most media and news sites have all converged from several hundred companies down to being owned by just a few and that they don't want articles with non-politically correct viewpoints being "published" because they're worried about what their stock holders would think. Even CNN is garbage now but it was probably the first that really got this shitball rolling back in the '80s when they started showing fluff pieces and going much more in depth with their coverage of hot news stories to fill every hour of their 365/24/7 news cycle.
 

Ogbert

Member
I too am starting to suspect that 'gaming' is just the low-hanging fruit of journalism.

Alas, I think this is the basic problem.

Games journalism is, let's be honest, a highly enjoyable but rather ridiculous profession. It's kid's stuff. That's not a criticism, by the way, it's why it's so fun.

The likes of Kotaku employee not especially bright individuals that what to work for the op-ed section of the New York Times. Like all people that aren't very bright, they're convinced that their opinion is correct. They don't like games. They've never liked games. They take no joy from the basic mechanics of playing a video game. They just use the industry as a launching point into their tiresome world of college progressive politics.
 
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