Wow that’s depressing. I guess the main solace is that if Sony patents this then we’re unlikely to see this practice on other systems.
A lot of times companies will patent things that they don’t necessarily intend to ever produce. Sometimes to obscure the patents that they actually do want to produce. Sometimes to reserve it in the case that they do want to later. And sometimes so that no one else can.
This. Sony patented the stand up and say something to skip ads.
This was a decade ago, and it’s not a thing, and won’t be a thing.
Also, the OP article is an accessibility thing, sometimes people just can’t physically do stuff, fuck them for their disability I guess is what top level comment is saying.
I love that patent. Whoever made it was really trolling.
As someone who does have a cognitive disability, there is a genuine difference between augmented input/level skip vs. what is effectively an integrated TAS.
Mario Kart 8 is a good example of accessibility that still empowers the player, as the player still needs to hold an input and retains control of the character - it’s just that massive errors that would result in loss (IE: falling off the track) are prevented by corrective steering taking control.
An automated TAS gives no empowerment to the player - it’s no different that running a lengthy macro script. If I wanted to watch the characters have an adventure without my ability to have influence in the journey, I’d just watch a movie instead.
Why are you assuming everyone will use it for the whole game? While that’s a possibility, those would be edge cases. The article specifically talks about it helping with CERTAIN parts. If you just ignore a major point of an article, of course you can embellish and look foolish.
Having a TAS to beat certain sections or a hard boss would be awesome, having it play the whole game? Well some people will have a benefit from it, but not for me.
And physical disabilities exist too!
Ai is not, and cannot be considered an accessibility feature. If anything it’ll just stifle any genuine attempts to create something accessible because why bother trying to make the game fun for everyone when the ai can just play the game for you when you’re stuck
What a horrible take.
I get “screw ai” but this doesn’t even need to use ai to work.
But go off I guess, people like you are just the worse. Decrying Ai, doubly so when it’s not even relevant to the story.
Still, on the long list of shit we need to fix with America, fixing the patent system is a big one.
Large corps buy them like lotto tickets and try to patent anything and everything they can.
Look how long WB has sat on the Nemisis system because they got a patent a decade ago on it. It wasn’t really a unique idea, but thousands of games have been prevented from doing anything similar.
They patented a very specific algorithm for a very specific kind of game. You can still do knock-offs of the system in the same way you can make RTS games without asking Blizzard’s permission or platformers without asking Nintendo’s.
I would suspect that SoM’s system is complex enough that nobody’s been eager to try and replicate it. But they high level concept of randomized enemy generation isn’t something you can patent. Neither is randomizing story elements between NPCs.
Digital Extremes was going to do something somewhat similar with their nemesis system in Warframe but had to scrap it because of that patent. So now we have the mediocre Lich/Sister/Boyband systems in place instead.
The Lich system was pretty close to the mark. Possible that developers gave the underlying features of SoM a wide berth out of caution, but so much of this seems to boil down to “we don’t want to risk the possibility of a lawsuit” rather than “we can’t just do our thing and see if WB’s lawyers care enough”.
So long as you’re not directly ripping off the code from another system, patent courts have been pretty generous in interpreting overlapping abstract concepts.
But any kind of suit is scary, particularly for studios that aren’t geared up to fight them.
It wasn’t complex at all. It’s incredibly simple
What is your problem with it? Just seems like an accessability feature to me. The one issue I see with it is folks who don’t need it using it in lieu of walkthroughs and wasting energy. I don’t expect that to be that big an issue though, generally people buy games because they want to play them.
Just screw disabled people eh?
Somethings aren’t possible for people to do, this would allow them to enjoy playing games still.
Just make a fuckin movie!
Sony:
I’m just gonna end up being an old man in my basement, staying warm with the radiant glow from my CRT monitor while playing SNES, Genesis and NES games.
I’m already there. It’s peaceful.
-inserts Aladdin geneses cart- “Then the fire nation attacked.”
There is a small bit of intrigue here, imagine you get to a boss and think, ‘this is impossible’ but there is an ability to observe a ghost of your character taking the boss on in your gear.
Bare in mind as well that ‘AI’ has existed as a word in gaming for decades and has nothing to do with LLMs, surely this is achieveable purely with the gaming definition of ‘AI’ simply coding the PC also as an NPC that reacts to things.
Yeah, it really annoyed me that the author of this piece doesn’t understand the distinction between AI as a concept (always around in computing) and AI as in LLMs and the other stuff.
And the next patent will be about a controller, not actually being plugged into the console, but merely giving gamers the illusion of affecting the gameplay…
I also made my little brother player 2.
Wait until they discover some remote controller, where you can switch the games that are played according to some schedule. Like some form of game stations. Maybe they could broadcast them for the whole population somehow, so that everybody can talk about the games they
playedwatched last week on their next town hall gathering or Sunday church with Aunt Lizzy.You’re on an entirely different plane of reality mate, my brain just can’t fathom a forward-thinking concept as such ;)
Every game is an idle game now… ?
Sure, why not.
Player counts is all Wall Street is looking for.
I’m not sure how I feel about games that are easy enough that AI can play them, and that people might need help with them.
The games we play are that easy though. Dark souls with eyes = hard, dark souls to an entity which has no eyes, but can read RAM states = easy.
Most singleplayer games (so the opponents are clockwork) are easy to enough to play with heuristics, why do we need a whole ass neural network?
But what if with banana?
This feels like it’s going to incentivise developers to either make bad puzzles, or bad hint systems. Why bother with a good one if the platform has a “complete this for me” feature? It is basically impossible for players to get stuck or struggle, when they’re either shown the solution, or the game completes it for them.
Isn’t this already done with Mario game(s)? I think it was Super Mario Deluxe, where if you die enough times, Luigi shows up and will be doing the entire level for you including the ‘boss’ fight.
On Super Mario Wii U this happens. My daughter used it to see how to get through levels she was having trouble with. It’s frustrating to watch, though it showed me I was wrong that levels basically needed the run button to be held to make it across the gaps.
And then you can either accept that the ghost beat the level for you or go back to trying.
But, the thing is it’s not very difficult to do this with specific games. You can just record the inputs as they come in and replay those, which is how replays or saved games often work.
Seems like they want to be able to do this for arbitrary games, which requires a much more sophisticated system that can understand what’s on the screen, what the goals are, and how to achieve them using just video and audio feedback (and maybe hint documents from the makers).
Vibe gaming
Can’t wait for crappy devs to use this feature as an excuse to design dogshit puzzles.
I’d rather have this than the currently popular “if the player hasn’t solved the puzzle within 30 seconds, have a character start repeatedly giving the solution away”.
“To solve this puzzle, you have to get your dog to poop in the circle…”
If the AI is unable to finish those puzzles because they are as you say “dogshit” then it still wouldn’t fix anything.
AI also still needs context, just like players. A better solution would just be a premade cutscene.
I’m more talking about crappily made halfasses riddles and puzzles that require huge leaps of logic to the point that random brute force is just as valid a solution.
Like the stuff from NES/SNES days. Not actually a puzzle, but just random sequences of seemingly unrelated triggers. Castlevania II comes to mind as a quick example.
Remember when the way to beat hard bosses was to either git gud or input a built in cheat code? Pepperidge Farms remembers
MMO veterans might be very interested in this kind of totally never seen before type of play automation
Remember when the way to beat hard bosses was to either
git gudhand the controller to an older sibling/cousin/friend or input a built in cheat code?Why would you single out MMO veterans in this scenario? I’ve been playing MMOs since 2001 AND I git gud. I am the older sibling/cousin that you hand your controller to when you don’t want to git gud to pass a boss.
Overall… I hate this idea that Sony has. If this becomes the norm I might never play a new game again 😭
Singled them out because they’re the most used to seeing “autoplayers”, aka bots
Mmo players are the lowest form of humanity.
Lmfao what? Ok.
Oh boy, the darksouls community is doing to be very funny to read
this just in the next generation of video games will play themselves. Due to rising costs though play time for most run-throughs will top out at about 90 minutes.
Already previous gen if you look at the mobile landscape, Sony’s just getting on with the times
Sometimes I like to play a game on max difficulty, sometimes I choose easy chill mode so I’m all for games having a wide difficulty scale of options.
This just seems stupid, and more like they can’t be arsed to balance a bunch of difficulties so just slap some AI slop in there and call it done.
I don’t know if you can describe it as “can’t be arsed” when their proposed solution is so much harder to implement.
Opening an rdp connection to some dude in India so he can do it for you isn’t that hard.
Like some other AIs ended up being.
