New World Notes

Will NVIDIA's AI-Powered NPCs Make Games More Fun? This Star Wars Old Republic Designer Has Concerns

You probably saw this  pretty impressive recent demo of NVIDIA's NPCs powered by generative AI, enabling players to converse in deep detail with an NPC (albeit with a cringey mechanical voice). And if you were to ask an AI evangelist, they'd pronounce it as The Future of MMO Games.

However, if you were to ask an actual MMO designer who led creation of a AAA game like Star Wars: The Old Republic, they might have a more ambivalent response:

WATCH: Sims/Second Life Dev Rod Humble Unveils Features in Life by You, His Ambitious, Upcoming Simulation Sandbox Game

In March we got the first in-depth preview of Life by You, the new life simulation game lead developed by ex-Linden Lab CEO / former EA/Sims lead Rod Humble. Since then, the game's YouTube channel has been steadily showing off various features, including Rod himself showing off the avatar movement interface. (Watch above.)

I have to wince and grin at the video because Life by You's movement UI is already easier and more intuitive than what it currently is in Second Life -- even though Rod himself implemented some click-and-move improvements to the official SL viewer during his tenure as CEO. By that time, however, most active users had switched over to a third party viewer for using Second Life -- so any fixes to the official viewer were like giving a new paint job to the entrance of a mansion that's already been mostly abandoned.  

That to one side, Life by You is looking pretty impressive. Previous videos show off the powerful home customization options, and a feature for editing chats with NPCS: 

In Russia, Ukraine News is Censored, But Counter-Strike is Extremely Popular. So Reporters Put the Truth About the Invasion in a Secret Room Players Can Only See When They Die.

Amazing cyberpunk-made-real story of the month, made possible by the fact that Counter-Strike Global Offensive is extremely popular with young gamers in Russia (most of them either in Putin's military or likely to be conscripted into it), but where news of the nation's real invasion of Ukraine is censored.

Here's what Finnish reporters did with a user-made CS:GO map:

When a player’s avatar dies, the game view changes: For a while, the player can go through walls or fly around the map. At this stage, they can also find the secret room hidden underground...

There is a light above the door. This is a hint that taking a closer look at the object may reveal something.

There are stairs leading to an underground room.

First, the player sees a wall with a headline.

Next to the headline, there is a map showing how many civilian targets in Ukraine have been hit by Russians.

Another wall displays a news item on the Bucha massacre. When the player comes close to the images, they hear a Russian voice-over on their radio telling them what the images are about: Ukrainian civilians murdered by Russian soldiers.

Read the English-language story here. The CS:GO map "de-voyna" is available on Steam. Consider giving it a good rating, so that more players will see and experience it.

Viewfinder, the Viral, Reality-Altering Unity Demo of 2020, Finally Playable as Free Demo on Steam

I first wrote about Viewfinder by indie game developer Matt Stark over three years ago, when it was just an impressive Unity 3D demo which went viral thanks to a pretty unique gameplay twist: It's a first-person puzzler where you alter reality by manipulating pictures within it. (Just watch the video above, for a glimpse of what I mean.)

The full game will be published later this year by Thunderful Games, but a free playable demo is now available on Steam here.

"It's a few levels from near the start of the full game, followed by a couple from later in the game," Matt tells me. "We're aiming for a 2023 launch date so it's largely representative of what the final game will be like.

"It's come so far since the demos I posted ages ago. There's lots of stuff in the demo I couldn't have even dreamed of us doing back then. At the same time, it feels like the demo is just scratching the surface of all the stuff we've got in the rest of the game."

One particular feature that wasn't in the 2020 demo is fairly dazzling:

Veteran MMO Designer Damion Schubert on Using ChatGPT to Help Create Virtual Worlds -- And Advice on AI for Novice Game Designers

Intriguing reader comment by veteran MMO game designer Damion Schubert (BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, among many other titles), discussing the potential uses of ChatGPT and other generative AI for designing games: 

AI is really good at generating ideas but none will be better than 80% of the way there. That being said, that's not nothing! That could be a huge head start to work from and could result in a net gain of quality quests.

As an example, I asked Chat GPT to generate a whole bunch of names for swords from me.  [See above] 80% of the names from ChatGPT were crap, but a designer could probably get a pretty good list of names if they were willing to (a) curate the results and (b) take the time to further train the AI so that its next version is better.

Creating 10,000 sword names is a terrible, soul-crushing task that MMO designers hate and could take us two weeks.

I could definitely see AI being used to make a list of better names in only a day (where that day is basically multiple iterations of the task). Menial tasks like this being more automatable means that designers have more time to spend on stuff that matters more.

"Basically," Damion tells me later, referring to the list of swords ChatGPT gave him, "most of those are 'fine' for non-exceptional stuff (i.e. grey, white or green weapons in World of Warcraft). Which is good -- creating the boring background items and NPCs is actually both incredibly boring and incredibly time-consuming."

I have done some writing for MMOs, and can personally confirm the tedium: The first hour, you start editing the item database with a childlike, "I can't believe I get to help create a whole new world!" zeal. By the fifth hour, you're grumbling to yourself, "Holy shit a robot could do this."

And now a robot can.

With a program like ChatGPT however, the human game designer can work at a higher level -- the fun stuff, where someone with a really ambitious vision can imagine a whole alternate world -- creating a large "bible" for the virtual world that includes historic lore and even special language (i.e. like a few hundred words in ancient Elvish or whatever), and then train ChatGPT to create weapon/character/etc. names from that knowledge base. 

Schubert concurs, with some practical advice:

Richard Bartle, Legendary MMO Designer, Reviews Amazon MMO New World

Pioneering MMO game designer Richard Bartle, author of the monumentally influential book Designing Virtual Worlds, recently started playing the MMO New World. Here's his hands-on review, including design tips for the developers:

 

I've been playing New World for the past couple of months. There was an update yesterday, bringing a whole new 50 hours of content with it, so I took this as an opportunity to uninstall (total time played: 360 hours).

 

On the whole, I rather liked New World. OK, so the quests were truly awful and 100 hours elapsed between my being given the final main-story quest element (a dungeon run) and my being geared up enough to complete it, but the lore was well-constructed and the world was very nicely put-together (except for the towns, which in common with those of every other RPG in existence were confusingly or irritatingly laid-out).

 

What I particularly found refreshing, though, was the way it encouraged players to make their own goals.

For example, in the end game there are areas containing chests guarded by elite mobs, and players self-organise "chest runs" to descend en masse on such areas to lay waste to the guards and loot the chests. There's no formal quest to do this, it's more of a "here's some stuff you might want" challenge thrown down by the designers that the players have accepted.

 

Other such challenges, such as pop-up events ("corruption portals" here — they're FATEs in FFXIV and rifts in Rift) were not so attractive, though, and something of an inconvenience at times if they appeared right where the mobs that you have a quest to kill were roaming.

 

As usual, I knew when I started that I'd be leaving after a couple of months so I didn't join a guild. I couldn't really join one anyway, because the server population was so low. There are three factions in New World, and all members of a guild have to be in the same faction as each other.

 

As is often the case when three-way inter-faction PvP is involved, one faction completely dominates, another just about holds its own and a third is nowhere. I didn't know what the situation was when I signed up to a faction, and happened to plump for the middle one. Its guilds were very PvP focused, because of the hold-their-own requirement, and they weren't looking for people who didn't perhaps enjoy having their heads handed to them on a plate on a daily basis.

 

I think I only ever saw one recruitment ad for my faction, excluding plaintive ones in French, German or Polish that could have been for anything for all I knew.

 

NEXT UP -- combat design, crafting, music, developer notes, and more:

 

When Will We Get AI-Powered Virtual World NPCs? Seasoned MMO Game Designers Weigh the Possibilities & Perils

Screencap of generative agent simulation -- playable here

Last week I wrote about the game developer who incorporated ChatGPT into his NPC-to-player conversations in his virtual world; now comes an experiment with "generative agents" -- AI-powered NPCs, who talk with each other:

In the experiment, the researchers placed 25 generative agents within a virtual world resembling a sandbox video game, similar to The Sims. Each agent was assigned a unique background and participated in a two-day simulation. The study observed various remarkable behaviors:

One agent planned a party, informed several friends who then invited others, and collectively they coordinated the event.

Another agent decided to run for mayor, sparking organic discussions about their campaign and political stances among the community. Different agents held varying opinions on this candidate.

Some agents retained memories with human-like embellishments, occasionally imagining additional details or interpreting events with their own perspective.

Developed by AI researchers at Stanford (read their academic paper here), some enthusiasts are effusive about the implications, declaring, "Entire virtual worlds could be populated with these agents, producing emergent behaviors."

Definitely eventually, on some level -- but the practical applications are still pretty challenging:

"First," veteran game designer Damion Schubert tells me, "we're at the very infancy of this kind of technology. Both the technology and game designers' capacity to work with it and shape it are going to be very different even six months from now than it is now.

"Second, every game is a different design, and what you need NPCs to do in every game is very different. Chat GPT today could probably make NPCs that spewed out random dialogue and light worldbuilding facts, but it's a longer walk to, for example, have NPCs be at a Bioware Companion-level of intelligence. But there's a lot of room between those extremes!"

Damion, as it happens, was lead designer of Bioware's Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO.

I've been excited about GPT-powered NPCs for quite awhile, but thinking about actual multi-user virtual worlds I actually play and enjoy, not to mention single-player sandbox worlds like Skyrim, it's difficult to imagine autonomous agents wandering around on their own devices without it becoming a vexing traffic jam. Like, what happens when the town blacksmith who's supposed to upgrade your broadsword decides that he'd rather become a master of interpretive dance?

Damion again:

First Look at Life by You from Sims/Second Life Dev Rod Humble -- a Simulation/Sandbox Game of Head-Spinning Ambition

Here's the first in-depth preview of Life by You, the new life simulation game by ex-Linden Lab CEO / former EA/Sims lead Rod Humble (who pops up at around 8:35 in this video above).

While an early teaser somewhat suggested it would be a Sims clone, that superficial appearance is deceiving: By the team's description at least, Life by You is vastly more ambitious: It's a head-spinningly deep and vast life simulator, as if Second Life and The Sims and a Peter Molyneux "God game" were wrapped together with today's technology and social media to become a completely new genre of its own.

In other words, an elevator pitch for Life by Me might be:

"The Sims, but where you control the whole world."

Or, "Single-player Second Life where you can also roleplay as Linden Lab, if you like." 

Here's what I mean, highlighting some features that jumped out at me in the video:

Ex-Second Life CEO Creating New Virtual World Sim Called... Life by You

Well this is an interesting reveal from Paradox Interactive (watch at 16:10): Life by You, a new life simulation game that's getting a full reveal later this month.  

Project lead of Life by You is Rod Humble, the game industry veteran who was once CEO of Linden Lab, and before that, was VP at Electronic Arts, where he worked on The Sims franchise (among many other tiles). From the brief glimpses we get from the teaser, Life by You looks like a cross between Second Life and The Sims, with some suburban sim living gameplay, but also quite a lot of user creativity enabled:

Viewfinder, Which Started as a Viral Brain-Melting Game Demo, Finally Coming to Steam & PlayStation 5 With New Features, Story

Remember Viewfinder, that utterly cerebellum-frying Unity demo from 2020 by game design student Matt Stark? I'm psyched to say it's finally becoming a full-fledged game, available soon for PlayStation and Steam. (In fact, here's the fully built-out Steam page.)

Viewfinder is for everyone who played the Portal games and said, "Yeah that was fun but it doesn't make my brain mushy and hurty enough." Basically it puts you in an interactive world where you take a "Polaroid photo" of the surroundings -- and once taken, the photo becomes its own little interactive, manipulable, physics-enabled world.

Probably best to just watch the trailer above, to see what I mean. (And read below for how this was done technically.)

Since getting picked up by indie publisher Thunderful (which also put out the seriously fun title Steamworld Heist, among other hits), Matt tells me that he his team have added quite a bit to that already stellar gameplay mechanic: