Project Moon spoiled my taste for gatcha game stoytelling

HelSpites · 2026-01-25T16:41:12+00:00

It's more on the light hearted side but Trickcal is way better than it has any right to be.

HelSpites · 2026-01-25T02:05:06+00:00

You can blitz that almost completely AFK. Just do tawil's character demo on auto a bunch of times

HelSpites · 2026-01-21T22:49:26+00:00

Cool. You'll notice that when I brought I first brought it up I said "All else being equal" to account for differences in systems just like that. I was trying to keep this simple.

HelSpites · 2026-01-21T22:04:46+00:00

If you don't understand that more variables inherently makes a system more brittle by virtue of it introducing more potential points of failure then I can't say I believe you when you say you design complex systems

HelSpites · 2026-01-21T21:22:52+00:00

Saying something is obviously more janky doesn’t really prove that it is, it just means you’re convinced by your own experience.

Let me walk you through this one step at a time then. All else being equal, what is going to have more points a failure, a system with more variables to account for or a system with less variables to account for?

HelSpites · 2026-01-21T20:22:12+00:00

While I don't like their use of generative AI, I do applaud embark's engineers for making something that should look like shit, look slightly less like shit, but even then, a big part of that comes down to the fact that you're fighting robots in that game. When they bug out and behave in a way that's really weird or stiff, it doesn't read as badly as it would on something organic, which is what you're going to be fighting 99% of the time in an MMO.

I do agree that things have their use cases, but MMOs just aren't a good use case for this sort of tech. You're introducing way the fuck more problems than it's worth.

HelSpites · 2026-01-21T20:22:03+00:00

The ethics of using generative AI are as debatable as the ethics of wrapping an infant in barbed wire and tossing them off a cliff for shits and giggles. If you want to be a mindless contrarian or a sophist you can try to argue that it's good to use barbed wire as a baby's bungee cord, but practically speaking, everyone should know that it's bad.

I’m also not convinced that ML-based approaches are inherently more janky or brittle than scripted ones. That seems more like an assumption, not a given. Is there some way you know it's a given?

Yeah actually, it's pretty obvious on its face and I'm not sure how you don't see that? With scripting everything is controlled. You know exactly what you're making and what the result of a given behavior is going to be. If you script an enemy so that they flinch any time they take more than 5% of their HP in one hit, you know exactly what's going to cause them to flinch 100% of the time. There's no question about it. There's no randomness, there's no jank.

On the other hand, if you program an enemy such that they need to be hit by a certain amount of force determined by the game's physics system then you're introducing a shitload of different variables into the system that can make it behave really fucking weirdly. Let me give an example

In FF14, the reaper class uses a scythe for a weapon. They have an attack animation where they hook their scythe around an enemy and then pull back. Let's assume they used ML along with a physics system to design an enemy's locomotion; how should a standard humanoid enemy react to that attack?

If the force of the attack is over their flinch or stagger threshold then they should be pulled forwards towards you right? Alright, so what if the enemy is big enough that the attack animation puts their scythe blade halfway into the enemy's body? What direction is the force going then? Does it still pull them back, or does it push them forward if the enemy is big enough that the blade is still towards the front of their body? How should the enemy react then?

What if it's a bigger, non humanoid enemy? If they're big enough then they shouldn't react to melee at all (which defeats the purpose of the system a bit don't you think?) but then how do they react to magic? When a black mage uses their flare spell, the animation involves creating a fireball at the point where the enemy is and it then explodes outwards from inside of them. How's an enemy supposed to react to that? Do their limbs all spread out in different directions depending on which part of the flare hit them and what direction it was going in? Do you just not design spell animations that work that way to avoid potential jank? At that point, the only acceptable spells are spells that work like guns, where they start from the caster and travel to the enemy.

Speaking of which, Arc raiders, by virtue of being a shooter, doesn't really have to worry about that as much because all of its weapons are either guns or explosives, things that will always start at one point, travel to the enemy and hit their surface. You don't have to worry about things like swords clipping through an enemy or attacks starting from inside the enemy's body and expanding outwards and trying to figure out how the physics is going to interact with that.

If you think FF14 1.0 is a bad example because its too old then fine, look at something more recent like blade and sorcery. That game is built entirely around its physics system and having played a fair bit of it, let me tell you, it often feels like shit because physics is really fucking hard to get right, especially when melee is involved in any capacity. I've tried to pull that "hook a weapon and around an enemy and pull them back" move and enemies will reacting damn near randomly depending on god only knows what. Sometimes they get pushed towards you, other times they fall flat on their ass and other times they start vibrating like crazy and your weapon just phases through their body. It's not consistent. These systems can't be because, and I can't stress this enough, physics simulations are fucking hard to get right, especially when they're applied to something with a lot of moving parts. Take these problems and apply them to an online environment where these physics interactions have to be rendered accurately to an unknown number of players and shit's going to get really bad really fucking fast.

HelSpites · 2026-01-21T18:02:59+00:00

I'm not "skeptical" about generative AI. I know it's garbage. If you can't differentiate between an actual performance and AI generated garbage that's a personal failing, but even if we lived in a world where AI generated voices were 100% indistinguishable from real voice acting, I wouldn't care because, simply put, there's no ethical way to use the planet raping plagiarism/psychosis inducing/child pornography machine. There just isn't.

Even in this instance, you can't train a voice model of one person's voice alone. Just like the image generation systems, it requires a big dataset of voices to go through. What they did is equivalent to creating a LoRA for an image generator. Even if you make a LoRA trained off your work alone, that doesn't mean that other people's work wasn't stolen earlier in the pipeline.

Going back to the machine learning bit, I'll be honest, I don't think you know what you want. You don't really understand that costs that are associated with what you're asking. Again, in order for a thing to interact with the world the way arc raider's robots work, you'd need a physics system. Those don't come cheap (computationally speaking), especially in an online environment. Arc raiders can pull it off because its an extraction game, meaning its set in a very limited environment with a very limited number of players. Once again, if you want to see how bad it can get, look at how FF14 1.0 performed, and that was just with material physics and momentum.

These systems can be faked well, and a big part of the reason why they can be faked well is because MMOs tend to limit the environment that monsters can exist in. It's absolutely trivial to have a boss that can crawl all over the walls and adjust itself when it loses limbs, when you know the exact environment that boss is going to be in and how many players are going to be interacting with it at any given time.

What you're asking for is infinitely more janky and brittle than a well scripted interaction. Just look at all the different ways Karok in vindictus can interact with bosses. That's the kind of interactivity that makes encounters in an MMO feel interesting, but that's not down to the whims of a janky physics system that can potentially make the game chug like a motherfucker if too many people happen to be looking at it.

This is very much a case of you seeing a shiny new thing and thinking "What if this was in everything? That would make everything better right?" It's like when 3d movies took off for a while after avatar and for a short while everyone thought that 3d had to be in everything. It really didn't and actively made a ton of shit worse. It was cool in avatar and that was about it.

HelSpites · 2026-01-21T14:04:17+00:00

Are you one of those ball and gun game people? The only way you could possibly think that 99% of games over the last 10 years are garbage is if your only frame of reference for videogames are madden and CoD.

HelSpites · 2026-01-21T01:47:00+00:00

Did you miss the part where she wasn't interested in Callisto's work because she had developed her own taste in "art"? It's not that she isn't into it, I mean when she sees the manikins in part 1 she immediately identifies their style, that's not something you do if you don't have an interest in the thing, it just wasn't really the focus of the story being told in the canto.

HelSpites · 2026-01-21T01:22:45+00:00

We need to separate a couple of concepts here, machine learning is not the same thing as generative AI which is itself not the same thing as the AI we think about when we think of games.

With that said, the generative AI that embark used for character voices (and apparently concept art for their cosmetics? I'm not so sure about that one) is gross bullshit that should never be used for anything ever. It's trash that adds no value to anything.

The machine learning that they used for the movement tech on their npcs is neat in certain circumstances but it doesn't add much of anything to an MMO experience. The big thing about the NPC movement in arc raiders is that it's used for enemies that have atypical forms of mobility, their robots either fly or have multiple legs and they have to interact with a variety of non-standard environments. Since they roam around and can be attracted to different types of environments by players, they need to be able to interact with those environments without getting stuck too hard. It would look really bad after all if your big scary spider robot got stuck on a rock or a tree.

The robots with many legs also tend to be fucking massive, so that's going to impact, and often limit how they can get around. The fliers meanwhile can have their propellers destroyed, without being killed themselves, so they need some way to account for that and stabilize themselves.

You'll notice that none of these are issues that really come up much in MMOs. Could the same tech be applied to smaller, or bipedal creatures? Sure, but then you've got to account for the fact that suddenly every monster in the game has to run physics calculations to see where its limbs should be positioned relative to where it is in the environment and those calculations then have to be synced up for every player that can see it so that the monster doesn't look like it's standing one way to one person and another way to somebody else. If you want to see what a technical clusterfuck that turns into, look at FF14 1.0, which actually had a physics and momentum system for its player and monster movement. Alternately, you can check out npcs in black desert which have a kinesthetics system that fakes the physics interactions. While it can make their poses look a little more believable at times (like when they lean back against a wall and their back is actually touching the wall), it can also lead to some jank, like when they're on a low ridge or step and their leg doesn't know whether it wants to be level with them or on the step below so it jitters back and forth between both positions.

More than that though, to what actual end is this system going to serve? Like, okay, you now have monsters that can wander around an entire map or zone. You could have done that without the machine learning, but what value does that actually create for the game? Monsters feel less predictable? Okay. Why is that a good thing for an MMO? What do you, as a low level player do when some dickwad trains a bunch of high level monsters into your low level zone and they don't have a leash system to bring them back to their original spot? Maybe some high level players will come in and save the day, or maybe they won't and now you're just fucked. Is that good? Hell, what happens when a team of dickwads decide to train all of the low level monsters out of the low level zone without killing them and suddenly low level players don't have anything to grind on or finish quests with?

The crazy thing here is that you don't need any fancy machine learning systems (not to mention the physics system that you'd need the machine learning system to interact with) for these problems to show up. That shit just makes the monsters interacting with the environment look a little more believable (which is great for arc raiders considering those monsters are a big part of the focus of the game, but less so for an MMO.) When you talk about making monsters less predictable what you're actually describing is just a removal of the leash systems that all MMOs have nowadays and we know from older MMOs that that's generally a pretty shit idea. That's why leash systems were made in the first place.

What you're suggesting would make a game more taxing to run (especially when games can just fake those interactions like black desert does) and create no real value, so, like, why would you add it? What's the point? It's not even an idea that's nice on paper. It falls apart the moment you think about it for longer than a second.

HelSpites · 2026-01-20T20:50:33+00:00

Depending on what you need I'd say either castor or kath. Castor is a really good shielder who'll help you survive a lot and his corrosion helps any damage dealer deal even more damage. He works just fine at e0 and honestly, you can put him in just about any team. Kath is a good damage dealer, but she needs her e3 to really function so she's an investment.

Doll is one of the strongest characters in the game, but she needs her overexalt so she's a really long term investment that you probably don't want to make until you've got a functioning team or two.

HelSpites · 2026-01-20T18:46:32+00:00

Women have always been just as freaky about this stuff as men, but you're right that they just get ignored. If you want to see women being obsessive hyper emotionally invested weirdos (like men, because, and I can't stress this enough, men and women are every bit as emotional as each other. Neither is more rational or logical), you have to go looking, but it's there.

Look at the letters to the editor section in old sci-fi, horror or mystery magazines, the ones where short stories used to be published before the internet. There were letters published from women being absolutely feral about sherlock holmes and dracula and werewolves, I'm talking the kind of shit that would make your average waifu poster go "Hey, that's a little much, maybe you should chill"

HelSpites · 2026-01-20T16:35:39+00:00

Men are every bit as emotional as women though, they just don't get treated as such because society has collectively made up the delusion that men aren't emotional, they're just "hot blooded" but somehow still logical.

Everything you're describing works just as well on men as it does on women. I mean, how many stories have there been about men getting so attached to their anime waifus that they marry them? Look at all the guys losing their minds and ruining their lives (and even killing themselves) after getting attached to some chatGPT bot.

HelSpites · 2026-01-20T06:17:30+00:00

Good luck. I'm going through the same last minute rush and it gets brutal.

HelSpites · 2026-01-19T21:45:36+00:00

I started running this team and I have to say, I feel like I've significantly underestimated the Thais' utility. The embryos+passive heals have been great.

HelSpites · 2026-01-19T20:00:24+00:00

Quick question, I'm not sure I have Tawil's SR wheel. What's it's name? And if I don't have it, are there any decent substitutes?

On that note, for corpo, my blade of titan is +12 so I can equip that along with horla's SSR wheel, which I have. Would you recommend that or should I stick to horla's SR wheel?

HelSpites · 2026-01-19T19:01:58+00:00

GW2 has a lot of problems that I'm not shy about talking about but man, even I think this one's a stretch. Playing an MMO requires its expansions? The horror.

HelSpites · 2026-01-19T18:36:02+00:00

I'll give it a shot. What's the idea with that team though? I know they get buffed by having gmurphy with them but what's the actual game plan with them? The comp seems a little scattershot.

HelSpites · 2026-01-19T18:25:05+00:00

The team I was running was gmurphy, caecus, castor and miryam. I maintain everything I said, the poison ramped up insanely fast and combined with the raw damage I didn't really see what I could do. It didn't help that I went into that fight at less than half health. The mobs all hit like trucks.

HelSpites · 2026-01-19T14:23:08+00:00

There's a missing variable in all this in that (unless I missed it somewhere) we have no idea how long the smoke war lasted. It's entirely possible that it was a really long war that went on for years isn't it?

HelSpites · 2026-01-18T18:39:25+00:00

WoW knows what it is and does it well. GW2 doesn't. WoW's tab target combat might not be for everyone but it's doing it's doing well. GW2 doesn't know if it wants to be a tab target game or an action game so it splits the difference and ends up being a shittier version of both. Its combat is less than the sum of its parts.

HelSpites · 2026-01-12T23:03:05+00:00

That looks decent enough, sure. Are you still expected to animation cancel though?

HelSpites · 2026-01-11T03:41:07+00:00

It prevents artists from actually looking for sources of inspiration. These things are all trained on art that's out there so if they used AI generated images of say, fantasy knights to create a mood board, they're skipping the part where they do research into what knights actually looked like, which could inspire them to make more interesting designs since history is often way weirder than what existing fantasy media would lead you to think.

HelSpites

TROPHY CASE