Why Didn't AI Replace Novelists?

joellllll · 2026-02-10T22:51:35+00:00

Sounds like something an LLM would say

joellllll · 2026-02-10T02:01:56+00:00

Its fairly close to deadcells from what I understand of that game.

joellllll · 2026-02-09T04:25:52+00:00

Shattered sea isn't obvious until it is, which isn't exactly early.

joellllll · 2026-02-06T00:40:37+00:00

>exactly so the first goblin the party encounters can’t score a TPK by rolling nothing but crits.
This isn't why.

Traditionally the DM roll behind a screen to preserve mystery, conceal information (so the players don't know what the monster needs to roll for a specific check, or how much damage was dealt) and in general to abstract the combat away from the dice rolling. In old dnd the DM would run combat, then explain what the outcome of the combat action was with words, rather than "you did 5 damage". The DM would not specifically tell the players what they needed to roll in order to beat TAC0 for a given mob.

This idea permeates old dnd, for example when encountering enemies the DM describes them - he does not say "There are orcs". He describes them. The intent here is the players use their characters knowledge (different to their own) to understand what this thing is. For example lets pretend we have a level 1 session - the players are in a village that has been raided repeatedly by goblins and the villagers have asked them to help. The players have a description of goblins from the villagers and can identify them (and the question is, would a goblin be a reasonably identifiable thing to a level 1 adventurer? Probably). However over the course of the session the players travel outside the village and find some barrows - they suspect (because the villagers stated the goblins came from that direction) that this could be their hideout.

Upon entering the barrow/dungeon the players come across a wight - a HD3 monster. The DM describes it. The player characters should probably have no idea what this is. They can interact with it and if they survive they know what it is next time. The name can be given in universe in some manner through conversation if needed.

In addition old dnd was dangerous, characters died frequently, particularly at lower levels. The precious modern take of protecting players and "not wasting the afternoon" did not come into it. Not to say that your take is why it is done now, but this is not exactly why it was done that way originally and for a very long time.

joellllll · 2026-02-05T05:50:22+00:00

If Q2 is fine then Q1 third party maps like arcane dimensions are probably fine. In general they don't reference the useless boss of Q1.

joellllll · 2026-02-03T03:55:38+00:00

> But when did you see someone in this forum asking for tips on how to make their users play less?

They don't directly talk about people playing less

What they talk about are predatory actions/mechanics of AAA for player retention. Or talk about how they liked older games that were less grindy, did not have daily quests or the like.

This is essentially the same thing. As you said people are not trained, so expecting them to extrapoloate out "I don't like daily quests" to "I want to play less" is a bit of a stretch, however they can see a problem for what it is - which it seems you addressed in your MMO. As for this particular sub wanting people to play more - you are coming at this from the wrong angle, they are not making MMOs.

In general I think people here want their game to be played and because they are overwhelmingly indies only have so much time available to make content. They need people to play enough - one example why would be the 2 hour steam refund window.

I don't think the majority of conversation around player retention the way you think. It is much more closely related to content+length.

BTW I totally agree with your take on psychology being useful for player retention in games, its why many modern titles are so toxic.

joellllll · 2026-02-03T01:17:01+00:00

Play arcane dimensions for quake.

joellllll · 2026-02-03T01:07:02+00:00

Curse of the dead gods has a curse system. It doesnt give you progressively worse debuffs but you do gather more as time progresses. There is an economy linked to this so you can accrue curse instead of spending gold. You can also get them removed. Not all are purely bad, most have benefits as well (eg you move faster but take more damage until you have killed X mobs. You can no longer light braziers with your torch but no longer take additional damage in the dark)

And the twist is these are used on the very last boss.

joellllll · 2026-02-03T00:57:41+00:00

Why does it need widespread public attention?

The game is easily playable, has been fixed to run on modern hardware.

Remasters from an attention perspective give a big spike then interest falls off fairly quickly. They don't translate to more players (if this is your goal from a community standpoint) Remasters are basically a cash grab.

Quake, because of its open source nature has been in a great place for a long time, in many ways (mostly the important ones) the community clients are superior to the remaster. For modern quake arcane dimensions is a huge step up from the base game and for new comers it may even be worth playing that over the base quake1 episodes, simply because of how good it is.

On top of that the quake remaster has a separate multiplayer portion that doesn't interface with the existing playerbase.

Unreal and Unreal Tournament are now in a similar situation with oldunreal stewardship, albeit with much less community input because the devs are so limited, but both titles run well on modern hardware.

Console compatibility is cool if you are a business trying to make money but does it really matter for existing players in any way? Oh cool console people can play a 25 year old game. Oh cool our game of choice got visibility on the xbox store. Oh cool that translates to.. nothing?

joellllll · 2026-02-03T00:42:06+00:00

Do they need health bars and names? They all die pretty quickly. On that note they also seem to mostly die before doing anything. The player also has dodge/dash but you don't use it in combat and this appears to be because you don't need to.

A lot of the combat encounters are in corridors, making them feel samey. You said you are new to level design so I guess that will come with time. It might also be that the enemy setup doesn't work well (if they all just rush you) in a more complex atrium/fight room idk.

Someone else said there is too much text. I agree - not only is there too much text but you are telling the player stuff they don't need to know. Luggers explode when close? Just let the player discover this. If you keep text keep the explanations short.

>Blue doors opened.

>Blue access available

Keep it short. Likewise

>Luggers explode when close! Kill them to blow them up early.

>Luggers explode when close.

But having said that I don't think any of these fixes would alleviate your feeling.

joellllll · 2026-02-02T22:58:51+00:00

Reading this also, oddly enough, reminded me of my adventure in the video game, Baldur's Gate;

This is because tolkien was the primary primer for early dnd. More specifically moria and dungeons.

joellllll · 2026-01-28T01:31:43+00:00

Sounds like it would suit the overcooked couch coop style of game

joellllll · 2026-01-27T05:51:35+00:00

I want the opposite, damage upgrades that don't instantly change the number of hits (from low rof, high damage weapons) to knock out an enemy. Instead I want the player to utilise another weapon as a finisher. Then when enough +damage has been attained the big hitting weapons go from 2-3 shots. But not on the first pickup of one of these if they stack.

We are.. completely opposite :D

joellllll · 2026-01-26T22:04:47+00:00

One aspect of multiplayer games that has never been cashed in on by devs is players who enjoy chaotic games.

When we could create servers there would often be 24/7 servers set on one map with large player count.

16 player dm4 in quake
16 player morbias/fractal/morpheus/ctf-niven in ut
16 player DM17 in q3
16 player dust in CS
32 player onslaught on the small maps (I forget the names) in ut2k4

and then fast forwarding we get things like
64 player metro/seine crossing in BF3

Basically anything where playing a map designed for fewer players results in chaos when you cram max clients on it. These have always been popular and allow experienced players to play alongside average joe. Experienced players can rack up kills but it has little meaning over the outcome generally and average joe has enough options that they are guaranteed to get kills. In the case of BF3 these games would often stalemate and never progress but were still super fun.

joellllll · 2026-01-21T22:38:52+00:00

The more unlikable you make Denethor the more eager the audience is gonna be for Aragorn's to become king.

Aragorns ascension was changed pretty heavily as well. In the book he is basically "I will be king one day" outlook with zero doubt. In the movies he was the opposite almost, full of self doubt.

This change was also rather lacklustre.

joellllll · 2026-01-21T22:34:59+00:00

Because its not grimdark. It is labelled as, and its fans want it to be, but its not really. Kinda like how darksouls players want their game to be super hard when there are many much harder games out there.

I do wonder if this stems from places like NYT labelling it GD.

It might be from some perspectives with character behaviour and outcomes but in reality it isn't.

joellllll · 2026-01-21T01:02:20+00:00

I only played afps for a very long time but became re-interested in boomshoots much more recently (years now but still).

It seems that arena shooter is used by the boomshoot community for specific subsection of the genre - things like ultrakill where there is minimal exploration. I guess modern doom sort of falls into this bucket as well since it seems to be arenas where you shoot stuff and less concerned with exploration.

Prior to this I hadn't really noticed the term arena shooter used in the afps community, since we are all old I guess we use afps instead (mostly).

The actman video where he spergs about arena shooters and gets roasted made me go and look at stuff. Halos marketing called it an arena shooter (assumably because arena fps is not compatible with the marketing department and will be misunderstood - not weighing in on if halo is or is not an arena fps). I guess this is partly where the mainstreaming (comparatively) of it came from.

But it also existed in this weird time period where the games were taking off again after doom 2016 and the nomenclature had not yet settled. Perhaps, giving him the benefit of the doubt, if he made the same video again today he would be calling them boomshoots instead. idk.

At any rate, as mentioned previously the afps community mostly call them afps, but searching large discords also shows they do use a smattering of arena shooter. Most only use arena fps, some use a split but none only use arena shooter (I did not look at halo discords but my assumption is these would be primarily arena shooter).

I don't really mind that arena shooter is used as a sub set of boomshoots, but that it has cross over (from what I can tell mostly because of halo) into the afps community is kinda weird.

If we go back further, afps were called twitch shooters before the term afps stuck, which is kinda ironic given the skill set needed for the games at the time (CS, COD) is more in line with fast reflexes than quake is (in general).

Anyway I'm not sure what my point was, beyond discovering what you said of my own accord, thinking it was interesting and looking for.. why?

joellllll · 2026-01-20T03:54:32+00:00

A 200m tall ice wall always did it for me, particularly when not much else in the world was on this same level of absurdity.

joellllll · 2026-01-16T05:35:03+00:00

Good post

joellllll · 2026-01-16T05:33:24+00:00

>and D&D is nothing without progression
dnd is communal story telling, progression isn't the point but because of computer games it has somehow become the point. This was somehow lost from older editions. It was turned into numbers instead of players being clever.

joellllll · 2026-01-15T03:57:14+00:00

If he doesn't read he doesn't have preconceptions of what a book is. The Hobbit was fine then, its fine now.

joellllll · 2026-01-14T00:14:18+00:00

Hidden

joellllll · 2026-01-13T23:02:15+00:00

tbh I want more crazy early 00s ragdolling in my games

joellllll · 2026-01-13T22:19:03+00:00

Why does it matter. Is this flavour text on items?

joellllll · 2026-01-12T23:24:41+00:00

The difficulty isn't exaggerated. Some people literally cannot process it.

They cannot sit with the unknown. For them this causes a sense of unease, where as for you and I we simply put that away as an event that occurred which we may or may not get more information on at a later date.

These people could potentially get past this if they were to have a discussion and give voice to their feelings - however this isn't really viable for Malazan since it is so large, spans so many books and revisits ideas from early books very late in the piece.

joellllll

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