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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

I like exploring! Wizardry, Ultima, Elder Scrolls, whatever, I like to go straight off the path and into the weeds. I think great RPGs let you tell as much of the story in your head as possible, and this is hard in very story/dialogue heavy games (especially since the advent of voice acting in games).

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This is exclusively the type of games I play now except for 'sport' related titles.

Rim World, Dwarf Fortress, Kenshi, Caves of Qud are all fantastic narrative generators and give you a crazy amount of freedom.

Another type of game I've fallen in love with that I don't remember being around when I was a kid is automation games like Factorio or Satisfactory. Gives you that open world feeling + exploring but you're not just running errands or slaying dragons.

>I think great RPGs let you tell as much of the story in your head as possible

I'd say that having to tell the story in your head is a sign of failure on the part of the game. But, for an open world sandbox RPG, so is restricting you from enacting whatever story you want and we don't have the technology to avoid both.

One of the most successful games of all time is Football Manager, which mostly involves staring at spreadsheets of numbers about football players. But it's also one of the most immersive games ever! Give me space, freedom, and simple tools to build my own narrative and I'll be more engaged than listening to the most soaring dialogue you might be able to write.

We have the tecnology. From Prolog, to Inform7.

More advanced TTS engines with possibility of generating emotive results might present a "mostly have your cake, and eat it too" solution.

At some point in the near future, I think we might have "good enough" AI voice acting. That could open some interesting possibilities, eh?

Quite apart from the voice acting, what about the writing itself? As a starting point, how far are we from having bots that can DM a plausible tabletop session?

Yeah, I think this is the secret. For me, I sort of bounce off things if they're too procedurally generated, since the tech isn't there to not make things seem too samey after a while.

I like discovering my own stories, but I want those stories to be how I fought off a dragon to save a town, not how I went into a dungeon for no reason whatsoever and came out with some more treasure and otherwise made no impact on the world.

Absolutely, but like, how cool would it be for a bot to be generating you new quests with an awareness of the full world state and everything you've already accomplished in the game thus far, plus seeding in bits and pieces that will tie into an overall arc?

I could imagine that potentially being extremely immersive, and doing it for a pure text-based interface would be a great first step on eventually doing it for a 3D open world game.

Yup, it's already being used as a placeholder during the process in some AAA games but I assume we're not far off the quality needed for final assets, even dynamically generated locally. Same goes for art, even narrative elements at some point.

Ok, Ultima, you stole as much shit from the shop as you could then wandered off into the weeds. :-)

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