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Comment by throwaway71271 | Hacker News Reader

Finally we can have interesting games with real meaningful choices that actually change the narrative of the game. Modern MMORPGs are barely better than the Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Every time I watch Chris Crawford's Dragon Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwZi58u1FjI I think about what could've been, and what games actually turn out to be.

Honestly, if the next The War Within (next World of Warcraft expansion) makes me do 10 daily quests per day again, I will cancel my subscription for the first time since 2005.

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You need focus and direction in any media. Books, movies, games, etc.... they all need it.

The first NPC that you encounter with such freedom of interaction is interesting, the 45th will be annoying and you'll just want to get to the point. The holodeck of Star Trek is often brought up as an excellent example of AI generated interactions, but people seem to be forgetting that the stories we see unfold on TV aren't random interactive stories. They're scripted stories written by show's writers.

Unless you want to make a simulation without a real goal, I don't see how this could lead to fun and interesting gameplay past the first hour. Realism is, always will be, a bad gameplay pillar just for the sake of it.

There is a group of orc kids running around in Orgrimmar, and sometimes they run around you and are very annoying, why can't I just trip one.

I had a friend who didn't want to fight against the Lich King. When we finally got to him in the raid, at the start of the fight he kneeled in front of him and died (caused us unnecessary wipe, but.. was cool).

I am not thinking about 'AI generated interactions', and I think the AI can create compelling story that you go through. Kind of like in Sword Art Online or Shangri-La Frontier's quests.

It surely can generate something better than the old "Fetch this item and come back" quests, but I wouldn't say the possibilities are endless, so eventually you would get bored of the same repeating AI quests the same way as you do now.

Good storytelling is hard and AI is not some magic bullet that can just solve it for good. But it can help raise the floor of the unimportant side quests.

> why can't I just trip one.

Some of the best writing and experiences I've ever had gaming have never come from the ability to do random acts that are worthwhile to noone.

> I had a friend who didn't want to fight against the Lich King. When we finally got to him in the raid, at the start of the fight he kneeled in front of him and died (caused us unnecessary wipe, but.. was cool).

Man that sounds cringe, not cool.

As my kids got some recent Choose Your Own Adventure books, I'd say that the quests in modern MMORPGs tend to be significantly worse than that.

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