Does it exist?
Drop 50 players onto a map, no PVP, only survival vs the hazards of the map.
Have the world difficulty scale with player rank.
This is sorta how ARMA goes when you play with a big group. There's a couple of DMs wrangling all the AI, but for the most part it's a couple of dozen players running around doing army stuff to large groups of AI baddies.
Some survival games are kind of like this if you have a big server size and turn the PvP off.
There are lots of PvE coop games, just not many with a large number of players, or where the goal is to be the last person alive. It's usually about keeping everyone alive.
Come to think of it the group I used to play with had an Arma mod called Bulwark or something where you'd get a crate that represented your "base" and you had to plop it down somewhere in the game world. Once the game started the AI would spawn in waves of enemies, along with items and weapons. The players would scavenge gear, fight off the wave of enemies, spend whatever money they found or earned on building pieces to fortify their base, and then the next round would start. The first few rounds would be guys in board shorts with pistols, but the last few rounds would be bad ass paratroopers with thermal ghost spookyvision and grenade launchers and tanks and shit. It started off pretty easy but it eventually got really real and it'd get pretty desperate when, like, a bunch of powerful AI soldiers were rushing towards your base but you couldn't do anything about them bc an IFV was covering them with a machine guns. Every once in a while a tank would just pathfind in to the center of your base, crushing walls in the process, and then you'd have to deal with that somehow without also blowing up your whole base in the resulting explosion. It was fun. We even won af ew times.
Antistasi mod as showcased by Sovietwomble makes Arma seem easy and fun to play when I happen to know it isn't lol
We played Antistasi, too. For every firefight that went well there were a dozen where our band of plucky insurgents rolled in to a NATO base full of tanks and died instantly. It's a fun game mode, though.
One of the biggest differences between games like ARMA or Squad compared to CoD or Battlefield is that you really, really, really have to knuckle down and cooperate with your team. If you go fucking off by yourself you're just going to die, probably to an AI or player 500m away that you never saw (I think it's hilarious that CoD gives you a "Long shot" bonus for shooting someone like 60m away when the average engagement in ARMA is 3-500m). Teamwork and coordination is how you get things done. You need a dozen pairs of eyes looking out for enemy forces, you need the tanks and the infantry leaders communicating to cover each other's weaknesses and provide supporting fire, you really, really want the guys doing artillery to be on the phone with everyone else bc artillery can delete an entire square kilometer and you don't want to be there when they do. Most groups will teach you some really basic radio procedures which seems silly until you actually get in a game with sixty people who all need to communicate and realize what a clusterfuck comms turns in to if people don't have rules to keep things orderly.
Enemy AI isn't nearly good enough to make this work it seems like. I'm sure someone's done it in a cheap "give the enemy more health and speed" sort of way though. Reminds me that it would be super cool to have enemies that use "generative adversarial networks" machine learning to fight players better.
Minecraft Hunger Games is PVP but it kinda has this PVE vibe. On some versions of it, you can pretty easily die to monsters (mainly skeletons or creepers) at night, or starve, or rarely get killed by a booby trap. You can spend a lot of time completely by yourself.
Reminds me that it would be super cool to have enemies that use “generative adversarial networks” machine learning to fight players better.
Game designers talk about this a lot, but you don't want effective AI, you want convincingly shit AI. It's really easy to make AI that always know where the players are and shoot them perfectly every time, but it's pretty hard to make AI that convincingly miss and bumble around like real people do in a firefight.
As far as I know some of the most well regarded AI just runs through a loop of "Am I in cover? If not, I should get to cover!" "I'm in cover, so I should shoot at the player!" "I can't see the player, I should move right towards another piece of cover!" and that's enough to defeat most people.
The real technical problem is making an AI that is working with limited information and trying to outsmart the player in a way that looks convincing, and that's mostly a strategy game problem. It's trivial to make deadly AI in an FPS because that's just a matter of tuning their aim cones and reaction times, and even basic squad tactics can be faked convincingly by just having them rotate out between "firing from cover" and "running to cover that's closer to the player or off to the side" in a staggered way so that half are shooting and half are advancing at any given time.
Strategy games are trickier and historically just cheat with perfect knowledge of the gamestate and tons of free resources, and they still get dunked on by skilled players. That is the genre that could benefit the most from machine learning on the task of inferring the gamestate through limited information and setting plans in reaction to known or guessed information. That's also been done by research teams, mind, but is probably out of reach of end-user facing systems for a few more years at least. Probably not until the next console gen at the earliest, if we're being honest. Not because the hardware required to run it locally is prohibitively expensive, but just because it's niche and probably more expensive than a majority of would-be consumers would be willing to shell out for.
Also GIVE TURN BASED STRATEGY A MULTIPLAYER! I wanna play competitive Fire Emblem.
they did it for starcraft 2, not sure if the bots are still playing on the ladder though, probably not.
training shooter enemies on... bad players who are trying to win would be kinda cool but you can already simulate a lot of bad habits close enough, like a lock-on timer is functionally equivalent to not looking directly where they want to scope-aim.
if i find another pvp game i want to play over a thousand hours of it would be cool to use myself as the training data and play against it.
Tarkov has the ‘shit AI’ problem - the scavs feel super inconsistent, sometimes they’ll miss and other times they’re terminators
I think there's still a middle ground of realistically difficult AI that, like KobaCumTribute mentions, operates on limited information, and operates with lifelike reaction speed. You can easily make enemies have perfect aim, or more health, or whatever. But it's difficult to make them do that if you put human constraints on them. Like giving them slower reaction speed, or making them have imperfect "sight", like games usually do.
But I suppose that's not something you need machine learning for. Machine learning is only useful if it's used for actually learning how a player acts, or how players in general act. Because you can easily find the weak spot in the enemy AI and enemies become boring.
Game AI probably just needs more investment. I don't know if any game studios actually invest much in that stuff beyond re-implementing existing techniques. But good AI behavior can really make or break a lot of games.
The AI doesn't need to be super intelligent really, there just needs to enough variables to provide the player a challenge so only one strategy won't allow you to win.
Did you ever play Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor/War? The Orcs operate under what they call the Nemesis System where every powerful, named Orc will be mostly unique and have a combination of classes, status effects, and abilities so there's not simply one way to easily kill all of them. And if you allow them to complete their missions or kill you, their levels will increase and they will get incrementally more powerful and learn annoying abilities like health regen and become more and more immune to your bullshit stealth and ranged abilities that decimate weaker Orcs
The problem with the Nemesis system is that Warner Bros own the rights to it and will most likely sue any game dev that tries to build a similar system.
Yeah. Fuck the patent system. The Nemesis system was one of the coolest things to happen in gaming in a long time, especially the fleshed out version in Shadow of War, and we'll likely never see it again because some fucking suit "owns" the rights to it.
Hunt: Showdown is kinda-sorta like this. There is PVP and don't get me wrong it's the focus of the game, but there's not a huge incentive for it game mechanics wise. The point of the game is to kill one or two AI boss monsters, loot it, and leave. The only reason you fight other players is for the right to kill the boss monster and/or because they'll probably shoot you first if you don't. The AI enemies around the map are brutal and absolutely will kill you if you don't respect them. The very best players just kind of run around slaughtering them and dare you to do anything about it, but even with ~400 hours I still slip up and get eaten by dogs every once in a while.
Definitely not what you meant, I'd really like something of this sort with no PVP at all. But it gets close sometimes. There's even proximity voice chat, and it's not that uncommon to make peaceful deals with other players. Sometimes it amounts to "hey buddy we're kind of in a stalemate here but I see somebody else sneaking up on you, you oughta go deal with them first" but sometimes it's straight up like "hey im alone out here, i just want one of them boss tokens, maybe we can share?" and then you end up working together. which also means you sometimes randomly run into teams of up to like 6 or 7 people who just spontaneously formed during the brutal pve-pvp match, when the maximum number of players who can actually go in together is 3. which is pretty cool.
Hunt is really cleverly designed. Most battle royale games use a big blunt stick to force the players to fight each other - there's a circle that gets smaller (or bigger in CoD DMZ) and forces everyone closer and closer to each other. In Hunt there's no circle. You can go anywhere you want, dick around, farm monsters, whatever. But the goal, most of the time, is to find and kill hte boss monster. To do this you have to find and interact with "Clues". Clues are game objects on the ground scattered around the map. When you interact with it it greys out part of the map where the boss is not, narrowing down the areas where the boss might be. Each boss has three clues. The first two grey out parts of the map, but once you have all three you'll be shown exactly where the boss is. The map gets greyed out in the same way for all players as they collect clues, nudging the players to search a smaller and smaller area for the boss. Since every sound you make in the game is audible to other players, and EVERY SINGLE GUNSHOT CAN BE HEARD FROM ANYWHERE ON THE MAP, Players can often located each other by sound and deduction. Instead of having a big blunt instrument forcing the players in to conflict the game flow is structured such that by pursuing the PvE objective you're organically brought in to PvP conflict.
The game is notable in that you're actually allowed to negotiate, team up, and cooperate with other teams as long as it's done organically in the match. It's not common, but every once in a while two teams will meet and agree to work together instead of killing each other. Since each boss drops two tokens that you can extract with for money and XP it's possible for two teams to "win" if they're willing to accept half the reward. This might happen just for fun, or because both teams have been mauled in prior PvP battles and don't have many resources left. Sometimes it'll happen becaues another team reached the boss first and fortified the boss layer and the two attacking teams agreed to work together to negate the defenders home field advantage. Sometimes solo players will team up with each other to have a better chance against teams of two or three. It makes for a very dynamic game that can be very unpredictable.
Yeah, I truly think Hunt is the best designed battle royale. On top of that, over the years they've released a lot of massive updates, and have somehow managed to avoid killing these cleverly designed elements. With most successful games, over the years you start to get the impression that the strengths were "accidental" or at least that the people responsible either don't work on the game anymore or have forgotten the reason behind the way it was designed that way, but Crytek seems to have a very thorough understanding of why the systems work and how to make them better. They've never released an update that made me think "well, fuck, they ruined it." The worst they've ever done is just adding guns / tools / whatever that change the meta in ways I don't like. For example the addition of slug ammo for shotguns kind of just made them the unambiguously ideal weapons for some scenarios which previously would've had a few different contenders.
And yet, even the update which added slugs, which I think are an overall negative change for the game, also added a bunch of stuff that I think was great for the game.
It's one of those games that I know someday I'm going to look back on and be like "I miss that game." When the servers are gone and maybe if you're lucky there's a fan project to play custom matches but there's not really a big playerbase for it. It's something really unique and special.
Most BR games are just trying to capture PUBG's explosive rise to fame and fortune, and PUBG was an ARMA mod working within the limitations of being an ARMA mod. Hunt is it's own weird thing, carefully and artfully designed around a innovative core gameplay loop that is supported by it's weapon design, art design, level layout, and even it's setting in the 1890s and the aesthetic of the bayou.
Like Apex? For all it's popularity it was supposed to be Titalfall 3, and was re-tooled over time as someone decided that Titans and the fast, free-form movement of Pilots was too much for the schlubs in the general public.
Fortnite was supposed to be a zombie base defense game and they pivoted almost literally overnight when PUGB exploded.
Hunt was always supposed to be Hunt, it was designed to be Hunt, and every piece of it, as far as I know, was made for hunt. Even the goofy full-auto Mosin-Nagant was there in some of the earliest promotional material. I'm not 100% on this but I think eve the "Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age" incarnation that was sort of the pre-development concept was still a PvPvE game with the same rough gameplay loop that Hunt ended up having.
It stands out from all the other extraction shooters and BRs in that it was designed to do what it does from inception. The only other one that can really say that is Tarkov, which AFAIK has always been Tarkov. All the other entries in the genre were adapted from somethhing else and it shows, whether that's PUBG's origins as an ARMA mod or CoD's DMZ being chained to the albatross of CoD.
Funny CoD DMZ story - There's a mission in DMZ that requires you to get kills from 100m+ with a rifle not suited to engaging at that range. 100m is generally further out than the AI spawn radius, so you have to do silly shit like sending one teammate ahead to force AI to spawn while other team-mates stay back to do the actual shooting. CoD is just bizarre bc so much of it is very deliberately, intentionally bad design and it still manages to dominate the space.
Yeah it does. Sorta. It’s called Death Run, but it’s a genre rather than a game. There are two versions.
The first is purely PVE where disasters keep ramping up on its own and you have to escape it. I used to play this on Roblox back in the day. Basically it’s like a flood or fire and you either have to find a way to survive, or continually move through the map to reach a finish line.
The other more popular one is Player vs Single Player, meaning one person controls all the traps and disasters and everyone else has to survive them. Think of Saw. Usually this is a linear mode where you go from one end of the map to the finish line, and the controlling player has to activate the traps at the appropriate times like when a survivor player is jumping in a platform that platform disappears and the player falls to his death. I’ve played these is CSS and Minecraft.
It seems to be popular in Fortnite but I’m unsure which version. But it’s not really battle royale since multiple people can survive
My favorite experiences with the division and the division 2 was forming spontaneous alliances with other players in the black zone or whatever and teaming up to do extractions. But ironically that is the pvp zone.
The vanilla game in the division 1 & 2 is pretty close to what the OP is asking for, I agree. Although ubisoft is vile.
It would be a neat focus. It's not like co-op games don't exist and couldn't be scaled up and a lot of MMORPGs are sorta that already.
Back when y'all were in the conceptual phase we used to get like 15-50 people and go to the bad dungeon in Ultima Online. There were no raids, no parties, no ability cooldowns, no boss mechanics. It was just you, 30 of your best friends, and the fucking acid elemental.
I know it's not well received but Fallout 76, every other player I've run into is helpful and there's end level monsters that are fun as a group. With the survival and building elements I can have a lot of fun with it from time to time.
Actually Mordhau had something sorta like this, too. You'd have like 20 players, and an objective to defend, and if hte objective was destroyed or everyone died you'd lose. And the game would send all kinds of bullshit NPCs at you like jesters throwing molotovs or some dude named Biff or Clive or something who was wearing nothing but trews and a helmet and would cut anyone in half with one blow but had like a trillion HP. If you survived the round you'd get cash based on your kills and you could use it to be weapons and upgrades and stuff.
Valheim can also be like this if your base gets attacked and suddenly everyone needs to come running home before skeletons murder all your chickens or something.
