Comment by mitxela
7 hours ago
It's really shocking that there aren't more games like (old-school) RuneScape. Like where is OSRS but you're a mafia boss in NYC, or OSRS but you're on a space station? Obviously games with these themes exist, but not games in this genre, which I'd say is defined by fairly shallow but very broad content building on a cartoonishly simple engine. Modern games seem to be going relatively long on engine capabilities but short on content instead. You'd think AI would have no problem designing 50 good quests for an NYC mob boss in a few days or less.
Maybe RS's origins from the text MUD era led it to a weird path-dependent place. The other day I watched a whole video essay about how weird it is that everything has an "examine" option when no other graphical game has this, but every MUD has it.
The problem with modern LLMs is that their writing/creativity skills are still fairly stilted. Like, it's not bad material? But it's stuck in the most common, trope-ladden ruts. Even if you get out of that, it suffers from the fact that every instance will write approximately the same quests.
That said, give it a year or two and I think we'll start seeing some pretty amazing stuff, there - LLM writing has been consistently improving, and I suspect at some point you could just generate quests by simulating a world and having the AI assign quests when it wants to accomplish goals outside of the character's skill-set, or when things go wrong with the economy (someone killed a traveling merchant -> farmer will now pay you to acquire good fertilizer/seeds)
Have you ever done RuneScape’s quests? No way an AI could create something so original
> You'd think AI would have no problem designing 50 good quests for an NYC mob boss in a few days or less.
Why would you think that?