The worst way to do it would be to have people randomly having their characters farming stuff automatically with AI, and users have no way of telling who is AI and who isnt.
But there are plenty of times where a player would love something in the game that was smarter than an NPC, but less important than another user. It would be fun to fill out your raid group or party with a few automated players when you can't fill it for real. Or be able to summon an AI controlled character to duel any time you wanted to practice. It would have to be managed by blizzard and the AI characters would need to be visually distinguished in game, of course.
it costed, IIRC, 30 bucks per 1 instance for lifetime access. the people behind were a legit company, for some incomprehensible reason -- a fucking GmbH. so they eventually got sued and lost and that was an end of a very long era. I always wondered if anyone had managed to pick up the mantle. maybe that's impossible now that Blizzard doesn't want goldsellers to compete with WoW tokens and started to take bots seriously (or so it seemed during my last relapse a decade ago).
Like so many games when npcs have one canned voice line, or the level is lined with doors that won't open because it's not the way you're meant to go.
Joking aside it is interesting to see that a general model can adapt to a world like this, but I think the contrast between the model being "naive" and then needing to build special-purpose code to allow it to interact somewhat begs the question of the experiment. Customization will always be needed so how interesting is it that an un-customized model can play with a highly customized harness?
I tried to make it win the last battle, but that was beyond its ability. Further accumulation of "hard earned lessons" in Markdown only made its behavior more chaotic.
Still, a very decent result, comparable to what I achieved back in the day (late 90s).
I wonder if people would be receptive to bringing games like that back to life with full-fledged AI players - not NPCs, but player-characters controlled by AI. It wouldn't be exactly the same - there was something charming about knowing that the guy you were swordfighting could be anyone from anywhere, talking to people about their IRL world, etc. But as others have pointed out, modern MMOs are flooded with bots that make the games actively worse and have been since well before LLMs became popular.
Plus, games might be a helpful means for folks to get used to the idea that, at this point, you have no idea whether the person you're interacting with is a human being until you meet in person.
2) I'm very glad to see some Puzzle Pirates love. I was and still am enthralled by the idea of in-game economies, loosely-narrative-driven cooperative play driven by simple independent tasks; it was such a neat idea in such a simple package, I'm surprised it hasn't really been copied with much success, the casual/puzzle games boom notwithstanding. I've been daydreaming of mixing Puzzle Pirates with FTL as a spiritual successor, but it's a game design exercise beyond my ken.
I'm also curious if it stopped after that goal or if it kept playing.
> But it turns out it completed the task easily in 40 minutes with 0 deaths and minimal complications.
Vibe Gaming: Unlocking new gaming experience with agentic AI
Microsoft VEGA Team
Microsoft Research & XBOX
What if, instead of controlling every move your game character made, you could tell them what you wanted and watch them live, act, and connect with others on their own in the changing game world?
> Using this data, it's also able to create an optimal strategy for quest order and preparation.
Bwahaha
Without the /s, WoW has been successfully automated without AI as a completely solved problem for like, 20 years.
what about world mobs and ai pvp players?
like how cool would it be to be roaming around and there’s a group of 3 or 4 horde or alliance bots wandering around as a war band or maybe they’re doing a special mission.
or a world boss who could engage in more interesting ways than just a fight.
a richer world would be cool in a game where it’s so casual and optimized there’s almost zero social interactions anymore and the world is barren.
i haven’t played wow since cata but that’s what my friends say about it to me. even in cata the world would feel dead.