Comments on: Euphoria over Bad AI in Backbreaker?

By: Victor

Victor — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 01:44:43 +0000

Oh I totally agree with you on that point. I remember 2002 EA tried to sell IK as the way to get all the realistic necessary animations for FIFA 2003. I very much doubt they even had time to work on anything but the euphoria engine hence their camera and replay compromise.

By: Dave Mark

Dave Mark — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:36:47 +0000

If you look again at the last two paragraphs of my column, I write:

“My point with all of this really has very little to do with the game itself and really less to do with the Euphoria engine.”

I even acknowledged that other people had given praise to the AI in the game (although the videos I watched that did so really weren’t showing anything spectacular that hasn’t been done for years in other games).

Additionally, the point of my column was this:

“This is really only a modified version of the graphics vs. AI debates. Originally, studios made pretty games with bad AI (and even bad physics). Now we seem to have moved on to making better physics… and with products like Euphoria, even better physics that take the load off of AI programmers trying to figure out what human reactions should be. None of that solves stupid AI play, though. And until we do that, we are going to be seeing otherwise decent games get shelved.”

I was being largely critical of the attitudes of the industry as a whole in thinking that nifty new technology is more important than things that directly affect gameplay (like AI in this case).

By: Victor

Victor — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:19:10 +0000

I wish you played the game than going off the review. There has been much debate on the validity of the review this game gets. It also seems the AI never gets praised for any of the good things it does as the flaws stand out a-bit too much. It also seems from forum comments that the game has a very slow adaptation mechanism that takes you a 10 minute match to appreciate. Apart from the difficulty “Form” also seems to affect the AI’s performance. The exploits and bad penalty calls are definitely a cause for concern but i think its a bit strange to make an article off someone Else’s impression of a game. Especially someone whose integrity has come into questions on a few occasion.

By: Dave Mark

Dave Mark — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:26:48 +0000

Yeah, that’s actually a good point. The 2nd time around for a particular technology usually gets it away from the core focus and simply uses it as another tool.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:26:55 +0000

Perhaps the positive thing to come out of this is that a company that knows how to make football games will then think about using this or similar technology to improve their product — and they will maintain what is right in their product to truly create a superior experience.

I was just arguing last week that building a game around a technology will create a bad game unless you can look at the initial product created, find what is interesting and fun, and then rebuild the game around that with the technology ending up just being support for what is fun. I haven’t studied backbreaker yet, but it looks like they didn’t do the second step here.

But, I wonder if they like their engine so much that it is fun for the design team just to see it in action. As you said, tunnel vision…