Monday 11 August, 2008

I've just finished the final battle and "won" the game. Yay!

I actually feel a bit sad because I don't think I'll play any more, though I'd like to. I have too many other games waiting! While playing I did realize a few things which surprised me (mainly because I hadn't thought of them before!)

(1) When "emulating" a dice roll in a video game, you aren't limited to "traditional" dice. For example, you can use a "die" that can only roll 5,8, and 2. It seems so obvious that I wonder why this hasn't been done more often. Of course, the tricky part is communicating the odds to your players so that they know what to expect. (ie, this is a wonky dice that mostly rolls 1s, but it can roll 10s 30% of the time!) To be honest, in Culdcept (where you roll a die, but the range of values you can get varies quite a bit), I never really knew what was going on but I got a general sense based on what I got and what my opponents rolled.

(2)I was a bit disappointed in the AI these past few matches when it made decisions that were obviously wrong. I found that it was ok when the AI made a "believable" mistake, rather than when it made one that just seemed too stupid. So, what makes a believable mistake? Hmmm.. that's a hard one to answer because I haven't seen anyone else play in order to see what kinds of mistakes they make. If I see an AI make a mistake like one that I've made in the past, then I feel it's ok. I guess what I'm trying to say is that a believable mistake is relative to the observer. (which sounds obvious) However, I think that it might be dependendent on the mistakes the observer has made in the past together with the awareness (by the observer) of those mistakes. I guess that sounds somewhat like a metric for AI design! (and I'm sure that others have figured this out long before I thought of it...)

In all, I'd love to play this against someone else!

I just stumbled on this log looking for what people thought of various Call of Duty games (I just bought CoD 4, have totally missed the phenomenon thus far). It always makes me happy to hear that someone played Culdcept and actually enjoyed it. I definitely count it as one of my favorite games of all time.

Did you ever find others to play against? A roommate and I used to have epic Culdcept battles. While the AI did tend to make poor choices on occasion, human opponents are a challenge. But the downside to human opponents is that luck still plays a big role in the game, and it can be maddening losing to your roommate due to unfortunate rolls. I need to find the XBox 360 version of the game and then find a system to play it on!

I never did get a chance to play against someone else which is a real shame, this is one of those games that SHOULD have taken off and SHOULD have been a great success. Hmmm, maybe someone should work on a sequel of sorts...

Funny you say it should have taken off. I first read about it on one of those "Best 10 Games No One's Ever Heard Of" type lists in a magazine, and bought it right after. I love those lists for exposing me to games like this that, yea, should have been more popular!