Just released into Early Access with Native Linux support, VEIN could be the next big survival game with a whole lot of features that just look and sound great. It may not be all that impressive graphically compared to some other survival games, with a rather flat-looking style to it, but it seems the list of features and general world interactivity make up for it.
You know the drill when it comes to this though - the world ended, it’s a zombie apocalypse. It’s been done over and over again. Where it actually sounds interesting is everything else. The environment is dynamic and changes with the seasons along with “long-scale” random events. There’s also some intelligent AI they say that can “see, hear, feel, and smell you, and react intelligently to those senses”.
Additionally there’s a lot of character customization, nearly everything is usable in some way down to simple things like knocking on doors and turning on taps. Then you get into the building systems where you can build up a safehouse, you need to go hunting and till the land for crops and there’s even vehicles too. So far, it seems like it has everything to make it quite a hit.
Intelligent Artificial Intelligence?
“AI” is a catch-all term in game development to refer to any enemies in video games, and it’s a common trope that lower quality games will have subpar enemies to fight.
“Intelligent AI” is usually used to indicate that the developer put some time and effort into making sure the enemy has more solid internal logic patterns when confronting the player (less rigid pathfinding, organically failing at a task rather than being stuck in a loop, attempting to surround, flank, outmaneuver the player, so on), so that’s probably why it’s included in the article.
Yes, it sounds weird in a world where LLM marketing and robotics has essentially co-opted the phrase. But games used it in standardized terminology first!
I guess AI is the new mandatory buzzword in every piece of software out there.
In games you can probably get away with adding some more variables to a character and simulate intelligent behaviour from simple formulas like attack = strength + rage - hunger - fear, you don’t really need to push a neural network into the game.
NPCs were always called ai in gamedev. It’s the modern world that has ruined the term
That’s the thing, the term is used to describe those formula implementations in gaming. It doesn’t indicate actual neural network usage at any point.
To be fair to the games industry, this term was used as far back in game development since the 80s/90s.
The closest might be those chess AI which learns by playing chess with itself.
While the “general purpose” AIs are simply shit (and this won’t change for the foreseeable future), specialized AIs for limited purposes have been a staple in gaming for ages.
I wrote a game called “sub hunt” on the TI99/4A (if anyone remembers it…). This was 40+ years ago, and used a kind of AI engine where the sub hunters learned about the players behavior. After a while, one had to restart the game because the hunters could easily predict where you would go…
We’ve all played games with unintelligent AI. This is just the opposite I guess.
Long drive let’s you interact with everything.
I originally wrote Vein off because it just looks so boring. Like it lacks flair.
It’s meant to be an RPG alla Project Zomboid but first person. It’s also currently in “free for testing” phase, so I’d imagine the art team hasn’t gone crazy yet.
