Death Stranding's Biggest Problem? Teaching the AI to Walk | AI and Games #67

[@AIandGames]

Some friendly advice: don't play this game on a PS5 with your headphones on unless you remember to disable the controller speaker. My partner came up to me at my desk asking "WHY THE FUCK IS YOUR CONTROLLER CRYING LIKE A BABY!?!?!?!" It was easier to turn it off than to explain why, to be honest. But yeah, I got grief for that for about a week.

[@genybr]

Would you like to review AI of "Vangers" game from 1998? It is pretty simple yet can make player curious "how am I playing online on PC without internet access??" So, 3 points "why": Second: because it have a ton of easer eggs on Death Stranding. First: it is open source with alive community, so you can even talk with actual devs. Zero: curious method to play with partial information in narrative (well, it's not for AI but dialogue is interactive, so it's kinda related to). __Please notice that english translation is awful, so it is better to contact with community to have more or less correct information.__ __Please notice that "correct" is NOT means adequate or human-readable. This game have it's own culture so community is quite... native.__ English is ok, so @vangers in telegram is good point to start. You'll find some people there, who may provide you detailed information and (probably) visuals. good game overview on youtube: 7smUD83nb_8 "Блуджать Вангеры". Please, turn on subtitles.

[@cheezandtoast]

I feel your pain. My wife did the same when we were over seas and I got death stranding

[@thewhitewolf58]

If your headphones are on the controller speaker needs to shut up.

[@fireaza]

I have to say they did a pretty good job, I don't think I've seen a more natural-looking environment than what's in Death Stranding. Usually, you only get a handful of trees and rocks on top of a lumpy grass-textured terrain.

[@AIandGames]

For real it is - from an environment art perspective - one of the most visually stunning games I've ever played. Several of the vista shots you see in the video came about because I just had to pause and turn the recorder on. Not often a game really blows me away like that.

[@LORDOFDORKNESS42]

...Does that mean that the terrain scanner shows you a glimpse of the NPC navigation mesh, just with symbols a human player understands? If so, that's a really clever dev trick, and it would be neat to see in more games!

[@AIandGames]

I think it's a combination of the two. The outline as it scans across it is a shader effect and doesn't really show any nav mesh data. But, when you do scan the environment, you'll see all the little X's on the ground that highlight on specific geometry. That I am pretty confident is being pulled from the nav mesh itself based on the terrain type and increased 'cost' to traverse it.

[@Tclans]

I’ve had an amazing time with Death Stranding. That being said I love hiking and mountaineering, so finding a safe traversal from A to B in this game came pretty natural. When I talk Death Stranding to people most of the time they heard stuff like, that it is a walking simulator. But I’d argue that the game simulates walking. I love what they have done with the different systems of surface, weight, speed and inertia. But also the way literal ‘tracks’ form. The more you travel the same route the more of an established route it becomes. And it benefits moving speed. Then there is the ‘weird shit’ ie. the story. My explanation is, see it as an anime with photorealistic characters. That, at least for me, works wonders in accepting and partly understanding the story of this game.

[@Chilli_Tea]

I just ignored the story, it's intriguing and stuff sure but at the end of the day I'm just a delivery man and those roads and ziplines aren't going to build themselves. Keep on keepin on

[@shingshongshamalama]

I think one really cheap thing devs could do is give NPCs some simple unique animations for when they face certain conditions of pathing failure. Having enemies that can't figure out how to get to you because there's a giant fucking ravine in the way, and then _visibly react_ with consternation and bemusement at it, honestly just adds to immersion and player engagement compared to NPCs that just bug out rapidly changing directions while their pathfinding visibly malfunctions.

[@LaNoLaCola]

I definitely want to see Tommy cover other non-Metal Gear games from Kojima in the future

[@kingofzombies9873]

One of my favourite games and an absolute masterpiece cannot think of another game so genuinely positive and hopeful where the story and gameplay breaks the idea that you are an island and instead incentives helping others and being helped yourself A game about strength in vulnerability and aid even without clear benefit I love it so much

[@waded4610]

I’ll be honest, I never paid much attention to Deaths Stranding, but after this video I had no idea how complex the work was that went into it!

[@youngknight5589]

I would’ve loved to see more talks on Death Stranding from GDC it’s definitely a fun game at least for me it was and its cool to learn how this fame handled its AI

[@khartoumist1031]

I knew there was a reason why playing this game mentally felt like backpacking class 3 terrain, and this video explains why!

[@aadipie]

Absolutely loved this game and everything about it, was watching Eric Johnson's GDC talk about the AI navigation a couple weeks back and it was so insightful, they really put in a lot of effort in all aspects

[@AIandGames]

It's a great talk. I didn't want to regurgitate what Eric says. So instead I focussed on why it's such a big deal that they have a one-hour video about it. It's both funny and distressing how many problems rocky terrain causes for a supposedly 'solved' problem.

[@aadipie]

@@AIandGames yeah lol, through the talk he kept bringing up the never ending number of problems that began rising and how the team rose to solve those problems head on.

[@nowgoawayanddosomethinggoo8978]

MGS 5 Skull Face: Today is Machines will learn to walk! Kojima meant what he said

[@TheIrishGamerGuy]

Playing it on an RTX 3080 and 3800x. The controls are so well thought out for keyboard it feels like a native PC game, its amazing. I held off returning to console version when I switched to PC knowing I'd revisit it someday (never made it past Craftsman on PS4, skipped Enginner like a fool back then) and now finishing Episode 5 for the 1st time on PC some 47 hours into it.

[@skupipup]

Not the first game to come into mind when you think AI but super fascinating stuff. Thanks for covering this Tommy!

[@michaelkeaton5394]

The engineer at koji pro did an incredible job on the decima engine. Graphicaly on the first place because when it came to faces it had a few difficulty espacialy HZD while in DS they have the most stunning mo cap in recent years. But all that ai work, i never thought about how complicated all of this pathing would be, thanks for the enlightment !!!

[@hueykratos]

its already impressive can't wait to see what it can do with even more iterations because i think games going fully procedural is the future

[@aarcade6676]

games "going fully procedural" sounds fucking awful. theres so much uniqueness and potential for creativity in a handcrafted map that procedural generation will never be able to match.

[@theblobconsumes4859]

@@aarcade6676 Fully agree. Ideally, we should have both co-exist, but not one replace the other.

[@BAVy11037]

I noticed that the subtitles are wrong in a few places, like 4:31, 11:57, 13:10

[@gaurd3]

Your shirt brought me here. It works

[@DarkDax]

Bloody hell these guys are smart - great insight as always Tommy!

[@hospie]

14:18 after all the work put on getting the terrain and character movement right they make melee combat have them sliding like they are on ice? Impressive game nonetheless...

[@seanmcilroy5106]

Fantastic vid as always.

[@TwashMan]

Really love your accent ! Also always wanted a really good video explaining this ! Thank you very much

[@rojanshabani]

Thank you for the video!

[@mBaron29]

Awesome video man, thanks!

[@Pretend3rA]

"algemeen Dagblad" native english people saying dutch worlds is always fun to hear.

[@lucasmelor]

Can you make a video about nextbots?

[@stevep9177]

20:03 I got pretty frustrated here too honestly (I was in a truck)

[@fhjunior6183]

Thanks for the vid

[@JohnBradyIRL]

One of my favourite games ever. It's so unique and will be interesting how it evolves and others use the techniques over time

[@dreddeus]

Love your videos, mate! Do you also do sports games, ie. Madden or FIFA?

[@AIandGames]

Would love to tackle a sports game in the future. Just haven't found the resources to pull one off yet. Though FIFA is increasingly a possibility.

[@dreddeus]

@@AIandGames Awesome, looking forward to it!

[@Great.Milenko]

so,,,, basically an A* pathfinding system with weight painted scores for the travers ability of the map. and a low range streamed and regularly updated navmesh

[@Z-Mikes00]

the fact this game took roughly 3 years to develop, had this amount of ambition, had these many challenges during development on a massive, and while also having to make loads of cut scenes and lore while turning out extremely polished day 1 with no delay is a true testament to how efficient and amazing his team is. unfortunately tho i feel the writing didnt pay off. i found policenauts to be his weakest game writing wise but then this game came out. policenauts imo just had a boring story and plot with some interesting ideas and a bit too much perverseness and cringe this just had more cringe and didnt know how to tell its story very well. the intro especially. all he had to do was make it a snatcher style intro but decided to be "artsy" and poetic instead and just filling us in later more in passing.

[@vonderdrake9796]

For me I thought the biggest problem with Death stranding was the lack of new enemies, obstacles and uneven balancing with vehicles and zip-lines. The focus on combat and boss fights felt unnecessary as well. The narrative, script and characters portrayed by Hollywood actors didn’t do it any favors either. But other than that I feel like it was one of the most unique gaming experiences I’ve ever had and I’m really intrigued by the coming sequel.

[@AIandGames]

It is an exceptionally long game. I do feel like it could be a lot shorter. That said, I still strangely enjoyed it, despite all the issues that it has. I found it quite a chill experience much of the time.

[@vonderdrake9796]

@@AIandGames True, the longer the game the harder it is to balance. Yeah it delivers such a fresh take on open world traversal and can feel so meditative to play.

[@lornenix2243]

Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 pathfinding is interesting.

[@w7x509]

Great, bad navmesh must be why pathfinding for NPCs in Dark Souls is often broken (and we can take advantage of it 😝)

[@LoiteringReaper]

XCom2 uses navigational meshes.

[@WunderWulfe]

Can you not break it all into larger and larger chunks, and have weighted and cached cost between the chunks? Then you break it into smaller pieces based on distance from the player

[@GameDevYal]

if you make large enough chunks they can become misleading depending on the terrain (e.g. if there's a giant ravine through the center of the chunk it might be impossible to reach one side of it from the other), it's hard to find shortcuts that doesn't lose information here since the whole *point* of the simplification is to throw away data to speed things up.

[@lauraschlieselhuber8487]

I'd say it's the lack of subtlety in the narration and the way the characters and dialogues are written, but yeah, that too.

[@fireaza]

Dude, it's a Kojima game, that's to be expected!

[@lauraschlieselhuber8487]

@@fireaza Well I expect artists and creators to get better with time and practice but maybe I'm naïve, you're right lmao

[@AIandGames]

I mean... you're not wrong.

[@horrgakx]

Very interesting about an interesting game. I really thought it was more style than substance and quickly got bored and gave up.

[@gimpscam9976]

Good video, but npcs don’t use roads you create which sucks. You’d think a porter would love a road but no they’d rather walk underneath or next to.

[@andybrown4284]

There's nothing strange in death stranding, plenty of kojima though

[@fastsupercool]

rain world ai?

[@Kisuke323]

Still no idea who is the game actually for.

[@JorgeEscobarMX]

And I thought data engineering was hard.

[@OnlyHerculean]

Funny thing is story wise the reason Sam has to deliver the packages is because the AI ist to bad at it and has no network connection. 😂

[@octaviosilva5808]

Death Stranding had an incredible team for development, if only the game design and Storytelling was refined, it would have been an exceptional game

[@MrRoland47]

The biggest problem of DS is that you don't have much space for creativity. You always have to go by a single path back and forward, back and forward, back and forward, back and forward, back and forward, back and forward, back and forward, back and forward, back and forward, back and forward, back and forward, Until the end of the game. If you want to create challenges for your self you feel that the game designer and level designer did not foresee this. Unfortunately.

[@marcelozerbini5411]

This game is the one that made me side with Konami

[@marcusaurelius647]

Christ, keep it simple stupid. Don't make enemys walking take months of development time.

[@aarcade6676]

...it's a game about walking. this would be like complaining about all the work they put into the cars in fast and furious.

[@marcusaurelius647]

@@aarcade6676 I certainly didn't buy it for the walking, but maybe I just got the wrong picture from the epic cinematic trailers.

[@BigHeadClan]

Videogames are effectively an art form failing to expand on what can and can’t be done is limiting to the medium it’s presented. The better understanding developers have of technologies and ways to work within the limited frame work the more fantastic and engaging games can be. Sure this took a lot of development cycles but now an entire development team and wider industry has a system and method for delivering this in other games. It goes without saying these systems can be applied in other creative ways as well, the mentioned birds flight paths in Horizon being one of them.