Comments section is pretty clear who read the article and who is only reacting to the title.
Helldivers 2 has weeks long campaigns where the entire playerbase has to defend certain planets. The “GM” keeps a close eye on progress of this event and manually adjusts it to make sure the campaign doesn’t complete too soon.
There isn’t some poor motherfucker staring at a screen watching the progress of each individual match spawning more bad guys whenever they feel like it.
This continuous evolution has actually seen Joel getting up at unsociable hours to sort out situations when the Helldivers 2 team realised the game wasn’t as balanced as it could be. “There have been some sudden moments where maybe one planet was too easy or one was too hard and [Joel] had to get up in the middle of the night to give the Automatons a bit of reinforcement so the players don’t take [the planet] too quickly,” Pilestedt said.
So the Director from L4D?
It’s literally a dude named Joel.
This is the most absolutely buck wild and inefficient version of this idea I’ve ever seen, ever. Director AI’s have existed over a decade, and have already been used to solve problems exactly like these. If I was Joel and was woken up at 2am to go drop a couple more bugs on Leedle III I’d tell my entire management team to eat shit and do it themselves. What the fuck. Who came up with this? This is half baked as hell
Director AI’s have existed over a decade, and have already been used to solve problems exactly like these.
My knowledge of Director AI’s is that they control the individual matches, but this is about the campaign as a whole.
This person isn’t calling down a dropship on individual players, he’s controlling how the campaign progresses at a higher level.
It sounds like he also writes the events. The article gives the example of one part ending faster than expected, so he added a bit about the forces pivoting to mine the planets. A director AI can’t make stuff up from scratch. (ML-AI could, but it wouldn’t be very good.)
This continuous evolution has actually seen Joel getting up at unsociable hours to sort out situations when the Helldivers 2 team realised the game wasn’t as balanced as it could be. “There have been some sudden moments where maybe one planet was too easy or one was too hard and [Joel] had to get up in the middle of the night to give the Automatons a bit of reinforcement so the players don’t take [the planet] too quickly,” Pilestedt said.
That’s honestly messed up and embarrassing for their developers. Writing a decent director shouldn’t be that hard.
It’s one banana, Michael, how much could it cost? 10 dollars?
They make this guy get up in the middle of the night to tweak some balance numbers? What the fuck?