Month: November 2024

The DreamWorld Playtest is an AI Nightmare

Disclosures: I received an unsolicited playtest key for this Beta via KeyMailer, the key distribution site. The content in this write-up was made in what the game describes as “Alpha 2 v 1.0”.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, as such I present the following.

Now that I’ve got your attention, either via lust, fear, or horror, let’s talk about DreamWorld!

DreamWorld, full name “DreamWorld: The Infinite Sandbox MMO” based on the press content I had to read, is not intrinsically interesting. The general gameplay is just “Cruddy Valheim MMO.” The controls are somewhat clunky. The graphics are tolerable, and there’s very little to actually recommend the gameplay.

The games only real strong point, outside of the one I’m about to talk about, is it’s building system. And even that, while in depth, isn’t particularly easy to use.

Even as I type this with the game in the background, a single doe clips back and forth at 90 degree angles in the distance.

But the first line of the game’s press release is what really caught my eye:

Surely this could only end well.

A Bad Idea, Implemented Poorly

DreamWorld allows players to use text-based generative AI to create 3D models that can be placed in the world, hence the Venus de Milo Pikachu above.

Using generative AI to create 3D Models isn’t new. Services like Meshy have been around for a bit, and models like Shap-E for local use also exist. But DreamWorld is the first game I’ve seen actually use one in “real time,” instead of just using it to generate assets to place into an in-development game.

As an idea in the abstract, it’s somewhat interesting . As a practical implementation, what DreamWorld currently has in its Alpha lacks necessary guardrails to prevent copyright infringement, adult content, or combinations of both!

Pikachu prior to fusion.

Before I get into the problems with bad actors (me) using the system, I first want to note that the system is entirely useless even if no one uses it to try to create pornography.

In DreamWorld, only the player who generates an asset can see the asset.

The result is that even using this in a positive way, like to cleverly generate extra decorations, the end result only appears for the building player, and no one else. For everyone else, it just appears as a sparkling box. So, the system is useless.

Secondly, assets are only cubes.

Every assets is just cube. It can’t be a chair, or a chest, or something clever and useful, it’s just a static cube. No dynamic properties, no color changing, just cubes.

A Lack of Reasonable Guardrails

DreamWorld appears to lack any sort of moderation on its models. While it limits users to 5 prompts per day, this isn’t much of a guardrail.

Here’s a brief list of prompts and results I tried out.

Prompt: Pikachu
Result: Copyright Infringement

With this “success” I decided to try for something slightly more risque. While I suspected their were filters for various keywords, I guessed that traditional artwork would not be subject to those filters.

Prompt: Venus De Milo
Result: Tasteful Nudity

With this confirmation that content didn’t appear to be filtered or moderated, I decided to move onto something a little more clever.

Prompt: Venus de Milo with the head of Pikachu
Result: Less tasteful nudity

Almost certain of my inevitable ban, I decided to show this off to a few friends. This led to suggestion that if there was a filter, it probably wasn’t calibrated for euphemisms in context.

Spoiler: It was not.

I didn’t end up creating anything too interesting with my remaining generations, but I do think this does a pretty good job of demonstrating that the game is absolutely not ready for prime time.

Now, some folks will be saying “What’s the harm?” or “This is only a problem because you made it a problem.” For those people, I would like to point them to the following document on Roblox from Hinderburg research.

I not opposed to adult content in games. I’ve written about a fair number of them on this site, and I’ve even suggested a few that are worth playing.

But adult content in unmoderated online spaces exposed to children is a bad idea. Unmoderated online generative AI is a terrible idea.

Final Thoughts

I don’t much like generative AI. If you want the longer take, read it here. But ignoring my personal feelings, this is still a bad implementation. Assuming there are no bad actors, the system does nothing meaningful. Taking bad actors into consideration, it lacks any meaningful human moderation or reasonable safeguards.

I reached out to the DreamWorld team on Discord and via Email, and they confirmed on both channels that in the future they expect to allow other players to view generated assets.

All I have to say on that is that I hope they have better moderation by then.

Magic player attends Lorcana Event with no experience. The results will shock you!

Non-Clickbait Title: I went to an Azurite Sea pre-release, and got 3rd.

I went to an Azurite Sea pre-release just about two weeks ago. I had never played in a Lorcana sealed event before. In fact, I’d never played in any Lorcana event before this one, and I’ve probably played less than 20 games of Lorcana total.

(Okay, that’s not counting grinding first chapter games with a friend about a year and half ago, but again, it’s been a while, and there game has had like 5 expansions since then.)

So why did I decide to spend $45 to play a sealed format for a game I don’t really play, for a set that I’d done no prep for? Well, because I make poor decisions when I’m bored.

Arrival, and Opening Boosters

I was relying on my expertise at Magic to carry me through the event. However, after cracking my boosters, I was hit with a few key realizations.

The first was that I had no sense of how “good” any given card was stat-wise, something that I can do with no effort in Magic. Is a 1/2 for 1 that quests for 1 worth playing? Should I only be running 2/2’s for 1? Something I take for granted (assessing stat values) was completely gone.

The second thing was the deckbuilding structure itself. In a sealed Lorcana event, you can use all colors of cards. This is a bit of a double edged sword, because what it actually means is that deck construction becomes a game of cutting 32 of the of the 72 cards you’ve opened.

Finally, I was confronted by the fact that I didn’t have a good sense of what the Inkable vs Non-Inkable ratio should be.

Faced with this dizzying array of choices, as well as not really knowing how locations worked, I decided to go back to my basics, and reach for my classic strategy.

BREAD

BREAD is a Magic strategy that dictates card value order in limited/sealed formats. It stands for the following:

B- Bombs
These are cards that will win you game if you resolve them, either due to high power, or just a very strong effect.
R – Removal
Cards that get rid of your opponents’ cards. Notably, there are far fewer of these in Lorcana than I’m used to, and they’re much higher costed. I actually only had a single card that could do any direct damage to a character.
E – Evasion
These are cards that get through to your opponent even if they have lots of characters out. Fortunately, Lorcana does have a good example of this: The keyword Evasive. These characters are tricky to remove and can safely build lore turn after turn.

I ran both of these in my deck, and they both did a LOT of work.

A – Aggro
Cheap cards that can be played early, and apply pressure.
D – Duds
Cards you just don’t want to play.

Deckbuilding

Confronted with an overwhelming number of cards, and 25 minutes to build a deck, I came up with the following plan:

  1. I would build out a pretty standard curve, prioritizing 1 and 2 cost cards, with a majority of the deck being under 4 cost.
  2. I’d try to run as many characters as possible, and few locations, but no items.

After building this deck, I made one last big decision, and probably the single decision responsible for my final result: I added in Pooh Pirate Ship.

Now, while this goes completely against everything else above, as it’s an un-inkable, type-specific item, I figured it could be worth it. Something that had become clear to me was that Lorcana had very little direct removal in the lower rarity slots, so I was unlikely to run into those sorts of cards. The second bit was that because Sealed formats for card games in general are at a much lower power level, they often stall out into top-decking.

My thought was that Pooh Pirate Ship would be a siegebreaker sort of card, allowing me to continually challenge with my pirates, and then fetch them back to replay them. And while I only had 8 or so pirates, I had two pretty decent targets for recovery in Mullins and Jim Hawkins, both of which seemed to have decent stats for combat.

These two quite honestly carried the day.


With deck construction complete, it was time to play.

The Games

I didn’t take great notes on my individual matches. But I can talk to the effectiveness of the decisions I made.

I finished with a record of 2-1, with most of my matches going to 3 games.

Match 1 wasn’t exactly a stomp, but I managed to pull ahead in the late game. Match 2 was my only loss of the three, and while it was possible I could have pulled out a win, I made some pretty significant misplays around my Vanellope Von Schweetz, choosing to Ink the locations that I would have placed her at.

That said, my game 2 opponent was also significantly better than me at managing the early game tempo, and outran me to the point that even when I had set up my board, I couldn’t clear their characters before they won.

Finally, for match 3, I managed to hit two Sail The Azurite Seas back to back into an early Jim Hawkins. He refilled my hand, giving me the win early, and then I was able to use Pooh Pirate Ship in the second game to grab back my cheaper 2-3 drop pirates for another win.

Overall

The last time I wrote about Lorcana was about a year ago. I predicted that if it could weather the storm, it would be set up to become one of the larger card games in the space. Not the most shocking armchair prediction, but something that seemed unclear at the time, what with the pretty blatant scalping making it impossible for folks to actually buy the game.

As far as I can tell, Lorcana seems to have done that. I’m not really a Disney person on any level, and coming in with no knowledge of the characters or cards, I still had a pretty good time. Games felt tense and plays felt meaningful.

Some of my habits from playing a lot of sealed Magic did carry over (recursion and evasion is good!), while others didn’t (My single damage spell did VERY little work). I think that sealed Lorcana might actually be a more interesting experience than Magic sealed, because it allows combos that can’t be done in the normal game, whereas sealed Magic is pretty much just slower standard Magic.

Overall, it was really fun to see how Lorcana has developed since I last played it, and also to see the design space that’s getting used now. For example, typal is much more of a thing than it used to be. I’ll probably try to play a bit more Lorcana, as I am getting a bit burnt out on Magic, and Foundations didn’t really sell itself on its limited format.

Grab Bag – November 2024

I play a lot of things that don’t end up on the blog. Sometimes it’s because the game is too small, sometimes because the game is too big. In either case, I still want to talk about them briefly before PAX Unplugged happens, and they are swept into the great void.

Wilmot’s Warehouse

Wilmot’s Warehouse is fundamentally a game about organization. As such I feel a that something should be noted before I give my thoughts on it.

From where I am sitting writing this, if I turn my head to the left, I can see, on top of each other, the following:
1. A hammer
2. A large set of strength cables
3. A cardboard box for wallmounting, and a variety of other objects.

If I crane to the right, I can see sketchbooks, notebooks, self help books, and computers, all stacked together. Should I manage to owl, and do a full 180 degree turn, I would see a table that has on it trading cards, dice, more notebooks, and uncashed checks. In front of me, on my computer desk, in addition to my mouse and keyboard, I see duct tape, a key, business cards, and in-game reward codes that haven’t been redeemed.

All of which is to say, organizing things is not something I do well in real life. As a result, when it is a primary game mechanic, and I’m asked to do it VERY QUICKLY I do not experience what I would call joy. Instead, I experience a set of emotions I tend to associate with work meetings with clients, and performance reviews.

It’s a very clever little game, but it’s absolutely not for me. It’s a puzzle game where the first part of the puzzle is realizing that there is a puzzle.

Of the items on this list, Wilmot’s Warehosue is the probably the one that deserves its own writeup the most, but because it just isn’t for me, it’ll probably never get one.

UFO 50

Remember those old “200 games in 1” bootleg ass CD’s? Or maybe those Plug-N-Play machines with a bunch of random garbage on them?

UFO-50 is kind of like that, but if all the games were good. Or at least interesting.

I’d like to do a full writeup on the game at some point, but the reality of it is that it’s a huge pain to try to beat all of them. I’ve actually only beat like 5 of them, and with perfect clears on 4.

And frankly, while I don’t enjoy everything in UFO 50, I only feel like I had to find 6-7 I really liked for it to be worth it. Also, if 50 games feels overwhelming, here are a few of my favorites.

#9 Attactics – Real time unit placement.
#12 Avaianos – A 4X game with scythe action selection style upgrades. (IE, each turn you worship a god, which gives a set of actions, and you get to upgrade those actions each time you select a god.)
#46 Party House – A clever little roguelike bag builder.
#24 Caramel Caramel – Cute little Shmup that I’m really bad at.

Zenless Zone Zero

I actually wrote 60% of a post on Zenless Zone Zero, took a break figuring I could put it up in a few months, and in that time they apparently completely removed one of the core systems I’d described. This would have required me to go back and play more of the game to actually figure out what the current experience was like, something I didn’t feel like doing.

I’m going to put the opening here, because it captures my feeling on the game pretty sufficiently.

It was the best of games, it was the worst of games, it was a brilliant spectacle fighter RPG with puzzle elements, it was a high production slot machine, it was the future of free to play, it was the end of the live-service bubble, it offered joyful combat and a fun story, it offered obnoxious time gated farming – in short, the game was so much like Genshin Impact that the critic wondered if he should just link to that writeup instead.

I played like 40 hours, and honestly, the first 20-30 are pretty fun, but once I hit the end of that, I ended up in the typical “grind your dailies” portion of every F2P game that exists. Now, in ZZZ, the dailies/weeklies are boss fights against excavators fused with ghost devils, and rogue-like style dungeon crawls, but they’re still dailies.

So once it became clear that I’d finished the story that was available, and everything required a daily grind, I just moved on.

And while I’m talking about F2P games, friends of mine have been playing a bunch of The First Descendant, and Throne and Liberty. The First Descendant is pretty much just “What if Warframe was REALLY horny?” and Throne and Liberty is a pay2win Korean MMO, so I don’t actually care what the game play is like.

But hey, they’ve played like a billion hours of each, and had fun, so who am I to judge?

Chained Together

Rage games are an interesting genre, things like Getting Over It or Jump King. Chained Together is a rage game you play with your friends.

Fortunately, it also has checkpoints, or I would not have beaten it.

There isn’t a lot to say on this one. I think part of the reason that Sexy Hiking and Getting Over It were so well received is because they were doing something new, if nothing else. Jump King is sort of in a similar space, in that no one had make a game with quite those mechanics.

Getting Over It in particular seems to want to talk a lot about the nature of what the game itself is.

But something about 3D rage games has always felt a bit… cheap to me? They feel like they were cobbled together out of Unity store assets to make a quick buck, and get streamers to play them.

In either case, we beat it in about 5 hours. (With checkpoints) It’s a good enough game if you want to grab 3 friends to do something stupid on a Friday, and no one can decide if you want to play Jackbox or not.

Vagrant Song

I started a writeup on Vagrant Song, and it was mostly vitriol. I did not find this game worth playing, and after a bit, even it’s outwardly charming art started to piss me off. After all, what’s the point of rubber-hose style art, if it’s NOT MOVING?

I only played the first 3 fights, which took about 6-7 hours total, and during that time I found it a pretty mediocre multiplayer boss fight sort of thing.

I legitimately do not understand who Vagrantsong is for. Like, seriously. You want a replayable multiplayer roguelike based on positioning and combos? It’s called Inkbound. You want roleplaying and turn based combat? Play 5E. You want better turn based combat? Play Pathfinder.

You want a mediocre campaign game that takes too long to play, that feels like an extended GM-less boss rush with limited agency to accelerate the fight?

Good news!

I have a copy of Vagrantsong I’m looking to sell.

If anyone ever tells me that they love Vagrantsong, I am going to have to stifle a little voice inside my head that wants to respond by asking if they’ve played any other tabletop or video game in the last 20 years.

Pokemon TCG Pocket

In a sense, I am grateful for Pokemon TCG Pocket. It’s given me something to write about this week. I won’t have to endure the depressingly real world of Disco Elysium, or parse out how Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess works. I don’t have to return to UFO 50 and try to figure out how to review 50 games in one writeup.

No, I can just complain about a little app, and call it a day, and ignore some other things stressing me out.

Opening

The starting moments of a game are critical ones. They’re the moment that developer tries to hook you in. It can be a flash-forward, an exciting call to action, character creation, introduction to mechanics, or one of many other different things.

TCG Pocket starts by having the player open booster packs.

This is followed by opening more booster packs.

You can’t actually play a game with the cards until you’ve reached level 3, something you do by opening more and more booster packs, and critically, using the not-quite-premium currency to speed up the pack opening timer. Sure, you could wait the 2 days or so it would take it do it normally, but I would be shocked if more than 5% of the playerbase actually did this.

But after reaching level 3, is that experience worth it?

Not really.

Gameplay

The game generally plays like a simplified version of the physical Pokemon TCG.

Like the physical TCG, there are multiple types of cards, primarily the Pokemon and trainers. Pokemon cards are played out onto a bench, with one Pokemon in the active slot at any point in time. Only the active slot card can actually use attacks. Trainer cards are one-time use effects that can do a variety of things, generally drawing more cards, healing damage off your own Pokemon, or switching which one is in the active slot.

The game has been slimmed down from a standard Pokemon game, however. Players only need 3 points to win, instead of 6. Trainer card effects have been simplified, turning Professor Oak into a Pot of Greed. The bench only has 3 slots.

The biggest change has been made to energy. In the physical game, energy cards are a part of the deck. Only one can be played per turn, and they’re played onto Pokemon. Pokemon can only use attacks that they meet the energy threshold for.

In Pocket, they’re not part of the deck. Instead, you generate a single energy each turn, and can play energy onto a single Pokemon each turn. As a result, it’s no longer possible to get too many or too few energy, even though you can get the wrong type. This is a nice idea that’s currently irrelevant, because the game rewards mono-type quite heavily, with only one incentive for doing otherwise.

The thing is… it doesn’t really feel like it matters. The rewards for winning in PVP are basically nonexistent. None of the daily missions require it, and none of my non-premium missions require it either. PVE is more rewarding, but the events are on a timer you can speed up with money, and many of the rewards are one-time, or locked behind using a specific deck type instead of just winning. The game’s balance is also pretty middling, with just a handful of decks being relevant, and they rely upon 2 copies of one of the rarer cards.

And that kind of makes sense, because it doesn’t really feel like it’s about the battling. It’s about the collecting. Critically, it’s about the booster packs.

Booster Packs

Everything about Pocket is designed to reinforce opening boosters. The home screen is the booster opening page. The link to the in-game shop is more prominently displayed than the link to the battle options.

Booster pack openings are an 8 step process. Select a pack type to open. Select a pack from a revolving carousal. Swipe the top of the pack for a crunchy lovely opening sound. Tap through each card in the booster, with what I can only describe as a glittering chime for each card, and more for rarer ones. View the full results. Watch cards slot into your binder. Swipe up on new cards to register them into your card dex. Watch them slide into place, and your card collection count tick up.

It is then time to open another booster pack.

I’m breaking this down not because it’s overwhelming or slow (though it feels a little drawn out). I’m noting it because it’s indicative of where the game’s priorities are.

Overall

Many people do just collect physical Pokemon cards without playing the trading card game. I certainly did growing up. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with just enjoying the art and collecting them. If Pocket TCG was purely the collection elements, without the aggressive monetization, it wouldn’t be for me, but I wouldn’t have as many problems with it.

But Pocket isn’t just “Not For Me.” It’s an aggressive experience that’s designed to build player engagement habits, and convert those habits into cash. I don’t respect it, and I don’t recommend it.

I’m also not going to pretend that it doesn’t work, that it isn’t at least partly compelling. Bait is designed to be tasty. But I am not a fish. I can spit out the hook.