Author Archives: Zhijie Li

Console vs PC

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The war between consoles and PC have been a gruesome one in the gaming industry, many people have debated which is the better way to play games, there are even a dedicated community on reddit called PC master race (https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/) with 3 million subscribers, the reason for such communities to exist is very simple, they believe that PC is better than console in general.

Let’s start this off with some history info, in 1972, the very first video game console was introduced, it was called Magnavox Odyssey, but the first real one to be purchased in many homes was the Atari 2600 that was released in 1977, it was known for classic titles such as pong, throughout the years, consoles have kept improving, currently the most popular video game console is the PS4, released in 2013.

Now let’s take a look at PC, computer gaming wasn’t a thing until the video gaming industry crash of 1983, after 1983, there has been a rise of “bedroom coders” that have made their own games but console games were still more popular then, PC gaming became popular and mainstream starting from 1990s and onwards.

Why do so many people believe PC is better than console nowadays? First of all, PC is a lot more flexible, when you buy a console, you may only select pre-assembled machines from companies when you try to obtain a PC, you have a variety of options and have the freedom to build it yourself. PC games are also very easy to mod, which have led to many player-created content games thrive such as Minecraft, gmod, Rimworld.

Do you prefer to play games on console or PC and why? And what is your view on the whole console vs PC war?

Meet AlphaStar, an AI designed to play Starcraft 2

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Starcraft 2 is a real-time strategy game that requires quick thinking, good planning and precise controls to dominate over your opponent, in this game, you can play as 3 races, Terran, Protoss and Zerg. You gather resources, build up your economy and train units to defeat your opponents, it sounds quite straight forward, but there are numerous variables at play on who will come out on top in a match, especially a professional match.

AlphaStar was developed by Google and is the first AI to ever defeat a top-level professional player in Starcraft 2, as many people who are aware, AIs are good at learning things that are repetitive and have a “rule” to it that is easy to code in, but how did Google make AlphaStar become good at a game with a lot of changing variables?

AlphaStar’s behavior is generated by a deep neural network that receives input data from the raw game interface (a list of units and their properties) and outputs a sequence of instructions that constitute an action within the game. In the initial stages, Alpha star also has guidance from human players to imitate from to flesh out the play styles to be more flexible like a human and less like a bot following a predetermined set of rules.

What does this mean for AIs in the future? Alphastar has proved that AI is not only good at performing repetitive tasks, it can also be trained to perform complicated tasks better than a human, this might sound worrisome to people, but the age of smart AI is coming towards us fast and in the near future, these AIs will no longer be used on games and might be used in many work situations.

Reference: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphastar-mastering-real-time-strategy-game-starcraft-ii

Video game Microtransactions

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Do you remember when games used to come out to be completely playable, little to no bugs, nothing you need to pay to unlock, no DLCs and can offer hundreds of hours of entertainment? Those were a simpler time.

Monetization in video games has seen a drastic change in recent years, nowadays, more and more games releases felt unfinished, just to realize that some content was probably cut to be sold as DLCs later. More and more games greet you with a banner telling you there is a deal going on and you can get 10 shiny loot boxes for only $24.99. There are even a few very notorious examples of a company putting a full $60 price tag on their games, and forcing players to pay more in-game to unlock content or to progress their characters. In this Reddit thread , a user named MBMMaverick expressed his displacement about EA locking a key character “Darth Vader” in their game “Star Wars BattleFront 2” which the user has already paid $80 for, EA’s response replied stating “The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.” Which were quickly massively criticized by Reddit users and this comment would become the most downvoted comment in the history of Reddit (668K downvotes.)

So what exactly is wrong with microtransactions? In my opinion, microtransactions are fine as long as they cosmetic and doesn’t impact gameplay much, I believe microtransactions can indeed provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment, but the boundaries are very vague and difficult to pin it down, Call of Duty World War 2 has a genius execution for microtransactions, while you are opening loot boxes, you go into a lobby where people can practice shooting or just chat with each other, when you open a loot box, your loot box content is visible to all other players in this lobby, so when you get a lucky pull, you can show them off to all nearby people and sometimes people log in just to go onto this lobby to watch people open loot boxes.

Overall, microtransactions are not exactly a bad thing, but some companies have way overdone and in turn ruined the reputation of their games such as NBA2K19, which 65% the users reviewed the game as “would not recommend.” , Fallout 76, which suffered a chain of catastrophic events that lead to the game’s swift death just a few weeks after it’s initial release and many others.

Reddit Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/dppum98/

NBA2k19’s steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/841370/NBA_2K19/