Machine Learning Analysis of Player Behaviour in Tomb Raider: Underworld | AI and Games #31
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- Опубліковано 21 сер 2018
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A written version of this video is available:
The AI and Games website:
aiandgames.com/tomb-raider/
Medium:
/ tombraider
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Tomb Raider: Underworld may well be over a decade old, but it's home to a number of exciting research projects that sought to understand how players play the game once it is released to market.
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Research papers referenced in this episode are listed below:
- Drachen, A., & Canossa, A. (2009). Analyzing spatial user behavior in computer games using geographic information systems. In Proceedings of the 13th international MindTrek conference: Everyday life in the ubiquitous era (pp. 182-189). ACM.
www.researchgate.net/profile/...
- Drachen, A., Canossa, A., & Yannakakis, G. N. (2009). Player modeling using self-organization in Tomb Raider: Underworld. In Computational Intelligence and Games, 2009. CIG 2009. IEEE Symposium on (pp. 1-8). IEEE.
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/...
- Mahlmann, T., Drachen, A., Togelius, J., Canossa, A., & Yannakakis, G. N. (2010). Predicting player behavior in Tomb Raider: Underworld. In Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG), 2010 IEEE Symposium on (pp. 178-185). IEEE.
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/...
- Sifa, R., Drachen, A., Bauckhage, C., Thurau, C., & Canossa, A. (2013). Behavior evolution in Tomb Raider: Underworld. In Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG), 2013 IEEE Conference on (pp. 1-8). IEEE.
eldar.mathstat.uoguelph.ca/das...
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Soundtrack for this episode is the following tracks from the Tomb Raider: Underworld Soundtrack.
- Main Theme
- Coastal Thailand - Ruins
- The Path to Avalon
- The Norse Connection
- Thors God-Like Strength
- Puppet No Longer
#gamedev #MachineLearning #TombRaider - Ігри
The story of player analytics in Tomb Raider: Underworld is one I've been sitting on for a *very* long time. I'm happy to finally get it out there and let people find out what was learned from the experience. I'm also beginning to think I'm a 'solver' according to that analysis.... took me forever to record the footage needed to get this video together. 😂😂
Did the people behind this study mention if and/or how they accounted for players who ''cheat'' puzzles by using online walkthroughs or guides?
Wonder if they collected any camera position data. I hope not, for my sake.
lol
same
To be fair, the camera was a mess so you could say it just freaked out and got stuck in weird places... xD
Turns out gravity is Lara’s most dangerous enemy...
Underworld is one of my favorite Tomb Raider games, it's unfortunate that it's largely forgotten.
Pretty sure people forget about the game because it was an unpolished mess
That's because Crystal Dynamics became a shill for Microsoft, releasing the 360 version as the 'definitive' version and half assed the PS3/PC versions. This type of move by CD will be repeated again by 2015 thus karma did struck them for good. Tbh Tomb Raider Underworld had the best launch trailer ever made.
for good reason. uninteresting, bland story, horrendous, clunky controls and camera. animations are often awkward and stiff and look bad, awful combat that didn't improve on legend or anniversary's combat.
good things i'll say. a lot of the levels are quite open and beautiful from an art design perspective and the level design in turn is quite alright.
but it's just like someone said above me, an unpolished, disappointing mess. I actually enjoyed angel of darkness more and would go back and play that before I played underworld again. It was a massive step down from anniversary which I thought was quite great.
I wanted to love it but the camera moves very weirdly. It goes of in wild directions every time I move slightly.
I love the Legend trilogy
I'm definitely in the solver group. I can also say the reason I take so long is simply because I'm looking in every corner I can find (even if I've found all the collectables) and enjoying the environment. This is also the reason for so many fall deaths, as I'm pushing to see where I can and can't go.
I personally think analytics can be a bad thing for the player, as trying to make a one size fits all for anything results in an uncomfortable experience for everyone. However if the result of their research is the kind of multiple difficulty options we are getting with Shadow of the Tomb Raider I'm all for it.
Oh my god I remember this game thinking the games graphics are god tier
It still looks great. :)
Still looks pretty good. We're certainly capable of better, but I'd still play this game more than happy with its level of detail.
It holds up really well, especially without the ridiculous bloom and blur other games were using.
It has the classic edios/crystal dymanics art direction which helps it alot with age.
It still looks amazing
I miss the old Lara Croft from Legend and Underworld
So do i. :/
I was also looking forward for the complete trilogy of Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness. Sad it didn't get the complete story of Lara Croft and Kurtis Trent.
OneWingedGamer96 Devil May Cry returned back to its true self with the upcoming Devil May Cry 5. Maybe the same can happen for Tomb Raider one day.
The best Lara!
If you not already played, I recommend you to download this one tombraider-dox.com/ It's fan made and is based on Tomb Raider 2 with the controls of Legend and Underworld
Tomb Raider Underworld is a beautiful ending to a great story I'll definitely give it that.
Unfortunately there were no bosses to fight and the game was largely free running. Again I do enjoy this game I'm simply pointing out it's platform.
Chrys.K.M Chris There's a problem with the ending of TRU it doesn't share a cohérence with one of the events in TRL wich is the destruction of the Nepal mirror by Amelia (the mother of Lara) when she take the sword and disappear the mirror is broken in pieces and unusable but in TRU it works perfectly. So plot hole...
@@kilianguibert6906 True that, again I enjoyed it only while playing it start TRL and TRA.
On it's own it doesn't stand as a powerful pillar as I believe the heads were more focused on starting the new Tomb Raider Trilogy.
Chrys.K.M Chris That's true for me they should not have include Natla or the Doppleganger and start directly when Legend end.
@@kilianguibert6906 well for me the best path of that trilogy was Anniversary.
Underworld was just an interactive movie.
I miss when they actually made platform games. Now everything is fps.
I like this old school Lara character much more than the innocent college girl type they've turned her into. The newer games themselves are great though.
Is it just me, or does "Tommy Thompson" sound like sort of name you would come up with if you were under pressure to think of an alias?
I am equally amused as I am angered by this and really don't know how to respond. 🤣😠😂😡
*Hi I'm Tommy Thompson*!
I like underworld but it was the last tomb raider game to have actual tomb or areas that took alot of thought to get through. The trilogy ( although I do like the games ) are too run and gun happy with a reliance on action more than solve puzzles and navigating traps like the series was know for from the beginning.
Hmm...something just crossed my mind. In the original timeline, the major cause of death is environmental hazards. In the second timeline, the major cause of death is falling. In the current timeline, the major cause of death is combat (Based on my own experience playing and watching other people play).
Sparky Barth nah I’m pretty sure in the originals it was falls too
I stand by my point. I feel like the amount of death caused by traps/drowning is more prevalent than falling in the OGs. Spikes, fires, rivers of larva, rolling boulders, collapsed floors, collapsed ceilings, trap mechanisms, etc. litter the levels in the OGs. Sometimes they are a part of the puzzles so you don't exactly know how they will behave, and sometimes you don't even see them coming until you're dead. The only way you will fall to your death usually is when you fail to calculate your jump - and unless you're new to the game, that shouldn't happen too often. Even death by falling in the OGs is somewhat related to the environmental hazards, e.g. you have to time your jump from a slide or you'll fall off the edge and die (sometimes into a trap); you shouldn't jump to this side of the room, there's actually a slope there that sends you plummeting to your death; you should jump into this nondescript hole backward because you need to be able to grab the edge at the bottom so you can safely land.
Meanwhile in the LAU timeline, death by falling is caused by the unpredictable fatal height and its over-reliance on ledge-hopping which is made worst by the sloppy control. In Anniversary, you're practically glued to the wall! And Underworld introduces all sorts of maneuvers that doesn't always work. Sometimes you know you're pointing her in the right direction, you know you press the right button, and she still jump to the wrong direction; or the most infuriating, she doesn't do the grab animation even though her boobs literally hit the bright white ledges.
I remember this game having a lot of frustrating deaths, if they had a category for amount of swear words shouted at the tv I would have made up a fair chunk of it.
Yeah... Having read the research then played the game, I totally understand why those fall deaths were so high!
You are brilliant! Why did i just learned about you? Thanks!
This is one of the most interesting subjects which I had no idea even existed until I clicked the video. Sub'd.
Great video as always.
Thank you so much for english subtitles! Thanks for content too!
Probably the reason for that many fall deaths was because the way she bounces of the ground is just so funny
Remember those "Lara dies [Funny]" compilations? Those were the days.
that boat thing is fascinating, apparently the shorter you spend on the surface of the sea, and the less reward you get, the less likely you are to finish the game.
while I am not sure about the validity of the method it still represents some interesting data, there is a bunch of times on steam you will find an achievement for finishing the first level of a game with barely 60% of players getting it, and for finishing the game it can go down to 30% or 20%, obviously as a designer you would try and get players to finish the game. most would assume you should make the games more accessible and let players get to "the good bits" quickly, but what this data show is you need to get players to enjoy the game from the start or that you should encourage them to practice their fundamentals so that they might not encounter frustrating parts later on.
definitely some food for thought, thanks so much for sharing this.
All them people that they were keeping track of. I'm pretty sure I was one of them. I beat this game so many times, fastest time was 2 1/2 hours, and having found just about everything in the game.
Tomb Raider ❤️
I wish they kept the smooth camera and movement system from Tomb Raider Legends and Anniversary... It's what brings this game down so much :( It's a beautiful game that is dragged down by the clunkyness of the gameplay which is so stupid because they nailed the gameplay in Legends and Anniversary.
Definitely worth mentioning MGS 4(?) where at the end of a level you'd get a different animal as a rating. I remember getting the tarantula when I took ages, collected everything and killed everyone
I liked this game, it was a lot of fun
great video, gonna read those papers :D
The accent kicks in after 30 seconds, but it was a nice video. I subscribed!
Your videos are great. Have you ever covered AI for Trico in The Last Guardian.
Not yet. Though I have found some research materials I need to read through (and get translated).
Very interesting
This reminds me a bit of Psycho Mantis’ (scripted) trick in MGS of commenting on how you’ve played the game up to that point. I wonder what a puckish developer could do with that in a modern game-as-a-service thing?
This is more than scary
hearing "now, in 2018" in 2022 is so jarring lmao- I forgot that time passes
Good god I didn't realise this episode is nearly four years old already... 😬
Hi, could you, please kindly specify what was shown on the heatmaps at 05:30? Picture 1 - the most challenging areas?
You should make a video about Dragon´s Dogma, the pawn system is really intriguing. l had a lot of trouble starting over on PC because my pawn on xbox 360 was just soo great; a bit brave, sometimes silly and extremely dumb in fights, always riding monsters xD and picking up stufff mid-battle but it became like that over time, at first l don´t remember anything remarkable about it´s behaviour.
l eventually decided to start a new story on PC and my new pawn is very different, she´s brave but smarter and focuses on bigger enemies, sometimes l feel like her sidekick LOL.
The named people in this all sound like Bond villains
This is genius.
somebody needs to remaster underworld, just he skin and face would do
TÖMB! (Sorry) :)
ARTILLERY ONLY
GladOS!
So number 1 way of dying in Underworld was falling. Makes sense that in TR 2013 death by falling was non existent.
All this information is really interesting.
If you don't mind me asking, where are you from? English is not my first language and I'm curious about your accent.
I'm from Scotland, specifically the west coast. It's a very particular accent that only exists in that region.
Scottish was my guess, but I wasn't sure. Thanks for your answer!
So wait, how does the boat time correlate to finishing the game? Is more or less time better? And what were the other parts in level 2 that really solidified its guess? IMO it's like you skipped over the point of it all.
I was curious too and in case you haven't read the articles on your own (after a year), it predicted longer time meant you where more likely to finish the game, it also evaluated rewards collected, if you finished quick but collected more rewards you where also more likely to finish the game, people who just finished the section quickly without collecting over 25.5 rewards were likely to drop the game after level 1.
All those millenials think that Legend was the first TR game.
ua-cam.com/video/ZbI29aw-Ve4/v-deo.html
Originals had clunky controls, but you knew before jumping if you'd make it :P blocky levels had some benefits.
Think I tried the TR1 demo for PC, but TR2 was the first full purchase. Great Wall swan dive neck snap party!
Can these types of categories be useful to other single player games?
And how useful will it be for them?
I think the techniques are useful, given it can help establish unique categories of players *for that game*. Whether it can continue to help that game as it persists over time is another question. However, with big 'live service' models for games such as Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, it could prove valuable in the future to be able to align gameplay experiences for specific audiences.
@@AIandGames Oh I see. Thank you for the reply.
I've studied some amount of Machine Learning and seeing your videos, I'm amazed at how designers and researchers use them.
And it almost seems essential for Live Service Games, where reading forum feedback isn't enough.
can you analyze the behaviour and analytics of the Thargoids in the Elite:Dangerous universe please?
I think I’m one of those 1,000 players. Unless they didn’t pull from usa
All this is really interesting. Though I don't really feel too great about having my games spy on me...
It's just collective data. You as a player are like a grain of sand in a desert. They don't have your specifics. Plus they can use that data to improve future games so in a way, you are partly responsible for the development of the next game and that's something.
at 0.42, you are saying "with AI"... just a note: you are talking mostly about data mining / data analytics, this is not the same as AI ;) Here ai is just a tool and not mandatory to achieve the same result (putting a chart can give the same results for seeing the type of players for example)
very interesting anyway
Underworld is such a weird TR game. It's basically a PS2 game through and through (in 2008 no less) with visual flourishes on PC/X360/PS3. It's visuals are between better (Lara's character model and animations) to worse (everything else, aside from textures, compared to Legend). And its story is a mish-mash of incorporating elements from Tomb Raider 1 from 1998 (or TR Anniversary) to TR reboot-Legend story elements. The proper epilogue to the game is also DLC only just for X360/PS3. It also somehow works.
Personally, Legend still looks (aside from Lara's face), feels and plays best from the 1st rebooted trilogy. 2nd reboot trilogy is dramatically better IMO.
The PC version of Underworld had some really striking graphics. I can't speak for the console version. Never seen it.
Games like Uncharted and God of War were easily beaten by the PC spec of Tomb Raider Underworld. Ultra Direct X 10 was better than anything on PS3 and XBox.
The controls were odd, and the DLC policy stank, but overall it was an no-nonsense entry with great levels. Mexico being high in the running for my favourite level ever. 8.5/10.
But what i found odd about Tomb Raider Underworld is the variance in detail to level design.
While the first 2 levels (Mediterranean Sea and Thailand) had striking visuals and detail, the other levels after that seemed more bland and im sry, Mexico is one of them.Im not talking about the level complexity or the level size, its just seemed that those levels had less development time. (By that time Tomb Raider was back to a yearly cycle).
Also odd were some questionable implementations into the game, as to choose weapons upfront, before entering the level. Well, you could use every weapon anyway, it didnt matter what you chose there.
Also the GPS System or something like that had no pupose alltogether, which also indicates that the developers wanted something new but didnt thought trough those features well enough.
Not a fan of the current reboot. Lara has completely lost her identity and is a different person. The story and survival gameplay elements are pretty bad too. It is supposed to be a Tomb Raider game. Not some survival IP.
I agree with you so much. I personally love Anniversary. :)
The reboot doesn't feel like Lara and the game is so... forgot the word for it... but it feels forced. Like everything you do is automated. Nothing feels natural.
BlueCorp it feels like the game plays itself
@@DUDUDISCH Exactly
i agree, id much rather see levels like the originals, you get dropped in an area with some tomb or other, in search of some clue or other, then explore and play through it... I dont want constant cutscenes and environmental "situations" forcing me away from a cool thing i was about to explore...
like the plane section in tomb raider (2013) you get dragged around the world without getting to take your time and see anything... then when you finallly get a chance to breath from the constant bombardment of "STUFF" happening, youre in a fixed room with a very obvious "PUZZLE" that needs to be solved... rather than a more subtle puzzle that might take half an hour to work out.
not to mention the obvious paths through the areas to the "next objective"
and the next objective is usually "shoot 357 men"
Uhh, that was a lot of numbers. Wouldn't it be better to write them down in the video? Or even better, make some simple graphs?
Given how much attention has been given to your accent just now, it’s funny to note some awful Americanisms - “fall of two-thousand eight”?
Haha. Well spotted. I find it easier to use American terminology depending on the audience. Drives my friends/family nuts when we travel to the US together.
ロボット鳥山
The French - automne
Brits - Autumn
Australians - Autumn
Kiwis - Autumn
Singaporeans - Autumn
Malaysians - Autumn
HKers - Autumn
Indians - Autumn
Americans - FALL BC LEAF FALL DOWN
Found it much more enjoyable than Rise of Tomb Raider. ROTR is unnecessarily long and tedious with meaningless RPG elements (exp + skill up just doesnt fit well in action adventure games), as well as a barren pseudo-open world. ROTR also has too much shooting and too little tomb raiding.
I’m just gonna say it now: As soon as Fortnite showed up in the video, I decided that it’d be pretty cool if they replaced endurance mode from Rise with a battle royale mode in Shadow. In the jungle the game takes place. I may be the only one but that’s just my opinion...
Edit: also the last 4 games have been a bit short for my liking...
I fell asleep
Xbox Live??!! so thats why the new tomb raiders are so easy.
How to you not butcher people's names lol?
Research... and lots of practice takes during recording.
lol
That explains why Underworld, and the subsequent games, kind of suck. They're too busy setting up data collection as opposed to actually designing a competent game.
It's been a trend in games these years, and why we kinda lost the magic games had before. Only a few handful and mostly indie games remain untainted by data analysis driven development.