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Comment by mclightning | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if they could make an AI co-pilot for those who don't have someone to company them as they play.

Platinum Games and some other studios are now in the habit of putting "easy automatic" (not always using that term) modes in, where you can set the game to automate some or all of its inputs. If you turn all the assists on in Toylogic's "Nier Replicant" for example, the game basically plays itself during combat but you still have full control so you are effectively orchestrating the action on screen instead of mashing the buttons. It's nice for people revisiting the game (it's a remaster with updated content) who don't want to do all the combat again. For some titles, this is a great accessibility feature since you can turn it on only for particular mechanics that are hard for you to keep up with (dodging, aiming, etc) and still play "the rest" of the game.

I think their first game with this feature was Bayonetta (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6nkc6GQ-B8) but at this point a bunch of other games have it. I think every action game should have this where possible, and you can find testimonials out there from people who love these features despite not having major accessibility concerns, like https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgx8nz/auto-battle-is-the-be...

Increasingly I think we're discovering that there's a class of temporary accessibility issues that can get in the way of using a website or video game - you have trouble focusing because your kids are distracting you, you can't remember what your current objective is because the last time you played was a week ago, etc. It's great for games to provide assistance in those cases too.

You're already overthinking it with AI and stuff; there's games (especially on mobile) with minimal input requirements, think flappy bird, runner games, some of the racing games, etc. Even Epic's first major mobile title, Infinity Blade, played more like a slow interactive story than something needing lots of control input.

I mean I won't claim they're fun, just that they're easy to play.

Your argument would also refute the whole co-pilot experience itself. It is not about "there are simple games, go play that". It is more to enable them to play anything.

I think anything that can be co-piloted so smooth that other player is not annoyed, can be also simulated by an AI.

It is not really overthinking it. It is taking the learning and bringing it to a wider audience.

We're not anywhere close to just having a general purpose game playing AI for the current gen (though there is that Atari playing one)

But there are a lot of affordances devs can make in individual games. Someone else mentioned Celeste and Last of Us, but Microsoft's Forza series has a bunch of options, like brake assist or turning assist, that can take a lot off your plate.

Won’t that be cheating ? (That’s how aimbot work on warzone and many fps on PC )

It is as much of a cheating as the co-pilot thing, yes. I guess it shouldn't be applied to multiplayer competitive games.

Only from the perspective of the 'inferior' player - 'co-pilot' seems fine for competitive multiplayer, since as far as other players are concerned you could have been performing better, if you were only the better of the two of you, 'unimpeded' by the one being assisted.

Many games have "assist modes" of some kind. Sometimes as part of a difficulty setting, sometimes you have fine-grained controls, especially in racing games.

Usually, when these modes are enabled, there is some indication that they are used, and you can't enter ladders with them, to prevent cheating.

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