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Comment by mitxela | Hacker News Reader

It's really shocking that there aren't more games like (old-school) RuneScape. Like where is OSRS but you're a mafia boss in NYC, or OSRS but you're on a space station? Obviously games with these themes exist, but not games in this genre, which I'd say is defined by fairly shallow but very broad content building on a cartoonishly simple engine. Modern games seem to be going relatively long on engine capabilities but short on content instead. You'd think AI would have no problem designing 50 good quests for an NYC mob boss in a few days or less.

Maybe RS's origins from the text MUD era led it to a weird path-dependent place. The other day I watched a whole video essay about how weird it is that everything has an "examine" option when no other graphical game has this, but every MUD has it.

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Have you ever done RuneScape’s quests? No way an AI could create something so original

Sure it could. Commercially sanitised corposlop machines like ChatGPT and Claude would never create something so silly, but LLMs are perfectly capable of it. Try turning the temperature up a bit. Might need a bit of human filtering and cleanup as well.

But if you're hand tuning your AI then I suppose it doesn't meet the promise of AI, does it?

The problem with modern LLMs is that their writing/creativity skills are still fairly stilted. Like, it's not bad material? But it's stuck in the most common, trope-ladden ruts. Even if you get out of that, it suffers from the fact that every instance will write approximately the same quests.

That said, give it a year or two and I think we'll start seeing some pretty amazing stuff, there - LLM writing has been consistently improving, and I suspect at some point you could just generate quests by simulating a world and having the AI assign quests when it wants to accomplish goals outside of the character's skill-set, or when things go wrong with the economy (someone killed a traveling merchant -> farmer will now pay you to acquire good fertilizer/seeds)

But many of RuneScape's quests are silly trope-laden ruts and they're fun anyway. King Arthur and Merlin are literally in the game. And there are pyramids full of ancient treasure to plunder, and vampires (that one's subverted a bit, the nobility is collapsing due to mismanagement of their human farm), and werewolves of course, and a disease epidemic that isn't real (hello 2020) and a lot of fetch quests. Even the Lorax is in the game although he's a gnome and he's not called that.

> You'd think AI would have no problem designing 50 good quests for an NYC mob boss in a few days or less.

Why would you think that?

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