AI-Driven Game Mechanics in Board Games Will Soon Be A Reality With Hasbro and Xplored
AI-Driven Game Mechanics in Board Games Will Soon Be A Reality With Hasbro and Xplored
In a groundbreaking partnership, toy giant Hasbro has joined forces with Italian tech company Xplored, signaling a potential future where artificial intelligence becomes an integral part of board games. Adam Biehl, senior vice president and general manager of Hasbro Game, envisions a seamless integr...
The next fad after companion apps?
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Integrating AI into electronic games is hard, let alone tabletop or board games, and Hasbro's shown the capacity to fuck up the much easier task of "sit on the legendary DND IP, let it function, and just sit back and count the river of money that floods in to you as a result." If Hasbro's performance at operating the DND brand is anything to go by, traditional board game designers have not a lot to worry about in the near future I think.
But in typical fashion, hasbro understands nothing about d&d and will probably almost destroy their property, again.
Yep. There were rumors of them implementing AI DMs already around the time of the OGL fiasco. I predict that they will ham-fistedly implement some kind of AI tabletop system, it will be hilariously bad, and the evolution of DND into some weird no-longer-a-fad thing will continue apace (with the genuine tabletop fans moving to Pathfinder / Dungeon Crawl Classics / etc, and the casuals going back to just doing something else.)
I kind of expect them to fick it up so bad they sell it off and hopefully someone better acquires it then. But I doubt I'll learn any edition past 5th. What I have right now does everything I need it to when I run a fantasy adventure
So I haven't actually run any Pathfinder games, but I've bought the book and looked it over, and it looks to me like it addresses a bunch of stuff that was annoying to me when I ran 5e games. I actually didn't feel 5e did everything I needed it to -- e.g. the guidelines for treasure are totally wack (and then there's this insulting refrain of "Well you know, every game is different! Just do what you feel!" as if that's an excuse for not providing a working out-of-the-box economic system I can reference), the CR system doesn't really work that well and you have to get a feel for how to balance encounters totally separate from the guidelines, etc.
When I read the Pathfinder book and found an extremely specific guideline of how much gold, how many permanent items, and how many consumable items, an average party should get at each specific level if you want a generally balanced economy, and every item is categorized according to rarity + GP value + "level" at which it's probably appropriate, I felt like shouting "FUCKING YES" because that's what I was looking for in the DMG and fumbling around trying to create for myself when I didn't find it. It does have treasure guidelines but they are very obviously just a bunch of non-working nonsense.
Ask me if I'm salty about this still lol.
I definitely don't assume that. In fact, I think they're far more likely to make a ham-fisted mess of it.
I'm not trying to throw shade here at the 5e designers, who are clearly smart people who care about the game, but I would say the result of what Hasbro is doing with the brand is actually pretty un-mixed, of cash-grab content with clearly evident flaws, in contrast to systems like Pathfinder that are designed to be well-designed and enjoyable systems.