The next fad after companion apps?
Just… make… it… fun and I’ll play and don’t make me sign up for a service or give away my data.
The only way to truly implement something like this would be with a digital board game framework similar to the Teburu system, which is an overpriced and uninspired bloated piece of junk. I have played around with my friend’s version as he was trying to sell it to me, it only has a few games for it and they are hundreds of dollars each. Each game has loads of bugs and every time he gets it out it needs to be charged, receives multiple updates, has tons of hoops to jump through just to play. When we finally set it up, he realized his dice wasn’t charged. This type of thing is exactly the opposite of classic board games that are just analogue pieces you can set up and play any time, even by candlelight. I don’t see AI driven board games gaining any traction, especially since the frameworks needed to house them aren’t really well done either. And honestly, we don’t need it. Games are well designed enough to provide lots of branching options and paths to victory. AI is just a buzzword people are trying to shove into everything.
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
If you integrate the digital into an analog game, it’s no longer an analog game. It’s now a video game with a physical dongle. Looking at you LoTR:JtME!
Did it sold well?
