Microsoft has published a browser level and playable for classic video games Quake II. It works as a technological demo for the game capacities of the Copilot AI platform of Microsoft – although by the company’s own admission, the experience is not quite the same as playing a well -made game.
You can Try it for yourselfUsing your keyboard to navigate a single level of Quake II for a few minutes before touching the delay.
In A blog article describing their workMicrosoft researchers have said that their Muse Family of IA family for video games allows users to interact with the model through keyboard / controller actions and immediately see the effects of your actions, essentially allowing you to play inside the model. “”
To show these capacities, the researchers have formed their model at the Quake II level (which Microsoft has thanks to its acquisition of Zenimax).
“To our great joy, we were able to play in the world that the model simulated,” they wrote. “We could walk, move the camera, jump, hang, pull and even explode barrels similar to the original game.”
At the same time, the researchers stressed that this should be “an exploration of research” and should be considered “Play the model Rather than playing the game. “
More specifically, they recognized the “limitations and gaps”, such as the fact that enemies are fuzzy, damage and health meters can be inaccurate, and the most striking, the model is struggling with the permanence of objects, forgetting things that are out of sight for 0.9 seconds or more.
In the opinion of the researchers, it can also “be a source of pleasure, by which you can defeat or generate enemies by looking at the ground for a second, then looking up”, or even “teleporting around the map while looking up to the sky then go down”.
The writer and game designer Austin Walker was less impressed by this approach, publishing a gameplay video in which he spent most of his time Trapped in a dark room. (It also happened to me the twice I tried to play demo, even if I admit that I am extremely bad first -person shooters.)
Referring to the recent recent declarations of a CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer who AI models could help preserve the game By creating classic games “portable on any platform”, Walker argued that this reveals “a fundamental misunderstanding not only of this technology, but also how the games work”.
“The internal functioning of games like Quake – Code, Design, 3D art, Audio – produce specific cases of play, including surprising edges”, ” Walker wrote. “This is a large part of what makes games good. If you are unable to rebuild the key internal work, then you lose access to these unpredictable edges.”
