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Re:The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress (2011) by khalilravanna on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @12:45PM (#13755668)
Black and White stands as one of my favorite games of all time for this reason. I'd argue it was the pinnacle of this behavior as far as Molyneux's games go because of the creature. It had a sophisticated AI that enabled it to actually be taught what was good and what was bad through experience. If it ate a villager you smacked it around and it'd learn it shouldn't do that. If it helped water your crops then you'd rub its belly and it'd know to do more of that.

It was especially interesting because in order to train the creature what behavior was or wasn't desired you had to catch them in the act doing that thing. Since the creature was an independent actor who you could only influence, you had to rely on the randomness of the AI to do certain things so you could teach them what was good and what was bad. E.g. you can't teach it eating villagers is bad unless you catch them in the act and smack them around. Such a shame they almost completely did away with that teaching-through-doing part of creature-training in favor of simplifying down the creatures behaviors to basically sliders like "good vs bad" and "friendly vs aggressive" in BW2. Still waiting on a proper spiritual successor to BW1... what a brilliant game.

Re:The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress (2011) by sudoscript on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @04:00PM (#13757775)
No surprise the guy who made it went on to create this little company called DeepMind...