Duels of the Planeswalkers for XBox, PC, and PS3

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Nightstalkers

Guest
Think MTGO with animations.... They've had this in the pipeline since 2000.
 
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Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
2000? Wow...

So... MTGO but with "solitaire" mode? Which is still basically Shandalar of old... the ability to play Magic against computer AI...
 
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theorgg

Guest
I've played this thing at a friend's dorm. It's o.k, but the rules implementation is terrible.

What happens when you attack someone at 9 life with three 3/2 goblins with Mountainwalk and the defending player has a mountain?

They block 'em. Duh, says the game.
 
Oversoul

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
That is bad. The old Microprose game has its own problems too. I still play it sometimes. The Shandalar part specifically has some fun quirks. Some of the items you can collect that modify gameplay are seriously broken. By the time I got to the bosses, I was going Black Lotus, Mox, Mox, Dark Rit, Contract from Below, Dark Rit, Dark Rit, Underground Sea, Contract from Below, Ancestral Recall, Dark Rit, Contract from Below, Mox, Black Lotus, Timetwister, etc.

But even normal gameplay is weird. The AI will sometimes giant growth my creatures during combat. Stuff like that.
 
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Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Yeah, but that was more than 10 years ago. This is now; and something like Mountainwalk should have been easy to code.
 
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theorgg

Guest
Speaking of Shandalar, I downloaded the Windows XP friendly version from HERE. You've got to get a Windows 98 emulator, and then it'll run just like an emulator for a video game system while you play the game. It's quite fun, still.
 
Oversoul

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
I'm on Windows 2000 myself, and need no emulator. I suppose I'll have to do that sort of thing if/when I upgrade to a newer computer. For now, most old computer games work just fine.

Spidey: Shouldn't it have been easy back then to not have the AI kill itself? Another thing I just remembered: the AI would never pay to untap its own Mana Vault, ever. Once it used Mana Vault, it would take a damage every turn until it died. It seems like even in the ancient past of 1997, that sort of thing could pretty easily be avoided. Then again, that's a bad AI, not bad rules implementation, which I suppose should be considered worse...
 
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Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
I've heard the newer computers with dual cores and 64-bit will probably cause problems for a lot of older games. Hopefully the emulation of older Windows versions will still remain functional in Windows 7.

Oversoul: Yes, but you didn't mention that example. Just the Giant Growth.

For the Mana Vault example, I think it's a case of which cards take priority. Either you pay to untap and thus use your mana for that turn or use the mana for another spell. And apparently, there's too many spells and interactions to make an accurate intelligent determination of when to untap the Vault.

Landwalk is pretty easy to code though, since there's no real problems: A creature has it, it's unblockableif the defending player controls that landtype. Unless a spell is cast that says landwalk creatures are blockable. But since that wasn't the case here, it doesn't matter.
 
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theorgg

Guest
Paying 1 to untap Brass Man and paying 4 to untap a 3/3 with paralyze on it, even though you've got a 2/2 that you had to tap for one of the mana to untap brass man, then attacking someone with a blocker and two life...

I said to myself, "Wow. I should be dead if this was a real person."
 
Oversoul

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Well now, I didn't mention it quite simply because I hadn't thought of it. I haven't been playing the game for a bit now. Ever since I went and bought Diablo II a few months ago, it's been practically the only computer game I've played. And my memory isn't some superhuman thing. I just gave the first example that popped into my head, and that was the Giant Growth thing. It strikes me as pretty bad. Sure, decision-making in a game like Magic might be tricky for an AI and I would expect them to be worse than humans even at this point, let alone in 1997. But for the AI to Giant Growth my creature when it has its own makes no sense. Even if the AI is bogged down with other details, the algorithms that tell it where to play Giant Growth could easily be written to exclude my creatures when it has its own creatures that could be targeted to no ill effect.

Anyway, I know pretty much nothing about programming, but I want to make it clear that I have never seen the AI pay mana to untap its mana vault. I'm not talking about us both doing lots of things on our turns and the AI doesn't know how to prioritize. I'm talking me playing Keeper and killing all the AI's creatures and emptying its hand and it has 12 lands out and is at 5 life with a tapped Mana Vault and it sits there taking Mana Vault damage until it dies. I couldn't program anything, I but I could easily come up with an algorithm that works better than never, ever untapping the Mana Vault.

And there were other issues. Most of them I remember weren't as bad as the Mana Vault one. For example, if you had Black Vise out, and the AI could play spells to get underneath the Black Vise, it would always do so, even if playing the spells was actually highly disadvantageous. I don't think it was getting confused by details. I think it was just sloppily designed and inadequately tested, which is really the same as the mountainwalk thing, even if that's rules and not decision-making. Both are "if x, then y."

Actually, maybe I'm off here, having never played MTGO, but I was under the impression that the rules worked properly there, so it seems rather laughable that they should not work in Duels of the Planeswalkers. Their work in implementing the rules should be essentially already done for them...

I mentioned Orgg's mountainwalk thing to Al0ysius, who has actually played Duel of the Planeswalkers (I have not). He noted there there are several annoying glitches in the game, which might explain the mountainwalk problem. A glitch interfering with the process sounds more likely to me than a total oversight in programming the rules interactions, but again, I don't really know anything. He also said that he's been able to exploit some glitch to take unlimited mulligans. Anyone know about this?
 
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theorgg

Guest
Magic Online does have proper rules interactions for 99% of things, but remember that it is NOT an AI.

Duels was ment to be an in-between between the old rules and the M10 rules that came out a few months after it did.
 
Oversoul

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
theorgg;287044 said:
Magic Online does have proper rules interactions for 99% of things, but remember that it is NOT an AI.
Click to expand...
Yeah, but I doubt that adding an AI necessarily makes the rules interactions part get all messed up.
 
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Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Oversoul: I realize that you or no one else has a superhuman memory, but I was merely responding to the example you gave, not future examples that you might give because you thought of them just then. I think we all know the AI sucked in Shandalar; some were probably avoidable and some probably weren't. All *I* was saying was that for something as simple as coding a landwalk ability that is pretty much non-interactive or conditional, unlike the examples you were giving, having it not work in 2009 is almost inexcusable. So hopefully it IS a "glitch" (whatever that means) and hopefully that means a fix will come out, although fixes for the few XBox games that I'm familiar with (like Puzzle Quest) seem to take a really long time.
 
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