Sad to say, but the union probably won’t get many meaningful concessions from this one. The technologies to fully generate model movement (motion capture) and emotive voice (voice acting) are already reasonably mature and constantly improving.
The artists will (rightfully) get strong control over their own likenesses, but if they think they’re going to stop mass adoption of AI in video games they’re dreaming.
Don’t underestimate the power of celebrity actors in games in terms of sales. There are people who buy games specifically because certain actors are in them.
That’s true, and there are people who go see movies specifically because of whom appears in them. But I’d hesitate to call that the majority, especially in gaming. The set of people that play games and the set of people who follow the industry are certainly overlapping, but are far from identical.
I think this is pretty much the perfect time to be doing this.
Plenty of actors and actresses do motion cap, or even full FMV acting, for a lot of smaller tier games. And plenty of major games outright market themselves on getting “real actors” involved. Remember how Patrick Stewart was in 30 seconds of Oblivion and Sean Bean was in five minutes? And not to mention the likelihood that GTA6 is publicly revealing fairly soon.
And looking forward: Anime games continue to be a thing and… that is an ongoing area of concern where the american VAs are openly acknowledging they are afraid to even SAY “union”. And while dubs are very much a third class citizen as far as studios are concerned, they are still a lucrative one and a lot of the major VAs have branched out enough that this could be an issue.
As for “AI”: All signs point toward The Law being about training data. In part because that maps best to the existing structures (if you steal a clip of a movie and don’t credit it, you get DMCA’d) and is something that benefits the actual major studios. With most of the SAG negotiations being about a performer/creator’s rights to their own media. The outcome will almost definitely end up being “all previous content is off limits for training. An actor or a writer can ‘agree’ to having their performance be added to a training database X years from now”.
But in games? Kojima is infamous for just making Snake look like (and be named after…) Kurt Russel’s performance in Escape from New York. And plenty of versions of Lara Croft and the like have looked eerily similar to some actresses. Same with studios over the years accidentally openly acknowledging that they are using episodes of Days of Our Lives or whatever as motion cap to model face emotion and the like. Hell, how many thirsty bois were wondering who the face model of the new soldier lady Jane in FF7-R was?
Right now, that is a wild west. But if that gets your studio put on the shitlist then it starts being a real issue. Especially with the ongoing acquisitions (even if we are in a lull). Get caught training your AI off of Anna Kendrick’s performance in 50/50? Your studio has now become radioactive.
God I wish I loved this game as much as I love the headlines it makes, but my max CHA archfey warlock failing every other persuasion roll just left a bad taste in my mouth.
It took me til halfway through Act 2 to realize you’re supposed to click on roll bonuses like Guidance before rolling in order for them to be added to your total
To be fair, even with the bonuses, and karmic dice enabled, you can still end up rolling a 1 multiple times in a row.
That’s why I save on the roll screen before I toss the die. Go through inspiration/tools first. Then reload if I get fucked over. Because it just sucks failing a DC10 when you can only fail on a 1, since the game does not let you just take a 10.
My wife, a player since the early betas, was shocked that in the first 10 hours of playing after release I had already banged laezel despite my lack of interest in the romance aspect of the game.
I may be going crazy, but wasn’t this game in development hell by another company, then changed companies mid-development and has stayed in dev-hell since?
Yeah, it was almost close to release and apparently it was a tire fire. Who knows how much of the original they kept. I really hope it’s good, the first bloodlines was a blast if you ignored or modded out the bugs.
She says we’ve gotta hold on to what we’ve got
It doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not
We’ve got each other and that’s a lot for love
We’ll give it a shot
eurogamer.net
Aktywne