Some AI or central computer going haywire and destroying everything is, like, the third or fourth stock RPG trope just behind the Dark Lord burning down the protagonist’s village in the first act or the mysterious waif girl actually turning out to be a princess.
Considering how the open source community is being inundated with low-quality bug reports filed using AI, I don’t have much faith in the tech reviewing code, let alone writing it correctly.
Could it be a useful aid? Sure, but 70% of your reviewing is a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream. AI just isn’t ready for this level of responsibility in any organization.
Anecdotal, but I have never read a game review in my life that was from a journalist. It’s always been in forums, and lately some small youtubers. I want to hear from normal gamers, not people getting a paycheck for it.
I‘d rather read a well articulated opinion that is embedded into a rich cultural context than some rambling from strangers. I know the former is hard to find (Eurogamer and RPS are good, but suffer from layoffs, too). The latter I only skim through to find things I might find distracting that were omitted by others.
Back in the late 90s-early 2000s the PCGamer magazine was actually worthwhile. It had reviewers who specialized in different genres and if read enough you could get a feel for their writing style and critical voice. The fact it was a monthly publication meant they weren’t racing to get a review out in the first 24 hours.
Nowadays it all seems like publications race to put reviews out online for relevance, and the reviewers often seem to have a disdain for video games and even if they don’t they aren’t genre experts.
I don’t like fighting games. My review of a fighting game would be trash. Yet major publications just pump out reviews by whoever.
Individual youtubers at least can develop a recognizable critical voice and stick more to genres they know and enjoy.
Embargoes exist to prevent that race. Your fighting game problem has been solved by assigning fighting game reviews to the “fighting game guy” on hand, which is why you’ll see the same byline on games in the same genre from major outlets.
I’ve actually just renewed my subscription to PC Gamer, I read it on my tablet. A large part of that decision was to just help keep it alive because I feel it’s important.
Future Publishing can get fucked though.
For all of the reasons everyone’s saying here that the quality has gone. When the only revenue for an organisation is adverts and data it tends to head downhill pretty quickly.
I actively borrow content from the internet but willingly cough up the money for things that i get good use out of. There’s no way you can visit the pc gamer website without an ad blocker, so i pay a little bit quarterly and sit with a magazine instead.
I also have box sets of tv series that I’ve never opened, i just bought them because I enjoyed the pirated version so much.
I’ll listen to music on Spotify or whatever but then go to the artist website and get some merch.
There’s a lot of content that deserves to be paid for and supported.
I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?
The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.
I would have thought my judgement of the quality of the content I’m willing to pay for would have been implicit.
For further context, for what it’s worth, I’m a British guy in my late 40’s who plays single player offline games. I don’t use or follow anyone from twitch, discord, or YouTube, mostly due to a lack of both time and inclination.
Personally I think AI generated content could be great when it’s used to create content that otherwise wouldn’t be present. Like when you have a game where all the buildings are just static models with all the doors closed and the curtains shut, imagine resolving all that with buildings you could go in. Basically I want Cyberpunk where all the lights and movement actually mean something.
Basically I want Cyberpunk where all the lights and movement actually mean something.
totally valid desire, but I don’t think AI would give you that solution. If you went into a building and it was a weird, hallucinated backroom, would that give you that feeling that you’re looking for? Or would you be left feeling disappointed in a different way?
People often don’t realize that most things can be and have been done with very simple algorithms, more advanced algorithms or at most very simple neural networks. Instead, they immediately jump to LLM integrations.
Training a model to generate 3D models for different levels of detail might be possible, if there are enough examples of games with human-created different-LOD models. Like, it could be a way to assess, from a psychovisual standpoint, what elements are “important” based on their geometry or color/texture properties.
We have 3D engines that can use variable-LOD models if they’re there…but they require effort from human modelers to make good ones today. Tweaking that is kinda drudge work, but you want to do it if you want open-world environments with high-resolution models up close.
Take-Two’s CEO doesn’t think a Grand Theft Auto built with AI would be very good | VGC
Sounds fair to me, at least for near-term AI. A lot of the stuff that I think GTA does well doesn’t map all that well to what we can do very well with generative AI today (and that’s true for a lot of genres).
He added: “Anything that involves backward-looking data compute and LLMs, AI is really good for, and that and that applies to lots of things that we do at Take-Two. Anything that isn’t attached to that, it’s going to be really, really bad at…. there is no creativity that can exist, by definition, in any AI model, because it is data driven.”
To make a statement about any AI seems overly strong. This feels a little like a reformed “can machines think?” question. The human mind is also data-driven; we learn about the world, then create new content based on that. We have more sophisticated mechanisms for synthesizing new data from our memories than present LLMs do. But I’m not sure that those mechanisms need be all that much more complicated, or that one really requires human-level synthesizing ability to be able to create pretty compelling content.
I certainly think that the simple techniques that existing generative AI uses, where you just have a plain-Jane LLM, may very well be limiting in some substantial ways, but I don’t think that holds up in the longer term, and I think that it may not take a lot of sophistication being added to permit a lot of functionality.
I also haven’t been closely following use of AI in video games, but I think that there are some games that do effectively make use of generative AI now. A big one for me is use of diffusion models for dynamic generation of illustration. I like a lot of text-based games — maybe interactive fiction or the kind of text-based choose-your-own-adventure games that Choice of Games publishes. These usually have few or no illustrations. They’re often “long tail” games, made with small budgets by a small team for a niche audience at low cost. The ability to inexpensively illustrate games would be damned useful — and my impression is that some of the Choice Of games crowd have made use of that. With local computation capability, the ability to do so dynamically would be even more useful. The generation doesn’t need to run in real time, and a single illustration might be useful for some time, but could help add atmosphere to the game.
There have been modified versions of (note: very much NSFW and covers a considerable amount of hard kink material, inclusive of stuff like snuff, physical and psychological torture, sex with children and infants, slavery, forced body modification and mutilation, and so forth; you have been warned) that have incorporated this functionality to generate dynamic illustrations based on prompts that the game can procedurally generate running on local diffusion models. As that demonstrates, it is clearly possible from a technical standpoint to do that now, has been for quite some months, and I suspect that it would not be hard to make that an option with relatively-little development effort for a very wide range of text-oriented games. Just needs standardization, ease of deployment, sharing parallel compute resources among software, and so forth.
As it exists in 2025, SillyTavern used as a role-playing software package is not really a game. Rather, it’s a form of interactive storytelling. It has very limited functionality designed around making LLMs support this sort of thing: dealing with a “group” of characters, permitting a player to manually toggle NPC presence, the creation of “lorebooks”, where tokens showing up trigger insertion of additional content into the game context to permit statically-written information about a fictional world that an LLM does not know about to be incorporated into text generation. But it’s not really a game in any traditional sense of the word. One might create characters that have adversarial goals and attempt to overcome those, but it doesn’t really deal well with creating challenges incredibly well, and the line between the player and a DM is fairly blurred today, because the engine requires hand-holding to work. Context of the past story being fed into an LLM as part of its prompt is not a very efficient way to store world state. Some of this might be addressed via use of more-sophisticated AIs that retain far more world state and in a more-efficient-to-process form.
But I am pretty convinced that with a little work even with existing LLMs, it’d be possible to make a whole genre of games that do effectively store world state, where the LLM interacts with a more-conventionally-programmed game world with state that is managed as it has been by more traditional software. For example, I strongly suspect that it would be possible to glue even an existing LLM to something like a MUD world. That might be via use of LoRAs or MoEs, or to have additional “tiny” LLMs. That permits complex characters to add content within a game world with rules defined in the traditional sense. I think I’ve seen one or two early stabs at this, but while I haven’t been watching closely, it doesn’t seem to have real, killer-app examples…yet. But I don’t think that we really need any new technologies to do this, just game developers to pound on this.
I’m not sure that Pete has actually played a game he wasn’t directly involved with since like… 2010?
What we’ve seen of his new game really isn’t that interesting in the modern landscape. Maybe a decade ago it would have been fresh and had enough of a hook to compete for gamers’ attention, but today? It looks pretty forgettable.
Then when you consider Molyneux’s propensity towards feature creep, it’s probably safe to assume that even if the game is a ‘success’ by most conventional metrics, it won’t be profitable because the amount of money spent to make the damn thing will have been completely insane.
Arguably the issue isn't so much in the gaming landscape as the history behind the game.
His previous "game" was a crypto/NFT scam where they sold land (as NFTs) to people who were speculating they could make IRL money from renting out this "land" to plebs.
It was a complete failure. I played it for an hour on a free sever (or something similar). The gameplay was complete shit, it was tedious and grindy (like mobile titles), a repetitive and uninspired experience, graphics were ugly, the multiplayer elements didn't really make much sense.
All the NFT buyers got destroyed while Molyneux collected tens of millions.
Allegedly that money was used to "invest" in Masters of Albion.
But the real kicker is that Masters of Albion seems to be based on that NFT scam game engine (which IMO is beyond saving).
I wouldn't be surprised if this a managed exit from his previous crypto/NFT scam "game".
Scamming a bunch of NFT idiots is an arguably better funding model than promising a bunch of stuff to Kickstarter backers that you aren’t going to deliver on.
I can’t even finish the trailer with how boring and stale it looks. Calling it pretty forgettable is stating it nicely… I’m convinced this game will be released and nobody will even notice. He even sounds bored out of his mind himself.
Maybe there is a market of mobile gamers gone PC that he’s trying to capture, much like Godus? I don’t see how this will entice anyone else.
Basically he has no clout left, even though I still wish for a good Black and White sequel, B&W 2 doesn’t count.
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Aktywne