I’m cautious but a little curious about this one, because QA could actually be a very good target for AIs to work with.
It might not kill jobs. Right now, engineers finish a task and the limited number of QA engineers can’t possibly test it enough before release. That game-breaking bug you found in a game? I’m sure some QA had it in their plan to test every level for those bugs, and yet they just didn’t have enough time - and the studio couldn’t justify hiring 20 more QA squads. Even if they do upscale AI testing, they’ll need knowledgable QA workers to guide them.
This is often extremely rote, repetitive work. It’s exactly the type of work The Oatmeal said is great for AIs. One person is tuning the balance on the Ether Drive attack, and gives it an extra 40% blarf damage. He tries it, sees it works fine, and eagerly skips past the part of the test plan to verify that all cutscenes are working and unaffected to push it in. An AI will try it out, and find: Actually, since an NPC uses an Ether Drive in a late-game cutscene, this breaks the whole game!
Even going past existing plans, QA can likely find MORE work for AIs to do that they normally wouldn’t bother with. Think about the current complexity of game dev that leads to the current trope of releasing games half-finished to eventually get patched. It won’t help patch games, but it’ll at least help give devs an up-to-date list of issues.
That said, those talking about human creativity and player expectations are still correct. An AI can report a problem with feedback that a human can say “No, that looks fine. Override that report.” It will also be good to do occasional manual tests, and lament “How did the AI think this was okay??”
Frankly, this is good news. Whoever buys the rights to kingdom hearts in 3 years when the company falls apart might manage to create an intelligible storyline.
Kingdom hearts 1 was a coming of age story with some fantastic elements tossed in
Kingdom hearts 2 was about antipathy and how it destroys the world, with some, uhh, who was that guy? And why’s the bad guy on my side?
Kingdom hearts 3 was, wait, why was he cloned? When was he cloned? When was she, and him, and him again? And his third clone was a girl? And whose heart was imbued into what? What war? What? Who? What???
I get that getting all the games as they released was hard, because the series is on so many platforms. But I really don’t get the “KH is hard to understand” argument today, because you can easily find hundreds of letsplays for every game, cutscenes complications, play/watch every game on the PS4 remix disk, and even watch a fandub of the mobile games (Dark Road is a WIP) if you don’t like the KHUX Back Cover recap.
So like, what’s so hard? If you skip games and only read a wiki (the worst possible way to consume any sort of media, mind you), of course you’re not gonna know the story and characters, and of course it’ll sound confusing.
Dude, it’s multi-author-comic level bad. I’ve skipped entire sagas in several book series due to a lack of translations and ended up less confused. It’s green arrow levels of clone shenanigans.
To be clear, I’ve played most of the games and they’re still ridiculously difficult to keep track of. All besides the mobile, early non-Ventus card mechanic arpg, and the disappearing girl clone sora game.
They’d be easier to follow if they stuck to the rules of their own universe. Body and heart separate and the body persists not once but twice? What?
That’s a stupid idea. You’re not supposed to QA or debug games. You just release it, customers report bugs, and then you promise to fix the bugs in the next patch (but don’t).
From a tech POV, that makes a lot of sense. Use AI to find the needle in the haystack. Then let a person validate. That’s probably one of the better uses for it. Although I don’t love AI for any of the broad reasons to not like AI.
Maybe before. But it’s gotten pretty damn good at detecting anomalies and issues. And every time a human QA validates the info, it gets better.
I’d still leave it to a human to fix the code though. I suspect that letting AI write the code would make it unworkable for people in the future. But maybe it can write code in a straightforward way to be managed. I don’t know. It’s advancing pretty fast.
If you hate Ubisoft because they put a black person in their game, and not because they are greedy bastards who make utterly vapid slop, then you are an idiot.
Cool, but I wish they’d look at why people hate them, ignore the bullshit reasons, and focus on the good points — and work to improve them.
I haven’t cared about Assassin’s Creed since the first one. The fights are like playing Guitar Hero blindfolded, but on Expert, except if you fail, you die and have to start over. QTEs where you can’t even see the prompts are dumb. They had a cool vision for the game, but the actual implementation sucked.
Another game, I forget which one, had forced inverted X-axis and you couldn’t un-invert it. Bonus, the Y axis couldn’t be inverted like I like. So the game was completely unplayable.
Ubisoft is a weird beast. They keep putting out the same slop time after time and people keep buying it up. I think Ubi is just really good at production quality and marketing, and this is apparently good enough to garner sales over and over again. It’s like…they have talented devs, but they don’t let them cook. They have a very “top-down” approach to design to encourage consistency in their catalog, but it seems like it’s also what has caused them to stagnate.
On the one hand, I appreciate that they are fighting this fight and trying to put a kibosh on the next gen of gamergaters. On the other hand, I kind of don’t care so long as every game they put out is all flash and no substance.
Yeah none of those reasons were why people hated Shadows though. It was entirely racists. They aren’t gonna make any more improvements to their formula because Ubisoft doesn’t innovate, they’ll just wait for someone else to add an interesting twist to the open world formula and then steal that.
Oh yeah, I heard people didn’t like the idea of a Black guy in the Japanese AC game. Is that the one Shadows was? So yeah, that person may not have existed in history. Then again, neither did Robin Hood. Stories don’t need to be based in fact, and as much as the original Assassin’s Creed was all about historical accuracy, the whole Animus thing placed the game entirely within the realm of fiction and fantasy, which tells me any artistic liberties they take with the history you dive into is A-OK in my book! So I don’t care if that guy existed IRL or not. I was intrigued by the idea of a Japanese AC game… but put off by the developer.
And racists are idiots, just, full stop on that count.
he also 100% existed lol. Yasuke has tons of historical records about him because he didn’t exist in like ancient Japan, he was the bodyguard of Oda Nobunaga during the Sengoku era. like you said, racists are just idiots and can’t stand actual history that goes against their stupidity.
Take Blizzard for example. They just released a new patch, where class campaign quests for 8/12 classes do not work. Sure, it’s a remixed version of older expansion, and with all the phasing stuff I can kind of imagine some of the phasing issues being caused by, I don’t know, the player having a weird combination of completed stuff that’s hard to properly catch in testing, since there’s quite a lot of variables.
But the fact that one of the class quests requires crafted items to be completed, while crafting isn’t available by design in the Remix, there’s just no excuse. They either just don’t give a fuck about an issue that’s literally a progression blocker with 100% repro rate (while also being pretty easy to fix), or no one ever tested it even once. And it’s not just some random sidequest, it’s literally the main class campaign, one of the main features of the expansion.
As someone who worked in QA and gamedev, I can’t imagine how could something as obvious as this ever get approved for release. That’s something you catch immediately. Hell, you don’t even have to play through it to realize that this might be a problem.
Work at a larger company. Most people are so used to terrible Customer Service these days that we just use our customers as the QA. Nobody complains as much as they should. As they say
Everybody has a test environment. Only some are lucky enough to have a separate production environment.
It has nothing to do with AI, it’s just plain old automation, but they solve most of the issues you get with making automated tests in non-discrete 3D playspace and they do that in a pretty solid way. It’s definitely something I’d love to have implemented in the games I’m working on, as someone who worked in QA and now works in development. Being able to have mostly reliable way how to smoke-test levels for basic gameplay without having to torture QA to run the test-case again is good, and allows QA to focus on something else - but the tools also need oversight, so it’s not really a job lost. In summary - I think the talk is cool tech and worth the watch.
However, I don’t think AI will help in this regard, and something as unreliable and random as AI models are not a good fit for this job. You want to have deterministic testcases that you can quanitfy, and if something doesn’t match have an actual human to look at why. AI also probably won’t be able to find clever corner-cases and bugs that need human ingenuity.
Fuck AI, I kind of hope this is just a marketing talk and they are actually just improving the (deterministic) tools they already have (which actually are AI by definition, since they also do level exploration on top of recorded inputs), and they are calling it an “AI” to satisfy investors/management without actually slapping a glorified chat-bot into the tech for no reason.
As a developer, it bothers me that my code is being used to train AI that Square Enix is using while trying to deny anyone else the ability to use their work
I could go either way on whether or not AI should be able to train on available data, but no one should get to have it both ways
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