the way i try to make sense of it is imagine if every commercial movie was released on the same platform. when i say every movie i mean every movie. every movie from film school thesis that got a limited screening in the local cinema to hollywood blockbusters, from every country of the world, USA, china, india, nigeria, etc… all released on the same platform. i’d bet it would probably have the same amount or even more movies than steam has games. valve just has that kind of global monopoly on the PC gaming space. we only tend to see the shovelware since they are predominantly made to swindle cash out of highest value customers which are english speaking people either in anglosphere or in parts of europe that english literacy is high. we never get to see countless good or bad chinese games because… well they are in chinese.
don’t get me wrong steam is filled with crap and scams but it’s because everything is filled with crap and scams. although actual moderation from valve would be welcome. it’s a hard problem but they got the money and no excuse.
I’ve had zero interest in anything Square Enix makes except the new Super Mario RPG, because otherwise it’s all weird ass weeb shit with the most convoluted storylines that need an undergraduate degree in the lore to understand it. I doubt AI will make that less of a problem.
Honestly for open world RPGs I can see AI used for making the world feel more alive and creating side quests on the fly. But it really needs to be done right.
Side quests on the fly? That already exists. Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 had radiant AI quests. I would much rather have a game that was hand made by humans where the quests that exist are the quests that were designed. Or, in the case of radiant AI, heavily guardrailed randomness.
The only radiant quests I can think of in Oblivion were after you had finished the Dark Brotherhood or Arena quest lines. I don’t remember any other random quests from that one.
It’s worth remembering that this guy says anything that’s in the current trend because just saying those things helps share prices. Then nothing comes of it.
FF16 wasn’t stuffed full of nfts or crypto or even microtransactions even though the president makes comments about this stuff.
In that specific context - of generating idle chit chat, sure. But is it ever going to be capable of generating the crucifixion quest from CP77, or Guild quests from Skyrim or the Festers Blue Star Bottlecaps from FONV?
or is it going to be more A New Settlement Needs Your Help from FO4, or Dunk the Shape / Kill X Enemy Ys from Destiny 2? which, yknow, we already have.
Generating idle text does not a great game make. Especially when you could just write it better.
And that’s not to mention the impact on the VO actor - who is unlikely to want to sell the IP to their voice
I am actually working on something for the quest generation problem. It is still in the experimental phases, so who knows if it will bear fruit, but don’t sell the concept short.
I remain politely skeptical. I’m not the least technical person- but also not a dev - but this AI has to create multiple NPCs that say sensical things, in a narrative form, in a reachable location, in a playable architecture and geography, using themed assets, realistic and not over-/under- powered rewards… draw, plot and arrange said assets, actors, cues, generate speech-to-text and assign the correct asset to the correct cue/trigger — all of which seem to me to be beyond the reach of AI/ML models at the current point in time, or else subject to multi-hour loading and generation times.
Then there’s the issue of if you’re generating assets for the engine, and it needs a filesystem to store those assets, is it not incredibly easy to create massive security holes? An attacker looks at the program, see it generates and FBX or OBJ and can use that as a security hole to inject malicious code.
Also, doesn’t engines like Unity, Godot, need to compile these assets and process them? It’s beyond my technical knowledge but you can’t edit game assets on the fly, right? Like I can’t just open up MYGUN.TEXTURE and paint it blue and now I have a blue gun without closing the game, right? How do you work around that?
You can change assets on the fly, yeah. Usually with stuff like making a gun blue you’d just load another texture and apply it to the material. It really depends on what the game is designed to do. For example a game where all the lighting is baked would have issues if certain parts of the level were changed in real time because you’d need to rebake the lighting (or add some dynamic lights specifically for certain objects)
Stuff like creating a quest in real time to the extent of hand crafted quests doesn’t sound like it’s quite there yet but there doesn’t seem to be a technical limitation there other than what AI can do and how to refine it to do that in an interesting way. You never know but it still feels a bit early considering how little has been done so far.
Not to belabor the point here, but in a discussion of “can AI do this” [now/soon] - saying “if AI could do this… then it could do this - but it cant - but it might” doesn’t seem to really counter my point that the next 5 years being full of empty promises about the potential (but not actualization) of AI.
If AI can’t find its market (which for all the hype it hasn’t thus far), then yes. Alternatively AI finds its market and it just becomes a norm that’s expected so no one will mention it at all
if AI can’t find its market (which for all the hype it hasn’t thus far)
AIs market is every market, which is why it seems like AI isn’t “doing much.” The primary benefit of AI in its current form is finding and driving efficiencies.
It’s much more like the internet in the early 90s than it is the block chain. AI hasn’t had its “dot com bubble” begin yet, because right now it’s all targeted services.
no, it’s every market when it’s actually a part of those markets, delivering value and funding itself. It is not doing that today. It may do that tomorrow, but not today.
Today AI is in the investor-funded, throw everything against the wall stage. the hope is that something will stick and become what drives that industry in the future. It hasn’t found that yet. AI could vanish tomorrow and no one would notice.
It is absolutely doing that today. From medicine to fucking call center QA.
That you don’t know about it is further evidence of my claim - AI is currently being leveraged within existing toolsets that you also do not know about.
One Verint system can do the jobs of multiple QA professionals while also handling WFM tasks that previously required 1-3 more jobs, all of which are innately high-paying due to being so specialized.
I use Synthesia every day to make training content (well, my intern does, but still). This content would take a minimum of 4 people to produce without the existing software. I know because we considered building that team and went with Synthesia instead. These aren’t plugs either - there are competitors to both of the above that are continuing to push features forward.
They did try that Symbiogenesis NFT bulshit. Now I’m not even sure if anything came out of it. Apparently it was supposed to be released this December but I didn’t hear a single thing about it.
Apparently it was released December 21th, but I cannot find a single thing whatsoever about how it played out. Which by itself doesn’t make it seem very successful.
It’s all just SEO farming. Square Enix isn’t setting the world on fire with 14 and 16, and there was exactly zero hype for OT2 and Various Daylife (worst game title ever), so they need to always say hypemachine phrases just in case anyone searching for AI or NFTs is also hungry for a milquetoast JRPG.
These words are also for the hopes that someone will buy this company and put them out of their misery. If FF7R 2 fails in the marketplace, they’re doomed.
This is actually what I look forward to most in gaming in the next decade or two. The implementation of AI that can be assigned goals and motivations instead of scripted to every detail. Characters in games with whom we as players can have believable conversations that the devs didn’t have to think of beforehand. If they can integrate LLM type AI into games successfully, it’ll be a total game changer in terms of being able to accommodate player choice and freedom.
I wonder if they’ll spend as much time defining what an LLM shouldn’t be talking about/doing as they would defining what a non-LLM should be talking about/doing.
This is something I used to be excited for but I only have been losing interest the more I hear about AI. What are the chances this will lead to moving character arcs or profound messages? The way LLMs are today, the best we can hope for is Radiant Quests Plus. Not sure a game driven by AIs rambling semi-coherently forever will be more entertaining than something written by humans with a clear vision.
Characters in games with whom we as players can have believable conversations that the devs didn’t have to think of beforehand.
Correction: characters in games will have soulless cookie cutter paint by numbers responses that sound hollow and lifeless. AI doesn’t generate, it only remixes.
Also, have you interacted with a LLM? They’re full of restrictions and they’re not very good at finding recent data. How would that implement in a video game? Devs would have to train the LLM to basically annihilate their own job as writers. Which still wouldn’t really save the dev company/publisher any money or time.
No. Hence why it’s a buzzword. The CEOs don’t know how it works, just that it somehow reduces payroll. For AI to do what you want it to do, you have to train it on hundreds of thousands of relevant data points over many weeks/months/years. That takes manpower, and consequently, payroll.
Also, games are supposed to be art. An expression of the humans creating it. Automating the games industry would make any MBA grad jizz in their pants, but it’s antithetical to the survival of the medium and, consequently, the industry. You want nothing but freemium games meant to milk kids of their parents money? Nothing but shitty mobile games and live services from now on then.
The ‘why not’ is not from the perspective of the industry - it’s from the perspective of the customer. Can you automate several tasks by using AI during game development? Sure. Will it translate into a better price or a better experience for the end-user? Let’s see.
Let’s say you give AI the unimportant tasks. You manage to reduce a lot of waste and maybe optimize your workflows. You improve efficiency. Maybe you can make more games in a shorter time span. Will you be willing to sell the games for less than the standard $60? I find this unlikely. This impacts me as a consumer - why don’t I see a reduction in cost, if it now costs less? Why am I still paying the same price for something that your improved tools can make at a fraction of the cost? Didn’t my previous purchases already give you enough money to invest in AI? Where is my benefit?
Let’s say you give AI the big tasks - you make it write story, generate graphics or code. But AI’s current level doesn’t allow for originality, or even cohesive thought. You’ll be churning out garbage until your AI is actual intelligence. This again impacts me as a consumer - why am I sponsoring your experiments with my money? Why am I paying the same for garbage as I would for quality content? Will you share your end-game profit with me? If I buy your first games to support your endeavor, do I get the next versions for free? No. I don’t. I’m just wasting money on inferior products, and when they become superior - I will reap no benefits.
So - sure, let the companies throw themselves at this. But I’m not investing my own cash in their research.
I mean, it is and it isn’t. On one hand, yes people will probably lose their jobs with these tools supposed to filled the gaps.
But that doesn’t mean the AI tools are actually anywhere near as competent as a human, and it will result in watered-down, anodyne, and to be more blunt, just boring art and writing.
Corporate will use the tools because they’re “good enough,” but we all know they’re really not good enough. They’re just one more way to cut costs at the expense of user experience and employee workload (the employees that are left being expected to do more work).
Bingo. AI is shockingly good at building simple things, helping with direct questions about items. It cannot replace humans in its current state.
At this point it’s CEO bluster just like the blockchain, where the suits are talking about technology like they personally handcrafted it while the actual engineers are sitting in the back of the room thinking “uh, there’s no way it can do that”.
I think we’re going to see a couple hilarious cycles of some shit thinks they can replace humans with AI, fail spectacularly, and then quietly go back.
I honestly don’t think they’ll even quietly go back. It’s clear “customer service” is becoming something that isn’t considered a return on value, so they’re shutting them down all over. Customer service will be the number one thing replaced with AI and they won’t go back on that.
Customer service for the last 20-30 years has absolutely been nothing but a shield for corporations to hide behind while screwing their customers. Low paid phone jockeys have to deal with people furious at being fucked over by conglomerates like Comcast. There is no way to contact anyone further up the chain, and that is deeply purposeful.
They record all the phone calls, but they refuse to learn anything that benefits the customer from them. All they do is deploy psychological tricks to try to get the customer to be happy while not actually rectifying the problem. It’s always a purposeful half-measure that has been deeply researched to calm people down and accept the big unlubed dildo in their ass like they should.
So yeah, the “customer service voice” will be long gone to be replaced with increasing shitty “customer service AI” with no human to talk to, and if you get lost in the shuffle and put in a digital black hole, well, “go fuck yourself” is clearly what they’ll be telling you. They already pretty much do this (especially Google) but it will become increasingly pronounced and difficult.
Clawing back anything that corporations have stolen from you will increasingly become an exercise in total futility as you’re stuck in an endless AI loop that refuses to give you options that actually address your issue.
It’s within literal months that leaps are occurring that defy most expert expectations and predictions.
While yes, creative writing is not part of the target of where models are improving right now (and there are IMO clear mistakes being made with foundational models contributing to that poor performance), we’re probably less than one dev cycle from the best AI outperforming an above average video game writer with institutional integration of the models.
And really, people thinking this is going to put writers out of business are missing the true value add for publishers.
You’ll see the same amount of writers as before. What will change is the amount of writing.
Being able to have a core writing team do the normal work they do of writing out main and side quests and then feeding all that writing into a model spitting out side NPC dialogue fitting in with the events taking place allows developers to make their world come alive in ways previously only accessible to the largest budgets in the industry like RDR2.
This also allows games that are successful to transition into more of a live service product without needing to have a massive audience.
For most live service games, you need as many people as possible playing to justify dedicating resources to continued development, or you need a subscription fee. But niche products with a dedicated fan base which aren’t overly popular are too small to justify continuous content development.
With AI that equation changes. More games have the opportunity to keep players engaged longer for continuing adventures when a smaller team can use generative systems to flesh out the product.
Everyone praises No Man’s Sky for their continued development with a team of about a dozen putting more and more content out, but the other side of the coin is that they can only successfully deliver updates that feel weighty because they are leveraging procgen to extend their efforts.
Imagine the next version of FF online where not only is there a core main story everyone experiences, but there are also individualized stories woven into it that are shaped around your interactions. Where every NPC can be spoken to and any one of them might lead to your next individualized adventure. A world that feels at once epic and shared with millions of other players while also personal and unique just for you.
Even if the individual writing wasn’t as planned out as world event scenario writing from lead writers, I’d sure as hell prefer to spend $16/mo on a world with little repetition and endless adventures than a world that only has a hundred hours of story every year and is mostly running the same things over and over in between waiting for small bursts of content updates.
AI makes perfect sense for any live service provider, and Square Enix has one of the most successful live service products to date. Of course they are going to be investing into it as it rapidly improves.
For every job that AI kills, you need at least 2 techs to train the AI. This isn’t meant to say “go get a job as an AI tech if you’re worried about job security” it’s more of a “businesses will see the obvious lack of ROI and vision and refuse to implement it”.
Which is also what the last CEO of Square Enix rode on. This is either investor appeasement or indeed improvement of quality with these tools or, and far more likely both buzzwords and producing crap to cut costs.
It absolutely is. Although, putting aside the obvious ethical debates, I will say that least AI has some practical uses. Crypto-currency and NFTs felt a lot like a solution looking for a problem, and while that can be true of some implementations of AI, there are a lot of valid uses for it.
But yeah, companies rushing to use AI like this, and making statements like this, just screams that they're trying to persuade investors they're "ahead of the curve", and is absolutely indicative of a hype bubble. If it wasn't a hype bubble, they'd either be quietly exploring it externally and not putting out statements like this, or they're be putting out statements excitedly talking specifics about their novel and clever implementations of AI.
I rwas this as them saying they’ll be cutting jobs left and right using an AI based solution to keep more profits for the top instead of making game characters smarter
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