Programmatically? Not really. There are efforts among the major LLMs and content creation tools to embed digital watermarks in AI generated media. But, especially for 3d games where most of these are textures, that is pretty difficult.
What I do see is a focus on computer vision to identify/isolate assets and then look up the provenance of those. Whether it is ripped out of a different game, part of a commonly available asset pack, or registered as having been made by an LLM. Which I actually would expect Epic to push for (since they have an asset store…) but… yeah.
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.
I was going to talk about how the load times are mostly just masked but still there but you acknowledged that.
At which point: Mark and Recall (or any of the Interventions) on an NVME is nigh instantaneous. And, much like Shang Tsung got neutered, those spells were largely removed because it made it too easy to load into a cell with a LOT of resources rather than an intentionally controlled and safe (asset wise) fast travel point.
At the end of the day: it is all the same “trick” Morrowind used. You load N cells ahead of where the player is so that they don’t notice the load times because they have been done by the time they get there.
In this case a “cell” could be a room or it could be DM-Deck 16 or it could be all of The Imperial City. It is the same trick. Hell, I think some streaming services even do this at different quality tiers so that you have no delay between one episode and another.
Size of levels is entirely a function of available memory. PS5 had more memory than PS4 and TF2 was targeting PS4 specs (… actually, was that PS3? Let’s say PS4 so I don’t feel too old). Faster load from disk helps a lot but NVMEs alone already get you there, as anyone who has experienced zero load times while playing a game can attest.
Like I said below where I already addressed this exact same point: It is great to applaud accomplishments. But by buying into this “only with the power of direct storage is this possible” nonsense you are not only parroting marketing: you are ignoring the legacy of all the devs who already did this years (really decades) ago.
There have been some fan stories of Troy Baker that make him seem like a real douche bag. But mostly, just watch basically any time he does a big stage interview. It is almost a meme that he will find a way to talk about how amazing of an actor he is and cut off any woman in sight.
He could very well end up being insanely pro-SAG and the like. But he shows every sign of being a Stephen Amell level of “Fuck you for not letting me promote my products”
We already have strong indications of companies like Ubi using AI models based on past performers. And stuff like Tomb Raider/Lara Croft is downright famous for how much they model her appearance off actresses (sometimes the mocap actress, sometimes just a random attractive one). And its worth remembering that the big attempt at “a virtual actress” was from a Final Fantasy movie. Hell, the rumor has been that most of Martinet’s Mario lines were recorded decades ago.
Plus, as much as I love Warframe and DE, it has always been more than a bit sketch how many characters are voiced by non-union employees of the company (and, bottom dollar, Space Mom going out for a pack of smokes for a few years was worries that Reb would leave). And they are not at all out of the ordinary in that.
So yeah. Video games should fucking respect the unions
And for people thinking nothing will happen (like last time) because the vast majority of game dev can be done without the VAs or even the motion capping done?
Take a look at the SAG strike. A24 and the like “rolled over” almost instantly and are largely operating like nothing has changed. Expect the vast majority of indie and “small studio” productions to do so. It means higher cost per game, but the SAG rates are nothing compared to the rest of game dev. And then it gives them a significant advantage.
Whereas the big studios? Rockstar are nearing formal announcement on GTA6. Can’t do that if your talent is refusing to record lines and the like (not to mention the rumors (?) that they blacklisted the hell out of Nico Bellic’s VA after he dared to ask for more money). And you can bet that Sony are trying to find ways to get the TLOU show crowd playing games (although I totally expect Troy Baker to scab the fuck out of things).
Keep in mind that the PS4 pro and the Xbox One X both had spinning disc hard drives. Going from an HDD to an SSD, let alone a pretty good NVME, is already an insane speed-up. There is a reason most PC outlets have said over the years that getting an NVME was a more noticeable improvement than a new GPU.
Similarly, most games and visuals that people were used to fit in 8 GB. This is twice as much RAM at a higher speed.
The “direct storage” argument is almost entirely marketing. And it is fundamentally no different than learning you can Boots of Blinding Speed across the map without loading if you installed Morrowind to an SSD.
It is a nice technical achievement. But pretending it was some unique and groundbreaking action is not only buying into the marketing: It is insulting to the devs who did similar with much less.
Ah. I remembered the Imperial City being its own loading area (and kvatch was the town that gets wrecked? So that would make sense too) but I could have sworn the rest of the towns were still “open world”.
Ah well. Maybe someday I’ll play Oblivion again. But almost definitely doing Morrowind first because Morrowind was awesome and weird as fuck.
R&C is cool as hell but it is NOT the revelation it was marketed as.
Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2 had already done almost exactly the same gimmick years prior. And that MyHouse.wad DOOM map that everyone lost their mind over a few years back actually was ALSO doing the same trick. Hell, the Build Engine games (particularly Duke Nukem 3D) were entirely built around this trick.
The reality is not that you are “changing entire dimensions”. It is that the majority of the map is loaded into memory and you are teleporting between parts of it. This has been a solved technology for literally decades. You just have seamless “portals” between different parts of the map. But it boils down to just loading enough assets.
R&C mostly benefited from the larger memory of the PS5 (16 GB of GDDR6 versus 8 GB of DDR5 for the PS4) with the “direct storage” mostly being background in, ironically, the same way Morrowind was: You are loading a few “cells” ahead of you as you traverse the world map so that you never notice a load time (unless you use the boots of blinding speed… or are playing on a console).
I think people were expecting fallout no man’s sky…and I don’t know why.
Well, Outer Worlds is already almost literally “Fallout 3, in space”. We had more, but smaller, open world areas but that isn’t much different than how The Pitt and the like were treated. Hell, it has been a minute, but I want to say DC proper was already a separate set of exterior cells that you transitioned into from the capital wasteland?
Mentioned elsewhere that I think anyone who was expecting seamless transitions just do not understand game dev (or Bethesda’s engine) in the slightest.
But it IS disappointing that there is such a massive emphasis on fast travel. Because Outer Worlds showed that traversing a space wasteland to do a few quests and find some POIs is really fun. And Bethesda have a LOT more resources than Obsidian and could have made that a much more “real” world. Even if it was mostly procedurally generated landscapes with painted in POIs.
It is not in the slightest bit surprising that bethesda would have issues with an interconnected world.
All (?) interiors are still different cells that require a load screen. And, since Skyrim (and, to a lesser extent, Fallout 3), the vast majority of towns are also a separate “exterior” cell as well.
MAYBE with the requirement of an SSD/nvme we could see a return to Morrowind/Oblivion style “the entire planet is one exterior area”. But we were never going to have atmospheric transitions.
There is a reason that basically every single “seamless transition” elite game has almost entirely barren planets. Balancing simulation for an entire solar system is already hard enough (and is why star citizen and elite dangerous like the long travel times…). Combining that with a planet where you potentially have to care about more than a few containers of loot and some scannable objects becomes hell. Its why so many games will hide a loading screen as you break atmosphere (I think one of the Evochrons did this? Been a minute) and why planets with cities are generally off limits… Or you just run like dogshit if you are star citizen.
That said: I REALLY hope this is the motivation for NMS to add cities. I don’t need “open world” cities. But being able to dock at a domed city would be AMAZING. And still get rid of a lot of these issues.
Having a very weird “relationship” with this game.
Switched to linux for my desktop so PC gamepass is… a hassle. Which means I would be playing this on my xbox. But also? There is a full month of “early access” that I need to wait through to play the game I “own”?
Caught a few streams yesterday and it looked fun in that “Outer Worlds without the charm” kind of way. Could see myself going hard on the ship editor but… Avorion and Space Engineers already exist. Also Cosmoteer
Which makes this weird. It looks fine/good (like basically any bethesda game since Oblivion) but I kind of already am having difficulty mustering up the interest to go preload it on my xbox. Suspect I’ll just “forget” about this game until a Steam sale a few years from now. Kind of like Fallout 4 (although, I have yet to actually bother with that outside of ymfah videos).
We were never getting Freespace 3. And, arguably, wouldn’t have “wanted” it because the vast majority of the people who worked on that left literally decades ago.
But a remaster/remake of 1+2 could have led to a revival of the space dogfighting genre.
Dwarf Fortress is very much NOT finished. Its roadmap is already more complex than most live game feature sets and Tarn and Zach are generally pretty adamant about it likely never being "finished"
Maybe consider reading more rather than just having a knee jerk reaction of “comparison to thing I don’t like, bad. I MUST REPLY!!!”