Square Enix’s president says it will be ‘aggressive in applying’ AI

Your response style is not rude. It is disingenuous confirmation hunting cherry picking. I addressed everything in your response in detail, but you latched on to the qualifiers and clarifications because those are the parts that satisfy your confirmation bias, even though in the full context they mean quite the opposite. I also am recognizing that you are not a dev, not a game designer, not an AI architect nor mathematician, or a computer scientist. All of this means that the scope and breadth of your understanding of the topic you are attempting to belittle and demean is myopic at best. It is obvious that you do not understand what a "quest" in a game is nor what it takes to craft or write one. It is clear that you have 0 understanding of how LLM or AIs as a larger topic function or generate information. You deign to belittle the work that I am doing on this topic without asking a single question or clarifying a single detail from me. I'm sure you are getting a nosebleed for your perch on Mt. Dunning-Kruger. I can see you from my position on the adjacent slope. I will humor you though, since you seem to at least care about the topic, even though you seem utterly incapable of recognizing when something should be informative and educational.

What is a "quest" in a game: The abstract of this article covers some key concepts of both current anf potential future paradigms of quest design in video games. Currently, quests, even handcrafted ones, consist of a list of tasks. Lists of tasks are text. Well-crafted ones include lore hooks, personal interactions with a variety of NPCs, tasks that are meaningful to the world, and rewards/results that either expand the player's capabilities or draw the player into the world and the story. Components needed to craft a quest are a means of initiating the quest for the player (quest givers, discovered information like a letter or journal, an event that happens in the player's presence), dialog, goals/tasks, and a location. For a well-made persistent world, locations, and NPCs are persistent as well. They don't need to be AI-crafted on the fly. They should have been created when the game was made, or at least some period long before the players interacted with them. What can be crafted as a just-in-time or an emergent experience is the interaction with the player. Dialog with lore hooks that give the quest grounded footing in the world. Interactions with other NPCs which are based with the relationships of the NPCs with each other instead of just the player, etc. All of this is textual in nature. Dialog, relationships, interaction. The secondary stuff, like animations, could be handled in a lot of clever ways. They could be hand-crafted by animators and an AI could be trained on what animation links to what interaction type. The AI then selects and blends the canned animations when it is interacting with the player. And before you have something to say about that, it is literally how animation is done now by people. I absolutely have authority on this topic as I have a graduate degree in animation and visual effects. The AI I am working to create currently is being designed around the goal of making a consistent world with complex relationships and personalities so quests can be written that are self-consistent and coherent with the world. It is not worried about writing dialog or generating rewards, just making a world and quests that are cogent and have minimal plot holes.

What isn't part of a quest? Geometry, models, textures, particles, VFX, rooms, people, trees, animals... basically anything that has physical form or defines a physical characteristic of an object. These things may be involved in the completion of the tasks themselves, but they are all separate from the quest. As an analog, your wife hands you a grocery list and asks you to go to the store to pick up the things she needs for dinner. This would constitute your bog-standard fetch quest in a video game. The quest is to obtain the listed items. All of the items exist independently of the quest. The grocer and cashier at the till do as well. As does your wife. The only thing that the quest consists of is the request which is made, and the list which is requested. Everything else does not need to be created, it already exists. I hope that clears up your misunderstanding of the topic.

You can erase the entire concept of modeling or texturing from your mind in relation to an AI creating quests. I mentioned it because I recognise that some objects may need to be created. Perhaps your wife asks for a product which the store did not contain already. So in a gaming context, this should be cleaned up so the quest is able to be completed. The product needs to be created. You can place limits on the list of items so they are all canned goods. Now you have a rudimentary prototype object that can be anything. Canned beans, sure. Canned orc tongue, why not? All that is needed is a label and a spot on a shelf. SD can create a label in a few seconds while the player moves from his home to the store and an observation-aware procedural system can stock it on the shelves when no players are looking and inform the AI driving the cashier of the existence and location of the item. Nothing needed modeled. Hell, all that was really needed was a procedural text generator to make a label for the can, no AI was needed for that. What the AI is needed for to make the trip to the grocery feel right is the request from your wife, the conversation with the cashier at checkout, and the smile and thanks from your wife when you got home with the items.

If more modeling is needed, procedural modeling takes care of that. Artists create prototype objects with fixed bounds on parameters and an AI is trained on how to set those parameters, so whenever a quest needs an item, the quest generation AI requests the type if item and the context in which it will be used, and the modeling AI interprets the request, prepares the correct prototype, determines the contextually appropriate parameters for it, then places it where the quest giver needs it. No muss, no fuss. Eventually, there will be SD analogs for 3D geometry and generative modeling. It is a field of active research at IBM, nVidia, AMD, Meta, and many others. It will happen, and it will happen sooner than anyone will be ready for it, much like SD. But for now, it is overkill. AIs can use procedural modeling to adequately furnish and populate a world without much overhead. I think I may play with that as well. Rip the character creator from the likes of Skyrim or Starfield and train an AI on faces and the character creator parameterization and have it go wild. The AI is still creating the characters, it is just using the same tool as the player to do so.