AI in big budget games is inevitable, say dev vets from Assassin's Creed and Everquest 2: 'Developers hate it … the money is still going to drive absolutely everybody to do it'
AI in big budget games is inevitable, say dev vets from Assassin's Creed and Everquest 2: 'Developers hate it … the money is still going to drive absolutely everybody to do it'
Depending on how it’s done, it could make the game better or worse, just like any other tool. I imagine there will be a lot of growing pains as devs figure out what works and what doesn’t.
As a developer (not of games, but still), I would actually be interested in a tool that can generate simple code snippets for me to correct and assemble into a more complex system. But yeah, as you said, there will be growing pains as everyone figures out the optimal use cases for AI in development
"Developers hate it". No they fucking don't. I know plenty of game devs saving a shit ton of time with AI.
I know this is mostly posturing at this point but:
"AI" has been in big budget games for decades. Hell, the big deal with Oblivion was that they had magic technology to procedurally place trees according to various heuristics. And I think that also added a resource management system to NPCs so that we could DB Apple them?
Same with coding and art and sound and so forth.
- All that cool magic wand and fancy ass filter shit in photoshop? Those are increasingly "AI" tools that will analyze the image and extrapolate what should or should not be "behind" something and so forth.
- Coding? if you AREN'T using a tool to generate stubs and even tests at this point then you are wasting your own time.
- Audio? Again, the same "AI" filters already exist. Same with tools to detect pauses or to split up dialogue and so forth.
The reality is just using it effectively. Oblivion was boring as hell because the entire overworld was empty and lifeless. Same with BOTW. Whereas Ubi, for all their actual gameplay flaws, are spectacular at adding POIs and "events" in strategic locations so that you find something while you are hiking across a forest to get to an objective.
Same with art and even CGI. You aren't going to get a good outcome if you ask dall-e to make your art for you. But you are going to get good results if you start with a solid base and then procedurally add rust or spatter to it. You aren't going to get a good result if you have your actors on a studio lit stage talking to nothing (Hi Prequel Trilogy). You are if you add lighting relative to the scene (The Volume) and use placeholders they can act off of.
And... same with writing. Ask ChatGPT to write your screenplay? It is going to be bad. Use the proper prompts to get the "voice" of a character right or to generate some background dialogue that you won't even correctly hear because the mics are focused on Meg Ryan faking an orgasm? Suddenly you have a better "product" than everyone else who just tells extras to wing it or putty around. Same with having a Black Scottish Chick sound like she isn't written by some white dude.
Your point about the screenplay reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves with armchair commenters on AI these days.
Yeah, if you hop on ChatGPT, use the free version, and just ask it to write a story, you're getting crap. But using that anecdotal experience to extrapolate what the SotA can do in production is a massive mistake.
Do professional writers just sit down at a computer and write out page after page into a final draft?
No. They start with a treatment, build out character arcs, write summaries of scenes, etc. Eventually they have a first draft which goes out to readers and changes are made.
To have an effective generative AI screenplay writer you need to replicate multiple stages and processes.
And you likely wouldn't be using a chat-instruct fine tuned model, but rather individually fine tuned models for each process.
Video game writing is going to move more into writing pipelines for content generation than it is going to be writing final copy. And my guess is that most writers are going to be very happy when they see the results of what that can achieve, as they'll be able to create storytelling experiences that are currently regarded as impossible, like where character choices really matter to outcomes and aren't simply the illusion of choice to prevent fractalizing dialogue trees too much early on.
People are just freaking out thinking the tech is coming to replace them rather than realizing that headcounts are going to remain the same long term but with the technology enhancing their efforts they'll be creating products beyond what they've even imagined.
Like, I really don't think the average person - possibly even the average person in the industry - really has a grasp of what a game like BG3 with the same sized writing staff is going to look like with the generative AI tech available in just about 2-3 years, even if the current LLM baseline doesn't advance at all between now and then.
A world where every NPC feels like a fleshed out dynamic individual with backstory, goals, and relationships. Where stories uniquely evolve with the player. These are things that have previously been technically impossible given resource constraints and attempts to even superficially resemble them ate up significant portions of AAA budgets (i.e. RDR2). And by the end of the next console generation, they will have become as normative as things like ray tracing or voiced lines are today.
That's a win win all around.
While I generally agree (and that applies to almost all "an LLM can't do that" discussions):
Head counts are not going to remain the same. Well, it might in writing, but there is a reason the WGA went on strike.
If you can apply effective filters/transforms to a base texture, you can now do the same work that would have taken you weeks in a day or two. If you aren't "wasting time" writing unit tests or making utility functions, you no longer need junior developers to punt the Charlie Work to. And so forth.
In some fields? Being able to do more with less means you do a LOT more.
But, generally speaking, that means you need fewer people and you pay fewer people.
This is one of many many reasons that we need to have been exploring UBI decades ago. Because we are increasingly going to see a decrease in employment as technology is more and more able to "get the job done". And unlike with farm work and factory work... there isn't really anything on the horizon for all the "creative" workers to do.
Ideally AI could be used to reduce the amount of work required to produce AAA assets, and allow that time to go back into quest design and world building. Or just reduce development time so we can get great games more often.
Yeah, another tool like licensing a game engine or procedurally generated content. It will still require a lot of review and revision, custom work to overcome edge cases, and direction to meet your goals.
What AAA studio managers hear:
"So you mean I only need two devs now to do the work of 10? Sounds great!"
"And no, we're not going to lower the price of our games."
It could be interesting for procedurally generated games. Imagine a world with no fixed map, settlements where every person is completely unique and will talk to you about any subject you want to talk to them about (instead of the same canned phrase or two), a completely different roster of baddies to fight every time, maybe even the storyline itself never plays the same each time, or the style of play changes from game to game. I'm hopeful we'll start to see some truly unique games with AI helping out, though I'm guessing we'll get a mountain of shovelware that just uses AI to generate shitty non-sensical art assets and meaningless dialogue.
Have you played/seen Vaudeville? It's a detective game where every character had their own LLM and TTS trained for a specific personality.
It's super janky and I never finished it because I kept getting conflicting info from characters but....it's a really great use case for it. The massive caveat being that it requires an Internet connection.
AI-generated maps and NPCs might be ok. Ditto fights, though there would have to be playtesters whose job it is to make sure the result is something winnable and acceptably fair.
The main issue there would be that there IS no continual certainty of that. You'd have to either be able to rerolled entire encounters — which would be jarring — or force the AI to DM what happens when you lose an impossible battle — far more rewarding, provided it doesn't keep doing it. But it may keep doing it. This would be impossible to ever test adequately. Every game on the market may be a hard mode Bethesda game.
I personally really don't think I'd enjoy something with a randomly generated cast/main story for the same reason I wouldn't be interested in owning one singular book whose writing changes every time you read it. I don't play to kill time; I play for the stories and I get attached like hell to the good ones. I replay them ad nauseam because I miss the characters.
I think it would be an intensely entertaining idea either as a New Game+ or for those games to have a wildcard setting that you could turn on and off. That way, there's no lack of devs who get to tell the tale they wanted and players can mix it up when they're bored. Otherwise, you've downgraded the job of the entire company to filling the AI in on background lore and nothing else.
Other aspects:
• for those that do get attached and wanna re-experience it, you'd need a way to save the information behind the game you just played. That file might be fairly gigantic?
• Would also lead to a weird market for other peoples' saves. The way modders already make quests, but for an entire plot.
• NPCs and party members that all look like randomized sims.
The wording of this is so stupid for a lot of reasons. Specifically with how ambiguous "AI" is. The ghosts in pacman are AI.
If they're talking about generating code bases, that's just not going to happen.
If they mean LLMs being used by programmers in code editors as a useful tool, like GitHub Copilot, then that's awesome and an increase in productivity.
Artists can use generative AI art for quick textures like repeating grass textures. An AI will not be able to match an art style or theme, it has a limited scope and can't be hand crafted like what's required in game with poly budgets.
Devs obviously love better tools. These save time and increase productivity.
I think you're on the money, but I have to disagree with one point: AI will absolutely be able to match an existing art style, if not now then very soon.
AI can be a great tool if used properly to enhance human work but companies seem hell-bent to instead have just AI do all the work, cutting human beings out completely and "saving costs". Recipe for disaster.
I like the idea of using it to give NPC's intelligent things to say.
"There are no countries in Africa that start with the letter K."
Together we can stop this
Not yet.
People are a bit optimistic about how it could be used, it's still a bit dumb. In all likelihood it's likely to be used in asset creation since that's one of the pricier aspects of game design, automating and replacing the more grunt work stuff. Not design so much as textures, object modeling, etc., which are already easy to do via AI (and easy to train, avoiding lawsuits by keeping things in house). That'll displace "artists" although texture creation is a bit of a slog anyway.
Should people be worried about writers? Maybe, but I'm not-- at least not yet. AI can create filler, but it's story writing is abysmal. You'll still need a creative behind the curtain to build the world, subvert tropes, and so on. AI can assist but if it's better than you on writing, you really shouldn't be a writer.
To use an example from when ChatGPT became mainstream, a certain scifi serial magazine had to close submissions because they were bombarded with cheap and fast short story submissions. According to the editors, these stories were some of the worst they've ever seen. I forget the name of the magazine, but I thought it was pretty funny since I was playing with the tool and couldn't agree more.
None the less, it's probably for the best. I hate making assets, and my wife used to do translation and that's really boring and under paid. A lot of game design is incredibly boring and laying off people making those things is probably in their best interest, those jobs suck. Main downside is the business class of the industry will pocket the profits instead of reinvesting in their products or reducing prices.
A lot of game design is incredibly boring and laying off people making those things is probably in their best interest
People need to pay rent. The fuck is this.
The fuck is what, the jobs in question won't even pay rent. Translation, for instance, is contract work and pays less than minimum wage if you do it well and it's not a job of passion. If that's what's keeping you afloat, your problem isn't with the gaming industry, it's with society itself.
Quitting that work was also the best decision my wife ever made, so fuck off with bleeding heart nonsense. Those jobs aren't jobs society should have.
Ideally, yeah, AI should be used to automate boring grunt work and enable more people to engage in something creative. Maybe those jobs in the future can transform into something like managing AI's output and fixing unique edge cases, where human input is still required.