There’s a quote Captain Jack Sparrow says to Captain Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. “World's still the same. There's just less in it.” This quote is more than relevant today in game development today, as artificial intelligence is taking over human intelligence.
Of course, AI has been an integral part of it, but it’s better now. NPCs are smarter, and generative AI can give you procedurally generated worlds to explore. No human developer is involved in such processes, as AI doesn't need those thoughts. A dataset from some corner of the internet is enough.
Advertisement
And that is how AI is changing gaming forever. It’s hollow, like fortune cookies. A body without soul. Like the White Walkers of the night in Game of Thrones. You will see a lot of content in the games, a variety too, sometimes. But it doesn’t even feel like we are interacting with a character or the environment anymore.
We will now see how this AI-rot is spreading and corrupting video games.
Advertisement
Creepy Things
Something just doesn’t feel right. Even when we play video games, it feels like we are in a world someone created. Even though there are glitches in there, it appears natural. The way a character walks and the way that all the characters or the creatures around behave.
Look at this concept that someone created using Google’s Genie 3, an AI-based worldbuilding model. Our protagonist is a fish in a kitchen, and though many video games fail at logic, they at least don’t put a fish moving out in the open.
Advertisement
Here, the players need to sneak around chefs who seem to be busy chopping things in a kitchen. If they catch it, they’ll serve our protagonist on one of their customers’ plates.
I know, it’s just a video game. But as you’ll look closely, the content generated here is somewhat slimy; the chefs' hands aren’t picking or chopping things using their knives. It seems like it’s made of paint and as the hands move, so do the colors from which those hands and knives are made. Hmm… Something’s fishy.
THis could be a good concept for prop hunt in Call of Duty, though. But I hope not to see the fish move in that uncomfortable sort of way it does here.
Not just unnatural, it’s creepy. Creepier than those hot nurses of the Silent Hill games.
You want to see something creepier? Somebody created a game where you play as a sock. A dirty (bad-smelling, probably) sock. You can take a look at it below.
But this one did some good work on the environment front. It isn’t just rapidly trying to generate and keeping it together like this AI-generated game inspired by one of those Grand Theft Auto products.
And all of these aren’t even fully developed games, just concepts. Something these so-called ‘developers’ have been playing with.
The Quantity Issue
This brings us to an issue that’s persistent with content today, which is quantity over quality. A video game needs an entirely dedicated team to build something from the ground up. If, let’s say, one game took 10 days and 20 people in the past, it takes one person and 10 hours to generate 20 games today. Thanks to AI.
These ‘developers,’ they aren’t even catering to the players’ needs. They are catering to their own needs. They are showing the world, ‘oh, see, I imagined something, and how cool it is.’ Even if it’s not. Some thoughts go into these that shouldn’t even be called video games.
Think of something like this: How does it feel if some of the popular video games, like Black Myth: Wukong, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, or other campaign-based games, start releasing a level every day in chunks? That thing is perhaps good for a TV series but not in video games.
With more access to these AI-generated tools allowing people to create concept video games, things are seeming to go that way only. Too many games releasing (read that as "uploading") are just killing value in them. Value comes with quality, while the quantity kills it. The latter’s dominant now.
The Dead NPCs
In video games, there used to be someone behind a character. Before motion capture came, there were voice artists lending characters their voices. It was satisfactory to know that what we are looking at has some life into it. Somebody gave a part of themselves in that character. Motion capture just took that to the next level, and we know that Sam Porter Bridges, the Deadman, and Cliff are none other than Norman Reedus, Guillermo Del Toro, and Mads Mikkelsen.
Now, the voices are generated using these AI tools. There’s no emotion or anything in the voices we hear. Take a look at this video from Nvidia’s ACE, which claims to “bring digital characters to life.”
Look at the way character Jim replies here. It’s plain dull. Though the fact that it is interacting with the player in real time is certainly revolutionary, it’s boring interacting with these digital characters.
Jim here is concerned about the rising crime. But it doesn’t feel like he is really concerned.
You want to feel the tension and the emotions from NPCs? Take a look at this compilation showing the madness of Vaas from Far Cry 3.
Or this one showing the gritty and stoic Captain Price from Modern Warfare (2019).
I hope that after seeing these videos, you are able to know the difference between a dead NPC and an alive one pretty well.
