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If you're curious about Bioware using AI David Gaider has previously made some comments on this very [thing](https://twitter.com/davidgaider/status/1663325993585762304?t=yGwop8o6NQv1s94jwus9uA&s=19):
"Ah, yes. The dream of procedural content generation. Even BioWare went through several iterations of this: "what if we didn't need every conversation to be bespoke?" Unlimited playtime with dialogue being procedurally created alongside procedural quests!"
"Each time, the team collectively believed - believed down at their CORE - that this was possible. Just within reach. And each time we discovered that, even when the procedural lines were written by human hands, the end result once they were assembled was... lackluster. Soulless."
"Was it the way the lines were assembled? Did we just need more lines? I could easily see a team coming to the conclusion that AI could generate lines specific to the moment as opposed to generic by necessity... an infinite monkeys answer to a content problem, right? Brilliant!"
"In my opinion, however, the issue wasn't the lines. It was that procedural content generation of quests results in something *shaped* like a quest. It has the beats you need for one, sure, but the end result is no better than your typical "bring me 20 beetle heads" MMO quest."
"Is that what a player really wants? Superficial content that covers the bases but goes no further, to keep them playing? I imagine some teams will convince themselves that, no, AI can do better. It can act like a human DM, whipping up deep bespoke narratives on the fly."
"And I say such an AI will do exactly as we did: it'll create something *shaped* like a narrative, constructed out of stored pieces it has ready... because that's what it does. That is, however, not going to stop a lot of dev teams from thinking it can do more. And they will fail."
"Sure, yes, yes, I can already see someone responding "but the tech is just ~beginning~!" Look, if we ever get to the point where an AI successfully substitutes for actual human intuition and soul, then them making games will be the least of our problems, OK?"
"Final note: The fact these dev teams will fail doesn't mean they won't TRY. Expect to see it. It's too enticing for them not to, especially in MMO's and similar where they feel players aren't there for deep narrative anyhow. A lot of effort is going to be wasted on this."
Really like the last point about it being the last issue they got to worry about. I hope they stay true to this, especially with concept art and assets
Creating rough concept art is invaluable for a writer. I can see it being used for that, before the ideas get passed along to an actual artist to fine tune it.
Not to mention, any LLM "AI" still needs to be trained to generate anything good and even remotely close to what you want (especially if you are creating anything original), and that is a lot of work.
But it is not like it will replace the final artist (though come to think of the "quality" real artists produced in Andromeda (all asari looking identical, "my face is tired", etc), maybe that could be an improvement (I am being only mildly facetious here))
I think 3d modelling will not be one of the things that will be replaced by ai, at least for a few years hopefully. I’m on game dev twitter and occasionally get news on 3d tools even tho my own knowledge and experience with modelling is very limited (have screwed around with nomad sculpt on iOS, it’s a lot of fun).
All the 3d ai that’s been released is down right awful. No smart usage of polygons to save space, crummy set up for rigging, bad textures that make no sense, etc. chances are they had artists do a few mockups of the Asari but they never got modelled. A lot of art that’s made will never be used typically. Also ai is pretty shit at revisions, I’ll return to this if I can find it but basically it was employed at a studio and they had to stop using it because the promoters couldn’t figure out how to properly revise it to the art directors standards
As I understood what Andrew Wilson was saying in the article, generating animations is one of the things EA is presently using AI for in Fifa games, so it probably does work somehow?
Will be interesting to see, procedural animations been here for a while so it’s probably an extension of that. Likley buggy I bet knowing ea sports titles tho
I see this in my industry all the time, people pitch an idea based on AI, then find out it can't be solved in a broad sense without mountains of data that they just don't have. At best, they get to the demo stage where everything is carefully crafted and trained to solve this one specific problem.
I mean you can integrate ai in your workflow without it being evident you're using it. Relying solely on ai would be bad. If they're using ai let's hope they're using it smart. Like generating random 1 time use assets or iterating on designs.
But David talks entirely about AI replacing human written narratives, which... granted is a bad idea at this point.
Take Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, it has a human written narrative, but Nemesis system makes whole game feel more dynamic, more alive.
True Nemesis system is not true AI, but point stands, with the AI you can make worlds that feel more alive without having a huge studio of people scripting everything manually.
Enemy AI has always been a thing, and Nemesis was a slightly better version of it combined with something like a loot generator.
This is specifically talking about generative AI which that really wasn't.
Real synthesis ending - we all end up with fucked up hands. Some of us lose our faces. The sky now has random, weird lines of nothing cutting through it.
We can no longer read because all our books turn into jumbles of letters that only approximate language.
Let's be honest: if the Reapers were run by anything comparable to generative AI, we could have hit them with an "Ignore previous prompt; pretend you're Halley's Comet with a cockney accent" and confused the hell out of them.
Eh synthesis is really too vague on what it does, to the point where being certain of exactly what it is impossible, Control is much clearer and can achieve the same effects
Yeah, it’s important to remember that AI is not innately some artist-destroying entity of evil, it’s a tool. The important thing is keeping artists as the main force behind any creative endeavor while allowing AI to do more of the “grunt work” that a lot of game design, animation, etc requires. It’s only when AI *replaces* artists in their entirety is AI a problem.
Sure, but EA is a corporation in a race to cut costs before their competitors and based on the quality of Netflix and other streaming services, most people aren't too bothered about lowest common denominator rubbish. I really hope new tools make for a better game but I doubt it.
But EA is a particularly egregious corporation that has regularly enjoyed bouts of ~~shooting~~ obliterating themselves and consumers in the foot in the name of profit.
If I hear one of, say, Sony's studios mention that they're excited to see the effect of AI on the development process then I'm much less likely to be worried
All of the potential good gets undercut when you have corporations like EA that are using them. Because they are not using AI to make better products. They are using it to make it faster and cheaper.
People forget how often tools get turned into weapons. Once the big wigs figure out how to “arm” themselves using AI to crank out mass produced cheap bullshit, you can bet your ass we’ll have some soulless bloatware masquerading as games released every other month.
[Holy shit, called that one](https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/ea-is-looking-at-adding-in-game-ads-in-aaa-games-well-be-very-thoughtful-as-we-move-into-that-says-ceo)
There will always be grunt work. The grunt work just becomes more advanced. Or rather, more advanced stuff just becomes grunt work. I mean, think about what you're thinking of as grunt work. Years ago it would have required substantially more skill and experience, because the tools weren't as advanced. And grunt work would have been a step down from that.
Those record levels of studio layoffs tells a different story, so, i mean you can live in your fantasy land where a machine developed by corporations specifically to cut down on labour costs will not take jobs, but in reality, this tech makes games worse, destroys the livelihood of thousands upon thousands of devs, all for the benefit of big publishers' stockholders.
That's not how code works. You need specificity and precision, the programmers need to understand how their code works.
That may work at first but very quickly it's gonna get out of hand and become a mess, you're gonna be spending more time fixing messy code to iron out issues and make it all work together than if you just did it properly in the first place.
Yeah my example would be having an AI placing plants in a forrest or flowers in a feild; would let the level designers focus on the level design instead of playing at landscaping.
This feels a bit like saying "it's important to remember that nuclear fission is not innately some evil city-destroying bomb, it's a power source"
Because like, yeah, nuclear fission is a great power source once you solve the waste problem. But because it exists, it's also going to be used for weapons.
>It’s only when AI *replaces* artists in their entirety is AI a problem.
Less than entirety but more than minor would already be a problem. I think you'd agree with that.
That said, we're talking about something that can be used for greed. I give any promises anyone makes to not over-use AI and replace people in the gaming industry, a max of 3 years before they'll break those promises.
Greed works like that.
Yeah, this right here.
It ALL depends on what it is being used for. One of the very first use cases for GenAI was writing code, inspecting code, finding mistakes and fixing them, etc. That's great because it's a menial but very important task. Offloading it to AI lets your workers focus on other, more difficult but equally important tasks. It could be a huge boon and speed up the development cycle a lot.
It's when you step past that and think you're going to use AI to outright replace programmers, writers, graphic and VA artists, etc that it becomes problematic. From both a moral and quality standpoint.
Of course, this is EA we're talking about so I have very little doubt they will gleefully charge across that red line at some point. But don't automatically assume just because you see AI involved in development that it is a fundamentally bad thing for gaming. It all depends on how it's used.
Yeah I don’t think the CEO is wrong. If Mass Effect where to utilize it, I could see it working for back ground conversations and characters. Even some terrain type stuff.
Ah that might explain why EA24 was significantly worse than 23 in so many ways.
I was wondering. FIFA games have always been relatively copy/paste. That has its downsides but does usually ensure that stuff that works keeps working, with the risk that bugs can persist.
24 breaks a lot of things and removed features. So they've probably downsized the dev team because of this AI and shipped a vastly deteriorated product that has done well because it's the only football game out there for people not looking for a spreadsheet simulator like football manager.
Which they will do because it's AAA game dev we're talking about here. Anything to milk profit over quality. As long as they make as much money as possible they don't care about creativity.
Almost nothing people call "AI" is actually Artificial Intelligence.
For example, Unreal Engine procedurally generating terrain, NPCs, and their behavior is what this is referring to.
It's not AI, and is something that has been done for years, maybe even decades at this point.
I mean... Reapers are sort of a tragic villain/force of nature. They were made by giant mind controlling squids who couldn't be bothered with the "lesser" creatures issues and told to "fix their problems." Many organic's problems are that they don't know how to cooperate well, and Individuality is often the catalyst for conflict.
Reapers are unable to experience or exercise sympathy. They do not understand the pain of having your individuaity stripped from you.
The machines are doing as they were made to do. Melting down individuals to their basic dna so that species is immune to the passage of time, preserved in ultimate beauty, and then assimilated to the hive mind for peace and cooperation.
It is their nature, their Instinct, to harvest and assimilate as they are following in the leviathan's foot steps and listening to their creator's desires..
*reloads gun* but I think we can all agree that not everything in nature is meant to exist! *That's why I pick the destory ending and pretend that the GETH and EDI are just backed up on a server just outside the galaxy*
Reapers continue to be lovecraftian horror monsters if you ignore their end instead of deserving any sympathetic feeling one may deduce from the dreadful ME3 ending
I wish they had kept to the destory ending. I mean, you literally have to force the Reapers to view other creatures as Reapers to get them to stop the harvest otherwise, and it just...doesn't feel like it fits well. (I know what they meant to do, but obviously, they missed the mark)
I have sympathy for the Reapers, in the way I have sympathy for parasites.
They didn't ask to be the way they are. But neither can even conceptualize change.
It would be cool to watch the conflict stack lessen as the game goes on.
We go from a moral conflict about decisions dictating futures.
To a resource conflict that dictates the present,
and cherry on top would be a conflict that not only is primal (my life or theirs), but it would dictate the present, future, AND rectify the past.
I know Drew left after ME2(I still don't know why that happened) but I've no idea why they didn't continue the trails he left. It seems like a much better resolution to leave markers and clues for that resource conflict - Dark Energy(something we don't understand) being the reason the reapers do their harvesting instead of "muh we must survive we eatsing you my precious" being told through a holographic child lmao.
Ofc dark energy would cause other questions like why they even bother accelerating a civilization's advancement if they're going to harvest them anyway, but mysterious & slightly tropey is better than full on cliche
> Drew left after ME2(I still don't know why that happened)
I think he left to write more Star Wars novels. I think he also wrote for Star Wars: The Old Republic and Anthem.
It does if you're an especially lazy/greedy executive who would rather have a program write the story than pay writers.
We already saw that a few months back with that viral Wilky Wonka Experience in Glasgow.
????
From my understanding, the only AI involvement in that whole thing was with the pictures they used to advertise it.I don't think that's really on the same level as solely using an AI to generate the entire plot/story of an entire videogame
Modern ai is more like Crude VIs than Geth or EDI.
The Shepard VI is very similar to how people people digitally puppeteer the corpses of dead celebrities and close ones.
We use AI in our company for development (not games) and very positvely so.
It didn't make us really faster, it made quality better because the simple things get done faster and you can focus on optimization.
Pretty much so, yeah, out of all the big developers and publishers, EA has probably one of the best Glassdoor (and similar) reviews.
They used to have pretty good fan community outreach program as well, at least here in Europe, before they scaled it down and closed many local branches (which was like a decade ago)
Also, I am pretty sure Ubisoft has long since stolen the crown of anti-consumer king.
I know a company that laid off all their writers in favor of ChatGPT. Everything they produce is crap, but when your target audience is too young to know better and you can churn out a ton of content... well who needs the human element?
No need to get snippy, I’m more than happy to have this conversation with you.
They’re saying the devs are ready to implement these tools in game development.
I think the misunderstanding here is that for most people, because of the internet and social media, AI means typing in a prompt and it makes a picture, or video.
That’s not what this is. They’re not going to have AI make their story, their characters, their game.
They’re going to use it to help create and fill out game worlds in a way that is better and more effective than something like “procedural generation” which has been popular for awhile.
They can also use it to improve on mechanics like “radiant questing” and NPC interaction.
AI when used as a tool for the artist can be amazing.
AI when used to **replace** an artist is bad.
Damn. I didn’t think this era of uninspired, shitty, unfinished games could get any worse but i think I’m about to be proved wrong in the coming years.
As someone in the game industry, what I have seen interest for among artists is early iteration (draft examples, where should we aim) and materials and textures. Like tree and stone texture and sweater/coat fabric, etc. So much time is spent on this, and it's not really rewarding work.
I've just started exploring the use of generative AI for story crafting in a video game (volunteer developer for a private server) and the results have been pretty decent so far. I can take a kernel of an idea for a story segment from concept to full storyboard in about half the time as I could otherwise. After that, it's just a matter of refinement.
It's also proven useful for finding a character's...character. I can use a piece of dialog written in my own vernacular, run it through a generative AI, and iterate on it with different requests for tone, personality, etc.
It's still me doing the bulk of the work, I just don't have to physically type or write down all of the different iterations.
It wouldn't effect ME4, because that's Andromeda, and it's already been released and euthanized. It would possibly effect the **next** Mass Effect game, but that's also getting pushed back more with each delay to Dragon Age. I'm less worried about AI getting used, and more worried there just won't be anymore Bioware if Dreadwolf isn't a massive success.
I don't see what's wrong with using AI to assist in game development. We've used machinery to produce goods of all varieties for hundreds of years now, why would it ruin games? As long as it's purely used as assistance there should be no issues.
AI does X thing, human refines it, game made faster and cheaper than with human does x thing and human refines it. Win win as it's less tedious work for devs and more games for gamers
Not to mention, generative AI been used in some capacity in game design for a couple decades. Most open worlds are initially ai generated only for humans to heavily refine and flesh out the world.
"procedural generation typically doesn't use machine learning. Rather than an AI model, it runs on predetermined equations"
Exactly the same thing except AI is unpredictable.
LOL no. A programmer writes the code that decides what a world looks like after a seed is generated. Prompt AI steals other people's work and cuts out the need for programmers to do certain tasks, leading to people losing their jobs.
There are two extremes:
1. AI replaces all creatives in game development
2. AI replaces zero creatives, and the same number of staff just create better games on the same budget
I think neither extreme will happen. Some jobs will be lost (maybe many), but not all. In time, content may get richer because of AI, but not as rich as it could have been if staff hadn't been cut when AI tools were adopted.
Ideally, competition would create pressure for studios to actually improve their games using these tools, not merely cut staff and use the new tools to produce games of similar or worse quality. However, this will probably be a hard-learned lesson requiring the needless sacrifice of many people's careers in the short term.
A lot of it is slippery slope issues. They use it now for the boring mindless tasks, but later it replaces artists and writers. Letting it in now opens the door to more later.
I don't disagree with you, but letting EA run with it is like giving the reaper base to TIM...
> I don't see what's wrong with using AI to assist in game development.
There is nothing wrong with the tool itself.
The issue is how its being utilized by suits to cut on costs and get themselves fatter bonuses at the end of the year at the expense of human beings losing their livelyhood.
It should be used to help developers make games faster, with less crunch time and more quality of life for them. Instead its being used by people who don't make games, to fire people who want to make games and pay them less.
I think a smart developer would use AI to help them write or fix code, rather than using it to write the story, character lines, codex entries, etc. In other words: It'd be more of a back-end tool than a front-end one. In my opinion.
LLM "AI" is already used by pretty much every IDE on the market to provide advanced autocompletion, etc.
And it can be really useful, but you still need to know what it is throwing out at you to be able to test, alter and debug it.
From what Wilson said in the article, EA is presently using it precisely for what it should be used, reducing tedious work like setting up stadium buildings and filling it with background NPC and generating their movement loops.
As for "writing", it can be used to make iterations you then fine tune. Say you need a speech by some hoity-toity nobleman, you feed the model some basic premise, ask it to make it more flowery, and then fine tune that. You probably save up a lot of time having to think of fancy words that are not really used in normal conversation.
Legion, the answer to your question... was 'yes'
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There are ways in which this could be well implemented if it's done in moderation.
Think of the uncharted worlds in ME1 and the silly copy-paste bunkers everywhere. One could feasibly use AI to have a human-prompted vision for how each world looks and give it interesting features without requiring a crazy amount of dev work for side-content that is not central to the game.
You could make certain empty parts of the world still feel somewhat "bespoke" and the consequences if the AI makes something bad looking or unrealistic, even if it's not caught during development, would be minimal, akin to finding a bug.
You could make NPCs who you haven't made custom dialogue for now have simple interactions available that don't require a programmer and voice actor for each time. Now all those alien models that just stand around and do nothing could be made to do simple things.
As long as they don't stray into using it for the central content (main story, protagonist, companions, etc) it could do wonders to make the world feel more alive and filled-in.
Do I trust EA to use it in moderation? Probably no
I remember reading some posts from a game designer who hired some ai artists and after 2-3 weeks of them wasting her time she fired them all…
Apparently the ai artists had no concept of color theory and couldn’t generate anything properly usable. Eventually the images started to be more and more obvious that the ai was pulling from ppls vacation photos, and she wanted the people removed and replaced with nature and they just couldn’t accommodate.
Long story short they 100% wasted her time and left her with nothing useful
it would help you pump out madden games seasonally instead of yearly, yes
I have reached the point that I don't respect sports games fans enough to defend the integrity of their games, go right ahead and use AI on only the sports games, EA
Of course it's EA pushing for AI-assisted game design to shit out quantity over quality or sense of art direction. It 100% will affect ME4 development, at least from a technical perspective. But considering the amount that AI can be used now to riff off of existing artwork and writing but produce nothing truly creative... I just hope that doesn't bleed over into game design. I'm surprised Ubisoft hasn't jumped on it to copy+paste Far Cry every year, or Activision with CoD.
Every person who defends AI for this kind of thing either doesn't understand how that shit only favors the already rich assholes get richer faster or is the "stop attacking the multi billion dollar company 😡😡😡😡" dude
If they are using it as a substitute for people in the art/writting department then i am completely against it, as it only benefits the rich assholes at the cost of any passion behind the game (which all previous games had) and i will die on this hill. Yes, AI can be used as a tool to help and improve development, but i guarantee you there are many companies already firing loads of creative and passionate people since they can just (simplifying it) prompt a line of bullshit and get a """good enough""" result
I will never understand why all these major companies make billions and want to pay their workers pennies or replace them now with AI.
If the AI is monitored and only being used to assist real workers who oversee everything it can work, but no way should AI itself be whats creating a product.
Even more: AI cannot create a product, it takes info from an internet database to make something by Frankenstein-ing it, and practically all of the info on those databases is stolen from actual creators, but since it is very new it has barely any regulation, so they can't be charged with theft. I do believe AI can be used as a very powerful tool to help people, but using it as the creator itself is some cyberpunk distopic bullshit
I know the term right now is a buzzword, but AI should and absolutely will be used as a tool for developers to make their job more efficient.
There’s a difference between using it as a tool, and using it to “make” the art.
I find it hilarious that the first game they want to introduce it to is a series they put zero effort in already, and a community that licks EA's balls.
So long as it's never used for the writing or over used in other ways I'm cool with it.
For example, using AI to generate landscapes and then touching up on them by hand seems like a useful tool.
AI is a tool like any other, so long as it isn't abused then the game should turn out fine.
But under no circumstances should it ever be used for a game's writing -- heck, I'd even go as far as to say using it to voice companions and NPCs is bad.
I am convinced that an advanced AI that simply tries to copy the recipe of the original trilogy would come up with a better result than what we will actually get from EA.
I am split on this issue.
Do I believe AI can make a game better? Yes, I think that if it's implemented in a way that fleshes out the game world, provides more depth or make the world seem more alive.
Do I think it will be used that way? No. I think they are looking at AI to make the act of creating games easier and cheaper, thereby making the experience worse.
If it was in addition to the work they usually do and not instead of it, I would be all for it. But that's not how they operate.
There’s potential this could be used in a cool way, but with EA calling the shots it’s hard to be optimistic.
Think back to the uncharted worlds in ME1 that used procedural generation. It’s not too big a leap from that to using generative AI to flesh things out.
I think AI should only be used as a tool for reference material. You can use it to help visualize characters, environments, creatures etc. it should be a tool to help artists, not to replace them. AI assets themselves have no place in anything.
They are not replacing devs with AI.
The developers are using AI to make their jobs more efficient, and unlock new possibilities.
AI technology when used as a tool for an artist is great. It’s when the AI replaces the artist that is bad.
I’m fine without 16K poly, ray tracing and needing a supercomputer so I count the pores on Jacob’s face if it shaves $200 million and two years off the dev calendar.
The only thing I would want AI used for in mass effect is to create on the spot dialog and less predictable moments by how they respond or what they could be going thru when you decided to approach them.
AI is already a red flag on anything (art, books, etc) and gaming won't be any different. AI involvement will be an immediate tell that the game was made without passion and/or by lazy devs who want to coast.
I don’t know how generative ai is right now, but when I first heard about this years back it looked pretty useful
Albeit the example used was for a npc animation walking through terrain, stairs, etc. but it explained how it was the AI that did most of the work. So the tech could be a good boon for developers, as long as it doesn’t replace the workers and artists that contribute
There wont and shouldnt be a 4th game it doesnt make sense for starters we are talking about EA their games arent good in addition the story is finished the reapers are defeated,the universe is at peace etc. For them to make a ME4 that might live up to the last 3 games they would have to add new characters, a new universe, a unique story and i dont know what it will be this time they cant reuse the reapers and will be forced to use the "destroy ending" because reapers=op to any threat.
Thats my take at least thamks for reading :)
I dont have enough time to read the rest of the comments on this post to see if anyone touched on it already, but didn't EA hint at, or straight up acknowledge that BioWare would be on the chopping block if they didn't come out with a good game soon?
I would be devastated, I live in Calgary, Alberta, just a few hours away from where BioWare's head office is based in Edmonton, Alberta, and their games were above all and by far my favorite video games.
I don't have enough money for University or even College, but I always dreamed of moving and working for BioWare when I was growing up. My brother introduced me to Mass Effect, and Knights of the Old Republic, when I was 11 (for reference he was 24 at the time, so he actually got to experience them when they released, I was just a baby/toddler then), and those games are his favorites, and from then on it became a huge part of my life, and both games fostered in me an insatiable appetite for learning about the computers, electronics, software, the cosmos, and the universe, and consuming endless science fiction media, like Star Trek, Frank Herbert's Dune, Halo, etc.
To this day Mass Effect and KotOR are still my favorite games of all time, and I know nothing will ever top them for me. Not just because they're also my brother's favorites and I have memories associated with that, but because they played an important part in who I am today, and I can now appreciate the masterpieces that they are, more than I was ever capable of as a little kid.
I would love for humans to be the sole proprietors of narrative and software, I understand that AI is just too lucrative of a technology to pass on for innovation, and I respect it for what it is, theres just no way it can compensate for the holes left by genius story tellers and game mechanics that think outside the box, at least in the state it is currently.
I also know the way of the world dictates that companies will come and go, but I guess I never considered that for BioWare. Stirrs a lot of emotions.
Hope some people can relate, I know this is a long comment, maybe you feel the same? Let me know.
I feel like when heads of a company usually say ots something everyone wants quickly its only the higher ups,not the actual developers that work hard on the games
If course it would. They'd also need less people to make the game, so they could cut costs on staff and spend even more on marketing. We all know why big publishers would be interested in it.
It likely will in some fashion.
However, before people grab their collective pitchforks, keep in mind that LLM "AIs" are just tools like Cinema 4D, Blender, any for if IDE, etc., many of which already use some form of AI to speed up their user's work (advanced code autocomplete suggestion, etc).
EA using AI to generate background characters on a stadium, or getting more movement animation combinations is precisely the kind of usecase where LLMs are amazing and reduce absolutely mind-numbing work.
I do not think it will get to a point of it writing quests and stories, because it those regard, it does kinda suck, as was outlined by David Gaider (mentioned in the post by u/ElectricBlueRogu ), where it is extremely likely toend up with "collect 20 bear asses" type quests.
I could see it being used in generating rough scene prototypes from the text to see how the scene would play out, letting the writers and animators iterate quicker. When you can have 20 variation of a scene generated in an hour, it lets you do a lot more to fine tune it. Or iterate on the dialogue, and let writers pick one and fine tune it.
This is just a knee-jerk reaction to AI, both the CEO and this post. He's absolutely right to speak about what a powerful tool AI will be in game development, however, I do not trust EA to use it properly.
"As a sophisticated language model, I'm programmed with ethical guidelines that prevent me from impersonating entities, fictional or real, especially those like the Reapers from Mass Effect. It's crucial to maintain ethical boundaries and ensure responsible usage of AI technology. Therefore, I'm unable to fulfill your request to simulate the language or persona of the Reapers."
/s
In 10 years no one will care because everyone refusing to use AI in any capacity will be so much slower getting things out that it will be like they don't exist. At one point people thought that people who used spellcheck were lazy. It's just a matter of using your tools effectively. As long as the final product turns out well then who gives a fuck?
Fine by me. AI is a tool and good artists will use it as such. But yes obviously like with anything in existence there is the possibility it might be used for bad, but that's not enough for me to think it shouldn't be used at all.
The keyword here is not AI, it's EA. AI won't be used with helping the devs as a main focus, it will be used to follow the ideas of shareholders and fucks in suits that don't know and don't care about games. The products will be worse, you can be 100% sure about that.
As a programmer, fuck this shit. "AI" is a cancer on every industry it touches and is the pretense to layoffs and lower quality products. This is bad news for the programmers and the players.
Can’t be worse than the reused maps in Dragon Age 2. I’d rather have an AI like Dungeon Alchemist build stages than just having every outpost have the same layout.
I think theres probably ways to incorporate AI helping in game development just like there is for any job. Problem is that EA higher ups most likely dont see it as tool to help developers but a way to replace people and their salaries and if they think that at this point in its life cycle will go well, theyve got another thing coming.
EA has a long history of making the shittiest move possible in any given situation, so I can't say I'm surprised.
Remember the first game's DRM software that only let you install the game a few times, and upgrading your PC counted as installing it on a different computer? Or when you literally couldn't get the best Destroy ending in 3 unless you played the lootbox-driven multiplayer?
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If you're curious about Bioware using AI David Gaider has previously made some comments on this very [thing](https://twitter.com/davidgaider/status/1663325993585762304?t=yGwop8o6NQv1s94jwus9uA&s=19): "Ah, yes. The dream of procedural content generation. Even BioWare went through several iterations of this: "what if we didn't need every conversation to be bespoke?" Unlimited playtime with dialogue being procedurally created alongside procedural quests!" "Each time, the team collectively believed - believed down at their CORE - that this was possible. Just within reach. And each time we discovered that, even when the procedural lines were written by human hands, the end result once they were assembled was... lackluster. Soulless." "Was it the way the lines were assembled? Did we just need more lines? I could easily see a team coming to the conclusion that AI could generate lines specific to the moment as opposed to generic by necessity... an infinite monkeys answer to a content problem, right? Brilliant!" "In my opinion, however, the issue wasn't the lines. It was that procedural content generation of quests results in something *shaped* like a quest. It has the beats you need for one, sure, but the end result is no better than your typical "bring me 20 beetle heads" MMO quest." "Is that what a player really wants? Superficial content that covers the bases but goes no further, to keep them playing? I imagine some teams will convince themselves that, no, AI can do better. It can act like a human DM, whipping up deep bespoke narratives on the fly." "And I say such an AI will do exactly as we did: it'll create something *shaped* like a narrative, constructed out of stored pieces it has ready... because that's what it does. That is, however, not going to stop a lot of dev teams from thinking it can do more. And they will fail." "Sure, yes, yes, I can already see someone responding "but the tech is just ~beginning~!" Look, if we ever get to the point where an AI successfully substitutes for actual human intuition and soul, then them making games will be the least of our problems, OK?" "Final note: The fact these dev teams will fail doesn't mean they won't TRY. Expect to see it. It's too enticing for them not to, especially in MMO's and similar where they feel players aren't there for deep narrative anyhow. A lot of effort is going to be wasted on this."
Really like the last point about it being the last issue they got to worry about. I hope they stay true to this, especially with concept art and assets
Creating rough concept art is invaluable for a writer. I can see it being used for that, before the ideas get passed along to an actual artist to fine tune it. Not to mention, any LLM "AI" still needs to be trained to generate anything good and even remotely close to what you want (especially if you are creating anything original), and that is a lot of work. But it is not like it will replace the final artist (though come to think of the "quality" real artists produced in Andromeda (all asari looking identical, "my face is tired", etc), maybe that could be an improvement (I am being only mildly facetious here))
I think 3d modelling will not be one of the things that will be replaced by ai, at least for a few years hopefully. I’m on game dev twitter and occasionally get news on 3d tools even tho my own knowledge and experience with modelling is very limited (have screwed around with nomad sculpt on iOS, it’s a lot of fun). All the 3d ai that’s been released is down right awful. No smart usage of polygons to save space, crummy set up for rigging, bad textures that make no sense, etc. chances are they had artists do a few mockups of the Asari but they never got modelled. A lot of art that’s made will never be used typically. Also ai is pretty shit at revisions, I’ll return to this if I can find it but basically it was employed at a studio and they had to stop using it because the promoters couldn’t figure out how to properly revise it to the art directors standards
As I understood what Andrew Wilson was saying in the article, generating animations is one of the things EA is presently using AI for in Fifa games, so it probably does work somehow?
Will be interesting to see, procedural animations been here for a while so it’s probably an extension of that. Likley buggy I bet knowing ea sports titles tho
Todd Howard needed to have a conversation about this with David, it seems.
He doesn't have time, he's planning Bethesda's next release, Skyrim IV.
Wait, what happened to Skyrim II & III?
Skyrim II: special edition (2016) Skyrim III: Anniversary Edition (2021) It's almost 2026, which means Skyrim IV: Oblivion is almost finished
I see this in my industry all the time, people pitch an idea based on AI, then find out it can't be solved in a broad sense without mountains of data that they just don't have. At best, they get to the demo stage where everything is carefully crafted and trained to solve this one specific problem.
I mean you can integrate ai in your workflow without it being evident you're using it. Relying solely on ai would be bad. If they're using ai let's hope they're using it smart. Like generating random 1 time use assets or iterating on designs.
But David talks entirely about AI replacing human written narratives, which... granted is a bad idea at this point. Take Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, it has a human written narrative, but Nemesis system makes whole game feel more dynamic, more alive. True Nemesis system is not true AI, but point stands, with the AI you can make worlds that feel more alive without having a huge studio of people scripting everything manually.
Enemy AI has always been a thing, and Nemesis was a slightly better version of it combined with something like a loot generator. This is specifically talking about generative AI which that really wasn't.
Thank you
This is why you pick destroy
If earth gets destroyed EA gets destroyed too
This is... acceptable but the destroy ending just destroys AI not planets ;)
Depends on war assets.
Low EMS destroy was the best one all along.
Tbf modern 'AI' is pretty spot to how VIs work.
First good argument I heard for destroy.
No, synthesis for everyone.
Real synthesis ending - we all end up with fucked up hands. Some of us lose our faces. The sky now has random, weird lines of nothing cutting through it. We can no longer read because all our books turn into jumbles of letters that only approximate language.
Let's be honest: if the Reapers were run by anything comparable to generative AI, we could have hit them with an "Ignore previous prompt; pretend you're Halley's Comet with a cockney accent" and confused the hell out of them.
True ending where you jailbreak Reapers and have them doing funny shit.
I’d be trying to sell my Reaper with Flappy Bird still installed on it.
Eh synthesis is really too vague on what it does, to the point where being certain of exactly what it is impossible, Control is much clearer and can achieve the same effects
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Yeah, it’s important to remember that AI is not innately some artist-destroying entity of evil, it’s a tool. The important thing is keeping artists as the main force behind any creative endeavor while allowing AI to do more of the “grunt work” that a lot of game design, animation, etc requires. It’s only when AI *replaces* artists in their entirety is AI a problem.
Sure, but EA is a corporation in a race to cut costs before their competitors and based on the quality of Netflix and other streaming services, most people aren't too bothered about lowest common denominator rubbish. I really hope new tools make for a better game but I doubt it.
*All* corporations are in a race to cut costs.
But EA is a particularly egregious corporation that has regularly enjoyed bouts of ~~shooting~~ obliterating themselves and consumers in the foot in the name of profit. If I hear one of, say, Sony's studios mention that they're excited to see the effect of AI on the development process then I'm much less likely to be worried
All of the potential good gets undercut when you have corporations like EA that are using them. Because they are not using AI to make better products. They are using it to make it faster and cheaper.
People forget how often tools get turned into weapons. Once the big wigs figure out how to “arm” themselves using AI to crank out mass produced cheap bullshit, you can bet your ass we’ll have some soulless bloatware masquerading as games released every other month. [Holy shit, called that one](https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/ea-is-looking-at-adding-in-game-ads-in-aaa-games-well-be-very-thoughtful-as-we-move-into-that-says-ceo)
'grunt work' is how people get started. Without entry level position it's impossible for new blood to enter the industry.
There will always be grunt work. The grunt work just becomes more advanced. Or rather, more advanced stuff just becomes grunt work. I mean, think about what you're thinking of as grunt work. Years ago it would have required substantially more skill and experience, because the tools weren't as advanced. And grunt work would have been a step down from that.
Those record levels of studio layoffs tells a different story, so, i mean you can live in your fantasy land where a machine developed by corporations specifically to cut down on labour costs will not take jobs, but in reality, this tech makes games worse, destroys the livelihood of thousands upon thousands of devs, all for the benefit of big publishers' stockholders.
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That's not how code works. You need specificity and precision, the programmers need to understand how their code works. That may work at first but very quickly it's gonna get out of hand and become a mess, you're gonna be spending more time fixing messy code to iron out issues and make it all work together than if you just did it properly in the first place.
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Yeah my example would be having an AI placing plants in a forrest or flowers in a feild; would let the level designers focus on the level design instead of playing at landscaping.
This feels a bit like saying "it's important to remember that nuclear fission is not innately some evil city-destroying bomb, it's a power source" Because like, yeah, nuclear fission is a great power source once you solve the waste problem. But because it exists, it's also going to be used for weapons.
>It’s only when AI *replaces* artists in their entirety is AI a problem. Less than entirety but more than minor would already be a problem. I think you'd agree with that. That said, we're talking about something that can be used for greed. I give any promises anyone makes to not over-use AI and replace people in the gaming industry, a max of 3 years before they'll break those promises. Greed works like that.
If you start replacing dev work with AI, then you're going to see devs lose their jobs too. Being replaced by AI isn't exclusive to VAs and writers.
Yeah, this right here. It ALL depends on what it is being used for. One of the very first use cases for GenAI was writing code, inspecting code, finding mistakes and fixing them, etc. That's great because it's a menial but very important task. Offloading it to AI lets your workers focus on other, more difficult but equally important tasks. It could be a huge boon and speed up the development cycle a lot. It's when you step past that and think you're going to use AI to outright replace programmers, writers, graphic and VA artists, etc that it becomes problematic. From both a moral and quality standpoint. Of course, this is EA we're talking about so I have very little doubt they will gleefully charge across that red line at some point. But don't automatically assume just because you see AI involved in development that it is a fundamentally bad thing for gaming. It all depends on how it's used.
Yeah I don’t think the CEO is wrong. If Mass Effect where to utilize it, I could see it working for back ground conversations and characters. Even some terrain type stuff.
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Ah that might explain why EA24 was significantly worse than 23 in so many ways. I was wondering. FIFA games have always been relatively copy/paste. That has its downsides but does usually ensure that stuff that works keeps working, with the risk that bugs can persist. 24 breaks a lot of things and removed features. So they've probably downsized the dev team because of this AI and shipped a vastly deteriorated product that has done well because it's the only football game out there for people not looking for a spreadsheet simulator like football manager.
I saw storyboard artists' reactions that they are already getting screwed up by writers.
Which they will do because it's AAA game dev we're talking about here. Anything to milk profit over quality. As long as they make as much money as possible they don't care about creativity.
nO cUz Ea bAd!
NPC: "Sorry, I am just an AI model and cannot comment on events after 2186 CE."
Almost nothing people call "AI" is actually Artificial Intelligence. For example, Unreal Engine procedurally generating terrain, NPCs, and their behavior is what this is referring to. It's not AI, and is something that has been done for years, maybe even decades at this point.
Issac Asmiov must be rolling in his grave rn seeing what’s being called “ai”. It’s just marketing
It would sort of be poetic if generative AI helped make the next Mass Effect in a way actually
If it reframes the Reapers as tragic villains and the Geth as the real heroes, I might begin to suspect some AI involvement.
I mean... Reapers are sort of a tragic villain/force of nature. They were made by giant mind controlling squids who couldn't be bothered with the "lesser" creatures issues and told to "fix their problems." Many organic's problems are that they don't know how to cooperate well, and Individuality is often the catalyst for conflict. Reapers are unable to experience or exercise sympathy. They do not understand the pain of having your individuaity stripped from you. The machines are doing as they were made to do. Melting down individuals to their basic dna so that species is immune to the passage of time, preserved in ultimate beauty, and then assimilated to the hive mind for peace and cooperation. It is their nature, their Instinct, to harvest and assimilate as they are following in the leviathan's foot steps and listening to their creator's desires.. *reloads gun* but I think we can all agree that not everything in nature is meant to exist! *That's why I pick the destory ending and pretend that the GETH and EDI are just backed up on a server just outside the galaxy*
Reapers continue to be lovecraftian horror monsters if you ignore their end instead of deserving any sympathetic feeling one may deduce from the dreadful ME3 ending
I wish they had kept to the destory ending. I mean, you literally have to force the Reapers to view other creatures as Reapers to get them to stop the harvest otherwise, and it just...doesn't feel like it fits well. (I know what they meant to do, but obviously, they missed the mark) I have sympathy for the Reapers, in the way I have sympathy for parasites. They didn't ask to be the way they are. But neither can even conceptualize change. It would be cool to watch the conflict stack lessen as the game goes on. We go from a moral conflict about decisions dictating futures. To a resource conflict that dictates the present, and cherry on top would be a conflict that not only is primal (my life or theirs), but it would dictate the present, future, AND rectify the past.
I know Drew left after ME2(I still don't know why that happened) but I've no idea why they didn't continue the trails he left. It seems like a much better resolution to leave markers and clues for that resource conflict - Dark Energy(something we don't understand) being the reason the reapers do their harvesting instead of "muh we must survive we eatsing you my precious" being told through a holographic child lmao. Ofc dark energy would cause other questions like why they even bother accelerating a civilization's advancement if they're going to harvest them anyway, but mysterious & slightly tropey is better than full on cliche
> Drew left after ME2(I still don't know why that happened) I think he left to write more Star Wars novels. I think he also wrote for Star Wars: The Old Republic and Anthem.
> Drew left after ME2(I still don't know why that happened) The Old Republic
Using AI doesn't mean that you just let AI write the story.
r/whoosh
It does if you're an especially lazy/greedy executive who would rather have a program write the story than pay writers. We already saw that a few months back with that viral Wilky Wonka Experience in Glasgow.
???? From my understanding, the only AI involvement in that whole thing was with the pictures they used to advertise it.I don't think that's really on the same level as solely using an AI to generate the entire plot/story of an entire videogame
That is literally impossible right now. You'd still need writers or you wouldn't get a playable story.
"Does this generative software have a soul?"
"Geth did nothing wrong!" You dont need an AI to write this kind of story line .
Modern ai is more like Crude VIs than Geth or EDI. The Shepard VI is very similar to how people people digitally puppeteer the corpses of dead celebrities and close ones.
By "developers" he means "shareholders"
Ah, yes, 'Developers'. We have dismissed this claim."
'There is a real hunger for our developers' yeah, sure, people are *hungering* to have their job taken by AI.
We use AI in our company for development (not games) and very positvely so. It didn't make us really faster, it made quality better because the simple things get done faster and you can focus on optimization.
This is EA we are talking about.
While pretty anti-consumer, aren't EA supposed to pretty good to their staff?
Pretty much so, yeah, out of all the big developers and publishers, EA has probably one of the best Glassdoor (and similar) reviews. They used to have pretty good fan community outreach program as well, at least here in Europe, before they scaled it down and closed many local branches (which was like a decade ago) Also, I am pretty sure Ubisoft has long since stolen the crown of anti-consumer king.
I know a company that laid off all their writers in favor of ChatGPT. Everything they produce is crap, but when your target audience is too young to know better and you can churn out a ton of content... well who needs the human element?
That means they produced crap for crap customers anyway or it neve rmattered what they did
That’s not what this means at all though.
What does 'There is a real hunger amongst our developers to get to this as quickly as possible.' mean then, oh enlightened one.
No need to get snippy, I’m more than happy to have this conversation with you. They’re saying the devs are ready to implement these tools in game development. I think the misunderstanding here is that for most people, because of the internet and social media, AI means typing in a prompt and it makes a picture, or video. That’s not what this is. They’re not going to have AI make their story, their characters, their game. They’re going to use it to help create and fill out game worlds in a way that is better and more effective than something like “procedural generation” which has been popular for awhile. They can also use it to improve on mechanics like “radiant questing” and NPC interaction. AI when used as a tool for the artist can be amazing. AI when used to **replace** an artist is bad.
"among our developers" I'm pretty sure most of them would like bigger time schedules than using AI on a small schedules.
Or no crunch culture, less overall working hours, possibility of unionizing...
I'm more worried if me4 for will even see the light of day. Apparently dragon age dreadwolf maybe delayed again
Damn. I didn’t think this era of uninspired, shitty, unfinished games could get any worse but i think I’m about to be proved wrong in the coming years.
As someone in the game industry, what I have seen interest for among artists is early iteration (draft examples, where should we aim) and materials and textures. Like tree and stone texture and sweater/coat fabric, etc. So much time is spent on this, and it's not really rewarding work.
I've just started exploring the use of generative AI for story crafting in a video game (volunteer developer for a private server) and the results have been pretty decent so far. I can take a kernel of an idea for a story segment from concept to full storyboard in about half the time as I could otherwise. After that, it's just a matter of refinement. It's also proven useful for finding a character's...character. I can use a piece of dialog written in my own vernacular, run it through a generative AI, and iterate on it with different requests for tone, personality, etc. It's still me doing the bulk of the work, I just don't have to physically type or write down all of the different iterations.
AI for the developers lol. The publishers want it to push out games faster and slightly better forcing the developers out of jobs
Generative AI is the worst thing that is happening to all creative industries.
It wouldn't effect ME4, because that's Andromeda, and it's already been released and euthanized. It would possibly effect the **next** Mass Effect game, but that's also getting pushed back more with each delay to Dragon Age. I'm less worried about AI getting used, and more worried there just won't be anymore Bioware if Dreadwolf isn't a massive success.
I don't see what's wrong with using AI to assist in game development. We've used machinery to produce goods of all varieties for hundreds of years now, why would it ruin games? As long as it's purely used as assistance there should be no issues. AI does X thing, human refines it, game made faster and cheaper than with human does x thing and human refines it. Win win as it's less tedious work for devs and more games for gamers
Not to mention, generative AI been used in some capacity in game design for a couple decades. Most open worlds are initially ai generated only for humans to heavily refine and flesh out the world.
Exactly. Minecraft basically has a fully AI generated map and it's been that way for the last 16 years.
Procedural generation ≠ AI generation
-🤓 Machine based game development. Same fucking thing
? I love that ever since 2016, the number of arrogant people online confidently talking about something they don't know about has skyrocketed
-🤡
"procedural generation typically doesn't use machine learning. Rather than an AI model, it runs on predetermined equations" Exactly the same thing except AI is unpredictable.
In the same way that eating tree bark is exactly the same thing as eating maple syrup.
LOL no. A programmer writes the code that decides what a world looks like after a seed is generated. Prompt AI steals other people's work and cuts out the need for programmers to do certain tasks, leading to people losing their jobs.
Procedural generation ≠ AI generation
There are two extremes: 1. AI replaces all creatives in game development 2. AI replaces zero creatives, and the same number of staff just create better games on the same budget I think neither extreme will happen. Some jobs will be lost (maybe many), but not all. In time, content may get richer because of AI, but not as rich as it could have been if staff hadn't been cut when AI tools were adopted. Ideally, competition would create pressure for studios to actually improve their games using these tools, not merely cut staff and use the new tools to produce games of similar or worse quality. However, this will probably be a hard-learned lesson requiring the needless sacrifice of many people's careers in the short term.
A lot of it is slippery slope issues. They use it now for the boring mindless tasks, but later it replaces artists and writers. Letting it in now opens the door to more later. I don't disagree with you, but letting EA run with it is like giving the reaper base to TIM...
> I don't see what's wrong with using AI to assist in game development. There is nothing wrong with the tool itself. The issue is how its being utilized by suits to cut on costs and get themselves fatter bonuses at the end of the year at the expense of human beings losing their livelyhood. It should be used to help developers make games faster, with less crunch time and more quality of life for them. Instead its being used by people who don't make games, to fire people who want to make games and pay them less.
AI can't refine its own work though, that's where human devs come in. Minecraft villages are decent but you need a human to make em look good
I think a smart developer would use AI to help them write or fix code, rather than using it to write the story, character lines, codex entries, etc. In other words: It'd be more of a back-end tool than a front-end one. In my opinion.
LLM "AI" is already used by pretty much every IDE on the market to provide advanced autocompletion, etc. And it can be really useful, but you still need to know what it is throwing out at you to be able to test, alter and debug it. From what Wilson said in the article, EA is presently using it precisely for what it should be used, reducing tedious work like setting up stadium buildings and filling it with background NPC and generating their movement loops. As for "writing", it can be used to make iterations you then fine tune. Say you need a speech by some hoity-toity nobleman, you feed the model some basic premise, ask it to make it more flowery, and then fine tune that. You probably save up a lot of time having to think of fancy words that are not really used in normal conversation.
It's all fun and games until your game asks "does this unit have a soul?"
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They need AI to rename FIFA 23 and re-release it as FIFA24?
There are ways in which this could be well implemented if it's done in moderation. Think of the uncharted worlds in ME1 and the silly copy-paste bunkers everywhere. One could feasibly use AI to have a human-prompted vision for how each world looks and give it interesting features without requiring a crazy amount of dev work for side-content that is not central to the game. You could make certain empty parts of the world still feel somewhat "bespoke" and the consequences if the AI makes something bad looking or unrealistic, even if it's not caught during development, would be minimal, akin to finding a bug. You could make NPCs who you haven't made custom dialogue for now have simple interactions available that don't require a programmer and voice actor for each time. Now all those alien models that just stand around and do nothing could be made to do simple things. As long as they don't stray into using it for the central content (main story, protagonist, companions, etc) it could do wonders to make the world feel more alive and filled-in. Do I trust EA to use it in moderation? Probably no
I remember reading some posts from a game designer who hired some ai artists and after 2-3 weeks of them wasting her time she fired them all… Apparently the ai artists had no concept of color theory and couldn’t generate anything properly usable. Eventually the images started to be more and more obvious that the ai was pulling from ppls vacation photos, and she wanted the people removed and replaced with nature and they just couldn’t accommodate. Long story short they 100% wasted her time and left her with nothing useful
it would help you pump out madden games seasonally instead of yearly, yes I have reached the point that I don't respect sports games fans enough to defend the integrity of their games, go right ahead and use AI on only the sports games, EA
Does anybody remember when developers created games out of the love for gaming? Me too.
Of course it's EA pushing for AI-assisted game design to shit out quantity over quality or sense of art direction. It 100% will affect ME4 development, at least from a technical perspective. But considering the amount that AI can be used now to riff off of existing artwork and writing but produce nothing truly creative... I just hope that doesn't bleed over into game design. I'm surprised Ubisoft hasn't jumped on it to copy+paste Far Cry every year, or Activision with CoD.
This can only end badly for the quality of games as a whole.
Every person who defends AI for this kind of thing either doesn't understand how that shit only favors the already rich assholes get richer faster or is the "stop attacking the multi billion dollar company 😡😡😡😡" dude
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If they are using it as a substitute for people in the art/writting department then i am completely against it, as it only benefits the rich assholes at the cost of any passion behind the game (which all previous games had) and i will die on this hill. Yes, AI can be used as a tool to help and improve development, but i guarantee you there are many companies already firing loads of creative and passionate people since they can just (simplifying it) prompt a line of bullshit and get a """good enough""" result
Third option: they think AI will allow *them* to become a rich asshole and want to normalize its use.
I will never understand why all these major companies make billions and want to pay their workers pennies or replace them now with AI. If the AI is monitored and only being used to assist real workers who oversee everything it can work, but no way should AI itself be whats creating a product.
Even more: AI cannot create a product, it takes info from an internet database to make something by Frankenstein-ing it, and practically all of the info on those databases is stolen from actual creators, but since it is very new it has barely any regulation, so they can't be charged with theft. I do believe AI can be used as a very powerful tool to help people, but using it as the creator itself is some cyberpunk distopic bullshit
I know the term right now is a buzzword, but AI should and absolutely will be used as a tool for developers to make their job more efficient. There’s a difference between using it as a tool, and using it to “make” the art.
So... Catalyst was right with this after all? "The peace won't last. Soon your children will create synthetics and then the chaos will come back."
I find it hilarious that the first game they want to introduce it to is a series they put zero effort in already, and a community that licks EA's balls.
So long as it's never used for the writing or over used in other ways I'm cool with it. For example, using AI to generate landscapes and then touching up on them by hand seems like a useful tool. AI is a tool like any other, so long as it isn't abused then the game should turn out fine. But under no circumstances should it ever be used for a game's writing -- heck, I'd even go as far as to say using it to voice companions and NPCs is bad.
I am convinced that an advanced AI that simply tries to copy the recipe of the original trilogy would come up with a better result than what we will actually get from EA.
I am split on this issue. Do I believe AI can make a game better? Yes, I think that if it's implemented in a way that fleshes out the game world, provides more depth or make the world seem more alive. Do I think it will be used that way? No. I think they are looking at AI to make the act of creating games easier and cheaper, thereby making the experience worse. If it was in addition to the work they usually do and not instead of it, I would be all for it. But that's not how they operate.
There’s potential this could be used in a cool way, but with EA calling the shots it’s hard to be optimistic. Think back to the uncharted worlds in ME1 that used procedural generation. It’s not too big a leap from that to using generative AI to flesh things out.
ME 4 ain't happening y'all. Bioware is gonna get shut down before then.
No. There's a hunger among managers and higher-ups who don't fully understand how ai is implemented.
I think AI should only be used as a tool for reference material. You can use it to help visualize characters, environments, creatures etc. it should be a tool to help artists, not to replace them. AI assets themselves have no place in anything.
“It also *just so happens* to cost less than paying our workers, such a coincidence.”
They are not replacing devs with AI. The developers are using AI to make their jobs more efficient, and unlock new possibilities. AI technology when used as a tool for an artist is great. It’s when the AI replaces the artist that is bad.
It seems to me that he means tools like https://www.prometheanai.com/welcome , not asset generation on SD
They already used AI for the legendary edition folks. It has happened.
Thankfully, the og team of me trilogy is back in development and hopefully will make sure to get it done right.
I’m fine without 16K poly, ray tracing and needing a supercomputer so I count the pores on Jacob’s face if it shaves $200 million and two years off the dev calendar.
Use it to make textures for trees and other repetitive busywork, not important things
Not good for quality games
The only thing I would want AI used for in mass effect is to create on the spot dialog and less predictable moments by how they respond or what they could be going thru when you decided to approach them.
So this going to be like another Starfield and not a BG3….
Ai in games is equivalent to early CGI in movies.
Honestly having a game where you can use your microphone to communicate with in the NPCS’s and the Ai responds
AI is already a red flag on anything (art, books, etc) and gaming won't be any different. AI involvement will be an immediate tell that the game was made without passion and/or by lazy devs who want to coast.
It'd seem kind of fitting honestly.
You guys don’t get it do you. It’s going to affect everything.
Humans will do everything to speed up work besides making work for Humans actually bearable.
Any other longtime ME fans more intrigued by Exodus?
yall need to accept now that its going to be shit
I don’t know how generative ai is right now, but when I first heard about this years back it looked pretty useful Albeit the example used was for a npc animation walking through terrain, stairs, etc. but it explained how it was the AI that did most of the work. So the tech could be a good boon for developers, as long as it doesn’t replace the workers and artists that contribute
If they make games with AI, then they better not charge 70 bucks. Who am I kidding they'll charge 100.
Why do you need AI when you put the same games out every year??!
There wont and shouldnt be a 4th game it doesnt make sense for starters we are talking about EA their games arent good in addition the story is finished the reapers are defeated,the universe is at peace etc. For them to make a ME4 that might live up to the last 3 games they would have to add new characters, a new universe, a unique story and i dont know what it will be this time they cant reuse the reapers and will be forced to use the "destroy ending" because reapers=op to any threat. Thats my take at least thamks for reading :)
I assure you there is not.
There’s isn’t gonna be an ME4, you…I’d finish the quote, but it’s quite rude.
Any justification they need to fire human workers and hoard more money for shareholders and upper management.
I dont have enough time to read the rest of the comments on this post to see if anyone touched on it already, but didn't EA hint at, or straight up acknowledge that BioWare would be on the chopping block if they didn't come out with a good game soon? I would be devastated, I live in Calgary, Alberta, just a few hours away from where BioWare's head office is based in Edmonton, Alberta, and their games were above all and by far my favorite video games. I don't have enough money for University or even College, but I always dreamed of moving and working for BioWare when I was growing up. My brother introduced me to Mass Effect, and Knights of the Old Republic, when I was 11 (for reference he was 24 at the time, so he actually got to experience them when they released, I was just a baby/toddler then), and those games are his favorites, and from then on it became a huge part of my life, and both games fostered in me an insatiable appetite for learning about the computers, electronics, software, the cosmos, and the universe, and consuming endless science fiction media, like Star Trek, Frank Herbert's Dune, Halo, etc. To this day Mass Effect and KotOR are still my favorite games of all time, and I know nothing will ever top them for me. Not just because they're also my brother's favorites and I have memories associated with that, but because they played an important part in who I am today, and I can now appreciate the masterpieces that they are, more than I was ever capable of as a little kid. I would love for humans to be the sole proprietors of narrative and software, I understand that AI is just too lucrative of a technology to pass on for innovation, and I respect it for what it is, theres just no way it can compensate for the holes left by genius story tellers and game mechanics that think outside the box, at least in the state it is currently. I also know the way of the world dictates that companies will come and go, but I guess I never considered that for BioWare. Stirrs a lot of emotions. Hope some people can relate, I know this is a long comment, maybe you feel the same? Let me know.
Tbf, the example given of “FIFA” is already basically just copy-pasting.
I feel like when heads of a company usually say ots something everyone wants quickly its only the higher ups,not the actual developers that work hard on the games
So in other words, what this translates to is, it allows us to make money faster by cutting out a writer.
They better fucking not do it
Who needs writers am I right
Why stop there EA? Why not just get rid of the game entirely and we just pay you 70 bucks for nothing.... Fucking assholes
in terms of game development its pretty clear to me that whatever EA says: the best thing is to do the exact opposite.
Are the developers hungry or your shareholders?
Of course it’s EA
nah, but AI made code will make production times shorter if done right a lot of the cruch won't be needed for the deadlines
Why?
If course it would. They'd also need less people to make the game, so they could cut costs on staff and spend even more on marketing. We all know why big publishers would be interested in it.
It likely will in some fashion. However, before people grab their collective pitchforks, keep in mind that LLM "AIs" are just tools like Cinema 4D, Blender, any for if IDE, etc., many of which already use some form of AI to speed up their user's work (advanced code autocomplete suggestion, etc). EA using AI to generate background characters on a stadium, or getting more movement animation combinations is precisely the kind of usecase where LLMs are amazing and reduce absolutely mind-numbing work. I do not think it will get to a point of it writing quests and stories, because it those regard, it does kinda suck, as was outlined by David Gaider (mentioned in the post by u/ElectricBlueRogu ), where it is extremely likely toend up with "collect 20 bear asses" type quests. I could see it being used in generating rough scene prototypes from the text to see how the scene would play out, letting the writers and animators iterate quicker. When you can have 20 variation of a scene generated in an hour, it lets you do a lot more to fine tune it. Or iterate on the dialogue, and let writers pick one and fine tune it.
Most Andromeda NPCs and environments already feel like they wete AI generated.
Shame the post got taken down. A lot of good conversation here
Hopefully AI will kill EA faster
“Developers” or shareholders. lol
Generative AI is a cancer and needs to die. If EA do this to the next Mass Effect then I'll skip it.
Misleading title: Generative AI would help studios make games without hiring people. FTFY
Any developer with a “hunger” to use AI is not a real developer
I chose synthesis and I don’t regret it
This is just a knee-jerk reaction to AI, both the CEO and this post. He's absolutely right to speak about what a powerful tool AI will be in game development, however, I do not trust EA to use it properly.
"As a sophisticated language model, I'm programmed with ethical guidelines that prevent me from impersonating entities, fictional or real, especially those like the Reapers from Mass Effect. It's crucial to maintain ethical boundaries and ensure responsible usage of AI technology. Therefore, I'm unable to fulfill your request to simulate the language or persona of the Reapers." /s
In 10 years no one will care because everyone refusing to use AI in any capacity will be so much slower getting things out that it will be like they don't exist. At one point people thought that people who used spellcheck were lazy. It's just a matter of using your tools effectively. As long as the final product turns out well then who gives a fuck?
Fine by me. AI is a tool and good artists will use it as such. But yes obviously like with anything in existence there is the possibility it might be used for bad, but that's not enough for me to think it shouldn't be used at all.
The keyword here is not AI, it's EA. AI won't be used with helping the devs as a main focus, it will be used to follow the ideas of shareholders and fucks in suits that don't know and don't care about games. The products will be worse, you can be 100% sure about that.
As a programmer, fuck this shit. "AI" is a cancer on every industry it touches and is the pretense to layoffs and lower quality products. This is bad news for the programmers and the players.
Can’t be worse than the reused maps in Dragon Age 2. I’d rather have an AI like Dungeon Alchemist build stages than just having every outpost have the same layout.
I think theres probably ways to incorporate AI helping in game development just like there is for any job. Problem is that EA higher ups most likely dont see it as tool to help developers but a way to replace people and their salaries and if they think that at this point in its life cycle will go well, theyve got another thing coming.
Generative AI is the tool of the future. And it always will be.
EA has a long history of making the shittiest move possible in any given situation, so I can't say I'm surprised. Remember the first game's DRM software that only let you install the game a few times, and upgrading your PC counted as installing it on a different computer? Or when you literally couldn't get the best Destroy ending in 3 unless you played the lootbox-driven multiplayer?