You have millions of dollars, none of which are ever spent in writing, the thing that mostly dictates if the game is gold or shit, and you plan on expending even less?
Marvelous
Graphics as the leading gimmick have often resulted in games that made lots of money in their time but tend to age very poorly.
I could, without much effort, list off probably a dozen highly profitable and (at the time) hyped up :soypoint-1: "OMG LOOK AT THE GRAPHICS" :soypoint-2: games from the 80s and 90s from memory alone that pretty much no one talks about except in lists of what existed at the time for archiving purposes.
Writing matters a lot. Under :porky-happy: this otherwise useful technology tool will push more writers out of work and what we'll get is the prose equivalent of McDonald's style pink slime with gradually more convincing post-processing flavor additives added over time but not much beyond that. It will be the same recycled shit, just more of it, over and over again, with less and less new input.
And a lot of people won't care except for the usual vague sense of unease and dissatisfaction but probably blame it on "wokes." :freeze-gamer:
When fast food places tried to replace workers with robots customers got angry because the place felt “soulless” and reinstated human workers. I guess video game companies may find out the hard way. Unless it’s FIFA or 2K in which case AI will churn out this shit and it’ll make billions
The process of churning out voice lines (long hours, poor pay, etc...) already grinds down the charm. Thinking about these sorts of big open world games, the proportion of character voices that I can recall or otherwise stood out to me feels quite low. If I'm thinking about generic townsfolk or bandits, I don't know if I could tell the difference.
When i first heard of the recently-released, improved AI voice clones i first thought of the new opportunities this would open for indie devs or game modding. Imagine fixing the minutemen into a socialist faction with a fully voiced, near-perfect impression of Preston Garvey and other NPCs.
but it seems that every day there's a new headline specifically tailored to kick my optimism down, reminding me that we Can't Have Nice Things under Capitalism™. In the not-so-distant future games will probably just not bother trying find VAs for their characters except for Badass MacProtagonist and instead use AI for everything, inluding generating the frames too.
I think it’ll still do some good for modders. It makes sense for them because the reality is that most people don’t donate and it’s usually a passion project, so they can’t always afford to hire the most accurate voice actors. But large companies have 0 excuses. Of course they have plenty if you only care about shareholders
Imagine fixing the Minutemen into a socialist faction with a fully voiced, near perfect impression of Dagoth Ur.
there is someone using chatgpt to do a Bannerlord mod with interactive npcs that you can talk to
in the case of bannerlord at least, there's literally no way it could produce less varied or interesting dialogue than the devs already did
don't get me wrong i love that fucking game but the social aspects are completely unfinished
I believe Watch Dogs Legion by Ubisoft already used AI voice modulation to artificially create more NPC voices instead of paying for more voice actors / more time with voice actors who can do multiple voices.
Surely NPC dialogue in a fucking Ubisoft game isn't that difficult to crank out in the first place? Like, are you really saving that much effort compared to generating and curating AI responses?
The first war between humans and machines will be human pinkertons vs unionising robots
See...this is actually kinda the thing I think might actually be appropriate for AI IF its implemented well.
Like obviously we know it won't be under capitalism. It can't be. It'll just be another way to cut costs, especially in an Ubisoft game where so much of it is already stock assets or procedural.
BUT I can see a universe here where a small indie team is able to create an open world bigger than the scale of the witcher using this as a supplemental tool too give every NPC unique dialogue. Actual human writers should obviously be at the helm and should be responsible for dialing in the flavor of various background NPCs....but this shit takes time to crank out and this could genuinely be freeing in a lot of respects.
Done right, it'd basically be giving the writers a particularly advanced templating tool for filling in all many thousands of places that need filling. They already do that for conversation animations, autogenerating them based on templates and crude lip-synching algorithms and then having an actual person fix them up.
Even in a AAA setting it could just be used to push past the organizational limits where just adding more writers doesn't make more work get done, although given we're talking about Ubisoft, a company that makes bland shovelware, it'll just be used to invest even less in an area they already ignore, maybe even reduce writing teams down to what would currently be the writing lead and one or two assistants depending on how much it lets them shovel out.
I admit that without :porky-happy: further fucking everyone else over with this technology, I'd only be pleased to have a reliable means to do the parts of stories that need details but I don't need to do personal touches for. Describing standardized architecture in a believable modern building is boring but probably necessary sometimes, for example.
I’d only be pleased to have a reliable means to do the parts of stories that need details but I don’t need to do personal touches for.
Yeah. Like personally I already lean heavily on random generators for things like names (although that's also an anxiety thing, like when trying to think of a name I compulsively think about everyone else with that first name I know of and feel weird, place names always feel cheesy, etc and just hitting a button to get a random list over and over helps me short circuit that and remove any feeling of responsibility to feel anxious over from the choice), and when I was GMing I'd use GPT-2 to give me random blurbs about restaurants or movies or NPCs to read or give to my players. It works so well for junk details.
ubisoft haven't released a game worth playing in like a decade and this isn't going to help
