What AI Will And Won’t Do For Gaming — Yet
AI in gaming: Balancing innovation with player preferences and avoiding excess complexity.
Anton Gorodetsky, Head of Industry Relations at MY.GAMES delves into the impact of AI in gaming, exploring its potential, limitations, and the delicate balance between innovation and player satisfaction.
What do the next few years for gaming and AI look like? Are predictions of all-encompassing superpowered games and transformative industry shakeups accurate or premature? Hype and excitable predictions for AI have dominated headlines this year as developers, businesses, and investors consider the implications for their industries, and gaming is no exception.
AI Will Greatly Improve the Efficiency of Game Development
Despite the pace at which AI is developing, we can expect its primary purpose to be to provide bases, renders, and structures for designers and programmers to build from, helping them save time and cut costs in the initial development process.
Bearverse offers a great example of this. A mobile multiplayer strategy game, Bearverse centers around building a clan of bears to engage in battle, requiring the creation of hundreds of bears of different varieties. Leveraging AI to fast track the process, using prompts like “an angry brown bear with guns’ to generate a model they could later refine into a fully developed character — reducing development time from a couple of days to just a few hours.
AI Won’t: Make Artists Obsolete
The latest mantra in tech is “AI will not replace you. A person using AI will.” Making games is incredibly expensive and challenging for developers, and AI will help reduce pressure on human and financial resources.
In our organization, we have an internal channel dedicated to AI creatives. We use it to help reduce some day-to-day grunt work. For example, turning low-resolution graphics into high-resolution images. This helps free up artists’ time to spend on more impactful projects, including developing fresh, original ideas, which AI is highly unlikely to usurp, given that it pulls from existing sources.
However, it would be naive to think that all gaming jobs are AI-proof. Junior employees should quickly get up to speed on leveraging this technology to ensure their skills aren’t easily replaceable
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AI Explores Boundless Customization in Characters, NPCs, and Game Worlds
Speaking at Lightspeed’s AI in Gaming event in August, Ken Wee, Chief Strategy Officer of Activision Blizzard, commented that “beyond productivity gains and development speed, AI will also unlock new game genres and design possibilities so that consumers can expect a windfall of new choices.” From a character that can be customized down to its eyelashes to a game that changes as it learns more about your play style and gaming habits, to a world filled with Non-Player Characters (NPCs) that continue to develop their independent personalities and social lives beyond you. These are all possibilities of an AI-powered future.
While these ideas may now seem wild, they are already attracting attention from investors. Inworld AI, a company developing complete character engines for NPCs, reached a valuation of $500m in August 2023, thanks to a massive funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures.
Beyond fun musings, such as Game Rant’s concept of a never-ending world of continual AI-generated side quests, many are excited by how many options could be for customer customization, given AI’s ability to learn and pull from a seemingly infinite number of sources. Given the clamor of dedicated articles and guides solely for Cyberpunk 2077’s character customization system — a game approaching its 3rd birthday — we’ll likely see teams racing to deliver an even more fully realized successor to this over the coming years.
AI Won’t: Immediately Get This Right
These new possibilities may only suit some; giving players too much control risks overwhelming them and leading them to crave more structure and linearity.
Morality systems, multiple endings, and gameplay-affected outcomes aren’t a new concept — but even with a title that does this amazingly well, such as Mass Effect 2, it was successful because there weren’t thousands of possible outcomes. Video games aren’t real life, and people don’t need — or enjoy — an excessive amount of choice.
Even Cyberpunk 2077’s famed character customizations weren’t for everyone. Despite being a fan of the game, I still abandoned character creations part way through as the sheer amount of add-ons felt a little excessive and laborious.
Similarly, a fully realized NPC is fascinating — I’m all for richer dialogue and interaction, but will take this to the extreme positively impact gameplay? Hopefully, the level of autonomy won’t hinder the experience or fatigue players with unnecessary distractions. Early attempts at this also risk characters developing beyond developer control, which could hugely disrupt a game’s feel.
So What Should We Expect From AI and Games?
While it’s worth exploring the possibilities and potential of AI, its application in the gaming world may not be as fancy as one might think. For now, it may be a valuable tool in solving fundamental issues and technical problems, cutting costs, and helping make developers’ working hours more reasonable.
Still, that won’t stop me from reading into the next big AI game feature or development — as much as the prospects may be further off than we think, they’re far too interesting to ignore.
How will AI shape your favorite games? Why might it not be as revolutionary as expected? Let us know on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
Image Source: Shutterstock
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