Cyberpunk’s quest director says CD Projekt Red has experimented with generative AI, but there’s still a ‘gigantic, really long way to go’ before AI NPCs are as good as scripted characters
Cyberpunk’s quest director says CD Projekt Red has experimented with generative AI, but there’s still a ‘gigantic, really long way to go’ before AI NPCs are as good as scripted characters
22 Comments
I have a feeling it won’t take very long. Lol
There’s a lot of really cool things that could be done with AI in game development. Especially for RPGs. Entire cities where you can interact with everyone could be 1000x as large as previous games with a fraction of the dev/VA time.
Just as long as it isn’t used as a way to cut corners but truly as a way to innovate.
Maybe AI tool usage can speed up game development enough that games won’t be released unfinished.
AI dialogue could be good with random NPCs you see in the streets, not with actual important characters
The main reason this doesn’t work is because there’s no AI to accompany the text AI, so you get characters speaking about performing an action but physically they cannot perform it because the chatgpt AI or equivalent will think up things that the NPC character physically cannot do, you see this in those Skyrim mods. Or they’ll talk about the superbowl in a medieval RPG.
If AI can be used to enhance game environments and not act as an obvious shortcut, it’d be game-changing. But let’s not forget the uncanny valley of awkward NPC dialogues
I believe we gonna see chatgpt sort of npcs in gta VI
I think the general way people are talking about using it is just weird. If they used it to get rough stuff done and send that over to the actual art team you could actually cut down on the workload and by extension development times. Suddenly an artist might be able to do twice as much work but instead we are trying to get them to do things that it just does not make sense for them to do.
Well….duh?
I think it depends. Completely unfettered, no-holds-barred kind of conversations with NPCs and self-driving stories? Yes, we’re way off.
But if it’s just reacting to specific clues to specific questions that the AI is programmed to know about and can understand where it fits into the human-made story, the AI should be able to generate some pretty damn good “semi-baked” responses.
You gotta remember, if AI takes over, THAT guy, that guy right there, HE’S gonna be out of a job! So of course he’s going to say it’s bad, his literal livelihood is on the line. A lot of these guys are panicking, because they can see the writing on the wall. AI is coming for all their jobs. And AI is accelerating. The better it gets, the faster it improves. Maybe not in the next 5 years, but the next 10? Maybe. The next 20? Almost certainly, barring any worldwide cataclysmic event or world war.
I really hope they don’t. AI just seems like a way for them to get around not paying other voice actors and to cut some corners. I love CD Projekt Red, and their formula works perfect as is.
They may not be all of the way there but what they have so far is impressive
https://youtu.be/1od2pIs9220?si=eGsJ7KJavVsm42_F
Ok, but could we get better AI for the gameplay bits? Please.
I mean, it’s going to take time, but once a breakthrough will be made and this will be decent and more importantly cost efficient… games will change a lot. For better or worse.
It probably won’t be good for story heavy games where immersion is king. It will be amazing for sandbox type games though. Imagine somthing like Stellaris or Civilization where each civ has an AI you can converse with. You could simulate actual diplomacy and convince them to declare war on neighbors, join into alliances, feed them false intelligence, etc. If you humiliated them in a past war they could hold grudges for that and play nice for decades only to stab you in the back at a later date. That’s the kind of stuff where AI will shine.
It’d be fine for background NPCs probably, it’s definitely not there yet when it comes to any NPCs that is at all important though.
Best game
Guarantee Ubisoft and EA are in a race to release a game first with all AI generated dialog and just don’t care how terrible the end product is. Ubisoft will make a trailer wish professionally scripted dialog to lie about the quality of the game. EA will make a game with only 5 NPC’s and will sell you “character packs” to get more variety of random NPC’s walking around.
Is there, though?
There’s a clear conflict of interest in having people automate out ambient immersive experiences with AI when they could instead bill their employer money to do it themselves.
“Creatives” continue to struggle with the necessity of incorporating AI into their skill set.
Unless we have agentic embodied llms its kinda pointless. Just trapping llms in npcs that cant really do anything will get old fast. Then the npcs are just interfaces for an llm and there isnt anything to gain from talking to them.
AI writing has thus far been like, “what if Oblivion dialog, but somehow less pertinent.”
To be fair, game writers and creators have been super lackluster for a while now.