Ubisoft insists yet again that its uncanny AI-generated 'NEO-NPCs' will make games 'more alive and richer', whatever that means
Are you feeling immersed yet?
The same company that insisted for years that 30 FPS is better than 60 FPS insists on something stupid yet again.
If the game is good I'll buy it, if it's shit I won't. I don't see how these NPC's will make the game good and I haven't personally bought an Ubisoft game in several years.
Quick question is it pronounced "you be soft" or "oo be soft"?
It stands for Ubiquitous Software, so it's "you be soft".
It's neither. The French "U" sound doesn't exist in English so I can't really give an example from an English word.
That said, being a global company they're probably fine with the default English pronunciation that would be "you be soft".
AI is the new procedural generation, in that it will be touted as making the games more real and immersive but really only makes them boring and repetitive, thus stressing the importance of genuine creative handcrafting. I'm looking forward to smaller studios selling their games with a "no AI" pitch in a few years.
I'd say it's just the latest innovation in procedural generation. But it's still just that.
Nah it'll make NPCs more interesting but $20 says they'll get all racist and genocidey too.
Human nature for ya or the dataset?
I disagree that procedural generation makes games more boring and repetitive. I think it depends on the game and how the procedural generation is implemented. Look at Noita for example - uses lots of procedural generation, mixed with some handcrafted elements, and it's really fun! Terraria, another similar formula.
Not my cup of tea, but a lot of people love No Man's Sky for that reason - it's fun to explore the crazy combinations.
The original Elite was procedurally generated IIRC, and from what I understand it was super fun (before my time though).
It will make the shareholders richer, as you can fire a few writers and animators to save costs, and still sell a the game with shittier dialogue
Replace "games" with "executives" and the sentence makes complete sense.
But… AI is stupid. I mean it really is dumb. And on top of that, it’s just an amalgamation of things fed to it which in itself is nothing bad, but it limits itself massively when combining things.
Mmo game of were wolf or sheriff, but there are goal is to blend in the the NPCs
Why all the salt? There's been AI in video games forever. Is this a line people are drawing?
For basic behaviour and pathfinding, yes. But aesthetics, outfits, dialogue, backgrounds, etc etc was all made by humans. The reason why NPC's can feel so immersive and part of the worlds they exist in is because they're made and written by the same people that made the rest of the game.
NPC's with awkward AI-gen voicelines spouting hallucinated nonsense that has nothing to do with the game or the player's actions is going to be an absolute dumpster fire.
There's a place for AI in NPCs but developers will have to know how to implement it correctly or it will be a disaster.
LLMs can be trained on specific characters and backstories, or even "types" of characters. If they are trained correctly they will stay in character as well as be reactive in more ways than any scripted character could ever do. But if the Devs are lazy and just hook it up to ChatGPT with a simple prompt telling it to "pretend" to be some character, then it's going to be terrible like you say.
Now, this won't work very well for games where you're trying to tell a story like Baldur's Gate... instead this is better for more open world games where the player is interacting with random characters that don't need to follow specific scripts.
Even then it won't be everything. Just because an LLM can say something "in-character" doesn't mean it will line up with its in-game actions. So additional work will need to be made to help tie actions to the proper kind of responses.
If a studio is able to do it right, this has game changing potential... but I'm sure we'll see a lot of rushed work done before anyone pulls it off well.
no, there hasn't. What games called ai has nothing to do with the generative ai bullshit of today
@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works proposed this theory the other day, and I think it makes a lot of sense. A lot of journalists are feeling threatened by the onslaught of LLMs so I would expect to see a lot more news attempting to shine a negative light on LLMs in any way possible.
Now that makes sense to me.
