The same company that insisted for years that 30 FPS is better than 60 FPS insists on something stupid yet again.
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.
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).
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”.
“oo be soft” because they’re a French company (at least originally). The “you” sound for U isn’t really in their language.
It’s actually pronounced like the word Hue more or less (slightly shorter,the first half) it’s pronouced as such " hue - bee - soft "and the you sound is very much present in our language, for exemple baillou or caillou.
I just meant to say that it wasn’t typically a sound used for just the letter U, but fair enough! I stand corrected. I’ll gladly learn a lesson at the hands of a native lol
I’ve always said it with “you” but that makes sense.
I was only curious because of the “an” before ubisoft in the comment I replied to. If it was the “you” sound it wouldn’t feel right to say out loud and it confused me lol
Thank you for the lesson!
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
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.
Replace “games” with “executives” and the sentence makes complete sense.
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.
I think the issue is that games are games; an example that springs to mind is Caves of Qud’s Markov-chain generated books. I don’t mind them, but once I realized what they were, I stopped reading them. Unless it’s written by a developer, it doesn’t matter. They might as well be empty, unopenable items, like books from Dwarf Fortress where they get a description of what is inside but not any text from the passage.
Even random dialogue is interesting in games not only to “immerse” the player, but to receive messages and information from the developers; if they are randomly generated, they have no purpose. The game would only be improved by their absence.
But is it gonna be a worse dumpster fire than the usual Bethesda game generic NPC barking its one line of dialogue at you?
Potentially yes as at least the Bethesda NPC will say lore-accurate lines.
Or line.
Pathfinding was an absolute dumpster fire for a long time. Remember dreading any gameplay where you had to lead an NPC somewhere? Things take time to get better. Gotta start somewhere.
Then start it in experimental games. There’s no reason to have garbage AI in production games in order to improve it. Make it functional, then deploy it…
“Please help me! I need someone to take care of 6 large rats that live in my kitchen!”
‘OK! Where are they at?’
“I’m sorry, but as an LLM, I cannot provide specifics on details pertaining to this request.”
Why would you train an NPC LLM to know it’s an LLM?
The best models right now still hallucinate, so no matter how well trained, they’re still going to be awful. The specific message isn’t the issue.
They have no object permanence and you can convince them of things by just repeating it to them enough times. But the worst part?
They’re not even fun to talk to.
So if they don’t hallucinate, have object permanence, and are fun to talk to, you’re all good with gen AI NPCs?
Those are not my ONLY issues, no. They’re the most egregious for a videogame right now, but the entire concept is just … Fluff for no reason other than to list “AI NPCs” on the box.
Paying for more writers is simply better all around.
I don’t get it. Actually well working AI NPCs sound fucking amazing. To have an actual conversation about anything in the game by typing your questions? That’s like the wet dream of an RPG.
Have writers write the background info, some lore stuff, “books” about stuff in the game etc.
I want to have a conversation with all the NPCs and choose from four premade questions about a quest I am on.
And yes, obviously they have to work well or they’re extremely awkward and anti-immersive.
Paying for labour is toxic to any self respecting capitalist
And do you believe paying for more writers will remain a better option for the foreseeable future?
no, there hasn’t. What games called ai has nothing to do with the generative ai bullshit of today
Map path finding isn’t remotely similar to LLMs.
They’re both A.I. Yes, they work very differently, but the goal is the same - simulate intelligence.
No. Just. No. One is just a complex logic gate with a bunch of if, the other is a generative ia. Those are two VERY different things. It’s like comparing a rc car with a cargo baot, they are simply nothing alike.
Which AI is the RC car?
Does a pocket calculator count as simulating intelligence? You should work on simulating intelligence.
Is Doom running on the calculator?
Ah yes now that you made a fool of yourself you start acting like one to play it cool. You really out did yourself on the personal development today didn’t you ? :)
The salt runs deeper than I expected.
But you don’t seem to understand the difference between a simple Turing Machine and a Machine Learning models.
I understand them both well enough to implement them in my projects. I don’t see why people are anything other than excited about the implementation of more capable AI in games. Are these initial implementations garbage? Probably, but that’s just growing pains, So what is it about gen AI that actually bothers people?
So what is it about gen AI that actually bothers people?
It’s being used corporate suits to replace talented artists, writers, programmers, and voice actors and make their shareholders happy. Although this is Ubisoft, so they already making substandard products anyway. I mean, how do you fuck up the login system for your online table top games as much as they did?
@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.
Why all the salt?
Because we’re all completely fed up with having shitty AI jammed down our throats. It’s nothing but a shitty marketing buzzword.
AI has its place, but it is abundantly obvious to anyone who has seen or experienced these characters that this ain’t it…
