


Whitten imagined a GTA-style game where you “go into the pawn shop and recruit the person behind the behind the desk and, you know, with maybe the game creator never even thinking about that as a possibility because of something else that happened in the game.” Whitten also thought about Scribblenauts, except in a world where you could truly make anything and assign it any properties. There’s a lot of potential in sandbox-style games, as well. It’s not hard to see the potential, though, especially in larger games with NPCs that don’t have set quests or exhaustive dialogue. We’re seeing some effort there with games like The Portopia Serial Murder Case, which, bluntly, haven’t made the best case for AI in games. What has happened with the character along the way? And then an AI model to generate what would be a rational response coming out of that, given all of those particular events.” “Well, what if each of those guards actually had a Myers-Briggs-type chart? A little bit of a backstory and frankly, a backstory that could have been impacted by that. We’ve all heard the “arrow to the knee” meme from the game, but Whitten imagined a game where that throwaway line meant something more. I asked for an example, and Whitten pondered what Skyrim would look like if it had a generative AI model behind it. Whitten believes the results of that are “broader, bigger, deeper worlds.” The result of that isn’t a flood of the same games we have, though. Whitten says the hope with AI is to make games “ten to the third better,” which means games that are ten times faster, ten times easier, and ten times cheaper to develop. We’re talking about large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and diffusion models like Midjourney, and they can radically change the games we see. It’s true that more research into AI models can lead to even more efficient creation pipelines, but we’re seeing a shift with generative AI. Machine learning and procedural techniques (such as tools like SpeedTree) aren’t exactly new in the world of game development. You’ve probably seen it in a few movies and TV shows even - Captain Marvel, John Wick 3, and Game of Thrones are on the list. It’s behind the suit deformation in Spider-Man: Miles Morales, as well as the Troll in the Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 trailer. With Ziva Face Trainer, developers “give it a mesh and we train that mesh against a large set of data… so you get back in five minutes a rig model that allows you to then run it in real-time.” Ziva tech is being used a lot, too.


Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II – The Game Awards 2019 – Announce Trailer (In-Engine)
