This is ultimately why a relatively small team producing an Indie game can create a 10-20 hour expierience, sell it at like 20-40$, have a total of like 5 people work on it start to finish, basically have no marketing budget, fire off an early access when they have a reasonably complete product where they are largely doing core gameplay refinements, and doing bug fixes… and end up selling like 2 million copies. It’s also why your first game will probably suck, so will the second one. But if you refine the process, get feedback, and figure out how to improve the process: You can do it.
The problem with big publishers is the executives look at the big newest game and go “WE NEED TO MAKE THAT” not understanding that players will play just about every genre IF IT IS GOOD. I mean, seriously until Baldur’s Gate 3 came out a bunch of people were like CRPG’s are dead… no, there just were not any good ones coming out.
How AI can make a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 even better… and why EA (probably) won’t figure it out*
A Company like Larian is passionate about the game world, the player expierience, the interactions, and creating a very systems (read: Game loop driven) driven game. The amount of interactions that happen in Baldur’s Gate 3 that occure because the game is based on systems, and the pieces are present - enabling players to just experiment is incredible.
If you take something like UE5 with it’s newer tools for filling in terrain, the lighting engine, and more - and hand that to a company like Larian you aren’t going to get a lesser product. Instead - you might very well end up with Larian going “Alright, we need a mount system, and an improved interactive camp system where the party has hirlings and the members of the party in the camp are defending it”. And suddenly the Shadowfell is a huge expansive place that is dark, dangerous, and explorable - not just with bespoke places, but just stuff team members slapped together, random encounters, and more. You might even go to a more Milestone experience system - just to enable the flow to feel better. You could have an AI trained to have relevant conversations about events going on, weather, and more - and it could be seeded and filled out so that you aren’t really sure what will be said.
The reason a company like EA won’t is at the end of the day - doing those things, needs time to figure out how to work it, how to catch errors, bug fix, improve training data, and a lot of testing to validate. EA just wants to shot gun out whatever seems popular and profitable at the time - instead of creating a unique experience that players will engage with. And that is because EA is ran by Marketing folk and MBA’s instead of Game Dev’s and Systems Designers.
Because it’s going to lead to yet more people getting fired. The whole “necessary evil” of large corporations in society is that they supply a lot of jobs. Since they are going out of their way to not even do that anymore, we have no use for them.
I can see them replacing artists to Ai generate art assets like in-game posters, promotive material, concept art… AI will have its uses, but I see them using it to fire the low hanging fruit like artists.
One game already replaced the voice actors for AI except when they needed a character to grunt. It’s all downhill from here for a bit.
It’s always easier to cut costs now than wait for the fruits of your effort in a year or two years or three.
Often large tech companies are huge, so you need a lot of momentum to ship major projects, which means you can use AI now but you don’t get the same share price bump as dumping a bunch of staff and saying the rest are 30% more efficient so it’s fine.
Oh man, I kinda hope this is the thing that kills EA.
But it probably won’t :(
Edit: not to mention, I’m pretty sure this is just a euphemism for “we’re going to fire 30% of our workforce”.
Despite all the hate AI tools get here, they havr their uses
Why not make your workforce 30% more productive and make your products 30% better?
Instead companies are using AI tools to make the same shitty product with less labour cost.
Because the corporate leadership doesn’t care about productivity or quality.
#ProfitÜberAlles :(
What Big Publishers think make good games:
What ACTUALLY makes a good game:
This is ultimately why a relatively small team producing an Indie game can create a 10-20 hour expierience, sell it at like 20-40$, have a total of like 5 people work on it start to finish, basically have no marketing budget, fire off an early access when they have a reasonably complete product where they are largely doing core gameplay refinements, and doing bug fixes… and end up selling like 2 million copies. It’s also why your first game will probably suck, so will the second one. But if you refine the process, get feedback, and figure out how to improve the process: You can do it.
The problem with big publishers is the executives look at the big newest game and go “WE NEED TO MAKE THAT” not understanding that players will play just about every genre IF IT IS GOOD. I mean, seriously until Baldur’s Gate 3 came out a bunch of people were like CRPG’s are dead… no, there just were not any good ones coming out.
How AI can make a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 even better… and why EA (probably) won’t figure it out*
A Company like Larian is passionate about the game world, the player expierience, the interactions, and creating a very systems (read: Game loop driven) driven game. The amount of interactions that happen in Baldur’s Gate 3 that occure because the game is based on systems, and the pieces are present - enabling players to just experiment is incredible.
If you take something like UE5 with it’s newer tools for filling in terrain, the lighting engine, and more - and hand that to a company like Larian you aren’t going to get a lesser product. Instead - you might very well end up with Larian going “Alright, we need a mount system, and an improved interactive camp system where the party has hirlings and the members of the party in the camp are defending it”. And suddenly the Shadowfell is a huge expansive place that is dark, dangerous, and explorable - not just with bespoke places, but just stuff team members slapped together, random encounters, and more. You might even go to a more Milestone experience system - just to enable the flow to feel better. You could have an AI trained to have relevant conversations about events going on, weather, and more - and it could be seeded and filled out so that you aren’t really sure what will be said.
The reason a company like EA won’t is at the end of the day - doing those things, needs time to figure out how to work it, how to catch errors, bug fix, improve training data, and a lot of testing to validate. EA just wants to shot gun out whatever seems popular and profitable at the time - instead of creating a unique experience that players will engage with. And that is because EA is ran by Marketing folk and MBA’s instead of Game Dev’s and Systems Designers.
What’s gonna happen is unemployment keeps going up, rich people get richer
Because it’s going to lead to yet more people getting fired. The whole “necessary evil” of large corporations in society is that they supply a lot of jobs. Since they are going out of their way to not even do that anymore, we have no use for them.
I can see them replacing artists to Ai generate art assets like in-game posters, promotive material, concept art… AI will have its uses, but I see them using it to fire the low hanging fruit like artists.
One game already replaced the voice actors for AI except when they needed a character to grunt. It’s all downhill from here for a bit.
It’s always easier to cut costs now than wait for the fruits of your effort in a year or two years or three.
Often large tech companies are huge, so you need a lot of momentum to ship major projects, which means you can use AI now but you don’t get the same share price bump as dumping a bunch of staff and saying the rest are 30% more efficient so it’s fine.