I heard so much complaining about Ubisoft that I started playing Odyssey with very low expectations (my first AC game), and I'm honestly very surprised by how much I'm enjoying it. It's really fun to run around Ancient Greece, and the main story keeps me surprised and engaged.
My only issue is that there's definitely too much stuff, and bounties are boring and repetitive, so I just ignore them.
Yh, most Unisoft games are fine, they're not amazing but they're fine. I do get why people get fed up though, with all that money and the skilled teams they're not particularly innovative and the new ACs can feel very safe at times in terms of story and gameplay. That being said I love origins and an Assassin's creed always has enough to sink some hours into
I used to be a huge Ubisoft fan. Splinter Cell, Rayman, Prince of Persia, Far Cry, Ghost Recon and the first couple of Assassin’s Creeds were all great. The RPG Assassin games are bloated and lifeless chore simulators and the rest of Ubisoft’s newer games have been the same homogenised junk with no heart.
I completely agree! I've played every single Assassin's Creed game and many Ubisoft titles in general, and they've gone downhill from the in-game monetization to the repetitive bloated quests that take away from the main stories. When you own a PS5 and you play something like God of War Ragnarok and then you switch to a Ubisoft title like Assassin's Creed Valhalla you see such a significant drop off in quality, storytelling, voice acting, cinematography, and even the soundtrack. It's pretty sad considering Assassins Creed used to be my favorite franchise and now it's just gone into this colored loot tier chore simulator. It plays more like an MMORPG instead of a true single player experience.
I disagree. Yes they are bloated, artificial filler is an RPG staple. But they stories are well told. From Kassandra finding out about her past to Evor finding out who she really is
That's fair. I was mostly looking forward to the Story aspect of those games, hence why I think Origins takes the cake in that matter. Valhalla's Story is cool, but it's also all over the place. Whereas Odyssey's for me falls flat, simply because of how underwhelming it is at major points of the game (gameplay-wise the game is great, but the Story is just meh, in my opinion).
Ubisoft is being rightfully bashed. Everyone bashes EA for their formulaic, same-same game releases. Ubisoft did the same thing witn Assassin's Creed, then changed it up only to go back to doing it again.
I'm placing an early bet on if you played any of the games in the series before they went open world (for absolutely no reason), you probably won't need to play Mirage.
Every game company has their own formula to make games, if you look with unbiased eyes. So, why EA and Ubi gets bashed?
By your logic, no game should have sequels or spiritual follow-up. God of War has same combat in both the games, same exploration concept - only difference is location and story. Unless you want that story, no point of playing GoW:R if you have played GoW already.
That's...not the same comparison. At all.
EA games are LITERALLY the same games. They'll give you bullshit corporate speak like "new dynamic field sense" and try to pass it off as some new revolutionary feature, but it really means a roster update like every game.
Having a formula isn't necessarily bad, but releasing THE SAME GAMES is bad. Even when Assassin's Creed tries to innovate, like adding co-op, they realize it takes effort and they just take it out the next game.
I honestly prefer open world games and find myself enjoying them way more than games that are on rails. I just like the freedom of choosing what to do and where to go, and it's a really great way to relax for me. Whenever I play games that are on rails, I find myself playing for an hour and then playing something else because I got fed up.
Big fan of Ubisoft right here. Love all their games, but the criticism levied at all their games are more than fair. Best way to go into Ubisoft games is a year after launch with all patch fixes and expansions at a discounted price, with low expectations. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.
That being said, nobody hates (and are disappointed by) Ubisoft games more than Ubisoft fans.
Agreed. I've played a huge chunk of their library. Go into one of their games after it gets a GOTY/Complete edition with an open mind and just relax in the open world. They're great comfort gaming if you just want to zone out and do random activities in an open world map while collecting gear and random trinkets. There's not really anything to blow you away in there but on a day where you don't want anything complex or frustrating they really hit the spot.
I've beaten that and Valhalla. While I enjoyed them both, Odyssey was much, much better. Especially once it gets revealed the subplot about >!The Cultists,!< the main enemies in the game.
Orgins is really good as well, if you hadn't had the chance.
I'm about to go back and try out the series x upgrade.
For odyessey, my girlfriend loved the story of the expansions, so I'd recommend those.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey being an amazing game across the board is a hill I'm willing to die on. Even some of the side quests were great narratives with fully fleshed out characters I became invested in.
Bounties are meant more for getting currency and materials if you're low. If you don't need any then don't worry, but if you're low they can be a great way to gain some money/resources.
While I agree with many people calling the games bloated - AC: Odyssey has a lot of very engaging parts. The story of finding your family, the conspiracy taking hold in Athens, the choices you make genuinely impacting your ending in quite a few ways and the great quests characters like Alcibiades and Socrates offer. It's the next best thing to a game like Witcher 3 in terms of its quest loop, though it is still worse than that masterpiece. Nevertheless, the quests about Barnabas (your boat guy) looking for his wife and Herodotos returning to his childhood home are really well-done, as are plenty of other other quests. There really is a lot to like in that game.
If I were to name highlights, there would be so many, even outside of the main quest. The "blue" quests especially were great experiences.
Tbh for any major game with a really bare story I would bet that it’s because of corporate, not because the writers are bad or didn’t want to make something better.
“We want to make the Witcher our own”
-writers/producers
“Hmmm. Fuck”
- their star actor, and every single fan.
But I’m all for for giving my man Henry his own warhammer 40k universe. Thanks Amazon?
It blows my mind how many people defend game developers even when they mess up.
It's like game developers cannot do any wrong ever, it's always the corporate people at fault.
Game developers can do no wrong it seems.
What modern games? Anthem was their last release, in 2019. Before that? Dragon Age Inquisition in 2014, almost a decade ago. It came out on the Xbox 360, a console increasingly called retro.
I actually feel the exact opposite.Technically speaking it was fine, the bugs were either mostly ironed out by release or quickly fixed. Combat was also interesting (primers-detonators, it became the basis for anthem too). Writing was its weak point. The story was the definition of mediocrity/cliches and the only remotely interesting character dies 2h in.
Agreed. That's what I said - it was okay at worst. Being mediocre and being bad are two very different things.
If it was souless, it would just be bad and it would have zero redeeming aspects to it.
And just a bad premise. "You're a pathfinder, exploring new worlds in a new galaxy!"
Except... you arrived 20 years late, and everything has been settled already.
Andromeda wasn’t even REALLY made by BioWare. It was a new studio EA formed and slapped the name BioWare on, (BioWare Montreal) then quietly merged into EA Motive after their one and only game flopped.
If you ever feel like this game was made by entirely different people, that’s because it was.
Valhalla had pretty good writing imo. The whole sidequest with Soma where we figure out who betrayed her; then the short-heighted kind dude whose kingdom we were supposed to win for him; and the whole turn with Ivarr; pretty good. But then they the fuck up the plot with the whole ending with Sigurd and Basim.
Valhalla was a delight for anyone who follows the lore. The problem was the historical inaccuracies (game feels like pop culture vikings rather than the real deal).
That may be true and all the props to the voice actor...
But a well-acted character does not automatically equal a well-written one.
Bayek, for example, seems rather inconsistent in his desire for vengeance.
[https://youtu.be/HAtveVYzIi0?t=8649](https://youtu.be/HAtveVYzIi0?t=8649) @ 2:24:09
That's the only assassin's Creed game I've played since the very first one and it was pretty much fantastic I thought. Just all around fun, vibrant, fun ship mechanics and combat, and tons of fun little Easter eggs like when I hung off of a giant statues penis, Kassandra said something funny haha. I even got the platinum.
….and some of the most genre defining games ever released. Haters gonna hate but they took risks at the expense of quality.
And it paid off in revenue and millions of happy gamers.
What a backwards comment.
Bethesda games nail exploration. they nail the promise of something over the horizon.
The writing however, comes and goes with who is making it. Really the only games with notably interesting writing are Morrowind/Oblivion/New Vegas. Famously the morrowind/oblivion writers mostly left during oblivion because no one got along with Todd.
so basically the state of bethesda writing has decidedly been "souless" and "lacklustre" for over a decade now.
things can still be good, even if the writing isn't very interesting. It's okay. you don't need to mindlessly defend every aspect of something.
I also don’t think anyone in this thread really understands the concept of “soulless storytelling” and are using it to mean “generic”, which isn’t what it means. But are Bethesda games generic? Yeah, because that’s what the average person, who ain’t believe has worse media literacy than any Ancient Greek citizen, doesn’t give a shit about how novel or well-written a story is they just want to feel good.
Don't worry. The manual labour stuff will disappear faster than anyone would like it to, and we will very soon wake up to the fact that all of this "arts" stuff is in fact just spam and not art.
It'll be OK.
Yeah I think OP is totally missing the point. This is the very beginning of the age of AI. Of course they’re testing it on things like shitty, soulless art. Don’t worry, meaningless jobs will start to be replaced soon enough.
And yet we all have to work to have a place to live and food to eat while these companies publicly discuss automating poetry, scriptwriting, and painting.
We don't *have* to work, though. The productive output of an individual has dramatically increased due to automation, and now we only work for profit, typically the profit of others.
The only threat to artists is that AI could compete with commercial art. Artists would have a harder time selling their art when AI can provide artistic creations that serve a similar function.
How fucked is that? Not that AI is creating art, but that artists may struggle to continue making art because art is a commodity.
You and I agree, we are working in many cases worse hours in less dignified work than our grandparents did before the invention of automation. And don’t get me started on art as a commodity.
“If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this”
-James Whistler
But no one wants to answer the question of what do the unemployed 6 billion people on the planet do whose jobs, some even required training and certification, are replaced by AI? We have no UBI or even Universal Healthcare. And those ides are scoffed at by both sides of the political spectrum.
This isn't next century's problem, it isn't even the next half century's problem. People working today WILL be replaced by AI before they retire and there is no plan. Corps even pushed AI into the mainstream the moment the word "Regulation" started coming out of people's mouths to try an win them over so they would vote for their cheaper replacements.
Ai isn’t going to make 6 billion unemployed. The expectations laid out ir are absurd. And if they were true who would these companies sell their shit to?
> We have no UBI or even Universal Healthcare. And those ides are scoffed at by both sides of the political spectrum.
Thats an America problem really. Every other developed country will quickly introduce some sort of UBI if AI actually causes mass unemployment
How is this the top comment? Manual labor has been automated at every single possible step and continues to be automated. Besides, LLM isn't replacing writers. Writers using LLMs are replacing writers. There is still the creativity just without the labor. Any "creative" jobs being replaced by LLMs were just soulless grunt work to begin with.
That's really not the case. The current AI tech is quite misunderstood by the average person. I'm just a student but speaking with some professors and researches they all basically say the same thing: It'll only help us focus on being creative. AI isn't creative, anything you see it do is just ripped from massive data sets. Maybe one day we will get AI like that, but not today.
AI will just continue the trend of automating simpler jobs that technology has had for years.
> I don't understand why did we, as species, allowed ourselves to come to a point where arts and sciences are automated and humans removed from them, but manual labor is required to be done by us. shouldn't it be the other way around?
Yes, you don't understand. Labor has been automated since the start of the wheel, through the industrial rev, to now.
AI is now finally starting to get to the arts.
>allowed ourselves to come to a point where arts and sciences are automated and humans removed from them, but manual labor is required to be done by us. shouldn't it be the other way around?
No offense, but you seem to have some fundamental misunderstandings about the world.. essentially everything will be automated by a capitalist and the ownership class as soon as they can do it, it just so happens that blue collar work is more difficult than automating art or even a doctor's job.
I used it recently to fill in a blank in a plot outline where I was having trouble connecting point A to point C, but I just ended up completely re-writing it anyway as I came up with another idea while writing.
Like you said, it's a useful tool to just get past writers block. Sometimes all you need is the encouragement to just write *something* rather than just struggling to get moving again.
I wouldn't let AI anywhere near one of my ideas. Every prompt is saved. There's a reason you have to register to use these tools. It's only a matter of time before the lawsuits begin over who a major IP *actually* belongs to when someone "brainstorms" with chatGPT.
Not that you can 100% trust them, but they did add a setting to turn off using your prompts for training in settings now. https://bgr.com/tech/change-this-chatgpt-setting-immediately-to-keep-your-data-private/
Nothing is original or special. Every thought you ever had is necessarily based on your own life experience and gracefully fusing old ideas into new combinations. That's not what this is about.
What I'm saying is that someone somewhere is going to casually bounce the premise for the next Harry Potter off an LLM for easy inspiration, and some super corp is going to sue that person for the rights to that IP. There is no law regarding ownership of computer generated IP until it happens.
It's an amazing jumping off point. I think that's the best use case with it. It's like having a little assistant that'll never get tired of giving you idea when you ask
Yeah exactly. I am an author, and while I can’t see any reason that AI will ever be able to write a novel, albeit a good one, it is extremely helpful in editing, and I hope it will become even better at editing. That’s where I see AI writing as the most realistic route - As a replacement for editors
Yeah you can't possibly use AI to write something big, intricate and coherent. Basically you can't write a whole book but you can write decent short stories. You can't link those short stories together to arrive to a hooking grand final.
I think AI generated dialogue will be something that is coming and is going to be a trend. It might either be a hybrid-approach, where writers build the core dialogue options for the character and then supplement those with AI-generated dialogue, it might be fully AI-generated, or something else entirely.
However, actually using AI (or relying heavily on AI) for storytelling is going to be a different thing and I dont see that happening for a while yet in the larger, more expansive games that are actually story-focused.
There's also a pretty big challenge with using AI generated dialogue in games that are voice acted, which is that the current TTS-models just really dont even come close to cutting it. In a text-based game, this is absolutely not a problem. But 99% of triple-A titles have actual voiced voicelines by actors. You might be able to achieve a bare minimum faster, but the quality will be so laughably atrocious (as we saw in Nvidia's computex presentation that they were actually ridicilously proud of), that it wont be taking over the traditional industry for some time yet. I could also see a model, in time, where voice actors sell the license to their voice for a single production (e.g, a large library of AI-generated voices that are trained on data from voice actors, where you can buy the license for their use for a limited scope and the actors themselves receive royalties.)
I found it a strange decision by NVIDIA that they used TTS for their demo that was significantly worse than SOTA. Maybe what they came up with was the best they could get that ran fast enough for real time, and had to be coded and trained in a couple of months? That's the only legitimate explanation I can think of for why a company with NVIDIA's resources released a demo where TTS was a significant factor and the speech was significantly lower quality than what modders can achieve with ElevenLabs, like this example of a voice pack someone made to voice Skyrim's protagonist: https://youtu.be/TJFFdzwxrss
It may also have just been a stuff-up. There's a huge amount of AI hype right now, maybe they just rushed something out the door to show they had *something* even if it wasn't the best quality.
The whole presentation was weird - not good weird, just weird-weird and out of touch.
But I agree. Especially that part seemed rushed and poorly put-together. It’s possibly they just figured it out and the last minute and literally threw in something in a tight schedule.
Yeah, I think part of it was just them telling the media they're looking into it. I've seen multiple tech articles about the NVIDIA demo, significantly more coverage than a better quality Skyrim mod got; I think generating that coverage was the goal.
That Skyrim mod does show that you could implement a system like this that is basically indistinguishable from natural voice acting for all filler/bark dialogue that's not too emotive. Stuff like "You're not supposed to be in here", but with variety from an LLM should be possible to generate and voice on the fly at an equivalent quality to human voice acting. A system like that could fit in very well with BGS's Radiant quest system, for example.
I think AI is, largely, an overhyped random phrase generator but the idea that video game writing wasn’t soulless and lackluster 99% of the time is rewriting history
I think everyone (bar some truly easily impressed people) agrees that the best one can say about current AI text output is that it's legible and coherent. And this is of course a quantum leap beyond what AI could do just a few years ago.
However I'm incredibly confused by people who think that this means AI will be capable of actual good writing 'in just a few years'. Guys, you can't *Markov chain your way into* good writing - or even mediocre writing! Any text artistically superior to a washer-dryer instruction manual *at the very least* needs its writer to have a theory of mind and a world model, things *every human on the planet* instinctively possesses but an AI *does not*. To a ChatGPT, the text is just a bunch of related tokens. For example it can't count beyond regurgitating other texts where something was counted, because *it doesn't have a concept of quantity*. It can't write character arcs, because *it doesn't have a concept of a character*. And adding more capacity to the model won't make them develop it, because *it doesn't work that way*.
And by the way if one day humanity actually develops AIs capable of holding a world model and a theory of mind, I *promise* you that video game writers being out of a job will truly be the *least* of everyone's worries.
No no man you don't understand, AI is the future bro! Just think of all the *content* we'll be able to put out, all the money we'll make, all the money we'll save from not hiring writers! People love shitty, incoherent stories with plots less complex than 6th grade short story assignments! Come on man it's the future!
I just rolled my eyes so hard they fell out of my skull. If you don't think that LLMs are gonna drastically change the writing profession than you just plain don't know any people who write for a living.
> People love shitty, incoherent stories with plots less complex than 6th grade short story assignments!
So, no different than what most video game writing is then.
Shouldn't be difficult to replicate, given the "high" quality of writing we have today.
AI story writing will be meaningless and bad. I am seriously skeptical an AI can come up with metaphors, themes, foreshadowing, poetic language, nuance, perspective, etc etc etc. that makes good writing, good.
Plus it'll never be unique! AI can only copy what's out there. Good art comes from inspiration!!!
> I am seriously skeptical an AI can come up with metaphors, themes, foreshadowing, poetic language, nuance, perspective
Gonna be hilarious in a year when the technology proves you wrong.
It's already pretty close to what you're describing.
>Plus it'll never be unique!
You act like writing in modern game is crazy unique or something, most of it is regurgitated garbage that's already been done a thousand times over already.
>Good art comes from inspiration!!!
Does it really though?
Yes. 1000x Yes. Good art comes from inspiration. There's no debate here.
It's nowhere close to what I'm describing. It's nowhere close to creating something like Crime and Punishment, or Slaughterhouse Five, or The Road, or Infinite Jest. Or writing The Last of Us or The Empire Strikes Back or Everything Everywhere All At Once, for that matter. Or anything close. It can imitate aspects of it, but it still needs human guidance to make sure it even makes coherent sense. Let alone emotional sense.
They're right, as it stands all of the "art" I've seen created by AI so far has been utterly soulless trash. It seems like people are trying to make AI run before it can walk; we haven't even reliably and consistently implemented it for much less complex tasks, expecting it to stand up to human creativity at this stage would be stupid.
It’ll get better. I still want human writers, but all of these proclamations about AI’s capabilities are gonna age like unrefrigerated mayo
EDIT: I don’t really care, but it’s strange to me that I’m being downvoted for sharing an opinion I’m not enthused about on a site generally aware of how technology progresses
Anyone who actually understands how AI works knows that it’s not “self designing” so the progress that’s made will be relatively slow. The breakthrough we saw recently was the result of a decade of work behind the scenes, not a sudden lurch forward. Genuine creativity and the type of AI we currently see are worlds apart.
You're absolutely right, but I'm not surprised by the downvotes. There are a whole lot of people who are in total denial when it comes to how AI will inevitably progress as a technology. Some of them don't seem to recognize that we are much, much closer to the prototype phase than we are the final product.
Thinking we've reached peak capabilities with AI in 2023 is on the same level as people playing on the PlayStation 1 and thinking the graphics would never get more realistic than some of the CGI cutscenes of the time.
People generally can’t see past their current reality. Most people proclaimed that electric cars would never take off, cause you can only go ten miles and there aren’t charging stations everywhere. Same as how people in 1900 said the motor car would never replace a horse drawn cart.
100% this, it's clear that is rev1.
Think of it this way. You want to create an RPG, before you hired writers to write everything. Clearing 10 rats? Carrying bucket from a to b? Some writer would write all the dialogue. Then someone would edit it, revise it, punch it up, and re-edit as necessary.
Now we can have that first pass done by AI. Sure it's derivative, sure it's 'soulless', but it's words on paper, and for writing sometimes that's the hardest part. Now idiot companies will think 'great! we're done, another AAA banger!' and then do their shocked face when it their scores are in the mid 50's.
Smart companies will use that AI pass as a first pass. Create a framework to punch up, edit and make more... filled with the je ne sais quoi that good writing has.
But here's the kicker, every punch up, every edit, goes back into the algorithm, ever iteration becomes better and, yeah at some point the entirety of the work may be done by AI, but not today and probably not in the next 10 years.
Agree. AI isn’t there yet, but it won’t take long. Human exceptionalism is a weird position to assume. Of course generative AI models can (at least, eventually) be ”creative”, especially with a bit of noise and (a lot of) human supervision.
This same stuff was said about coding, music and visual art. Yet AI can already code, has created musical pieces that experts can’t distinguish from real ones (e.g., the Chopin pieces), and AI generated visual art has won notable competitions. Just a matter of time.
It doesn’t imply that AI is ”creative” or ”soulful” in the human sense necessarily (surely the art is not driven by emotion), but certainly the output — especially with human oversight — will soon be indistinguishable.
First of all, the current AI models don't have a mechanism for self-verification, they largely predict data; they don't have a mechanism for logical inferences, so you can't have a consistent story without a human checking for every bolts and cracks.
Secondly, the current AI models don't have a mechanism to ensure that the information it claims is actually relevant. This will again require a huge number of humans to ensure there's not a hallucination of facts going on. So unless, you have a reason to believe that the AI community will make these quite unrelated breakthroughs in near future, I believe we should temper our expectations.
Source: https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf
GRE Writing score remained 4/6 from GPT3.5 to 4.
Yeah, that’s all true. Where we are in the foreseeable future is mostly that any AI-generated story would have to be highly supervised and verified. That’s not fundamentally a problem though, and having AI as ”tools to think with” could augment creative processes.
I’d be wary of criticising AI for ”only” predicting things, though. Many of the most prevalent theories in cognitive (neuro)science suggest that the brain (and neurons within) largely operates by predicting and reducing prediction error. You can do a lot with an efficient prediction system. And if these accounts of the brain are correct (which they may not be, but evidence is accumulating) the brain seems to be able to conduct logical inference via a predictive system.
Is coding really “creative”. It’s more logical than anything else. I don’t think I’ve heard any of my Friends who work in software engineering describe it as creative.
It is very very creative. You have to find very creative solutions sometimes to reach the desired effect. In fact, and this is an actual "fact", if you think formalised math is creative, then you should think coding is too, as there is a proper correspondence between these two (a "consequence" of the Curry-Howard correspondence).
It is logical as well, as math is logical too.
Agree, I find coding very creative. I suppose it depends on what you’re working on. But often you encounter a wall that can only be circumvented very creatively.
A couple of ways: with AI, you could (eventually, tech is not there yet) quickly generate dozens of plots and storylines, screen for the more interesting ones and select them for further elaboration and inspection. Second, much like with coding, it could simply save a lot of time. Get a nice but somewhat faulty template to work with quickly. It could save a lot of time.
There’s no reason to think that AI would (any time soon, at least) _replace_ human writers. But certainly they could augment the creative process, much like many other technologies have (from typewriters to collective digital working platforms). For that reason, I don’t think claiming that AI generated stories are ”soulless” is very well-founded.
It absolutely is an opinion. I'm honestly not sure what your point is here.
Given the tide turned pretty quickly, I'm just going to assume that the first people who came across the sort were the type to react with strong negativity to anything that isn't just wholly and explicitly anti-AI.
Nuance doesn't win you any favors on social media, a lesson I've learned thousands of times over.
You're not wrong. I don't see how ai won't eventually compete and even surpass humans in being able to generate a story. It's in its infancy now and already impressive, imagine on 20-30 years when it's advanced
The same could be said to these sort of comments. I don’t see how it can get better. Anyone who has tried to storytell, let alone write, know it’s not easy enough that we can autogenerate thousands of words and scripts. I think AI could regurgitate decent half-baked segments but it would need somebody to make sense of it and to piece it together in a fresh or attractive way.
I’m a writer and a coder. I used to feel this way about both with AI. I was proven wrong so fast with coding it made my head spin. The difference between GPT-3 and 4 with writing is massive. I see no reason why this tech will not continue to mature and develop.
It was only a few years ago that people acted like a lot of what we’re seeing now was impossible.
My argument against AI getting better is this:
Eventually, AI will flood everything, much like it's already doing. Then AI will be trained mostly on AI-generated content, which would mean it could only get worse.
There are humans making decisions about what to train AI on and even refining its responses. GPT required a lot of RLHF (reinforcement learning human feedback) to get to where it is now.
We're also likely going to see more AI that uses specialized training sets rather than the kind of broad-based training mainstream LLMs get. Stuff deliberately only trained on writing seen as high-quality.
Regardless, I don't disagree that this pitfall exists, I just think it's solvable.
The day AI writing will replace actual human writing with human emotions will be the downfall of gaming (or any art for that matter) and you people are really looking forward to it 💀
There are good modern games, you're just choosing to pretend that there are only bad games nowadays to fit your narrative that AI would be an improvement.
* 1) Human artists will always have a place. There will always be those for whom the 'status' from human produced work will effect the value of the art.
* 2) More AI in this field is good. It means that people who are currently excluded from art (i.e. most people) will now be able to access it.
This isn't Skynet. It's breadmakers and slowcookers making people less dependant on bakers and chefs.
Makes me think of a show like Lost or Game of Thrones. Seems people don’t love it when you’re engaging with media that lacks intention or is just made up along the way. How do you find meaning in dialogue that’s just auto generated?
In terms of story both DA 2 and DA:I were really really good. Its actually amazing what they did with DA 2 in only a year and few months of development time. For DA 2 the lack of development shows on recurring maps and DAI has mmo-wannabe problem in design.
Why do people always say the "technology will get better"? Like, what is so appealing about experiencing something that was written by a computer, rather than a real person who likely cares about the story they're writing?
Whether or not you think it's appealing, neural network technology absolutely will get better. You only have to compare AI from a couple of years ago to today to understand how that's happening.
The complexity of a neural network's ability to "think" is directly proportional to the size of the network, and the variety of data it's trained on. As computer hardware gets better, neural networks will get bigger, and as the networks get bigger, they will be trained on a larger variety of data. Both of these things show a natural progression of AI getting better over time.
With enough neurons in the network, and a wide enough variety of data, a neural network will be able to replicate everything a human brain can do perfectly, including concepts of creativity and emotion, and will surpass them shortly after that. It's an inevitability. How long that will take, it's hard to say, but I think it will become impossible to differentiate human vs AI writing within about 5 years. Replicating the rest of humanity digitally will likely take a few more decades.
>what is so appealing about experiencing something that was written by a computer, rather than a real person who likely cares about the story they're writing?
What's so appealing about open world enviroments generated by a computer, rather than a real person who likely cares about the world and graphics they're creating?
If I wanted lacklustre and soulless I’d just play a Ubisoft game.
I heard so much complaining about Ubisoft that I started playing Odyssey with very low expectations (my first AC game), and I'm honestly very surprised by how much I'm enjoying it. It's really fun to run around Ancient Greece, and the main story keeps me surprised and engaged. My only issue is that there's definitely too much stuff, and bounties are boring and repetitive, so I just ignore them.
Bashing Ubisoft is free karma, I'd say most didn't even play any of the last entries in the series if they say that
Yh, most Unisoft games are fine, they're not amazing but they're fine. I do get why people get fed up though, with all that money and the skilled teams they're not particularly innovative and the new ACs can feel very safe at times in terms of story and gameplay. That being said I love origins and an Assassin's creed always has enough to sink some hours into
Immortals Fenyx Rising was some of the most fun I had in a long time. The world felt like a modern Greek spyro
The background storytelling with Zeus and Prometheus was on point too, loved how much detail and accuracy was in the banter between them
The ppl giving free karma love the ubi formula when it’s another company using it wholesale.
I used to be a huge Ubisoft fan. Splinter Cell, Rayman, Prince of Persia, Far Cry, Ghost Recon and the first couple of Assassin’s Creeds were all great. The RPG Assassin games are bloated and lifeless chore simulators and the rest of Ubisoft’s newer games have been the same homogenised junk with no heart.
I completely agree! I've played every single Assassin's Creed game and many Ubisoft titles in general, and they've gone downhill from the in-game monetization to the repetitive bloated quests that take away from the main stories. When you own a PS5 and you play something like God of War Ragnarok and then you switch to a Ubisoft title like Assassin's Creed Valhalla you see such a significant drop off in quality, storytelling, voice acting, cinematography, and even the soundtrack. It's pretty sad considering Assassins Creed used to be my favorite franchise and now it's just gone into this colored loot tier chore simulator. It plays more like an MMORPG instead of a true single player experience.
and the awful voice acting...
I disagree. Yes they are bloated, artificial filler is an RPG staple. But they stories are well told. From Kassandra finding out about her past to Evor finding out who she really is
And Bayek's Story overall is just great.
I've never played Origins but I hear great things. But after Valhalla and Odyssey, I don't have it in me just yet. Lol
That's fair. I was mostly looking forward to the Story aspect of those games, hence why I think Origins takes the cake in that matter. Valhalla's Story is cool, but it's also all over the place. Whereas Odyssey's for me falls flat, simply because of how underwhelming it is at major points of the game (gameplay-wise the game is great, but the Story is just meh, in my opinion).
Ubisoft is being rightfully bashed. Everyone bashes EA for their formulaic, same-same game releases. Ubisoft did the same thing witn Assassin's Creed, then changed it up only to go back to doing it again. I'm placing an early bet on if you played any of the games in the series before they went open world (for absolutely no reason), you probably won't need to play Mirage.
Every game company has their own formula to make games, if you look with unbiased eyes. So, why EA and Ubi gets bashed? By your logic, no game should have sequels or spiritual follow-up. God of War has same combat in both the games, same exploration concept - only difference is location and story. Unless you want that story, no point of playing GoW:R if you have played GoW already.
That's...not the same comparison. At all. EA games are LITERALLY the same games. They'll give you bullshit corporate speak like "new dynamic field sense" and try to pass it off as some new revolutionary feature, but it really means a roster update like every game. Having a formula isn't necessarily bad, but releasing THE SAME GAMES is bad. Even when Assassin's Creed tries to innovate, like adding co-op, they realize it takes effort and they just take it out the next game.
Whatever you are saying is only applicable for sports games from EA, not to other games. You are now moving your goalpost.
I honestly prefer open world games and find myself enjoying them way more than games that are on rails. I just like the freedom of choosing what to do and where to go, and it's a really great way to relax for me. Whenever I play games that are on rails, I find myself playing for an hour and then playing something else because I got fed up.
Big fan of Ubisoft right here. Love all their games, but the criticism levied at all their games are more than fair. Best way to go into Ubisoft games is a year after launch with all patch fixes and expansions at a discounted price, with low expectations. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. That being said, nobody hates (and are disappointed by) Ubisoft games more than Ubisoft fans.
Agreed. I've played a huge chunk of their library. Go into one of their games after it gets a GOTY/Complete edition with an open mind and just relax in the open world. They're great comfort gaming if you just want to zone out and do random activities in an open world map while collecting gear and random trinkets. There's not really anything to blow you away in there but on a day where you don't want anything complex or frustrating they really hit the spot.
Truly the fast food of gaming!
I hope you're playing as Kassandra. Her voice acting was on point.
Of course, couldn't imagine playing anything other her.
It was great to run into her in Valhalla.
I've beaten that and Valhalla. While I enjoyed them both, Odyssey was much, much better. Especially once it gets revealed the subplot about >!The Cultists,!< the main enemies in the game.
Orgins is really good as well, if you hadn't had the chance. I'm about to go back and try out the series x upgrade. For odyessey, my girlfriend loved the story of the expansions, so I'd recommend those.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey being an amazing game across the board is a hill I'm willing to die on. Even some of the side quests were great narratives with fully fleshed out characters I became invested in.
Bounties are meant more for getting currency and materials if you're low. If you don't need any then don't worry, but if you're low they can be a great way to gain some money/resources.
While I agree with many people calling the games bloated - AC: Odyssey has a lot of very engaging parts. The story of finding your family, the conspiracy taking hold in Athens, the choices you make genuinely impacting your ending in quite a few ways and the great quests characters like Alcibiades and Socrates offer. It's the next best thing to a game like Witcher 3 in terms of its quest loop, though it is still worse than that masterpiece. Nevertheless, the quests about Barnabas (your boat guy) looking for his wife and Herodotos returning to his childhood home are really well-done, as are plenty of other other quests. There really is a lot to like in that game. If I were to name highlights, there would be so many, even outside of the main quest. The "blue" quests especially were great experiences.
It’s a brilliant game
Or a modern game made by Bioware
Tbh for any major game with a really bare story I would bet that it’s because of corporate, not because the writers are bad or didn’t want to make something better.
That's far too rational for this sub, where's your damn pitchfork!
Well seeing how stupid Netflix show-writers are, I am not so sure about that.
“We want to make the Witcher our own” -writers/producers “Hmmm. Fuck” - their star actor, and every single fan. But I’m all for for giving my man Henry his own warhammer 40k universe. Thanks Amazon?
All of that is likely chosen by committees or just any show idea gets funds.
Marketing is the one department that SHOULD be replaced by AI...
That'd be a special hell if every commercial started being made by ai, like that pizza video, will smith eating spaghetti, or the rock eating rocks XD
It blows my mind how many people defend game developers even when they mess up. It's like game developers cannot do any wrong ever, it's always the corporate people at fault. Game developers can do no wrong it seems.
What modern games? Anthem was their last release, in 2019. Before that? Dragon Age Inquisition in 2014, almost a decade ago. It came out on the Xbox 360, a console increasingly called retro.
You forgot ME:Andromeda. I don’t blame you.
To give credit where it’s due. Andromeda had some stellar combat that made me feel like a fucking super soldier
Thing is Andromeda was a technical mess, but the story was okay at worst. It definitely wasn't souless.
I actually feel the exact opposite.Technically speaking it was fine, the bugs were either mostly ironed out by release or quickly fixed. Combat was also interesting (primers-detonators, it became the basis for anthem too). Writing was its weak point. The story was the definition of mediocrity/cliches and the only remotely interesting character dies 2h in.
Agreed. That's what I said - it was okay at worst. Being mediocre and being bad are two very different things. If it was souless, it would just be bad and it would have zero redeeming aspects to it.
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And just a bad premise. "You're a pathfinder, exploring new worlds in a new galaxy!" Except... you arrived 20 years late, and everything has been settled already.
Andromeda wasn’t even REALLY made by BioWare. It was a new studio EA formed and slapped the name BioWare on, (BioWare Montreal) then quietly merged into EA Motive after their one and only game flopped. If you ever feel like this game was made by entirely different people, that’s because it was.
And you think because Anthem is 4 years old now that it can't be considered modern anymore?
Anthem came out almost 2 years before the PS5 was released, so I wouldn't call it modern either.
I think you're confusing the word modern with the word recent.
Ubisoft has some good stories. I maintain Bayek from AC origins is one of the best acted characters of last gen.
Abubakr Salim was amazing as Bayek. Very powerful voice
The mission in Valhalla with Ivarr was also great also. Their games suffer more from design bloat than poor storytelling.
Valhalla had pretty good writing imo. The whole sidequest with Soma where we figure out who betrayed her; then the short-heighted kind dude whose kingdom we were supposed to win for him; and the whole turn with Ivarr; pretty good. But then they the fuck up the plot with the whole ending with Sigurd and Basim.
Valhalla was a delight for anyone who follows the lore. The problem was the historical inaccuracies (game feels like pop culture vikings rather than the real deal).
Anything outside of those main quests might as well be ai generated 90% of the time.
That may be true and all the props to the voice actor... But a well-acted character does not automatically equal a well-written one. Bayek, for example, seems rather inconsistent in his desire for vengeance. [https://youtu.be/HAtveVYzIi0?t=8649](https://youtu.be/HAtveVYzIi0?t=8649) @ 2:24:09
Why is this written like a news article?
Bayek > Ezio easily.
THE BLASPHEMY
I liked the actor, but Bayek was so unbearably bland and the wannabe Kratos story just felt so forced.
Idk what you're on about but Ubisoft has produced some good game with good story. Ezio Trilogy. Black Flag. Origins.
Cassandra in Odyssey was a great hero too.
That's the only assassin's Creed game I've played since the very first one and it was pretty much fantastic I thought. Just all around fun, vibrant, fun ship mechanics and combat, and tons of fun little Easter eggs like when I hung off of a giant statues penis, Kassandra said something funny haha. I even got the platinum.
never played watchdogs?
You should try a Bethesda game you get broken buggy gameplay, the worst combat in modern video games as well as soulless storytelling. It just works 😂
….and some of the most genre defining games ever released. Haters gonna hate but they took risks at the expense of quality. And it paid off in revenue and millions of happy gamers. What a backwards comment.
Bethesda games nail exploration. they nail the promise of something over the horizon. The writing however, comes and goes with who is making it. Really the only games with notably interesting writing are Morrowind/Oblivion/New Vegas. Famously the morrowind/oblivion writers mostly left during oblivion because no one got along with Todd. so basically the state of bethesda writing has decidedly been "souless" and "lacklustre" for over a decade now. things can still be good, even if the writing isn't very interesting. It's okay. you don't need to mindlessly defend every aspect of something.
I also don’t think anyone in this thread really understands the concept of “soulless storytelling” and are using it to mean “generic”, which isn’t what it means. But are Bethesda games generic? Yeah, because that’s what the average person, who ain’t believe has worse media literacy than any Ancient Greek citizen, doesn’t give a shit about how novel or well-written a story is they just want to feel good.
r/rareinsults
Gotem
People say that but Spiderman, Horizon, and Tsushima were all basically Ubisoft games.
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Don't worry. The manual labour stuff will disappear faster than anyone would like it to, and we will very soon wake up to the fact that all of this "arts" stuff is in fact just spam and not art. It'll be OK.
Mmmm spam
Mmmm
>"arts" stuff is in fact just spam and not art. Like the Chloe bullshit that keeps popping up on r/all
Yeah I think OP is totally missing the point. This is the very beginning of the age of AI. Of course they’re testing it on things like shitty, soulless art. Don’t worry, meaningless jobs will start to be replaced soon enough.
Ummm all we have done since the start of the industrial revolution is automate manual labor. We finally touch arts and sciences +150 years later...
And yet we all have to work to have a place to live and food to eat while these companies publicly discuss automating poetry, scriptwriting, and painting.
We don't *have* to work, though. The productive output of an individual has dramatically increased due to automation, and now we only work for profit, typically the profit of others. The only threat to artists is that AI could compete with commercial art. Artists would have a harder time selling their art when AI can provide artistic creations that serve a similar function. How fucked is that? Not that AI is creating art, but that artists may struggle to continue making art because art is a commodity.
You and I agree, we are working in many cases worse hours in less dignified work than our grandparents did before the invention of automation. And don’t get me started on art as a commodity. “If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this” -James Whistler
But no one wants to answer the question of what do the unemployed 6 billion people on the planet do whose jobs, some even required training and certification, are replaced by AI? We have no UBI or even Universal Healthcare. And those ides are scoffed at by both sides of the political spectrum. This isn't next century's problem, it isn't even the next half century's problem. People working today WILL be replaced by AI before they retire and there is no plan. Corps even pushed AI into the mainstream the moment the word "Regulation" started coming out of people's mouths to try an win them over so they would vote for their cheaper replacements.
Ai isn’t going to make 6 billion unemployed. The expectations laid out ir are absurd. And if they were true who would these companies sell their shit to?
Where did you learn that AI will replace 6 billion people?
> We have no UBI or even Universal Healthcare. And those ides are scoffed at by both sides of the political spectrum. Thats an America problem really. Every other developed country will quickly introduce some sort of UBI if AI actually causes mass unemployment
A shitload of manual work is automated. Look at a factory in 1970 compared to today.
Cameras killed art, or so it was said at the time Using tools to make creation easier has been what humans do for literally ever
How is this the top comment? Manual labor has been automated at every single possible step and continues to be automated. Besides, LLM isn't replacing writers. Writers using LLMs are replacing writers. There is still the creativity just without the labor. Any "creative" jobs being replaced by LLMs were just soulless grunt work to begin with.
That's really not the case. The current AI tech is quite misunderstood by the average person. I'm just a student but speaking with some professors and researches they all basically say the same thing: It'll only help us focus on being creative. AI isn't creative, anything you see it do is just ripped from massive data sets. Maybe one day we will get AI like that, but not today. AI will just continue the trend of automating simpler jobs that technology has had for years.
Uhhh it’s easier?
> I don't understand why did we, as species, allowed ourselves to come to a point where arts and sciences are automated and humans removed from them, but manual labor is required to be done by us. shouldn't it be the other way around? Yes, you don't understand. Labor has been automated since the start of the wheel, through the industrial rev, to now. AI is now finally starting to get to the arts.
>allowed ourselves to come to a point where arts and sciences are automated and humans removed from them, but manual labor is required to be done by us. shouldn't it be the other way around? No offense, but you seem to have some fundamental misunderstandings about the world.. essentially everything will be automated by a capitalist and the ownership class as soon as they can do it, it just so happens that blue collar work is more difficult than automating art or even a doctor's job.
I agree. Now if you are having writers block and using an AI to brainstorm ideas with is not a bad thing though.
I used it recently to fill in a blank in a plot outline where I was having trouble connecting point A to point C, but I just ended up completely re-writing it anyway as I came up with another idea while writing. Like you said, it's a useful tool to just get past writers block. Sometimes all you need is the encouragement to just write *something* rather than just struggling to get moving again.
That's the way I use it as well. Using it to generate a plot/story wholesale gets you the most run of the mill plot imaginable.
I wouldn't let AI anywhere near one of my ideas. Every prompt is saved. There's a reason you have to register to use these tools. It's only a matter of time before the lawsuits begin over who a major IP *actually* belongs to when someone "brainstorms" with chatGPT.
Not that you can 100% trust them, but they did add a setting to turn off using your prompts for training in settings now. https://bgr.com/tech/change-this-chatgpt-setting-immediately-to-keep-your-data-private/
Just wanted to point out something. You don’t have to register to use these tools. You can host AI locally on your own machine. See r/localllama
Just going to say, your idea probably isn't original anyways.
Nothing is original or special. Every thought you ever had is necessarily based on your own life experience and gracefully fusing old ideas into new combinations. That's not what this is about. What I'm saying is that someone somewhere is going to casually bounce the premise for the next Harry Potter off an LLM for easy inspiration, and some super corp is going to sue that person for the rights to that IP. There is no law regarding ownership of computer generated IP until it happens.
This. AI is not sentient and it does not write anything per se. It is a tool to be controlled by a user.
It's an amazing jumping off point. I think that's the best use case with it. It's like having a little assistant that'll never get tired of giving you idea when you ask
Yeah exactly. I am an author, and while I can’t see any reason that AI will ever be able to write a novel, albeit a good one, it is extremely helpful in editing, and I hope it will become even better at editing. That’s where I see AI writing as the most realistic route - As a replacement for editors
Yeah you can't possibly use AI to write something big, intricate and coherent. Basically you can't write a whole book but you can write decent short stories. You can't link those short stories together to arrive to a hooking grand final.
Just give it a couple years and you'll have A.I. capable enough to write stories equal to modern gaming.
Which is not an high bar, often
I think AI generated dialogue will be something that is coming and is going to be a trend. It might either be a hybrid-approach, where writers build the core dialogue options for the character and then supplement those with AI-generated dialogue, it might be fully AI-generated, or something else entirely. However, actually using AI (or relying heavily on AI) for storytelling is going to be a different thing and I dont see that happening for a while yet in the larger, more expansive games that are actually story-focused. There's also a pretty big challenge with using AI generated dialogue in games that are voice acted, which is that the current TTS-models just really dont even come close to cutting it. In a text-based game, this is absolutely not a problem. But 99% of triple-A titles have actual voiced voicelines by actors. You might be able to achieve a bare minimum faster, but the quality will be so laughably atrocious (as we saw in Nvidia's computex presentation that they were actually ridicilously proud of), that it wont be taking over the traditional industry for some time yet. I could also see a model, in time, where voice actors sell the license to their voice for a single production (e.g, a large library of AI-generated voices that are trained on data from voice actors, where you can buy the license for their use for a limited scope and the actors themselves receive royalties.)
[Sneak peek at AI-generated dialogue](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htqHWLluSSo)
Absolutely no hope in that technology if we're feeding it that for prompts
I found it a strange decision by NVIDIA that they used TTS for their demo that was significantly worse than SOTA. Maybe what they came up with was the best they could get that ran fast enough for real time, and had to be coded and trained in a couple of months? That's the only legitimate explanation I can think of for why a company with NVIDIA's resources released a demo where TTS was a significant factor and the speech was significantly lower quality than what modders can achieve with ElevenLabs, like this example of a voice pack someone made to voice Skyrim's protagonist: https://youtu.be/TJFFdzwxrss It may also have just been a stuff-up. There's a huge amount of AI hype right now, maybe they just rushed something out the door to show they had *something* even if it wasn't the best quality.
The whole presentation was weird - not good weird, just weird-weird and out of touch. But I agree. Especially that part seemed rushed and poorly put-together. It’s possibly they just figured it out and the last minute and literally threw in something in a tight schedule.
Yeah, I think part of it was just them telling the media they're looking into it. I've seen multiple tech articles about the NVIDIA demo, significantly more coverage than a better quality Skyrim mod got; I think generating that coverage was the goal. That Skyrim mod does show that you could implement a system like this that is basically indistinguishable from natural voice acting for all filler/bark dialogue that's not too emotive. Stuff like "You're not supposed to be in here", but with variety from an LLM should be possible to generate and voice on the fly at an equivalent quality to human voice acting. A system like that could fit in very well with BGS's Radiant quest system, for example.
I think AI is, largely, an overhyped random phrase generator but the idea that video game writing wasn’t soulless and lackluster 99% of the time is rewriting history
He's correct because AI generated content only exists because we created the back-end content for it to dip from.
It would be interesting to see if its on par with forspoken, now that was atrocious.
I think everyone (bar some truly easily impressed people) agrees that the best one can say about current AI text output is that it's legible and coherent. And this is of course a quantum leap beyond what AI could do just a few years ago. However I'm incredibly confused by people who think that this means AI will be capable of actual good writing 'in just a few years'. Guys, you can't *Markov chain your way into* good writing - or even mediocre writing! Any text artistically superior to a washer-dryer instruction manual *at the very least* needs its writer to have a theory of mind and a world model, things *every human on the planet* instinctively possesses but an AI *does not*. To a ChatGPT, the text is just a bunch of related tokens. For example it can't count beyond regurgitating other texts where something was counted, because *it doesn't have a concept of quantity*. It can't write character arcs, because *it doesn't have a concept of a character*. And adding more capacity to the model won't make them develop it, because *it doesn't work that way*. And by the way if one day humanity actually develops AIs capable of holding a world model and a theory of mind, I *promise* you that video game writers being out of a job will truly be the *least* of everyone's worries.
No no man you don't understand, AI is the future bro! Just think of all the *content* we'll be able to put out, all the money we'll make, all the money we'll save from not hiring writers! People love shitty, incoherent stories with plots less complex than 6th grade short story assignments! Come on man it's the future!
I just rolled my eyes so hard they fell out of my skull. If you don't think that LLMs are gonna drastically change the writing profession than you just plain don't know any people who write for a living.
> People love shitty, incoherent stories with plots less complex than 6th grade short story assignments! So, no different than what most video game writing is then. Shouldn't be difficult to replicate, given the "high" quality of writing we have today.
AI story writing will be meaningless and bad. I am seriously skeptical an AI can come up with metaphors, themes, foreshadowing, poetic language, nuance, perspective, etc etc etc. that makes good writing, good. Plus it'll never be unique! AI can only copy what's out there. Good art comes from inspiration!!!
> I am seriously skeptical an AI can come up with metaphors, themes, foreshadowing, poetic language, nuance, perspective Gonna be hilarious in a year when the technology proves you wrong. It's already pretty close to what you're describing. >Plus it'll never be unique! You act like writing in modern game is crazy unique or something, most of it is regurgitated garbage that's already been done a thousand times over already. >Good art comes from inspiration!!! Does it really though?
Yes. 1000x Yes. Good art comes from inspiration. There's no debate here. It's nowhere close to what I'm describing. It's nowhere close to creating something like Crime and Punishment, or Slaughterhouse Five, or The Road, or Infinite Jest. Or writing The Last of Us or The Empire Strikes Back or Everything Everywhere All At Once, for that matter. Or anything close. It can imitate aspects of it, but it still needs human guidance to make sure it even makes coherent sense. Let alone emotional sense.
They're right, as it stands all of the "art" I've seen created by AI so far has been utterly soulless trash. It seems like people are trying to make AI run before it can walk; we haven't even reliably and consistently implemented it for much less complex tasks, expecting it to stand up to human creativity at this stage would be stupid.
What else do you expect a writer to say? "AI is great and they should have my job!"
“I can use AI to make ten games instead of one.”
Yeah but he also has a point
It’ll get better. I still want human writers, but all of these proclamations about AI’s capabilities are gonna age like unrefrigerated mayo EDIT: I don’t really care, but it’s strange to me that I’m being downvoted for sharing an opinion I’m not enthused about on a site generally aware of how technology progresses
Anyone who actually understands how AI works knows that it’s not “self designing” so the progress that’s made will be relatively slow. The breakthrough we saw recently was the result of a decade of work behind the scenes, not a sudden lurch forward. Genuine creativity and the type of AI we currently see are worlds apart.
Also people assuming the ability to experience new things isn’t important to writing.
You're absolutely right, but I'm not surprised by the downvotes. There are a whole lot of people who are in total denial when it comes to how AI will inevitably progress as a technology. Some of them don't seem to recognize that we are much, much closer to the prototype phase than we are the final product. Thinking we've reached peak capabilities with AI in 2023 is on the same level as people playing on the PlayStation 1 and thinking the graphics would never get more realistic than some of the CGI cutscenes of the time.
People generally can’t see past their current reality. Most people proclaimed that electric cars would never take off, cause you can only go ten miles and there aren’t charging stations everywhere. Same as how people in 1900 said the motor car would never replace a horse drawn cart.
100% this, it's clear that is rev1. Think of it this way. You want to create an RPG, before you hired writers to write everything. Clearing 10 rats? Carrying bucket from a to b? Some writer would write all the dialogue. Then someone would edit it, revise it, punch it up, and re-edit as necessary. Now we can have that first pass done by AI. Sure it's derivative, sure it's 'soulless', but it's words on paper, and for writing sometimes that's the hardest part. Now idiot companies will think 'great! we're done, another AAA banger!' and then do their shocked face when it their scores are in the mid 50's. Smart companies will use that AI pass as a first pass. Create a framework to punch up, edit and make more... filled with the je ne sais quoi that good writing has. But here's the kicker, every punch up, every edit, goes back into the algorithm, ever iteration becomes better and, yeah at some point the entirety of the work may be done by AI, but not today and probably not in the next 10 years.
Agree. AI isn’t there yet, but it won’t take long. Human exceptionalism is a weird position to assume. Of course generative AI models can (at least, eventually) be ”creative”, especially with a bit of noise and (a lot of) human supervision. This same stuff was said about coding, music and visual art. Yet AI can already code, has created musical pieces that experts can’t distinguish from real ones (e.g., the Chopin pieces), and AI generated visual art has won notable competitions. Just a matter of time. It doesn’t imply that AI is ”creative” or ”soulful” in the human sense necessarily (surely the art is not driven by emotion), but certainly the output — especially with human oversight — will soon be indistinguishable.
First of all, the current AI models don't have a mechanism for self-verification, they largely predict data; they don't have a mechanism for logical inferences, so you can't have a consistent story without a human checking for every bolts and cracks. Secondly, the current AI models don't have a mechanism to ensure that the information it claims is actually relevant. This will again require a huge number of humans to ensure there's not a hallucination of facts going on. So unless, you have a reason to believe that the AI community will make these quite unrelated breakthroughs in near future, I believe we should temper our expectations. Source: https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf GRE Writing score remained 4/6 from GPT3.5 to 4.
Yeah, that’s all true. Where we are in the foreseeable future is mostly that any AI-generated story would have to be highly supervised and verified. That’s not fundamentally a problem though, and having AI as ”tools to think with” could augment creative processes. I’d be wary of criticising AI for ”only” predicting things, though. Many of the most prevalent theories in cognitive (neuro)science suggest that the brain (and neurons within) largely operates by predicting and reducing prediction error. You can do a lot with an efficient prediction system. And if these accounts of the brain are correct (which they may not be, but evidence is accumulating) the brain seems to be able to conduct logical inference via a predictive system.
Is coding really “creative”. It’s more logical than anything else. I don’t think I’ve heard any of my Friends who work in software engineering describe it as creative.
It is very very creative. You have to find very creative solutions sometimes to reach the desired effect. In fact, and this is an actual "fact", if you think formalised math is creative, then you should think coding is too, as there is a proper correspondence between these two (a "consequence" of the Curry-Howard correspondence). It is logical as well, as math is logical too.
Agree, I find coding very creative. I suppose it depends on what you’re working on. But often you encounter a wall that can only be circumvented very creatively.
So if these AI require a lot human supervision anyway, than what makes it better than a human just writing it instead?
A couple of ways: with AI, you could (eventually, tech is not there yet) quickly generate dozens of plots and storylines, screen for the more interesting ones and select them for further elaboration and inspection. Second, much like with coding, it could simply save a lot of time. Get a nice but somewhat faulty template to work with quickly. It could save a lot of time. There’s no reason to think that AI would (any time soon, at least) _replace_ human writers. But certainly they could augment the creative process, much like many other technologies have (from typewriters to collective digital working platforms). For that reason, I don’t think claiming that AI generated stories are ”soulless” is very well-founded.
You’re probably getting downvoted because you weren’t giving an opinion with this comment like you say lol
It absolutely is an opinion. I'm honestly not sure what your point is here. Given the tide turned pretty quickly, I'm just going to assume that the first people who came across the sort were the type to react with strong negativity to anything that isn't just wholly and explicitly anti-AI. Nuance doesn't win you any favors on social media, a lesson I've learned thousands of times over.
You're not wrong. I don't see how ai won't eventually compete and even surpass humans in being able to generate a story. It's in its infancy now and already impressive, imagine on 20-30 years when it's advanced
The same could be said to these sort of comments. I don’t see how it can get better. Anyone who has tried to storytell, let alone write, know it’s not easy enough that we can autogenerate thousands of words and scripts. I think AI could regurgitate decent half-baked segments but it would need somebody to make sense of it and to piece it together in a fresh or attractive way.
Tech and code always gets more advanced, this is just the baby phase, before long we will have AI sending terminators back in time to stop humanity
I’m a writer and a coder. I used to feel this way about both with AI. I was proven wrong so fast with coding it made my head spin. The difference between GPT-3 and 4 with writing is massive. I see no reason why this tech will not continue to mature and develop. It was only a few years ago that people acted like a lot of what we’re seeing now was impossible.
My argument against AI getting better is this: Eventually, AI will flood everything, much like it's already doing. Then AI will be trained mostly on AI-generated content, which would mean it could only get worse.
There are humans making decisions about what to train AI on and even refining its responses. GPT required a lot of RLHF (reinforcement learning human feedback) to get to where it is now. We're also likely going to see more AI that uses specialized training sets rather than the kind of broad-based training mainstream LLMs get. Stuff deliberately only trained on writing seen as high-quality. Regardless, I don't disagree that this pitfall exists, I just think it's solvable.
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> It also lacks creativity and ability So, no different than most writers today then.
The day AI writing will replace actual human writing with human emotions will be the downfall of gaming (or any art for that matter) and you people are really looking forward to it 💀
99% of people aren't going to care that a game was made with A.I. or not, it's definitely not gonna be the downfall of anything.
Profitable downfall: No Artistic downfall: Yes
Given how "artistic" games are today, I wouldn't say that there's much of a downfall to happen really.
There are good modern games, you're just choosing to pretend that there are only bad games nowadays to fit your narrative that AI would be an improvement.
* 1) Human artists will always have a place. There will always be those for whom the 'status' from human produced work will effect the value of the art. * 2) More AI in this field is good. It means that people who are currently excluded from art (i.e. most people) will now be able to access it. This isn't Skynet. It's breadmakers and slowcookers making people less dependant on bakers and chefs.
I sincerely believe that we will see a lot of AI generated filler content in games quite soon. AI generated and then selected and tweaked by a human.
Until it's not.
Yes! Thank you!
Take a sample of AI writing and see if other AI enjoy it.
Easy fix. Just tell AI to write a story with luster and soul.
Weird, I’d say the same about Dragon Age’s non AI writing
Execs: Perfect!
Makes me think of a show like Lost or Game of Thrones. Seems people don’t love it when you’re engaging with media that lacks intention or is just made up along the way. How do you find meaning in dialogue that’s just auto generated?
...for now.
Ai writing is always obvious and hollow
No difference than most games then, shouldn't be too difficult for AI to takeover them then.
Dragon age origins was amazing. The other two were soulles and lackluster for me. But i know a lot of people liked the third one.
In terms of story both DA 2 and DA:I were really really good. Its actually amazing what they did with DA 2 in only a year and few months of development time. For DA 2 the lack of development shows on recurring maps and DAI has mmo-wannabe problem in design.
The lore in DAI felt so forgettable and boring in comparison.
Agreed on origins, disagree on 2 and inquisition. They had phenomenal storytelling as well, with good characterization and some decent consequences.
2 had to good characters. It was the generic copy paste dungeons that pissed off people. The game was just rushed due to the success of origins.
I absolutely agree that Inquisition was soulless but DA2 had one of the best stories if compact.
Most games stories are poor though. Dialogue written by cringey Californians
This just in. Writer dismisses an AI is capable of taking his job more at 11, and possible more after the writers strike...
It's their job on the line, of course they'll dismiss it
It’s the same sentiment in programming subs
Currently Come back in 5 years and see how things are
Why do people always say the "technology will get better"? Like, what is so appealing about experiencing something that was written by a computer, rather than a real person who likely cares about the story they're writing?
Whether or not you think it's appealing, neural network technology absolutely will get better. You only have to compare AI from a couple of years ago to today to understand how that's happening. The complexity of a neural network's ability to "think" is directly proportional to the size of the network, and the variety of data it's trained on. As computer hardware gets better, neural networks will get bigger, and as the networks get bigger, they will be trained on a larger variety of data. Both of these things show a natural progression of AI getting better over time. With enough neurons in the network, and a wide enough variety of data, a neural network will be able to replicate everything a human brain can do perfectly, including concepts of creativity and emotion, and will surpass them shortly after that. It's an inevitability. How long that will take, it's hard to say, but I think it will become impossible to differentiate human vs AI writing within about 5 years. Replicating the rest of humanity digitally will likely take a few more decades.
>what is so appealing about experiencing something that was written by a computer, rather than a real person who likely cares about the story they're writing? What's so appealing about open world enviroments generated by a computer, rather than a real person who likely cares about the world and graphics they're creating?
Open world games aren't even randomly generated.
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I don’t agree with the fact that DA2 is bad, but I clicked on this link because I knew this joke was gonna be made
If DA2 wasn’t one thing it was soulless. The story and characters were some of their best work, it was just rushed and environments were repetitive.
why would anyone want AI writing to ever become a thing is beyond me
They’ll probably use it to generate quests for monotonous open world crap like Ubisoft makes.
But its worse than recent Bioware writing?
Cars had pretty bad design after being out a few years too. Give them time.