Study shows 97% of developers believe gen AI is transforming the industry, with a focus on creating more dynamic worlds, intelligent nonplayer characters (NPCs), and more efficient workflows...
I feel like we have pretty good concepts and tools for world gen. If games are going to use AI I’d expect the best results to be in quest systems. Most games struggle to procedurally generate good quests. They end up feeling formulaic in almost every aspect.
I imagine even if the quest structure stays the same simple “go to X and do Y” but you let AI generate a good reason to go on the quest it instantly improves the quality of procedural quests.
But that assumes AI can generate a good reason and I have my doubts about that, and a lot of other things AI supposedly can do.
I only really enjoy WFC mapgens, simply because structures they come up with are largely driven by modular pieces and that produces interesting results for longer time (for me personally). I find noise/biome/temperature driven open-world worldgens boring af, and I get a feeling I’ve seen it all very very fast. AI can potentially produce unique structures in open-world worldgens way better than noise-based algorithms with basic heuristics on top of them. You mentioned quests, just consider that AI-based worldgen can generate/modify world based on those characters and quests. You can ask it to start with noises, then modify to arrange for villages/cities, then make sure there is nice road from village A to village B and landscape is modified to make this road nicely traversable, and if there is a quest, modify map in a way that the needed dungeon happens according to intended progression in the mountain between those villages, etc.
I feel like we have pretty good concepts and tools for world gen. If games are going to use AI I’d expect the best results to be in quest systems. Most games struggle to procedurally generate good quests. They end up feeling formulaic in almost every aspect.
I imagine even if the quest structure stays the same simple “go to X and do Y” but you let AI generate a good reason to go on the quest it instantly improves the quality of procedural quests.
But that assumes AI can generate a good reason and I have my doubts about that, and a lot of other things AI supposedly can do.
I only really enjoy WFC mapgens, simply because structures they come up with are largely driven by modular pieces and that produces interesting results for longer time (for me personally). I find noise/biome/temperature driven open-world worldgens boring af, and I get a feeling I’ve seen it all very very fast. AI can potentially produce unique structures in open-world worldgens way better than noise-based algorithms with basic heuristics on top of them. You mentioned quests, just consider that AI-based worldgen can generate/modify world based on those characters and quests. You can ask it to start with noises, then modify to arrange for villages/cities, then make sure there is nice road from village A to village B and landscape is modified to make this road nicely traversable, and if there is a quest, modify map in a way that the needed dungeon happens according to intended progression in the mountain between those villages, etc.