Just so people know, you can ignore games by publisher in steam by searching their name in the store, clicking their page, then click the gear icon to ignore. EA who? Ubiwhat?
Ubishit.
I’ve had EA on ignore for years (whenever they demanded we switch to Origin) and they still showed up on my front page during the last sale !
For those that don’t know, Stability AI is already a zombie, even in the local ML community. SD3 was a flop, they shed all their devs/projects worth anything, and now with Qwen/Longcat SAI is beyond obsolete.
Apparently EA didn’t get the message. They invested in a broken, burning company who’s only decent results are free and old?
…Sounds about right.
Sure, why not? Its up to gamers to dump them, and only time will tell how this will evolve.
It also comes to the point replacing employees with AI.
This is not going to end well.
if isnt already bad enough that SAUDIA arabia and kushner owns it.
EA is the world’s shittiest game company. Just gutter trash all the way through.
I can’t start boycotting a company that I’ve been boycotting for well over a decade.
Last thing I bought from them was Mass Effect (only the first one) circa 2008 I think.
Carry on, sir.
Double boycott
So, repeatedly buy and return games?
Will my steam account get banned if I pre-order every one of their games, click play for 5 minutes then instantly refund? I have my faith, but I don’t know if they’d see that as abuse of their refund policy.
Why punish valve? Do that shit through origin.
This will suck so fucking hard
Just look at skate. Now imagine that but somehow worse and even uglier
For them
I mean it’s definitely gonna be entertaining, but I’ll watch that embarrassment from afar.
The tagline of everything EA has touched for years now.
It wont if you dont buy their shit.
To be fair, it probably won’t suck any more than EA games have for the past… er… ten years?
Respawn still made some pretty fun games. But errr yea that’s pretty much it.
15+ BF3 was when I made my vow to stop supporting them for releasing unfinished buggy ass games.
What are these ass games you are talking about? Im willing to look past them being buggy.
I don’t know what they’re taking about. Amarillo’s Butt Slapper isn’t published by EA.
Sorry. Time flies.
“Making games with AI” sounds like hell… like this is what hell must be.
Sitting there prompting AI, getting shitty ass results, prompting it again and again until you eventually settle for slightly less shitty results. The frustration and the loss of agency… oh God, someone should make a psychological horror about this: a frustrated artist forced to ditch their skills and tools and use AI to bring their unique vision to life, and throughout the film you watch them descend deeper and deeper into madness and depression until they burn down a data center and laugh manically as it disintegrates around them.
I don’t make computer games with AI, but I do create tabletop roleplaying adventures on a regular basis. I use AI for a lot of it. You have no idea what the workflow is. It’s not hell, it’s an enormous boon.
Gross.
So what’s your process and how is it a boon?
Major applications I use AI for:
- Art, obviously. I generate lots of illustrations of the characters and other things they encounter. These days image generators have become good enough that I usually just have to describe things well in the prompt and get usable results, but if I need to edit the images to get them closer to what I need I run ComfyUI locally and have lots of models for that as well.
- I use producer.ai to generate custom music. Sometimes it’s diagetic - in the previous campaign the party encountered an NPC that loved to sing about important plot developments in-universe - but mostly it’s either background soundscape or supplementary songs (consider them like “theme music” that plays during the intro or credits). Producer.ai closed down new subscriptions a while back but I’ve also used Udio and Suno and they’re both good too.
- I record the sessions and transcribe them using WhisperX. I feed the transcripts into NotebookLM and have it generate summaries and notes about the events of each session. It can also generate “overview” videos that work great as a 5-minute catch-up players can watch before the session if they’ve forgotten what happened last time.
- Since NotebookLM has all my campaign notes in it as source documents, as well as PDFs of the rulebooks, it’s great for quickly whipping up stats for creatures when the players do something unexpected. It’s also been a good brainstorming assistant, and it “knows” the names of every random little NPC or village we’ve seen along the way.
I’ve been experimenting with the Wan2.2 video model lately. It’s not quite up to snuff for generating videos of meaningful length, but it’s still pretty neat to be able to put a character portrait in and have a 5-second snippet of them just “being alive.” I think it’ll be a neat addition to having static portraits.
Aside from producer.ai, all of these tools are free. Though the WhisperX transcription program I use is a custom Python script, I’m not sure what would be a good solution for a non-programmer to spin up.
Edit: Downvoting me isn’t making any of these tools less useful.
Those poor players lol
They have every opportunity to tell me they’re not liking what I run. Turns out I know them better than you do.
He who has never tasted bread would be contented by porridge.
We’ve been playing together for ~20 years, since long before there were any AI tools.
Once again you’re making some wildly inaccurate assumptions.
You think I have them captive somehow? Your assumptions are getting weirder and weirder.
We all have other groups we play with too, this is just the “core” group that’s been together longest.
You are going to get downvoted, but you’re right. AI doesn’t need to be used for every part of the entire development process for it to be “made with the help of AI”. There are certain parts of the workflow that I’m sure is already being done regularly with AI, for example commenting code.
Mindlessly feeding prompts into chatgpt for the entirety of the core code or art would be terrible.
I haven’t been getting downvoted as much as I used to these days, at least. I think more people have started to actually experiment with AI and see what it’s good at, and are finding it to be not the Great Satan that popular opinion paints it as.
For sure, the popular opinion on reddit/Lemmy skews towards absolutely self-hosting everything they can, and multi-trillion dollar tech companies controlling AI skews the opinions of the technology negative. I have a BIL who runs self-hosted AI though (requiring 2 x 4090s in series for his use-case), so it can be done. The tech is only as shit as the user allows it to be (environmental concerns, obviously its pretty objectively shit)
I do much of my image work with local models, at least when it comes to trying to get something specific. All audio transcription is done with a local model, and a lot of the summarization and categorization of those transcripts is also local models.
The comment where I explained this all got downvoted too, though, so yeah. Still a lot of “AI=bad” regardless of self-hosted or not.
That’s… not what this is about?
The point of integrating AI into games is to provide further diversity within the game.
Think Skyrim. By default you’re limited to 3-4 discussion options, right? Imagine now, if you will, that you could just… type in anything, including emotional markers, and have the characters respond interactively to the statement and tone. No longer are you bound by limited dialogue in RPGs.
visual generative AI will just spice up the visuals - hopefully. Things like repetitive textures and such will disappear as the game generates brand new textures for each grid element. Or create tons of background characters without the need to specify them. The list goes on.
I dream of AI being used to generate cool, theme appropriate NPCs for an indie dev that doesn’t have an army of talented writers at their disposal.
But honestly let’s face it, that’s never what they’ll aim for. It’s all about not paying people, for these assholes. They’ll happily fire their talented writers of they can use AI instead, never once wondering who’s gonna feed the AI in the first place.
And so it is a matter of principle to say no to AI in general, because you know they’ll always pick the worst possible way to use it.You wish, this will be about money.
You have optimism. It could be used for good like you describe, but most likely will be used by EA to cut artists out, slash costs, make as much profit as possible and suffocate the company until the private equity owners move on to the next company.
No, that’s exactly what this is about. They came right out and said as much. It won’t work, but they’ll cause a lot of damage in the process of failing.
Which is a different article about a (somewhat) unrelated topic.
Using AI for development is already out there, and you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. As an engineer I’m already using it in my daily work for tons of things - I’ve built separate agents to do a number of things:
- read work tickets, collate resources, create a work plan, do the initial footwork (creating branches, moving tickets to the right states, creating Notion document with work plan and resources)
- read relevant changes in UI design documents and plan + execute changes (still needs some manual review but e.g. with Android Jetpack Compose, it makes 90-95% of the needed work and requires minimal touch-up)
- do structural work - boilerplates, etc.
- write unit and integration tests, and already working out a UI test automation agent
- do code reviews on changes, document them, and write appropriate commit messages
- do PR reviews - I still review them myself but an extra eye is always helpful
guess what, AI didn’t replace me, it just allowed me to focus on actually thinking up solutions instead of doing hours of boilerplate stuff.
AI isn’t the enemy in software development. Companies who think they can replace engineers with AI. Middle managers will sooner be on that date, as they were mostly useless anyway.
How do they reduce costs with AI if not by eliminating jobs?
By improving the cadence of projects.
A project costs X amount because of the standard template of pay per time unit Y multiplied by timeframe in time unit Z.
Simply said if you have 100 people working on the project, that costs 100Y per hour. If the project takes 6 months (approx. 960 hours), you multiply the two and get that your costs are 96000Y.
Now the two ways to reduce this is to either reduce the number of employees, with AI you can get rid of maybe 2/3, reducing the expenses to 32000Y…
Or since AI speeds up almost every workflow by about 8 to 10 times, you can keep all the people, but cut down project time from 6 months to about 2 months, which doesn’t just reduce the expenses by the same 2/3 but also increases potential profits for the same 6 month period by 200%, as instead of one product you’re releasing three.
Cutting jobs ain’t the only way to reduce costs with AI.
since AI speeds up almost every workflow by about 8 to 10 times
Citation fucking needed.
My own fucking experience. Which I’ve already explained in detail above.
Procedural generation with appropriate constraints and a connected game that stores and recalls what’s been created can do this far better than a repurposed LLM. It’s hard work on the front end but you have a much better idea of what the output will be vs. hoping the LLM “understands” and remembers the context as it goes.
Sorry but procedural generation will never give you the same result as a well tuned small LLM can.
Also there’s no “hoping”, LLM context preservation and dynamic memory can be easily fine-tuned even on micro models.
I agree that the results will be different, and certainly a very narrowly trained LLM for conversation could have some potentials if it has proper guardrails. So either way there’s a lot of prep beforehand to make sure the boundaries are very clear. Which would work better is debatable and depends on the application. I’ve played around with plenty of fine tuned models, and they will get off track contextually with enough data. LLMs and procedural generation have a lot in common, but the latter is far easier to manage predictable outputs because of how the probability is used to create them.
It would be interesting if NPCs could react believably to free form input from the player, but that seems unlikely to be reliable. I’m not sure how you’d map the text to in game actions.
Like, you could have the LLM respond with “ok I’ll let you have my horse if you leave in the morning, and solve the zombie problem” but it’s not trivial to make the game world respond to that. Not even counting it breaking out into “sorry as an LLM I can’t …”
I’ve seen prototypes of RPGs where you could freeform talk to NPCs and I pretty quickly lost enthusiasm for the idea after seeing it in action.
It didn’t feel like a DnD game where you’re maneuvering a social conflict with the DM or other players, it felt more like the social equivalent of jumping up on a table where an NPC couldn’t get to you and stabbing them in the face.
If I wanted to talk to NPCs at length I’d just type into a fucking chat bot. I play games to experience the developers story and vision, not endlessly prompt an npc.
I think your experience will be a common one for players.
Yes it is trivial.
LLM can already do tool calling, emotion metadata output and so on. It would take minimal effort for a well tuned model to also output things like facial expressions, body language, hand and body movements and so on.
The tool calling part might be doable (though I’ve personally struggled to get it working passably with local models), but if the goal is to tell a compelling story or create an interesting experience, especially if doing so in a very open ended way, that isn’t trivial. The only LLM based game I’ve personally played that seemed good was mostly on rails and partially scripted, most of them just aren’t very interesting to play, because the model doesn’t have a good idea where it’s going with anything and is often not very creative, the stuffy personality of the instruct model seems to infect the dialogue and apparent thought process of the characters. For a specific example I’d recommend watching streams of the game Suck Up, which has a genuinely cool concept and solid execution, but you can see people being frustrated running into its limitations as something to interact with creatively.
I’ve tried a couple times to start game projects involving LLMs, and get the feeling that there is a lot of exploration that needs to be done into what can be done well and where that intersects with what is actually fun. Kind of don’t expect EA to be the one to do that.
I don’t think it would be easy to map free form text to game behavior. Not just like “make the NPC smile” but complex behavior like “this NPC will now go to this location and take this action”. That seems like it would be very error prone at best.
How do you think most game scripting engines work?
Nowadays game engines don’t rely on strictly speaking hardcoded behaviour, but rather are themselves just a scripting environment to execute a specific format of code.
Skyrim is still the perfect example because it gives you the ability to literally do anything in the world, via a scripting language.
Instructing NPCs to behave in a specific way is also done through these scripts. And LLMs - especially coding fine-tuned ones which could be tied into the execution chain - can easily translate things like
<npc paces around>to specific instructions so the NPC walks up and down at a specific distance or in a circle or whatever you want it to do.You’re seriously over-estimating the work it takes on even crappy, but modern engines to get certain things to happen. Especially when it comes to things that are already dynamically scripted. Like NPCs.
LLM generated code is notoriously bad. Like, “call this function that doesn’t exist” is common. Maybe a more specialized model would do better, but I don’t think it would ever be completely reliable.
But even aside from that, it’s not going to be able to map the free form user input to behavior that isn’t already defined. If there’s nothing written to handle “stand on the table and make a speech”, or “climb over that wall” it’s not going to be able to make the NPC do that even if the player is telling them too.
But maybe you’re more right than I am. I don’t know. I don’t do game development. I find it hard to imagine it won’t frequently run into situations where natural language input demands stuff the engine doesn’t know how to do.
Alright I did read further and damn, you just keep going on being wrong, buddy!
Yes, you can fucking do “stand on the table and make a speech” work. You know how? By breaking it up into detailed steps (pun intended), something that LLMs are awesome at!
For example in this case the LLM could query the position and direction of the table compared to the NPC and do the following:
- plan a natural path between the two points (although the game engine most likely already has such a function)
- make the NPC follow that path
- upon path end, it will instruct the NPC to step onto the table via existing functions (Skyrim pretty much has all these base behaviours already coded, but the scripting engine should also be able to modify the skeleton rig of an NPC directly, which means the LLM can easily write it)
- then the script can initiate dialogue too.
I’ve asked Perplexity (not even one of the best coding agents out there, it’s mistake ratio is around 5%), and within seconds it spit out a full on script to identify the nearest table or desk, and start talking. You can take a look here. And while my Papyrus is a bit rusty, it does seem correct on even the third read-through - but that’s the fun part, one does not need trust the AI, as this script can be run through a compiler or even a validator (which let’s be honest is a stripped down compiler first stage) to verify it isn’t faulty, which the LLM can then interact with and iterate over the code based on the compiler feedback (which would point out errors).
now mind you this is the output of an internet-enabled, research oriented LLM that hasn’t been fine-tuned for Papyrus and Skyrim. With some work you could probably get a 0.5B local model that does only natural language to Papyrus translation, combined with a 4B LLM that does the context expansion (aka what you see in the Perplexity feed, my simple request being detailed step by step) and reiteration.
You’d also be surprised just how flexible game engines are. Especially freeroaming, RPG style engines. Devs are usually lazy so they don’t want to hardcore all the behaviours, so they create ways to make it simple for game designers to actually code those behaviours and share between units. For example, both a regular object (say, a chair) and a character type object (such as an NPC) will have a move() function that moves them from A to B, but latter will have extra calls in that function that ensure the humanoid character isn’t just sliding to the new position but taking steps as it moves, turns the right direction and so on. Once all these base behaviours are available, it’s super easy to put them together. This is precisely why we have so many high quality Skyrim mods (or in general for Bethesda games).
And again, code quality in LLMs has come a VERY long way. I’m a software engineer by trade, and I’d say somewhere between 80-90% of all the code I write is actually done by AI. I still oversee it, review what it does, direct it the right way when it does something silly, but those aren’t as minor functionalities as we’re talking here. I’ve had AI code a full on display driver for a microcontroller, with very specific restrictions, in about 4 hours (and I’d argue 2 of that was spent with running the driver and evaluating the result manually then identifying the issue and working out a solution with the LLM). In 4 hours I managed to do what otherwise would’ve taken me about a week.
Now imagine that the same thing only needs to do relatively small tasks, not figure out optimal data caching and updating strategies tied to active information delivery to the user with appropriate transformation into UI state holders.
Okay I won’t even read past the first paragraph because you’re so incredibly wrong that it hurts.
First generation LLMs were bad at writing long batches of code, today we’re on the fourth (or by some metric, fifth) generation.
I’ve trained LLM agents on massive codebases that resulted in <0.1% fault ratio on first pass. Besides, tool calling is a thing, but I guess if I started detailing how MCP servers work and how they can be utilised to ensure an LLM agents doesn’t do incorrect calls, you’d come up with another 2-3 year old argument that simply doesn’t have a foot to stand on today.
It’s very obvious in this thread that you have hands on experience and many others do not. 20+ years professional SWE here, a majority of it applied ML/big data/etc. LLMs are really bad at many things but specifically using them as a natural language layer over NPC interactions would be relatively easy and seems like a great use case honestly.
What a fucking surprise.
LOL Good thing I am going to continue my boycott of anything EA, I can’t wait to see how hard this is going to fail.
Who fucking asked for that? WHO??!!
They all went to the same Donald Trump business school.
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Wages are very expensive.
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Fire as many people as you can.
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Shareholders see number go up.
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The Saudis? 🤷♂️
They’re trying to cut costs to pay for the loans they took to make the acquisition
they should concentrate on disney ones.
