Why No AI Games?
franklantz.substack.com
Why No AI Games?
1–10 of 90 posts
Re: Why No AI Games?
#2Only because it is something i find fascinating:
> There are those Orcs in that one Lord of the Rings game who hold grudges against you.
Is referring to the nemesis system in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, and its an amazing set of interlocking procedural systems that do genuinely feel like its AI, but is really AI in the sense its always been used by games (the rules the games follow to govern NPCs+world) and not AI in the sense of modern LLMs or even other generative systems. This video is a great look at what it is and why its great IMO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm_AzK27mZY
I think a system like this could really work well with some modern LLM stuff, but it certainly feels magic without it.
Re: Why No AI Games?
#3And to separate my thoughts from the info blob:
i think the culture war point is also super true of the game design industry, not just the consumers, where the already ultra competitive nature of the work means that the creatives and the industry as a whole have taken a veeeery strong stance against genai. Thats a reckon, and i dont know if its good or bad.
It does feel a little counter to the march of progress, but in a medium where high effort can be enjoyed by many, im personally cool with artisinal handmade games.
Re: Why No AI Games?
#4Only because it is something i find fascinating: > There are those Orcs in that one Lord of the Rings game who hold grudges against you. Is referring to the nemesis system in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, and its an amazing set of interlocking procedural systems that do genuinely feel like its AI, but is really AI in the sense its always been used by games (the rules the games follow to govern NPC…
> I think a system like this could really work well
Too bad, it's patented! https://www.eurogamer.net/shadow-of-mordors-brilliant-nemesi...
Fuck software patents and every single person who has ever filed one.
Re: Why No AI Games?
#5> The video game audience has decided, almost unanimously, that they don’t want generative AI in their games.
Nah, it's just a very vocal minority making lots of noise. We're slowly starting to see saner minds prevail, with steam backtracking on the ban of aigen and so on. People don't care if the end result is good. And the "but muh art" is just virtue signalling. I've used this example before, for me "art" is the fact that I can have a horse as my ruler in EU, not the fact that the horse might be generated by a diffusion model. Art is always in the eye of the beholder, or something.
On a more general note, like with the question "where are all the good open source projects", things will come. We're still in the learning phase of this new shiny toy that we got. It's only been 3 years since the tech is readily available, and maybe 2 years since people can take offline models and run with them. Give it time.
In the meantime, I see a lot of help from agentic coding in game dev. I've been following a space rouguelite thingy on itch, the developer has been pumping updates every other day, and the game is pretty much ready in ~1month. Sure, some updates broke stuff, some things didn't make much sense, but the speed with which the dev could take the feedback and pump out an update is remarkable. Small projects are doing it today. Larger projects will probably do it tomorrow.
My guess is that there's a big chance that the next "big thing" in gameplay w/ AI being somehow used will come from a smaller team / single dev type of thing, and not the big labs. Something genre-defining like minecraft or tarkov.
Re: Why No AI Games?
#6I have had a great amount of fun prompting Claude with: “Lets play a choose your own adventure game. Give me a completely random scenario. I’ll be a xxxx.”
Re: Why No AI Games?
#7For games, interacting with an LLM is an improv experience. It’s a fractal that can be explored in any direction.
Video games have discrete, static goals that let a player focus on an objective. Compared to LLMs, it’s a passive experience.
People play games for all sorts of reasons (to relax, competition, to build something of their own, solve challenges).
I think this is a fundamentally different experience than what an LLM can offer.
That’s not to say LLMs can’t become a fun experience, but it’s going to take decades to develop a way to procure that experience. Look at how long it took dungeons and dragons, or any video game genre, to get to the level of polish it’s at today
Re: Why No AI Games?
#8They're are plenty of mods that inject AI into games, like Skyrim. Though in order for a game to have LLMs and scale to a shipping audience without a subscription, you would want to run them locally.
The real technical blocker is performance and voice synthesis. If voice synthesis was at parity with human actors, it would be worth it to battle the performance aspect for major studios. In text based games especially, taking time to generate enough text is just too slow to be convenient
Re: Why No AI Games?
#9The costs of interactive AI have interesting effects as the author points out. Much like the lack of variety in music models, 3D asset generation via AI has a long way to go, particularly as studios have no incentive to share their data. But I think AI assistance could at least make some marginal improvements. Take a procedural game like No Man's Sky. There are billions of possible worlds in the game. But, presumably because of team size and/or agile philosophy, they drop these rigid, nearly identical, items and buildings throughout those billions of planets. AI could at least conveniently empower some added incremental complexity (via Claude Code etc.) to their existing asset generation, which lends more believability to these planets. If studios were willing to partner and share data, incredible world generation models, which could be used exclusively as asset generators rather than real time world renderers initially, could be built and dramatically empower designers.
Re: Why No AI Games?
#10They're are plenty of mods that inject AI into games, like Skyrim. Though in order for a game to have LLMs and scale to a shipping audience without a subscription, you would want to run them locally. The real technical blocker is performance and voice synthesis. If voice synthesis was at parity with human actors, it would be worth it to battle the performance aspect for major studios. In text based games especially,…
Yeh there is a skyrim mod that lets you talk to any NPC and basically queries an LLM behind the scenes even with a screenshot of the scene so it can react to your clothing etc. if you insult it the LLM understands it dynamically and makes the NPC attack.
I mean thats not a new game concept but I definitely think that levels up the experience.