AI-generated story and dialogue is not going to work, says Dragon Age creator David Gaider: 'A lot of effort is going to be wasted on this'
Procedural generation is a powerful tool for games. From Minecraft's endless worlds, to Borderlands' «87 bazillion» guns, to Shadow of Mordor's countless orc captains, a system that can create new, semi-randomised content on the fly can enormously extend replayability.
Inevitably, in this era of renewed interest in AI-driven generation, companies are looking at whether that idea can be pushed forward into new frontiers. Does the increased sophistication of chatbot ChatGPT, for example, suggest that dialogue and story in games could be procedurally generated too? According to David Gaider—the man who created the world and story of Dragon Age—the answer is a firm «no». And he knows because BioWare tried it.
Reacting to a Guardian article that asks the question «Could AI write super-intelligent video game characters?», Gaider tweeted: «Ah, yes. The dream of procedural content generation. Even BioWare went through several iterations of this: 'what if we didn't need every conversation to be bespoke?' Unlimited playtime with dialogue being procedurally created alongside procedural quests!» Based on when Gaider left the company, this work likely happened in or before 2016.
«Each time, the team collectively believed—believed down at their CORE—that this was possible. Just within reach. And each time we discovered that, even when the procedural lines were written by human hands, the end result once they were assembled was… lackluster. Soulless.»
He goes on to suggest that the core problem of any such system is that it can only create superficial content—it can make «something *shaped* like a quest… but the end result is no better than your typical 'bring me 20 beetle heads» MMO quest.'" In other words, without a human mind
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