AI in big budget games is inevitable, say dev vets from Assassin's Creed and Everquest 2: 'Developers hate it … the money is still going to drive absolutely everybody to do it'
AI's a thorny subject, to say the least. The big issue with technology is that it advances in waves. There'll be a very long time where it feels like nothing's changing much at all, and then suddenly we're all saddled with something new to irreversibly change our lives.
The trouble with these sudden ramps is it takes a while for the law, social etiquette, and plain ol' common decency to catch up. Generative AI's been no different—it's created ripples in art, music, writing, coding, design, and by virtue of the fact all of those are part of it in some way: game development.
The latest two cents thrown into the ongoing debate comes via an interview from our friends over at Edge Magazine, who sat down with former Assassin's Creed lead producer Jade Raymond and Raph Koster, the former co-director of Everquest 2 co-director.
«AAA games have gone from taking teams of 50 people two years to make to now sometimes taking teams of hundreds of people more than ten years to make … [we believe] these technologies will eventually help game developers reverse that trend, and unlock more creativity from developers and players alike,» says Raymond as she goes over the R&D projects of her new professional home, Haven Studios.
It's true that the gulf between what game development used to be and what it is now—specifically in the big stonking budget department—has completely changed. What a studio can do has been rapidly overtaken by the expectations placed upon them and a market hostile to letting anyone take their dang time with anything, and it's led to all sorts of symptoms.
Cold-shoulder layoffs of even talented workers, big releases plagued with performance issues, histories of unjustifiable (yet somehow still common) crunch culture:
Read more on pcgamer.com
