Baldur’s Gate 3 And Nier Automata Directors React To AI Hype

Some tech companies are running head first to embrace the hype around new large language model and generative AI tools. Shopify won’t hire new people unless they can prove AI can’t do the job. Duolingo is replacing all its contract workers with AI agents. What about game companies? Two veteran directors recently shared their takes on the emerging technology.

Baldur’s Gate 3 director and Larian Studios founder Sven Vincke told GameSpot, as part of a recent interview on the studio’s future, that he doesn’t think the AI race will upend gaming as much as some have warned. He noted that Larian already uses machine learning to speed up grunt work like polishing motion capture footage or voice editing, and said that he sees generative AI tools as potentially helpful for fast-tracking early prototyping when developers need to quickly see ideas put into practice in order to better evaluate them.

The studio is also apparently exploring using narrative AI tools to flag potential plot holes or inconsistencies as human writers create scripts, but Vincke doesn’t see a future in which AI tools are making finished products or replacing game developers.

“I don’t think you would have a competitive advantage if you do, because it’s gonna be what’s available to everybody—if the baseline goes up because generation is available to everybody? Fine, that’s a new reality that we’re in. But you’re still gonna wanna create something special on top of that, and I think that’s where teams like us will make the difference.

“I don’t think that people in my position that say ‘oh, we’ll replace everyone with AI’ are doing the right thing, they’re doing the wrong thing. But what I do think is we’re gonna jump forward in the kinds of games we make…we’re gonna be making our games differently, but to say that it’ll replace the craftsmanship? I think we’re very far from it.”

Yoko Taro has a much less optimistic view of the tech. The director behind the Nier games, infamous for wearing a giant creepy moon-shaped mask in public, recently told Famitsu that he thinks the wave of generative AI advancements will lead to a grim future for game designers in which many roles once held by humans are eliminated. “I think that AI will make all game creators unemployed,” he said, according to a translation by Automaton. “In 50 years, game creators may be treated like bards.”

The response was part of a roundtable discussion with fellow designers Kazutaka Kodaka, Kotaro Uchikoshi, and Jiro Ishii about the recently released visual novel strategy game The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, which Kodaka, known for his distinct work on Danganronpa, helped make. The group was asked if AI tools would eventually be able to mimic the styles of human creatives. Taro suggested the tools would actually help players bypass game makers altogether, at least in certain types of games like text-heavy adventures.

“I think that in the near future, we will move from an era where we have to imitate the style of our favorite creators to an era where we can have our favorite scenarios generated,” Yoko added. “AI will determine the preferences of users and skillfully generate route branchings that they would want to read, and the recommendation capabilities will continue to improve.”

A fittingly grim diagnosis from the designer of Nier Automata, an action-RPG about machines with some very human-like tendencies in a post-humanity dystopia. The game requires multiple playthroughs to explore its story in full, culminating in a twist so unique that it’s hard to imagine an AI prompt would ever come up with it on its own.

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