Ancestors

Toot

Written by Richard Littler on 2025-01-27 at 09:14

Video game developers need to do something about the sense of isolation that players feel at the end of open-world, 3rd-person adventure games. With the main story over, the vast world, empty of side quests, challenges & characters, becomes a lonely place. Even characters with whom you collaborated so closely for weeks now distance themselves; they either fob you off "I can't talk right now, come back later", or they ignore you entirely, seemingly unaware of your presence. Tristitia post ludo?

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Descendants

Written by Richard Littler on 2025-01-27 at 09:15

And yes, I say this as someone who really should get out more.

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Written by acb on 2025-01-27 at 09:16

@Richard_Littler Less Assassin’s Creed, more Animal Crossing?

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Written by Tony Wells on 2025-01-27 at 17:41

@acb @Richard_Littler

YES! I'd just like to wander around a well rendered Ancient Egypt or Rome, looking at the sights and doing basic activities. Bonus if every other character is a cute animal.

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Written by jonathankoren™ on 2025-01-27 at 09:24

@Richard_Littler LLMs as sidequest / NPC generators.

The here’s a million stories in Liberty City. Let’s start telling them.

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Written by disky on 2025-01-27 at 10:38

@jonathankoren @Richard_Littler I hate AI for so many reasons, but this is what I came to say. If Cyberpunk 2077 had the ability to generate meaningful additional content, I'd probably never stop playing it.

I'm sure it will happen in the not-too-distant future. The concern I have, though, is that it will overtake the creative process of actual humans, which doesn't make much of a difference in a lot of AAA games because they're pretty braindead already, but it will do the same in games I like.

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Written by arclight on 2025-01-27 at 16:52

@disky00 @jonathankoren @Richard_Littler If done responsibly, I don't see it as a different form of procedural generation. Don't cook the planet, train models only on internal or public domain data or data you've licensed and paid for, and don't displace paid writers, artists, etc.

Imagine the replayability you'd have in LA Noire had they licensed the late 1940s, early 1950s Dragnet radio series and generated side mission from that corpus. Nothing dealing with the main plot, optional and basically forgetable missions that add some depth to an otherwise barren world*.

It's naïve to think this technique wouldn't immediately be used to replace artists and writers on core aspects of a game using unlicensed and uncredited training data. Small studios have dreams bigger than their budgets and large studios are beholden to investors so I can't see this working in practice.

• I would play the hell out of a game based on 1940s-1950s Dragnet scripts. LA Noire was such a disappointment, trying to be an edgy movie instead of an actual enjoyable game.

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Written by OliverUv on 2025-01-27 at 09:35

@Richard_Littler I agree that it's something that devs need to do something with. Not do something about. Not remove, or try to minimize, but perhaps embellish and make explicit.

If not for any other reason than to teach us that it's necessary to let go, in the end.

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