Stefan Brunk March 17, 2024 | 10:00 a.m
In recent years there has been repeated talk about artificial intelligence and, at least since the big debate in 2023, it has been clear that this type of technology will soon become an integral part of our everyday lives. Of course, this everyday life also includes the games that you play every day on your PC or console. Even if the points of contact are still limited so far, more and more developers will soon rely on the possibilities that come with artificial intelligence. Square Enix CEO Takashi Kiryu, among others, announced in January 2024 that he wanted to use this technology more to advance development work on the games.
Source: buffed Farcry 6: Even if the idea is scary at first, your games can noticeably benefit from the use of artificial intelligence.
But what does that mean for you as a player? While you probably won't notice much about the changes to the development processes, the use of artificial intelligence also offers numerous opportunities to noticeably improve your gaming experience. There will soon be features that were not yet conceivable and perhaps you will be able to try out completely new genres in the coming years. That's why in this article we want to talk about how the right use of AI can improve your games from a gamer's perspective. The great thing is that all of the ideas presented here are based on technologies that already exist, so we don't have to wander into the realm of fantasy.
Caution: Good AI vs. Bad AI
It should be said again that we are well aware of the negative sides of artificial intelligence. The danger of plagiarism, for example, is just as real as the restructuring of the working world of many developers, voice actors and artists. However, these and similar problems go hand in hand with every major upheaval in society and ultimately these points have already been thoroughly discussed by all conceivable sides in the past few months. That's why in this article we want to consciously focus on the positive sides and the possibilities of this new technology.
Your character can have a say!
The generation of realistic voices is probably one of the best-known games currently possible with AI and is often used, for example, for comedy or satirical political messages. You can find entertaining videos everywhere on YouTube in which songs are played with the voices of well-known politicians or Twitch streamers. The generators for this are easy to find and, conveniently, anyone can get started with them straight away.
The “Voice Over” add-on for World of Warcraft shows how something like this can improve a game. This made it possible to have the rather boring quest texts read out to you by an AI, which also spoke with a voice that was adapted to the respective character and situation. The result was excellent and brought significantly more life to the leveling process, which we otherwise already knew inside and out.
But how can this feature become useful in the future? Many of you are probably familiar with the following situation: Before you start a game, you have the opportunity to create your character in all shapes and colors in an extensive character generator. However, what often gets overlooked is the voice of your hero. Most of the time you don't have an option at all and when you do have a choice, it's limited to a few sounds. However, when the main character takes part in conversations set to music, you usually have no choice at all about what he should sound like.
Source: buffed Games like Fallout are a great example of how your character could benefit from different voices. The reasons for this are simple: With each additional voice, all of your character's conversations would have to be re-dubbed and recorded. This would not only mean enormous amounts of data, but also create a lot of unnecessary costs for voice actors that even a large studio cannot afford. In addition, this huge effort wouldn't even be relevant to the flow of the game in the end, since you can only choose one option at a time and then keep it for the entire game. So it's entirely understandable why this part of character creation has always been neglected.
With the help of AI voice generation, this problem would no longer exist in the future and you would be allowed to choose from 20 or maybe 30 different voices when creating your character. The spoken texts would then be generated directly by the AI during the game and thus realistically inserted into the conversations. With a little training of the AI, it would even be possible to have the main character speak in your own voice. This is just one example of how artificial intelligence can help overcome the limitations your games have previously had.
Random maps – finally good!
With the help of AI, randomly generated maps and game zones will soon feel more realistic and believable. Randomly generated dungeons are practically as old as computer games themselves and have always been a great way to keep games interesting even after playing through them several times. Nevertheless, the zones created in this way never felt particularly believable and were often just a means to an end to keep the player occupied a little longer with the search for treasure or the safe exit.
Source: buffed The random dungeons in games like Diablo 2 serve their purpose, but are completely illogical. The locations are often structured illogically (such as the dungeons in Path of Exile or Diablo 2), are often repeated (the tombs from Valheim immediately come to mind) or are puzzled together in a modular system of prefabricated rooms, as is the case in many Roguelikes is the case. It never feels particularly interesting and in terms of storytelling, atmosphere and believability it always falls far short of the dungeons that a developer has painstakingly designed by hand.
But how exactly will AI solve this problem? It's simple: Similar to image AI, such generators can also be trained to represent believable environments based on real models. Old mansions, abandoned factories, churches or eerie caves are always created with unpredictable elements, but still feel like places that could actually exist in reality.
Depending on the game, you would even be able to design your world yourself using your own prompts (i.e. specifications for the generator, such as “dark forest, haunted castle, night”). This can be interesting for all types of open world games and give you more control in game creation than would ever be possible with current random generators.