In a recent appearance on CNBC's morning business news program Squawk Box, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that in the future, game characters will likely be AI-trained on human-made scripts to have more natural conversations with players, instead of being limited to the scripted interactions that the developers had foreseen when they envisioned the game.
Historically, we had to script every single action that a character engaged in, and because it is interactive, think about how much scripting that is. Now, we're always going to need great writers, and we always will have plenty of scripting, but characters should be able to be trained on that very scripting that has been created by great writers and then interact in a way that feels more natural. I do see that happening.
Could that be one of the major new features that Rockstar Games has prepared for Grand Theft Auto VI, now officially one year away from its launch (provided there are no further delays)? Just two days ago, a new rumor surfaced about the game featuring extremely ambitious features that may remain unmatched for 'decades'.
Regardless of whether a similar feature makes it in GTA VI or not, the technology is absolutely here now. NVIDIA ACE and Inworld AI already offer something like that, where game characters can respond to natural conversations depending on what they should be aware of.
Zelnick's comment, however, comes at a time when there's a lot of tension on the usage of AI in the industry. Black Ops 7 was criticized for its 'AI slop' assets, while ARC Raiders came under fire for using generative AI to voice NPCs. On that subject, the developers behind the highly successful episodic adventure game Dispatch told GamesIndustry:
You're not going to be surprised because it's built on something you've heard before if you go the AI route. So, yeah, honestly, AI feels like a production solution, not a creative one. Maybe it's a creative one if you aren't creative.
Of course, when discussing AI, there's much more beyond just empowering game characters or voicing them. As part of his reply on CNBC, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick also highlighted that the company is using the technology to create 'efficiencies', which, however, won't reduce the headcount but will instead let them focus on creative tasks.
Table stakes are creating more efficiency in development and marketing, and every enterprise is trying to do that. We're trying to do that and we're seeing some good early results in creating efficiencies. By the way, efficiencies is not code for reducing employment, it's code for taking away mundane tasks so people can focus on more interesting, creative tasks.
That is, after all, the sentiment behind many other AI statements we covered recently, from Hideo Kojima to Ricard Pillosu. Perhaps, though, it was Dean Hall who, speaking to Wccftech, really got to the heart of the issue:
I think that regardless of what we do, AI is here. So really, then, it's about a matter of how do we deal with what the impact of that is.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
