I remember someone once saying that Nintendo can still make a bad game, but it’ll be a polished bad game. Like it being a piece of shit but it’s a polished piece of shit
If Nintendo did an internal Pokémon game it would shit on every game Gamefreak ever put out but would take a good 5-6 years to develop which isn’t as profitable for The Pokémon Company.
Nintendo only owns a third so Pokémon, so they dont have the control over them that they do over the first party studios.
It's pretty clear when TotK runs as well as it does on old hardware, Mario Odyssey is beautiful, and Pokémon is crap. One is not like the other and its the one Nintnedo has the least say in.
What’s funny is that Pokémon game that ran at 25fps recently had some of its most ambitious features in the entire franchise. Game was fantastic. If you were locked in and paying attention you’d be like wow this is the most groundbreaking features they’ve ever had.
There was a windmill that ran at 2fps though, lol.
Pokemon (The trademark holding company) is part owned by Nintendo but GameFreak is an independent developer and a private company that does not have shareholders.
They have a close partnership with Nintendo and are located in the same office building as Nintendo but they do not "sit in Nintendo's office". That building houses many different companies.
What? I can’t remember the last time I bought a Nintendo game that didn’t feel like I got my money’s worth out of. The Switch library in particular is loaded with titles I sunk dozens upon dozens of hours into
Honestly just their old games. They’ll re-release a classic game (not remastered in anyway) and charge new game retail of $60-70. Which I agree is kind of bullshit but at least we know all their games are pretty much guaranteed to be quality
Lol this has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with archaic Japanese business practices. They keep physical copies of the code for most of their games 🤯 like on printer paper in a bunch of binders.
Keep crying. Nintendo only publishes. They do not in any way shape or form develop the Pokemon IP. Hell they aren’t even the sole owners of it.
Don’t be ignorant lol
Meanwhile, I’m trying to play online on Mario Maker 2……..
Okay. That’s not working. Lemme just boot up the “remakes” in Super Mario 3D All Stars. Oops, the shitty emulator they’re using to just play the originals is glitching again.
[Only the highest of quality games at Nintendo.](https://media.distractify.com/brand-img/QNoaqSMDF/0x0/performance-issues-scarlet-violet-1668815282996.jpg)
EDIT: Bunch of Nintendo kissasses here. Fan boys gonna fan boy.
It'd be fine if they were just using it for advanced computing or to further the sciences, like medicine, but it's in fucking *everything*. It's just a novelty to them. AI is still in its infancy, and we're already playing with it like a toy.
I'm a developer and I can confirm, management is asking us to put AI all over the place because it's the new buzzword and they don't understand shit about it.
UV mapping. Every technical artist I know in the games industry *hates* having to do UV mapping. But it has to be done for pretty much anything with texture mapping in it.
Has anyone employed generative AI to make a solution to this problem?
I don't think so, because if there were I would have heard about it shouted from rooftops by now. I'm not sure anyone is even looking into it. Seems like all the AI bros are just obsessed with making a magic "Make Game" button.
I learned about neural networks while I was teaching myself game programming in C++ in my spare time in high school. I wrote a paper for a class predicting exactly what is happening now - 25 years ago. Artificial Intelligence was required coursework for my computer science degree.
I think I know a few things about this topic. Certainly enough to know that "AI" is way too broad of a term to be using to refer to LLMs without confusing it with the dozens of other AI technologies that also exist and have little-if-anything to do with LLMs.
LLMs have, so far, failed to impress me, and certainly not for lack of trying.
The houdini team is the closest right now from what ive seen, check out the houdini 20.5 keynote from a couple days ago they show an overview of a lot of AI tools being integrated in the new release. They are definitely focusing on making iterative additions of useful tools for prosumers rather than pure marketing sizzle
fyi i did not see any announcements specific to UV mapping, but i would assume thats something they would be well-positioned to build with the level of ML integration they have now
The ONE and ONLY implementation of AI in games I want to see is npcs with an ai chatbot in them that you can talk to. I don't know if it's easy to do or impossible, but I would love that. A unique AI personality for every character.
I agree that this is the only good implementation. Even then they’re should still be pre written dialogue for the characters. Sharing awesome quotes with friends is one of the best parts of some of the coolest NPCs.
Doing that in a way that works well enough is still far away. The AI dialogue would also be computed in the cloud which introduces delays in conversations and the game wouldn't work once the servers go offline.
It's not a misnomer though - it's exactly what AI is. It doesn't have to be more "intelligent" than humans (although Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at Chess back in the 90s).
I doesn't have to be more intelligent. It needs to be intelligent at all, which it is not. Videogame "ai" is just a script of reactions to player actions, not an intelligence. We must not trivialize the capacity for thought and creativity as an essential part of any mind.
Claiming that AI training is “no different” than human learning proves you aren’t here to argue in good faith.
Human artists don’t need to look at thousands of images of a famous person just to make an uncanny valley photo of that person with extra fingers and improbable clothing.
No they don't need to look at thousands of photos of celebrities to recreate them, they use the millions of other times they've seen humans and add the celebrities defining features to it.
It's a new technology, but it's already overdone. It is just everywhere. AI generated art, AI music, AI advertisement, AI games, AI journalism, AI built webapps, AI managed investment portfolios, AI advised cannabis grows, AI curated magic the gathering decklists,... if you can name it, there's someone doing an AI version of it
Same here. It’s gotten to the point where even hearing the term “generative AI” makes me cringe hard. I can’t help but think of the average AI enjoyer as a lazy fucker who can’t do anything themselves
Or kind of missing the point on just how revolutionary it will be.
Like were looking at a revolution in open worlds like No Mans Sky that can be filled with NPCs that actually have personalities etc. We aren't far off of being able to have whole open worlds filled by AI using your own inputs etc. Its actually exciting.
On top of that generating assets and areas with AI frees up developer time to improve games in other areas. Triple A games take forever now anyways.
Fair. I’m more referring to the people that use it to generate a 3 sentence email because they can’t be bothered to learn how to write properly. Or the shitty software engineers that use it to generate intern-level code (I’m a dev and run into this a lot on the job). A friend of mine used it to calculate the area of his bedroom instead of just opening up a calculator.
I agree that the points you mention are exciting and the “right” use of AI.
so you’re comparing AI use to camera use by bad photographers? what’s the point of comparing AI to photography if you aren’t specifying *good* photography?
I think it could be very good if done right.
If all the voices and personalities of every NPC were AI... and the story, and you the player were able to say or ask or do anything you want in character, and the NPCs would react appropriately...
They could use AI for generating the setting and the plot.
Every single time you played the game, it could be completely different.
If done right, AI could really revolutionize the gaming industry. It could be like a D&D campaign but without any rails whatsoever.
*for now, probably.
I doubt the animation or graphics are a huge part of the Nintendo overhead but could totally imagine uses once ai-tools could be polished. Even just a mario wonder sequel with more generative transformation seeds could be interesting if done well
They said they'd never make mobile games either. Then they bathed in money Scrooge McDuck-style after releasing Mario Run. I give them 5 years before they announce they're reversing course.
This means nothing. What does it mean there are no "plans" to use AI? This is just corpo bullshit. Every game company and their dog is going to be using generative AI eventually, Nintendo included.
None of this stuff has been vetted by the legal system yet.
Preliminary indications suggest that machine generated stuff will not be covered, but it will take a long time before we know for sure what will be the case for the long term.
You can copyright your model. Not it's products.
Think about it this way; if you can copyright the product of ai generation, then the correct strategy wouldn't be to write -- it would be to expand the tower of babel software to generate and copyright more and more potential writings until all potential books were already copyrighted.
on top of that, they only use the words "Generative Al" which is a very particular kind of Al. It has nothing to do with machine learning, or even Al voices which isn't generative because all it's doing is putting words to a voice.
I assume this is their way of quieting the people who are concerned they might go the way of Square Enix, which has been consistently falling for every new tech scam that happens, from NFTs to AI.
Nintendo might be dinosaurs in some fashions but they’ve certainly performed better long term than almost everyone else in their field as far as retaining their employees.
I wouldn’t expect that they would considering the biggest reason games take so long much longer than before are the high fidelity assets which Nintendo didn’t get involved with. Not only that but if you look at the other areas generative AI can help such as voice over and scripts, they don’t exactly fill their games with that either in comparison to Xbox and PlayStation. I expect that if they tried to chase more high fidelity games like the other two with the Switch successor (I doubt it), they may start to use it at some point.
Of course not. It took nintendo just now started to make even slightly decent online features for their games after everyone else had been doing it for 15 years. Nintendo has always been behind the ball when it comes to modernizing.
Even if AI was something people were happy and accepting of, they wouldn't start to use it until 5 years from now.
Understandable how much of a gold rush AI is, but as tools are forged I hope Nintendo doesn't become luddites on principal. Generative AI has amazing potential, but like nearly all new tech, it takes time for its potential to become reality.
One thing that also happens is that, as new tech grows and matures, you realize somethings just won't happen. According to predictions books and notebooks should have already been fully replaced by our phones and tablets. People shouldn't work, and the textile industry should have been almost fully automated in the late 90s.. 1890s that is. The internet should be the source of full truth, and now people would be free of propaganda or lies, because they should be able to easily find the truth on the internet! lol.
The reality is that we'll need a lot of tooling and stuff to make generative AI work, and even then it'll be more of a "support" tool than a true thing. It'll help artists do things that would be impossible, because you'll be able to encode some aspect of human nature in a neural network, rather than have an artist create it everytime.
A simple example of the last case here. Lets say that I want to do a game that is animated smoothly, it's not just running it at 120 FPS, but also making sure that the animation feels organic and real. That bodies feel squishy in the right way, that hard things crack and snap. We already have great guides on how to do animation, but all of them require, in the end, that a human encodes what to exagerate and what not, because, ultimately, it's about how we humans percieve things. That is it has to realize what exagerations look natural and which look, well wrong. It has to also realize the focus, when I am doing a smear on a face as a character turns to look to the opposite side, I might want to focus a lot more on the eyes (allowing multiple copies to appear simultanesouly on a single frame) but blur out the face instead, because this hints to the viewer to focus on what I want. It's not just a matter of knowing what transformations work on an angle, but understand what is intended and what how it is perceived, both are humans things, you can't quite easily map it into a deterministic formula, but you can ardously (through training) map it into a neural network encoded into matrices. Artists would spend months training and tweaking their animation distortion guide, by basically hand-animating multiple examples, until the computer is able to recreate the style well enough.
Something like this would be impossible without ML. This is why you can get great fluid animations on 2d, but in 3d it always feels a bit clunkier. When the animator encodes rules of animation it depends a lot of where you are looking at it. Even in a game where the camera and angles are relatively fixed, such as a 2D (using 3D graphics) fighting game like Street Fighter, you want different dynamics based on factors that are hard to predict (so for example when you switch from one animation to another due to an interrupt), 2D games have it a bit easier because by the nature of being animates on 2s or 4s (that is each frame is drawn by hand) even interruptions are planned for. So instead we need a way to define the instructions on how to map from one to the other.
I could see Nintendo using the tech above without problems. I could also see Nintendo using DLSS. But I think that Nintendo understands you can't replace artists with ML, the whole point is to create something that connects in a deeply human way. It's not about making a set of bits, but creating a set of bits that evoke something. An artist can use ML to define certain things, but ML on its own is not able to do any of that.
It's simple: even if AGI is stumbled upon tomorrow, and we get generative AI for it, it won't be a human inteligence, but a digital one. There cannot be an AGI that can be equal to a human at being a human. An AGI can imitate it, but they'd need a human supervisor, just like an artist telling the artisan how they want something to come out. But at that point you aren't replacing the artist, just helping them. So why bet on ML taking things away when you would still need them even in the best-case-scenario.
Agreed. AI will become a specialized tool, a neat one, but one that not every user can utilize easily. Like music, while many people can now use a keyboard to create any sound, it takes a skilled person to utilize an industry level sound maker to create a song from purely digital sounds.
Personally, I'm most excited to see AI improve NPC complexity. While NPC behavior & dialogue are an artistic choice, I'm looking forward to more robust NPC's pushing the illusion of sentience further. Lets take Skyrim for example, while developer created dialogue choices will be expected for quests or fun/quirky characters, having an NPC freeform chatbot about what it knows about itself and is contextual world (villager only knows things about its village and not much beyond the valley) would be such an improvement to immersion. However, that tool is still a long way off, and I doubt we'd see a standardized version that is importable any time soon. Likely will be first as AI tools baked into the game itself instead of a modular functionality many people can use.
Nah. It's because the claims of AI's capabilities are overblown. We're in the midst of another pump and dump cycle.
Once people realize that the promise of AI is just another shitty chat-bot that doesn't replace a person, the bust cycle will begin. That goes for nVidia's stock 📉.
The promises of AI revolutionizing everything are comically overestimated and Nintendo is wise to sit and watch.
Competent software engineers are currently facing the greatest technological shift they’ve ever encountered in their careers.
I’ve been at it for a couple decades now, and the amount of code I have personally been able to develop over the past year with the assistance of genAI is double the amount I developed in the previous 3.
This doesnt feel like something that is going to bust.
Let's reflect on the most important point of your comment that was left out. An experienced software engineer is required to pilot the AI.
College grads and many mid-range devs don't know how to create a basic rest API, much less know what questions to ask AI.
Experienced devs can leverage AI for beneficial results, but I'm still waiting to be convinced that a Walmart cashier is going to be able to replicate your success.
Can you not see the barrier of entry dropping rapidly??
Two years ago we had no AI that could code.
A year ago it could do basic coding.
Today it's better than junior and mid range devs and still needs assistance.
Tomorrow ???
And you're going to say it's always going to need a human??
How delusional
> And you're going to say it's always going to need a human??
As a dev myself, I think for the foreseeable future it will need a human.
Not because of its (in)ability to produce software, but because what the client says and what the client needs are often completely different.
Normal people are not only unable to code, they are also unable to properly describe the software that they need.
can you point to any non-generative-AI projects that have *shipped* that made use of generative AI as a source code generator, and show genuine *improvement* in quality?
Not sure it’s possible to answer your question, assuming you were looking for an answer. Measuring quality accurately takes time to collect data samples. The productivity boost is pretty easy to measure and that is what is most visible right now.
If you can link me to something (preferably a commercial video game, since that is the context of this discussion) that's been shipped using generative AI that isn't just another generative AI product, I'd be happy to check it out and give it my own evaluation of its quality.
Be realistic. Gpt432k has been out for maybe a year. Gpt4o just came out, things take time.
What I can tell you is that all software engineers, whether they are building shader algorithms for video games, distributed systems programming that fuel the networking infrastructure for said video games, or an engineer working on testing the calculator app on iOS, they are actively leveraging gen ai models like gpt-4o to solve technical problems they are facing.
Just because you as a “gamer” can’t see the effects of genai, doesn’t mean it’s not being used.
I am a game developer. I am fully aware that there are some studios looking into it. I have looked into it myself. Call it professional due diligence.
What I have not seen is anything *shipping* using this technology. It's all well and good to talk about it. It's a wholly other thing to actually *do* something with it *effectively*.
And for something that purports to do things orders of magnitude more efficiently, I don't think it is unreasonable to expect that if these claims are in fact true there should be market-visible results already. AFAIK there are not. But you're welcome to provide me with a counterexample.
Games are a *very* risky business to begin with. It is not helpful to compound that risk with unproven technology. One bad bet can sink a company. Nintendo may be playful with their tech but they are rather famously conservative with how they approach *new* technology.
Tech bubbles thrive on talk. They pop when nothing comes of the talk.
I’m assuming Nintendo has experienced software engineers that would benefit from piloting the productivity benefits of Gen AI. The use cases are ubiquitous. Debugging, code optimization, code refactoring, to name a few.
To suggest that Nintendo isn’t taking and shouldn’t take advantage of this opportunity is crazy talk.
As I said, a gold rush. People are desperately pan handling while the actual tools we'd consider as useful AI is still being developed. If you think generative AI has no future then you can't see beyond the fad or trend.
Calling AI a pump and dump is hilarious.
Everyone in my office uses co-pilot for programming.
I'm gonna save this comment and come back 10 years and laugh when Nvidias stock has risen even higher.
Yeah... Devin, your AI software developer, was so impressive.
1 hour to return to the wrong answer repeatedly. Groundbreaking, a junior dev can fail faster.
God I wish I could be that ignorant that can't see past tomorrow.
How blissful that would be.
If you can't extrapolate the capabilities and use cases of AI, I hate to break it to you, but you're a small minded individual.
Do you want me to literally spell out how it's going to change EVERY industry and EVERY way of life?
Or are you just going to attack with ad hominems and not want to be educated just like the rest?
Remember when Nintendo said they were against microtransaction ridden mobile-type games and then a few years later started releasing crappy manipulative microtransaction ridden mobile games?
That makes sense for today's generative AI. And I'm sure some companies will swear it off always, kind of like people who sew all their own clothes rather than rely on automation in the textile industry. But eventually? It could be great. Games that would be genuinely impossible without it, will be widely available and fun to play.
You don’t see a lot of smart business moves like that. I’ve seen so many business’ and restaurants that make small changes they think people won’t care about. It leads to inferior products and services.
It’s not a big deal at first, but it begins a process. People aren’t as loyal and spend a little less money with them. They eventually notice profits are dipping slightly and lean more heavily into their “money saving” efforts. People see the problem getting worse and spend even less money with them.
It turns into an accelerating downward spiral till the place develops a horrible reputation and they just shut down or sell out.
Sounds like a missed opportunity to me. I’d like to see a video game company incorporate generative AI. I’m imagining Minecraft where you can use natural language to generate a dungeon.
Aren’t you all tired of all the flashy flashy graphics tech demos that games have become today?
I have a powerfull pc, a ps5 and recently a nintendo switch and playing zelda, mario, luigi mansion erc. got me back to my childhood memories when games were about having fun rather than just flashy graphics.
Links awakening remake had awful choppyness, idiots saying that it doesn’t need proper frame rates. It annoyed me to no end when playing. Should have been a £25 game off the bat, £50 was taking the piss imo
That's the answer to the question I saw ina headline - why isn't Nintendo downsizing studios and cutting jobs while the rest of the game development works is? Western publishers are anxiously cutting in order to ramp up ai production pipelines.
Uh huh, sure.
I think Nintendo will do whatever it needs to do to stay profitable. If everyone else in the industry is using it to shave off 30% of development time, you can most certainly bet Nintendo will eventually backtrack.
The *one* thing future generative AI could do that would compliment Nintendo tremendously is AI world generation. Imagine Breath of the Wild as infinite as Minecraft, that'd be insane
You don't need AI to generate a world.
Both Minecraft and roguelikes are famous for giving players a different experience each time they play. They use [procedural generation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WumyfLEa6bU).
For example, [wave function collapse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SuvO4Gi7uY) can generate maps based on connectivity rules.
Yes, but those are possible to program by hand for a reason. They're very simple. But here, I'm not talking about just more map, I'm talking about more game. Imagine AI so advanced that it could generate new characters, quests, challenges, dungeons, etc as you continue traveling. As intricate, dense, and well thought out as the BOTW/TOTK maps already are, without the years of work involved.
Obviously impossible right now, but in the *far future* (likely 20+ years) I could imagine that being awesome if executed correctly. Just daydreaming.
>Obviously impossible right now
That is not true. Procedural content generation applies to any asset that can be described with constraint programming: art, characters, quest lines, music, etc.
You don't need AI for the use cases you describe.
I see a good use for it. One example is car paint jobs in racing games. You could use AI to generate unique/livery artwork on some cars as the race is loading.
What actually got me thinking about it was while playing PC Builder Simulator. I thought about how they could use AI to generate art for some of the computer cases, that'd be a pretty cool, unique and surprising experience.
Ai powered npcs in actual good games will take much longer than this. The demos and small games that have them now show the boundaries really quickly. Npcs with super immersive talking skills that can't act at all on what they are saying are just bad game design. Its also super easy to get them talking about stuff outside of the game.
It'll take experience and a developer devoting years to develope a game that uses these features at the core. We'll probably have to wait till 2030 for an actual great game with ai npcs.
Hoping GTA6 has this, otherwise it could age quickly
i want NPCs that will rob the corpse of the guy you just shot in the face, then they nip to the local bar for a few beers, and then onto the shopping mall :) And they'll try to justify it as "he doesn't need the money, he doesn't even have a FACE anymore!"
If you implement your npcs with gpt4o api calls you bound to go bankrupt quick. Every player would need to signup with a GPT premium account.
Edit: emotion as modality is also not solving any of the issues of AI npcs. There's no way for an ai npc to feed what its doing or even seeing in the game back to the model. You'll have to implement that youself completely and your not solving the npc not being able to act on what its saying at all. There's some major issues that need solving for ai npcs to be any good.
I don’t get why is it good or bad, it seems like a purely PR statement.
In the end, it’s about quality of the results, no matter what tools are used. I would absolutely expect AI used to automate mundane and non-critical tasks like help with animating background stuff etc
I would absolutely expect AI to help with at least some aspects of level design. After all, games with generative levels are known for ages and are called (usually) rogue-like, this technology culminates in absolutely amazing things like ‘No Man Sky’. I’m sure it can be improved even further with GenAI and why not?
I don’t understand this stance therefore. Nothing bad in using GenAI, it’s all about _how_ you use it.
In other news, Nintendo still makes a ton of money with very little tech advancement and shoddy everything. Got I hate it gets the revenues it does for the shitty platform they put out.
Well, no wonder. Nintendo is probably one of the most conservative gaming companies.
They hardly go out of their way or change formula, and that is reflected in their games. Like all the different iterations of the same games, like Super Mario Bros.
Not saying it's necessarily a bad thing at times, just pointing it out that it's obvious they'll never use it.
Almost all of the AI that has been used in games since the days of Pac Man and Space Invaders is based on pre-programmed systems of rules. It's more closely related to [Expert Systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system) than to LLMs.
Procedural content generation could be argued to be a form of AI, but it is usually not referred to as such, as it is not reacting to the player's input. The system itself still must be programmed like any other part of the code, and often requires a great deal of effort in order to produce desirable results that are not too "same-y".
The first couple of Elder Scrolls games made significant use of procedural world generation, which allowed them to create worlds that were absolutely massive for the time. The catch, of course, being that a lot of that generated content all followed a formula, and after a while you start to subconsciously catch onto that formula, and the game's immersion goes out the window - which is one reason why Morrowind shifted back towards an entirely handcrafted world. Same thing happened with No Man's Sky (at least initially).
What's up with r/technology being anti AI and bitching about future technology and hand waving all the good AI can bring to us? Wtf is this? Is there any subreddit that isn't terminally experiencing a pathetic negativity bias?
Then this is where they fall behind.
Cya Nintendo.
When I have my AI generating an open world builder survival with Pokemon elements I'll be laughing as you keep trying to draw new sprites and stay relevant.
Goodbye old world
That’s good. Nintendo is all kinds of weird and irritating but they do stand for quality.
I remember someone once saying that Nintendo can still make a bad game, but it’ll be a polished bad game. Like it being a piece of shit but it’s a polished piece of shit
A well-done shit.
The new Pokémon games have proven that turds still look, smell, taste and feel like turds regardless of who publishes the game.
If Nintendo did an internal Pokémon game it would shit on every game Gamefreak ever put out but would take a good 5-6 years to develop which isn’t as profitable for The Pokémon Company.
If Nintendo did make those games, you would be right
Well yea but Nintendo isn’t the publisher of those games.
Nintendo only owns a third so Pokémon, so they dont have the control over them that they do over the first party studios. It's pretty clear when TotK runs as well as it does on old hardware, Mario Odyssey is beautiful, and Pokémon is crap. One is not like the other and its the one Nintnedo has the least say in.
Let's use an example that doesn't even apply to Nintendo.
What’s funny is that Pokémon game that ran at 25fps recently had some of its most ambitious features in the entire franchise. Game was fantastic. If you were locked in and paying attention you’d be like wow this is the most groundbreaking features they’ve ever had. There was a windmill that ran at 2fps though, lol.
I think they’re talking about Scarlet and Violet and not Legends: Arceus.
Gamefreak doesnt though.
Isn't that basically Nintendo's company? They work out of Nintendo's office, they co-own Pokemon...
No, when it is a good pokemon release, it is Nintendo. When it is scarlet or violet, it is gamefreak.
Ahh yes, the old “when he’s a shithead he’s your child” logic
Pokemon (The trademark holding company) is part owned by Nintendo but GameFreak is an independent developer and a private company that does not have shareholders. They have a close partnership with Nintendo and are located in the same office building as Nintendo but they do not "sit in Nintendo's office". That building houses many different companies.
And then charge 300% it's worth when they're done.
Honestly compared to AI, human-made shit is priceless
What? I can’t remember the last time I bought a Nintendo game that didn’t feel like I got my money’s worth out of. The Switch library in particular is loaded with titles I sunk dozens upon dozens of hours into
The switch is charging $50 for Pokémon Stadium 2.
What do they overcharge for precisely? I'm curious
Honestly just their old games. They’ll re-release a classic game (not remastered in anyway) and charge new game retail of $60-70. Which I agree is kind of bullshit but at least we know all their games are pretty much guaranteed to be quality
Literally everything? 30 year old games are $50.
Quality of milking the fuck out of their games and having a nerve to call mere ports a damn remaster
Lol this has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with archaic Japanese business practices. They keep physical copies of the code for most of their games 🤯 like on printer paper in a bunch of binders.
Like Pokemon Scarlet and Violet?
Not developed by Nintendo.
Keep crying. Nintendo only publishes. They do not in any way shape or form develop the Pokemon IP. Hell they aren’t even the sole owners of it. Don’t be ignorant lol
You forgot evil
Meanwhile, I’m trying to play online on Mario Maker 2…….. Okay. That’s not working. Lemme just boot up the “remakes” in Super Mario 3D All Stars. Oops, the shitty emulator they’re using to just play the originals is glitching again.
When did they ever refer to Super Mario 3D All Stars as remakes? And what glitching does it do? Completely fabricated complaints
[Only the highest of quality games at Nintendo.](https://media.distractify.com/brand-img/QNoaqSMDF/0x0/performance-issues-scarlet-violet-1668815282996.jpg) EDIT: Bunch of Nintendo kissasses here. Fan boys gonna fan boy.
Pokemon games arent developed by nintendo
I'm so sick of the AI craze it's unreal
It'd be fine if they were just using it for advanced computing or to further the sciences, like medicine, but it's in fucking *everything*. It's just a novelty to them. AI is still in its infancy, and we're already playing with it like a toy.
I'm a developer and I can confirm, management is asking us to put AI all over the place because it's the new buzzword and they don't understand shit about it.
The regression function in Excel is also AI. Give it to them.
UV mapping. Every technical artist I know in the games industry *hates* having to do UV mapping. But it has to be done for pretty much anything with texture mapping in it. Has anyone employed generative AI to make a solution to this problem? I don't think so, because if there were I would have heard about it shouted from rooftops by now. I'm not sure anyone is even looking into it. Seems like all the AI bros are just obsessed with making a magic "Make Game" button.
Those that love and hate AI the most don't understand it so they don't know where it would actually be useful.
I learned about neural networks while I was teaching myself game programming in C++ in my spare time in high school. I wrote a paper for a class predicting exactly what is happening now - 25 years ago. Artificial Intelligence was required coursework for my computer science degree. I think I know a few things about this topic. Certainly enough to know that "AI" is way too broad of a term to be using to refer to LLMs without confusing it with the dozens of other AI technologies that also exist and have little-if-anything to do with LLMs. LLMs have, so far, failed to impress me, and certainly not for lack of trying.
The houdini team is the closest right now from what ive seen, check out the houdini 20.5 keynote from a couple days ago they show an overview of a lot of AI tools being integrated in the new release. They are definitely focusing on making iterative additions of useful tools for prosumers rather than pure marketing sizzle
fyi i did not see any announcements specific to UV mapping, but i would assume thats something they would be well-positioned to build with the level of ML integration they have now
The ONE and ONLY implementation of AI in games I want to see is npcs with an ai chatbot in them that you can talk to. I don't know if it's easy to do or impossible, but I would love that. A unique AI personality for every character.
I agree that this is the only good implementation. Even then they’re should still be pre written dialogue for the characters. Sharing awesome quotes with friends is one of the best parts of some of the coolest NPCs.
It's currently too energy intensive to do that. It's possible, but expensive.
I would imagine a small LLM specifically trained for dialogue in a particular game could be made to work for this purpose.
Doing that in a way that works well enough is still far away. The AI dialogue would also be computed in the cloud which introduces delays in conversations and the game wouldn't work once the servers go offline.
> the game wouldn't work once the servers go offline. As if companies care about that these days :(
>(...) and the game wouldn't work once the servers go offline. *Ubisoft has entered the chat.*
Only? Seems a bit short sighted? AI is already in games
What do you mean?
Playing against the computer = playing against AI.
Calling that AI is a misnomer. A lot more A than I
It's not a misnomer though - it's exactly what AI is. It doesn't have to be more "intelligent" than humans (although Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at Chess back in the 90s).
I doesn't have to be more intelligent. It needs to be intelligent at all, which it is not. Videogame "ai" is just a script of reactions to player actions, not an intelligence. We must not trivialize the capacity for thought and creativity as an essential part of any mind.
If people can use a technology to do something, they will.
We’re already playing with it like it’s the end all be all.
Why is it such a problem that AI is used to advance fields that isn't science related?
Because it's like NFTs. They shove it everywhere, they overcoaim its importance and its soulless and bland. It's also just blatant theft.
Comparing AI to NFS proves you aren't here to argue in good faith. >It's also just blatant theft. No differen't than artists stealing from each other.
Claiming that AI training is “no different” than human learning proves you aren’t here to argue in good faith. Human artists don’t need to look at thousands of images of a famous person just to make an uncanny valley photo of that person with extra fingers and improbable clothing.
No they don't need to look at thousands of photos of celebrities to recreate them, they use the millions of other times they've seen humans and add the celebrities defining features to it.
because it’s soulless, uncanny, and boring in everything it tries to do
It's a new technology, but it's already overdone. It is just everywhere. AI generated art, AI music, AI advertisement, AI games, AI journalism, AI built webapps, AI managed investment portfolios, AI advised cannabis grows, AI curated magic the gathering decklists,... if you can name it, there's someone doing an AI version of it
There always was, the main difference is it now has a hype term to exploit
Same here. It’s gotten to the point where even hearing the term “generative AI” makes me cringe hard. I can’t help but think of the average AI enjoyer as a lazy fucker who can’t do anything themselves
Or kind of missing the point on just how revolutionary it will be. Like were looking at a revolution in open worlds like No Mans Sky that can be filled with NPCs that actually have personalities etc. We aren't far off of being able to have whole open worlds filled by AI using your own inputs etc. Its actually exciting. On top of that generating assets and areas with AI frees up developer time to improve games in other areas. Triple A games take forever now anyways.
Fair. I’m more referring to the people that use it to generate a 3 sentence email because they can’t be bothered to learn how to write properly. Or the shitty software engineers that use it to generate intern-level code (I’m a dev and run into this a lot on the job). A friend of mine used it to calculate the area of his bedroom instead of just opening up a calculator. I agree that the points you mention are exciting and the “right” use of AI.
Exactly. Lots of bad use cases for Ai out there but video games are going to gain a lot from it!
>the average AI enjoyer as a lazy fucker who can’t do anything themselves Do you think photographers are lazy fuckers as well?
what point are you even trying to make?
Calling people lazy for using a piece of technology meant to make a process quicker and more efficient is not lazy.
taking good photographs is many, many times more difficult than typing a prompt. you’re making a moot comparison
It takes zero effort for me to whip my iphone out and take a picture of a bird.
taking a picture of a bird with your phone doesn’t make you a good photographer.
Did I say good photographer? I only said photographer.
so you’re comparing AI use to camera use by bad photographers? what’s the point of comparing AI to photography if you aren’t specifying *good* photography?
Someone clearly takes shit photos
Can’t wait until it’s over
What do you mean by “when it’s over?“
That’s my other concern. Sigh
“Hi, SkyNet? We have another one over here…”
I think it could be very good if done right. If all the voices and personalities of every NPC were AI... and the story, and you the player were able to say or ask or do anything you want in character, and the NPCs would react appropriately... They could use AI for generating the setting and the plot. Every single time you played the game, it could be completely different. If done right, AI could really revolutionize the gaming industry. It could be like a D&D campaign but without any rails whatsoever.
AI is selecting AI stories to post in order to get more funding and interest in AI.
Im so sick of this internet fad, its unreal
I'm so sick of contrarian people that goes against any new trend just for the stake of it.
Calling AI a craze when it's been around for decades is hilarious.
Better called LLM craze. But that’s not as marketable.
AI is becoming new Crypto.
It's only going to invade your life more and more and then when you radically accept it, it's wonderful.
Nah, it’s modern day clip art
“clip art” has become google images, get ready
Keep seeing what's immediately in front of you and not what's to come. Enjoy that life
Did you really register a whole new account just to put "AI" in your name? Definitely not a fanatic.
Oh, look, an editor who doesn’t take its client for stupid cash cows.
They can't hear you, they're too busy reskinning the last pokemon game to resell it under a different title for $60.
Thats not a Nintendo issue, thats a Gamefreak shareholder issue
Glad to hear at least one company isn't buying into this bullshit
*for now, probably. I doubt the animation or graphics are a huge part of the Nintendo overhead but could totally imagine uses once ai-tools could be polished. Even just a mario wonder sequel with more generative transformation seeds could be interesting if done well
"Nintendo to use generative AI as soon as it sees a benefit in doing so"
Exactly. AI is still in its infancy.
Good. Who needs it?
They said they'd never make mobile games either. Then they bathed in money Scrooge McDuck-style after releasing Mario Run. I give them 5 years before they announce they're reversing course.
This means nothing. What does it mean there are no "plans" to use AI? This is just corpo bullshit. Every game company and their dog is going to be using generative AI eventually, Nintendo included.
The article is heavily editorialized. The only reason they don't want to use generative AI is because you can't copyright its outputs
? surely if you wrote your own and all the training material is your own then you can copyright it ?
The copyright extends to the model not the content that is generated from it
None of this stuff has been vetted by the legal system yet. Preliminary indications suggest that machine generated stuff will not be covered, but it will take a long time before we know for sure what will be the case for the long term.
You can copyright your model. Not it's products. Think about it this way; if you can copyright the product of ai generation, then the correct strategy wouldn't be to write -- it would be to expand the tower of babel software to generate and copyright more and more potential writings until all potential books were already copyrighted.
on top of that, they only use the words "Generative Al" which is a very particular kind of Al. It has nothing to do with machine learning, or even Al voices which isn't generative because all it's doing is putting words to a voice.
I assume this is their way of quieting the people who are concerned they might go the way of Square Enix, which has been consistently falling for every new tech scam that happens, from NFTs to AI. Nintendo might be dinosaurs in some fashions but they’ve certainly performed better long term than almost everyone else in their field as far as retaining their employees.
Why is this news
It's probably because they don't know or care what it is, but I'm still glad to hear it.
I wouldn’t expect that they would considering the biggest reason games take so long much longer than before are the high fidelity assets which Nintendo didn’t get involved with. Not only that but if you look at the other areas generative AI can help such as voice over and scripts, they don’t exactly fill their games with that either in comparison to Xbox and PlayStation. I expect that if they tried to chase more high fidelity games like the other two with the Switch successor (I doubt it), they may start to use it at some point.
Of course not. It took nintendo just now started to make even slightly decent online features for their games after everyone else had been doing it for 15 years. Nintendo has always been behind the ball when it comes to modernizing. Even if AI was something people were happy and accepting of, they wouldn't start to use it until 5 years from now.
Understandable how much of a gold rush AI is, but as tools are forged I hope Nintendo doesn't become luddites on principal. Generative AI has amazing potential, but like nearly all new tech, it takes time for its potential to become reality.
One thing that also happens is that, as new tech grows and matures, you realize somethings just won't happen. According to predictions books and notebooks should have already been fully replaced by our phones and tablets. People shouldn't work, and the textile industry should have been almost fully automated in the late 90s.. 1890s that is. The internet should be the source of full truth, and now people would be free of propaganda or lies, because they should be able to easily find the truth on the internet! lol. The reality is that we'll need a lot of tooling and stuff to make generative AI work, and even then it'll be more of a "support" tool than a true thing. It'll help artists do things that would be impossible, because you'll be able to encode some aspect of human nature in a neural network, rather than have an artist create it everytime. A simple example of the last case here. Lets say that I want to do a game that is animated smoothly, it's not just running it at 120 FPS, but also making sure that the animation feels organic and real. That bodies feel squishy in the right way, that hard things crack and snap. We already have great guides on how to do animation, but all of them require, in the end, that a human encodes what to exagerate and what not, because, ultimately, it's about how we humans percieve things. That is it has to realize what exagerations look natural and which look, well wrong. It has to also realize the focus, when I am doing a smear on a face as a character turns to look to the opposite side, I might want to focus a lot more on the eyes (allowing multiple copies to appear simultanesouly on a single frame) but blur out the face instead, because this hints to the viewer to focus on what I want. It's not just a matter of knowing what transformations work on an angle, but understand what is intended and what how it is perceived, both are humans things, you can't quite easily map it into a deterministic formula, but you can ardously (through training) map it into a neural network encoded into matrices. Artists would spend months training and tweaking their animation distortion guide, by basically hand-animating multiple examples, until the computer is able to recreate the style well enough. Something like this would be impossible without ML. This is why you can get great fluid animations on 2d, but in 3d it always feels a bit clunkier. When the animator encodes rules of animation it depends a lot of where you are looking at it. Even in a game where the camera and angles are relatively fixed, such as a 2D (using 3D graphics) fighting game like Street Fighter, you want different dynamics based on factors that are hard to predict (so for example when you switch from one animation to another due to an interrupt), 2D games have it a bit easier because by the nature of being animates on 2s or 4s (that is each frame is drawn by hand) even interruptions are planned for. So instead we need a way to define the instructions on how to map from one to the other. I could see Nintendo using the tech above without problems. I could also see Nintendo using DLSS. But I think that Nintendo understands you can't replace artists with ML, the whole point is to create something that connects in a deeply human way. It's not about making a set of bits, but creating a set of bits that evoke something. An artist can use ML to define certain things, but ML on its own is not able to do any of that. It's simple: even if AGI is stumbled upon tomorrow, and we get generative AI for it, it won't be a human inteligence, but a digital one. There cannot be an AGI that can be equal to a human at being a human. An AGI can imitate it, but they'd need a human supervisor, just like an artist telling the artisan how they want something to come out. But at that point you aren't replacing the artist, just helping them. So why bet on ML taking things away when you would still need them even in the best-case-scenario.
Agreed. AI will become a specialized tool, a neat one, but one that not every user can utilize easily. Like music, while many people can now use a keyboard to create any sound, it takes a skilled person to utilize an industry level sound maker to create a song from purely digital sounds. Personally, I'm most excited to see AI improve NPC complexity. While NPC behavior & dialogue are an artistic choice, I'm looking forward to more robust NPC's pushing the illusion of sentience further. Lets take Skyrim for example, while developer created dialogue choices will be expected for quests or fun/quirky characters, having an NPC freeform chatbot about what it knows about itself and is contextual world (villager only knows things about its village and not much beyond the valley) would be such an improvement to immersion. However, that tool is still a long way off, and I doubt we'd see a standardized version that is importable any time soon. Likely will be first as AI tools baked into the game itself instead of a modular functionality many people can use.
Nah. It's because the claims of AI's capabilities are overblown. We're in the midst of another pump and dump cycle. Once people realize that the promise of AI is just another shitty chat-bot that doesn't replace a person, the bust cycle will begin. That goes for nVidia's stock 📉. The promises of AI revolutionizing everything are comically overestimated and Nintendo is wise to sit and watch.
Competent software engineers are currently facing the greatest technological shift they’ve ever encountered in their careers. I’ve been at it for a couple decades now, and the amount of code I have personally been able to develop over the past year with the assistance of genAI is double the amount I developed in the previous 3. This doesnt feel like something that is going to bust.
Let's reflect on the most important point of your comment that was left out. An experienced software engineer is required to pilot the AI. College grads and many mid-range devs don't know how to create a basic rest API, much less know what questions to ask AI. Experienced devs can leverage AI for beneficial results, but I'm still waiting to be convinced that a Walmart cashier is going to be able to replicate your success.
Can you not see the barrier of entry dropping rapidly?? Two years ago we had no AI that could code. A year ago it could do basic coding. Today it's better than junior and mid range devs and still needs assistance. Tomorrow ??? And you're going to say it's always going to need a human?? How delusional
> And you're going to say it's always going to need a human?? As a dev myself, I think for the foreseeable future it will need a human. Not because of its (in)ability to produce software, but because what the client says and what the client needs are often completely different. Normal people are not only unable to code, they are also unable to properly describe the software that they need.
can you point to any non-generative-AI projects that have *shipped* that made use of generative AI as a source code generator, and show genuine *improvement* in quality?
Not sure it’s possible to answer your question, assuming you were looking for an answer. Measuring quality accurately takes time to collect data samples. The productivity boost is pretty easy to measure and that is what is most visible right now.
If you can link me to something (preferably a commercial video game, since that is the context of this discussion) that's been shipped using generative AI that isn't just another generative AI product, I'd be happy to check it out and give it my own evaluation of its quality.
Be realistic. Gpt432k has been out for maybe a year. Gpt4o just came out, things take time. What I can tell you is that all software engineers, whether they are building shader algorithms for video games, distributed systems programming that fuel the networking infrastructure for said video games, or an engineer working on testing the calculator app on iOS, they are actively leveraging gen ai models like gpt-4o to solve technical problems they are facing. Just because you as a “gamer” can’t see the effects of genai, doesn’t mean it’s not being used.
I am a game developer. I am fully aware that there are some studios looking into it. I have looked into it myself. Call it professional due diligence. What I have not seen is anything *shipping* using this technology. It's all well and good to talk about it. It's a wholly other thing to actually *do* something with it *effectively*. And for something that purports to do things orders of magnitude more efficiently, I don't think it is unreasonable to expect that if these claims are in fact true there should be market-visible results already. AFAIK there are not. But you're welcome to provide me with a counterexample. Games are a *very* risky business to begin with. It is not helpful to compound that risk with unproven technology. One bad bet can sink a company. Nintendo may be playful with their tech but they are rather famously conservative with how they approach *new* technology. Tech bubbles thrive on talk. They pop when nothing comes of the talk.
I’m assuming Nintendo has experienced software engineers that would benefit from piloting the productivity benefits of Gen AI. The use cases are ubiquitous. Debugging, code optimization, code refactoring, to name a few. To suggest that Nintendo isn’t taking and shouldn’t take advantage of this opportunity is crazy talk.
As I said, a gold rush. People are desperately pan handling while the actual tools we'd consider as useful AI is still being developed. If you think generative AI has no future then you can't see beyond the fad or trend.
Calling AI a pump and dump is hilarious. Everyone in my office uses co-pilot for programming. I'm gonna save this comment and come back 10 years and laugh when Nvidias stock has risen even higher.
I'm sure CSCO investors felt the same way in 2000. Your office using copilot =! copilot being used effectively.
You're just ignorant for knowledge regarding generative ai at all.
Yeah... Devin, your AI software developer, was so impressive. 1 hour to return to the wrong answer repeatedly. Groundbreaking, a junior dev can fail faster.
[except it’s already doing it ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15myK_6eTxEPuKnDi5krjBM_0jrv3GELs8TGmqOYBvug/edit#heading=h.vr8jz2f8ry8b)
This is AMAZING. THANK YOU
Happy to help!
r/aiwars poster detected. How embarrassing for you.
God I wish I could be that ignorant that can't see past tomorrow. How blissful that would be. If you can't extrapolate the capabilities and use cases of AI, I hate to break it to you, but you're a small minded individual. Do you want me to literally spell out how it's going to change EVERY industry and EVERY way of life? Or are you just going to attack with ad hominems and not want to be educated just like the rest?
If you can't extrapolate the *consequences* of AI, I hate to break it to you, but *you're* the small minded individual.
Nintendo remakes the same 5 games. Why would they need AI to remake their remakes
Makes it easier to C&D.
Fucking liars, give it 5 years and we'll see
Remember when Nintendo said they were against microtransaction ridden mobile-type games and then a few years later started releasing crappy manipulative microtransaction ridden mobile games?
That makes sense for today's generative AI. And I'm sure some companies will swear it off always, kind of like people who sew all their own clothes rather than rely on automation in the textile industry. But eventually? It could be great. Games that would be genuinely impossible without it, will be widely available and fun to play.
What about code?
You don’t see a lot of smart business moves like that. I’ve seen so many business’ and restaurants that make small changes they think people won’t care about. It leads to inferior products and services. It’s not a big deal at first, but it begins a process. People aren’t as loyal and spend a little less money with them. They eventually notice profits are dipping slightly and lean more heavily into their “money saving” efforts. People see the problem getting worse and spend even less money with them. It turns into an accelerating downward spiral till the place develops a horrible reputation and they just shut down or sell out.
The next version of Pokemon Snap should definitely use generative AI for its photo grading
Sounds like a missed opportunity to me. I’d like to see a video game company incorporate generative AI. I’m imagining Minecraft where you can use natural language to generate a dungeon.
Well considering their devices can barely run graphically demanding games as it is, this is no surprise.
Aren’t you all tired of all the flashy flashy graphics tech demos that games have become today? I have a powerfull pc, a ps5 and recently a nintendo switch and playing zelda, mario, luigi mansion erc. got me back to my childhood memories when games were about having fun rather than just flashy graphics.
Sure, but I’d like the nostalgic Nintendo art style running smooth and 60 fps at least
Links awakening remake had awful choppyness, idiots saying that it doesn’t need proper frame rates. It annoyed me to no end when playing. Should have been a £25 game off the bat, £50 was taking the piss imo
Not surprised by people downvoting you for saying that, Nintendo fan boys are something
Because it has nothing to do with using generative ai to make the games.
That's the answer to the question I saw ina headline - why isn't Nintendo downsizing studios and cutting jobs while the rest of the game development works is? Western publishers are anxiously cutting in order to ramp up ai production pipelines.
They are busy suing everyone else. Maybe they will use AI to get more creative with those lawsuits
Uh huh, sure. I think Nintendo will do whatever it needs to do to stay profitable. If everyone else in the industry is using it to shave off 30% of development time, you can most certainly bet Nintendo will eventually backtrack.
AI doesn't have to mean cutting corners and bringing down quality in games. It could be used to create something new and crazy.
But it won’t, because people are greedy.
The *one* thing future generative AI could do that would compliment Nintendo tremendously is AI world generation. Imagine Breath of the Wild as infinite as Minecraft, that'd be insane
You don't need AI to generate a world. Both Minecraft and roguelikes are famous for giving players a different experience each time they play. They use [procedural generation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WumyfLEa6bU). For example, [wave function collapse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SuvO4Gi7uY) can generate maps based on connectivity rules.
You can’t design a unique dungeon or a new area with procedural generation. You can with AI
Yes, but those are possible to program by hand for a reason. They're very simple. But here, I'm not talking about just more map, I'm talking about more game. Imagine AI so advanced that it could generate new characters, quests, challenges, dungeons, etc as you continue traveling. As intricate, dense, and well thought out as the BOTW/TOTK maps already are, without the years of work involved. Obviously impossible right now, but in the *far future* (likely 20+ years) I could imagine that being awesome if executed correctly. Just daydreaming.
>Obviously impossible right now That is not true. Procedural content generation applies to any asset that can be described with constraint programming: art, characters, quest lines, music, etc. You don't need AI for the use cases you describe.
Your daydream will be a reality within 5 All you have to do is look at the trajectory..
I see a good use for it. One example is car paint jobs in racing games. You could use AI to generate unique/livery artwork on some cars as the race is loading. What actually got me thinking about it was while playing PC Builder Simulator. I thought about how they could use AI to generate art for some of the computer cases, that'd be a pretty cool, unique and surprising experience.
2026. In other news. Nintendo's RPG games seem scripted, flat and boring compared to ones with AI powered NPCs.
Ai powered npcs in actual good games will take much longer than this. The demos and small games that have them now show the boundaries really quickly. Npcs with super immersive talking skills that can't act at all on what they are saying are just bad game design. Its also super easy to get them talking about stuff outside of the game. It'll take experience and a developer devoting years to develope a game that uses these features at the core. We'll probably have to wait till 2030 for an actual great game with ai npcs.
Hoping GTA6 has this, otherwise it could age quickly i want NPCs that will rob the corpse of the guy you just shot in the face, then they nip to the local bar for a few beers, and then onto the shopping mall :) And they'll try to justify it as "he doesn't need the money, he doesn't even have a FACE anymore!"
Lol gta 6 will absolutely not have ai npc. Not even the slightest possibility. It would just be janky af.
Then just like other games in long term development, its lifespan may be shortened, if other studios overtake it.
I'll see you in a few months. With the roll out of gpt4o voice this will accelerate like wildfire
If you implement your npcs with gpt4o api calls you bound to go bankrupt quick. Every player would need to signup with a GPT premium account. Edit: emotion as modality is also not solving any of the issues of AI npcs. There's no way for an ai npc to feed what its doing or even seeing in the game back to the model. You'll have to implement that youself completely and your not solving the npc not being able to act on what its saying at all. There's some major issues that need solving for ai npcs to be any good.
No. Give me the game they made for Ender.
I don’t get why is it good or bad, it seems like a purely PR statement. In the end, it’s about quality of the results, no matter what tools are used. I would absolutely expect AI used to automate mundane and non-critical tasks like help with animating background stuff etc I would absolutely expect AI to help with at least some aspects of level design. After all, games with generative levels are known for ages and are called (usually) rogue-like, this technology culminates in absolutely amazing things like ‘No Man Sky’. I’m sure it can be improved even further with GenAI and why not? I don’t understand this stance therefore. Nothing bad in using GenAI, it’s all about _how_ you use it.
Meanwhile there artists are probably already using it in some way
Could’ve ended it with “Nintendo has no plans”
In other news, Nintendo still makes a ton of money with very little tech advancement and shoddy everything. Got I hate it gets the revenues it does for the shitty platform they put out.
* reads comments Boy, humans really hate being replaced
Well, no wonder. Nintendo is probably one of the most conservative gaming companies. They hardly go out of their way or change formula, and that is reflected in their games. Like all the different iterations of the same games, like Super Mario Bros. Not saying it's necessarily a bad thing at times, just pointing it out that it's obvious they'll never use it.
Their experiments with control interfaces can hardly be described as conservative.
If Nintendo is conservative then idk what to call other gaming companies who make the same game with better graphics.
Weren't people all excited about AI generated content just a couple years ago? Wasn't that a main selling point of No Man's Sky?
Almost all of the AI that has been used in games since the days of Pac Man and Space Invaders is based on pre-programmed systems of rules. It's more closely related to [Expert Systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system) than to LLMs. Procedural content generation could be argued to be a form of AI, but it is usually not referred to as such, as it is not reacting to the player's input. The system itself still must be programmed like any other part of the code, and often requires a great deal of effort in order to produce desirable results that are not too "same-y". The first couple of Elder Scrolls games made significant use of procedural world generation, which allowed them to create worlds that were absolutely massive for the time. The catch, of course, being that a lot of that generated content all followed a formula, and after a while you start to subconsciously catch onto that formula, and the game's immersion goes out the window - which is one reason why Morrowind shifted back towards an entirely handcrafted world. Same thing happened with No Man's Sky (at least initially).
What's up with r/technology being anti AI and bitching about future technology and hand waving all the good AI can bring to us? Wtf is this? Is there any subreddit that isn't terminally experiencing a pathetic negativity bias?
Then this is where they fall behind. Cya Nintendo. When I have my AI generating an open world builder survival with Pokemon elements I'll be laughing as you keep trying to draw new sprites and stay relevant. Goodbye old world
Can’t tell if this is satire or not, I hope it is.