Industry News / Upcoming Games

Cahir

Innkeeper
Staff member
Messages
447
That's really interesting. I wasn't aware that MS already lost the console wars. I also never thought of games as competing with 30-second video clips of random and inane things. I play games for an interactive experience. If I watch YT shorts, it's usually because I'm somewhere where I only have my phone and am looking for some time killing quick entertainment. I never choose between the two. If I can game, gaming wins.
Well, they don't (compete with TikTok and YT shorts). The fact that it's a conclusion Nadella made means he totally lost it.
 

O_Bruce

Habitué
Messages
435
When the AI bubble bursts, we're going to have a real mess on our hands. But, sadly, that crash is the best outcome to hope for.
The worst thing is, when it happens it would be ordinary people like you and me who will feel the crash. Peopl that contributed to that bubble in the first place will suffer no consequences.

That being said, the bubble bursting is the only outcome that makes sense and that offers some kind of psoitive future.

And I think it will happen. So far, generative AI is not sustainable technology. It requires enormous servers, even more money, creates massive emmission and water usage, and is founded mostly by promise of eventually turning out to be revolutionary industry. It only matter of time until investors will lose interest and bubble will burst. Think about this: apparently generating a single video on Sora costs about 5 USD. Now, think of potentially thousands or hundred of thousands of users who'll generate multiple videos a day. How is thing like that going to be monetized? Hypothetical question - I don't care. That's not my problem. I just wait for AI bros to fall flat on their faces.
 

Antimatter

Administrator
Staff member
Messages
1,709
The Embark Studios extraction shooter Arc Raiders has exceeded expectations for player counts. Media opinions are also positive, with an 84 Metacritic rating. However, one score sticks out like a sore thumb, as the only negative Arc Raiders review on the aggregator. Eurogamer awarded the game a 2/5 rating, primarily due to its use of generative AI.

Arc Raiders uses AI-generated text-to-speech (TTS) for some in-game voices, particularly for non-player character (NPC) call-outs and contextual lines.

Anything you PING on the map, any ITEM, the call out voice, "Hey! I found magnets!" that is a TEXT to SPEECH technology trained by a voice actor for a pinging system. They can add items in the future and use TTS to say the item.

Every other voice line is a real voice actor. All the cut scenes, the characters in Sparanza etc. Embark said they understand the importance of humans talking to each other for real, nothing beats it.

Eurogamer’s article focuses on how the ping system and call-outs employ TTS to replace voice recordings. Embark claims it has limited resources to hire a large number of human voice actors. Its CCO, Stefan Strandberg, has explained in interviews that AI voice generators only supplement recorded dialogue. Still, while he argues that this process doesn’t qualify as generative AI, some critics disagree.

The speech in question sounds unnatural compared to other lines, according to the reviewer. More troubling, he notes how in the extraction shooter’s world, robotic Arc machines overwhelm humans. Having traders and voiced by machine-generated dialogue demonstrates a “total lack of awareness, or worse, wilful ignorance of Arc Raiders' own semantics”.

Arc Raiders is a social game that’s casual enough for teammates to have conversations. The article highlights how the robotic TTS seems even more jarring in this environment. The title also employs AI to make enemies respond to human players more authentically. This application is not new to game development and is less contentious to the reviewer.

 

JustKneller

Habitué
Messages
857
wtg, Eurogamer. People are going to take a stand on the issue of AI, and it's good to see a media outlet drawing a line in the sand.

Of course, I'm so cynical that I expect one of the next news breaks to be the world finding out Eurogamer uses AI to generate their articles.

But, wouldn't that be the best way to fight AI? Media outlet saturation of articles about how terrible AI is all written by AI. You can't hire enough writers for this smear campaign, but AI can crank out tons more content in a fraction of the time. 😁
 

Antimatter

Administrator
Staff member
Messages
1,709
Yeah, everything we keep hearing about Subnautica 2 and Krafton is bad.

And here is Eurogamer using double standards. They DID NOT give CoD any bad score, even while the game blatantly uses AI:






So the media keeps being inconsistent, and that makes people see their reviews more as political statements/personal author agenda instead of actual reviews.
 

Chronicler

Habitué
Messages
415
I mean, 6/10 is still not a positive score.

That sounds more like there was maybe a different guy assigned to that review, than that they took money from Activision to fluff the score or anything unsavory like that. I don't think that's the score they wanted at all.

Both scores also presumably account for other elements of the game than just the Ai.
 

Antimatter

Administrator
Staff member
Messages
1,709
This story is one of the most blatant examples of how to fail in developing a game, from the very concept to the release:


Paradox has announced it is writing down SEK 355 (around $37 million) of development costs for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, after early sales figures fell short of expectations following mixed reviews. The company said it would still deliver the two planned expansions to the game.

Data from GameDiscoverCo suggests the game sold 121,500 copies on Steam, which would amount to net revenue of around $4 million. The game currently has "mixed" reviews on the platform and on Metacritic.

CEO Frederik Wester took it on the chin. "Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is a strong vampire fantasy and we are pleased with the developers’ work on the game," he said in a statement. "We’ve had high expectations for a long time, since we saw that it was a good game with a strong IP in a genre with a broad appeal. A month after release we can sadly see that sales do not match our projections, which necessitates the write-down."

"The responsibility lies fully with us as the publisher. The game is outside of our core areas, in hindsight it is clear that this has made it difficult for us to gauge sales. Going forward, we focus our capital to our core segments and, at the same time, we’ll evaluate how we best develop World of Darkness’ strong brand catalogue in the future."

Paradox initially greenlit the game after acquiring the IP in 2015, with Hardsuit Labs making something closer to the cult-favourite 2004 original. That title was due to ship in 2020, but Paradox terminated its deal with Hardsuit after two delays and the removal of Ka'ai Cluney and Brian Mitsoda, the senior creatives on the project. UK-based studio The Chinese Room then took over the project, ultimately delivering a tighter narrative experience compared to the sprawling RPG original, which received a lukewarm response from players and critics.

The studio had anticipated the blowback from fans based on the game's deviation from the original's formula, with former creative director Dan Pinchbeck telling the Goth Boss podcast of their attempts to ditch the name entirely.

"The tricky question around it was Bloodlines 1," Pinchbeck said. "Are you making a sequel to Bloodlines 1? We used to sit there and have these planning sessions of how do we get them to not call it Bloodlines 2? That feels like the most important thing we do here, to come at this and say this isn't Bloodlines 2. We can't make Bloodlines 2; there's not enough time, there's not enough money.”


Hopefully, lessons will be learned from this story.
 
Top Bottom