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Devs are more worried than ever that generative AI will lower the quality of games
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this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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Wait, if devs are worried about it, and players are worried about it, who the fuck is doing it?? If it's a widespread fear, they should band together and set up an AI-weary union, and gamers would support the shit outta them for it. Make it like a privacy policy, a binding agreement that AI will be used sparingly if at all.
The CEOs and upper management goons that don't care about anything but a single number getting higher.
Why are players worried about it? It has the potential to take video games to another level entirely.
Yeah... But "below rock bottom" isn't the level we want.
That's a ridiculous take. It could add a level of variability and replayability that far exceeds games today, even those using procedural generation. There's no reason to think it would lower the quality to "below rock bottom", at all.
You're assuming AI will be used in a sensible way for the aspects it is good at, and not by forcing developers to use it for code generation uncritically with the hope they can eventually dump most of their workforce.
Using AI in games isn't about AI coding. Using AI to code games is likely already in almost every studio.
When they say AI in games that means AI artwork, voice lines, environments, etc.
i.e. imagine NPCs that change their voice lines based on recent events like recently completed missions, or your player looks/equipment/etc. With AI you don't have to pre-record a near infinite amount of voice lines they can be generated on the fly.
Yes, that's the sensible aspect I was referring to. But I doubt the heads of these companies are going to show that level of restraint given all available evidence.
The biggest question is going to be will the AI be able to run locally or will they use it as an excuse to turn the game into a subscription.
I can see it now... "The game needs to make calls to OpenAI that we have to pay for to generate dialog so we need to charge by the month for the game"
They will finally have an excuse to turn single player games into subscriptions as well.
If they used the generative AI to actually generate dialogue on the spot it could be pretty dope assuming it is trained properly so its consistent with the lore of the game and you could actually have a productive conversation with the NPCs without being constantly gaslit.
But that's not how any major dev has planned to use it. They use it to cheap out on art assets and writing the pre-scripted shit.
As it stands, even the few independent games doing the thing mentioned in my first paragraph are pretty garbage because they can't even remain consistent enough in their own logic to make the games actually playable.
The problem is hallucinations are part of the solution to conversations with LLMs, but they're destructive in a game environment. An NPC tells you something false and the player will assume they just couldn't find the secret or that the game is bugged rather than an AI that just made some shit up.
No amount of training removes hallucinating because that's part of the generation process. All it does is take your question and reverse engineer what an answer to that looks like based on what words it knows and it's data set. It doesn't have any "knowledge", not to mention that the training data would have to be different for each npc to represent different knowledge sets, backgrounds, upbringing, ideology, experience and culture. And then there's the issue of having to provide it broad background knowledge of the setting without it adding new stuff or revealing hidden lore.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if we see this attempted, but I expect it to go horribly wrong.
so are you currently employed as a vibe coder or looking for work as one