This is going to be a dumpster fire and I can’t wait to sit and watch it burn
And simehow it will be Valve’s fault, according to Tim-boy
ccording to a new report by Bloomberg, developers on the game were told to implement an “AI-first” production model using Anthropic’s Claude AI models. The team is not to use any more “hand-written code,” and even artists are being pushed to use the technology that has become a punching bag among actual players. The director of the unannounced game reportedly told developers that all art should be “generated with full AI workflows.”
No handwritten code allowed is laughably stupid. This decision was made by someone who doesn’t understand code or llms.
AI Art is even more stupid, getting a diffusion model to depict something generic close to what you want is easy, but when you want more precise control it takes a ton of effort, and it’s a whole new area of knowledge. Sure, full models on servers with terabytes of RAM will follow instructions better than what I run on my GPU, but it’s still absurd.
The team is not to use any more “hand-written code,”
Sweet, so if someone gets a copy of the source code then it is public domain as the output of AI is not copyrightable under current US case law.
Wouldn’t that mean the compiled game is also not copyrightable?
Do you think so? Most big companies require developers to use Ai.
Edit: I don’t understand why my question is downvoted.
AI can for sure be a useful tool in development - but forcing everyone to use just the one tool and removing developer agency is going to be a shitshow. You can absloutely make slop code usable and stable - you could make dreamweaver code or VS’s autogenerated C# usable too - but it’s not a magically quick process. Given the goal here is speed, this ill wind doth blow due trainwreck…
Not only that. LLMs have serious flaws like are much more costly than hand written code, are much more prone to errors, cant be reviewed or audited, and rarely employs the most efficient architectures. On top of that, execs think the memory is absolute and dont realize the more context you feed it, the more it has to guess.
LLM-only code is going to be terrible.
They’re using AI as the main development tool by the sound of it, not a supplementary tool. If they’re anything like the AI ads I have seen lately it will look like shit. I have no trust that this will create a cohesive product.
As someone who works in a studio that can afford unlimited AI bills, if you can afford to pay for 4-5B tokens per developer per month (that is the average monthly usage across our team for the past montha + CI) on latest models, it does a pretty good job and we can mostly commit fully AI authored code. Not one shots, it’s rounds upon rounds of AI reviews, re-prompting to use a different system/make a change that sucks, but it works well.
Sure, the team is loosing project domain knowledge. The results are currently possible because most of us did spend few years working in the codebase before AI, so we can quickly spot an issue and point the prompt to a general direction, a space/system to use, or ask it to look into what part of the code. If we don’t, it will duplicate random stuff and make it even more mess.
Of course, neither is worth it or sustainable. The cost is not reasonable in the slightest, my usage alone is more than my salary. Reviews are a bottleneck, and people have started to just run more rounds of AI on the PR, in adittion to the CI review loops and the authors review loops. It does help - each round usually catches something, but the cost, lol. And of course, we are slowly loosing both the abilitty to work without AI, and domain knowledge to be able to somehow rein in the code base.
So, if you have unlimited usage and can afford to run billions of tokens of looping reviews with the latest models, you can go fully AI pretty succesfully. But at the cost, and that is the pricing while AI companies are in the start-of-Uber phase, it’s such a stupid idea.
I don’t care about the job that much. I get to spend money (without trying to, to be exact - its just the only viable workflow) to make a point how stupid it is, while being able to do other stuff, so I don’t really care, other than getting a course to requalify into another field after the studio burns.
But yeah, if you just ask claude to one-shot something, it sucks. It needs at least a few rounds of looping, clean slate review loops, or council decisions during the development. It would probably eat your Claude weekly limit just for one PR.
The point is - there is a huge difference in how people experience AI. If you can pull the slot machine lever more times, for an absurd cost, it will eventually get to passable results. The AI companies only see that, and from that PoV, yes, it is kinda passable. But there’s like five companies in the world that can do that, and not for long.
Yeah if people want to use LLMs long term, they better learn using smaller models and less tokens, because once investors stop subsidizing tokens, those who can’t maximize results will be fucked.
I’ll be gutted if they do this to the Team Ico folk
They own Ico?!Edit: Sony owns Japan Studio, which owns Ico.
sigh of relief
I hope someone launches Tim Sweeney into the sun.
Cost to much money and effort. There are cheaper ways.
Yeah, but it is about making a statement.
The same statement can be made if you launch him towards a granite wall.
Sounds like sloppy garbage.
I’m going to try to approach LLMs differently than I normally do. Anyone with a slightly conservative or liberal bent should be railing against LLMs, they are what those people think DEI is (without the racism sure, but still). The dumbest motherfucker in the world can fire up a Chatbot and look like they know what they are doing, from the outside, if you squint. Hell if I pitch this right a few of those dumbest motherfuckers will “Um Ackshually…” me in replies to tell me how many amazing edge cases they can think of for using the slopboxes, like fucking junkies lined up to tell you they only use the finest meth to elevate their lifestyle.
LLMs are participation trophies for the cognitively impaired, “Don’t want to learn this shit, let a computer tell you how to do it. Sure it won’t be as good as someone who knows how to do it properly, and there’s a chance it will just lie to you, but what are you going to do? Pay someone to do it properly? Nah half ass that shit.”
Why does some fucking AIBro get to fuck the economy building a solution in search of a problem, that actively generates a bunch of problems in the background while it’s searching.
This is money America could be spending on more guns, or political corruption, or cheap junk food.
Forcing devs to use AI in areas they don’t need to sounds stupid, and how you end up with slop.
AI is supposed to be a tool to assist devs to do things they can’t do like how its being used to get PS5 games running on the PC.
But, forced usage when it isn’t need is as dumb as people having AI generate sentences instead of writing content themselves. Smarter approach would be asking AI to highlight areas where mistakes have occurred in your writing for you to manually review and make adjustments yourself, so the human element remains.
Will their profits be generated by AI? They’re getting fuck all from me already.
Epic developers didn’t need AI’s help to make slop before. Even the lowest have room to fall.
What bad games does epic make? They suck ass as a company sure, but objectively which games of theres are poorly made?
I mean they make Unreal Engine which most people credit as one of the worst optimized engines in a while and responsible for inflating system requirements.
I’ve used it. Works great. If you overload it with particle effects, screen-space effects, and high-poly models, yeah it’s going to run like shit, but that’s not the fault of the engine.
This is very faulty logic, Unreal is a tool. A tool that’s very easy to use (and abuse) which allows devs to launch half-baked projects. It’s mostly on the devs to optimize a project, epic can’t do anything about that
If this was an IDE or something the argument would hold more I think but it’s a whole engine. Unreal Engine is very much set up for a specific workflow and makes assumptions about how it will be used. Every engine does. It’s harder to optimize a whole game engine like Unreal. Sure some people are doing it, or some are just disabling features right and left, but I still place that on the engine, on it’s defaults, and it’s assumptions, just as much as on the developers using it who just leave everything as default.
I don’t think this is entirely or even mostly Epic’s fault.
Unreal Engine 5 is a very forward-looking engine in terms of its features, which does translate to relatively high hardware requirements if you use every one of them in an improper manner, however: If you adjust the settings for Nanite and Lumen and use the engine for what it’s good at, you can quite dramatically speed it up at a low cost to visual fidelity (example: Fatekeeper, which is gorgeous, runs well and is being developed by a tiny team; exactly the promise of this engine) - or you can more selectively employ only some of them for a more performant game (example: ARC Raiders, which employs UE5 without Nanite nor Lumen - still looks good and runs on a toaster).
The main problem however is that Epic inadvertently chose the worst timing possible for releasing these expensive new features (regarding processing power and memory cost) to their engine. All versions of UE - or, to be more precise, games released with them - have had relatively high hardware requirements when they were new. The kind of hardware that was necessary to run the first Unreal back in 1998 the way it was meant was eye-wateringly expensive, adjusted for inflation. However, what used to happen was that prices for suitable hardware quickly dropped at the same time as performance increased. This was annoying in some ways - a high-end 1998 gaming PC was pretty much obsolete for the latest titles by the year 2000 already - but it also meant that as the years went on, more and more people could afford to enjoy playing good-looking games based on this increasingly capable and more accessible engine.
The quadruple-whammy of the crypto boom, AI mania, rising global inequality and hardware capabilities plateauing or even degrading (the 2022 RTX 4090 is more powerful and cheaper than the rumored upcoming 24 GB 5080, which is set to replace the 5090 as Nvidia’s gaming flagship) means that releasing an engine with seductive labor-saving and artist-friendly features like geometry that doesn’t have to be simplified (Nanite) and lighting that just works™ (Lumen) results in below average and average developers more or less happily rushing out games that would have previously been impossible to make without incredibly talented teams - but the downside is that due to a discrepancy between increasing engine complexity (easy to learn, hard to master) and the cost of hardware, those games do not run as well as they should.
Empowering developers with a capable, yet accessible engine is always a double-sided coin: On one hand, it can allow people with tons of talent and limited budgets to punch way above their weight class (like the aforementioned developers of Fatekeeper), but on the other hand, it also results in low quality games from less intelligent (or just greedy) people that tarnish the name of the engine behind them. None of this is new: When Unity gained in popularity, we got both great Indies and a still ongoing avalanche of abysmal asset flips (and I predict the same for Godot). Unreal Engine 3 was the first version of UE that was widely accessible to smaller and mid-sized studios, but many of especially early games for it looked and ran extremely poorly, as even experienced developers were like kids in a candy store trying out every flavor (new rendering technique) all at once, even if the result was often a shiny, blurry, bloomy mess that stuttered more than it ran on contemporary hardware.
Have you ever heard of fortnite
To be fair, Fortnite isn’t a bad game. It is just not my cup of tea. in fact, I’m a bit jealous to any Fortnite player.
Yes I have. I haven’t heard anyone say it’s a badly made game.
It’s just bad.
I’ve already asked on the Epic community what good games Epic has made and the only answer was Fortnite from multiple people. So if Epic starts making AI slop, nothing of value is being lost.
Have people forgotten Unreal / Unreal Tournament? The engines namesake?
More recently, Gears of War. Not revolutionary, but still popular.
I liked Epic Pinball, Jazz Jackrabbit, and Jill of the Jungle.
Epic Games as in the developer. Not the storefront. They do this in their own company to their own product. That’s mostly their perogative, I guess.
