Destructoid Checkpoint: Kicking it off strong.

The year has now properly begun. The festive season is but a memory, and the long days of January are upon us. This means the hives where the busy bees who make video games are buzzing once again. This means new stories to talk about, and, of course, more information on important stories from the last couple of weeks, such as…

To err is human, to AI is divine

Okay, so that is a bit of a stretch for a subheading, but I am just limbering up for the year ahead, leave me alone. Prior to the Christmas break, Divinity and Baldur’s Gate 3 studio Larian found themselves at the center of a kerfuffle.

When asked about Gen AI in their creative process, Larian CEO Swen Vincke talked about some of the good sides, in his opinion. Now, AI is a massively complicated area, but a lot of pretty simple things are currently being thrown under that label that are really just very simple tools. Most people don’t mind things like an AI process being used to generate a randomized texture based on a set of similar textures provided by an artist. People do still worry a lot about Generative AI and the shady way it can be trained.

Sven let slip that they use Gen AI to explore things in the concept stage, and that was enough to worry a pretty substantial number of people. Ultimately, Gen AI is trained on the work of people who have not agreed to have their work used in such a way, and people may not want to support projects that use these tools.

Sven and the rest of the Larian team took to Reddit today for an AMA, and, needless to say, the AI issue came up. According to Sven, they have now decided not to use any Gen AI art for concepting on the upcoming Divinity to put people’s minds at ease, and he also did, to be fair to him, seem genuinely contrite for having caused a kerfuffle in the first place.

Does this mean that they will never use AI? Nope, as it seems that there are still plenty of use cases for AI and machine learning that don’t stray into the “how do we not pay people for things” area, such as helping animators to tidy up animations when you need dozens of variants of very similar movements, etc.

Ultimately, the lesson here is that the conversation around AI and what it means, does, and why all that matters is still young, and even fan favorite studios can find themselves in hot water if they don’t figure out how to properly talk about this stuff. 

Sony wants to replace you!

If the big boogeyman of AI is that it will become a tool for people replacement, then Sony is already one step ahead of the crowd. A recent patent filed by Sony Interactive Entertainment would reportedly introduce a Ghost Player.

You know, when you were a kid, and you were sick of getting bodied by a boss, so you’d call in an older sibling to help out? Well, Sony is looking to digitize that experience and render it oddly cold and vacant. This AI helper will apparently have a number of modes that you can set, allowing it to help you explore, fight, or enter a period of existential dread where you wonder why you can’t even face up to the challenge of a simple video game anymore without crumbling under the mildest of difficulties. 

Ahem. Sorry.

Interestingly, this type of thing is not cheap computationally, so whether this is just some kind of patent hoarding or something that Sony really wishes to introduce remains to be seen. You had better pray they don’t plan on putting the required muscle in the PS6 to run this thing, however, as that will almost certainly lead to some pricing shenanigans that none of us will enjoy. 

Lisa Su has abandoned you

Over the years, it’s been joked that AMD just kind of follows along behind Intel and NVIDIA, perpetually second to them in the CPU and GPU market. This looked like it was changing, with AMD taking the fight to Intel with their Ryzen chips, and potentially poised to clip NVIDIA’s wings in the consumer GPU market as Team Green focuses more on AI tech and working with the US military, I can only assume, to help them take over Greenland. 

Well, if you were hoping that Lisa Su and AMD would step up and put the consumer first, you can keep on dreaming, bucko. Lisa took to the stage at the recent Consumer Electronics Show to talk about how they were going all in on AI. The US government is currently willing to shovel insane amounts of public money into private industry, and AMD wants in.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, AMD spent all its time talking about pretty much everything except the consumer, while also expecting us to sit and clap while plans continue to remove computing power from our homes, placing it behind subscription paywalls, where everything we ever do will be monitorable and controllable. 

Just more pathetic behavior from an industry that has really been showing its belly over the last couple of years.

Xbox hopes to start the year strong

Xbox has been doing nothing this generation but spending vast sums of money and then getting absolutely big-brothered by Sony and Nintendo when it comes to sales. That is why I hope that the upcoming Developer_Direct on January 22 is a strong one.

Remember, a games industry that has high-quality games coming from all possible directions is a fun one for consumers. Good hardware, produced by companies that are in competition with each other instead of canoodling with governments and AI tech-bros to bend over the end user, means lower prices at the till. 

Xbox has promised us a look at Fable, our first real sighting of the game. I think a lot of us are very excited to see if this will really have that classic Fable feel, and we don’t have long to wait in order to find out. Forza Horizon 6 will also be there, and I must confess, they are one of the few driving games that I still play, so I am selfishly eager to see this.

Finally, Beast of Reincarnation, Game Freak's Xbox-bound tale of a lass and her dog. All three titles have huge potential for Xbox, and they can plant their flag by impressing a currently listless fanbase with some intrigue and excitement. 

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Scott Duwe takes a look at Roblox’s efforts to protect young users from online predators and finds some flaws. - “One of the problems with the feature, at least at the outset, is that it seems to come to incorrect conclusions. In many cases, it’s overestimating the age of children and then placing them into a bracket where they can chat with users deemed older than them.”

Bhernardo Viana has found five games that all turn five this year, and he thinks they are worth a visit. - “Remember that five years ago, many of us were finally transitioning out of the COVID-19 lockdown? We were learning again how to talk to each other outside laggy Zoom calls with the resolution of a 2009 webcam—and enjoyed some really great games, too.”

Andrej Barovic argues that ARC Raiders is right to hone in on the countless casuals who log in each day, rather than no-lifers playing for keeps. - “I think ARC Raiders and any online shooter out there should genuinely always focus on the casual side of things. Professional play is entirely separate and exists on a plane far removed from the one everyone else is on. The builds are never the same, neither are the strats and tactics, and no matter how much casuals try to mimic pro players in casual environments, it’ll never result in the same kind of gameplay.”

And that’s it for this week. Stay gold.