By Leonard Boyarsky, the game director behind The Outer Worlds and The Outer Worlds 2, once believed AI was a reasonable idea in video game writing – but it’s evident he certainly no longer holds that view regarding the contentious technology.
Back in 2019, Boyarsky, co-creator of Fallout and the genius behind other RPG treasures like Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, acknowledged that Obsidian Entertainment‘s aim for more profound player choices through in-game dialogue could benefit from additional funding (which makes a lot of sense) and, perhaps more astonishingly, the deployment of artificial intelligence. However, with the recent surge of generative AI, it’s prudent to say that he has since revised his opinion.
He understandably believed that AI could generate far more dialogue options than human creators could even envision at that point, hypothesizing that the technology might be trained on countless lines crafted by individuals: “The computer could simply take it from there, and the player could genuinely express – without even needing a list of choices – what their responses were and have the computer react in real-time.”
Currently, however, Boyarsky informs Game File in a recent interview that his perspectives on AI from six years ago do not represent his current feelings. He clarifies they were “literally just me conducting a thought experiment,” confiding he would like to give his past self “a good smack upside the head” for those comments. The RPG genius raises a possible issue as an illustration – such a system “quickly becomes very cumbersome,” as per his view.
A rapid response– one of the most prompt that Game File has reportedly ever received – states: “We haven’t been utilizing it at all.” That’s certainly not a negative stance to adopt, especially as AI expands and conversations surrounding it within the gaming sector persist to evolve. Renowned Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu recently shared how he’s “never employed AI and likely never will” himself, as it’s not fulfilling.