Upcoming games may be based more on AI interactions within the game worlds rather than good graphics, sound or storytelling planned ahead of time by a dev team.
I previously wrote an article how the next Elder Scrolls should focus on AI interaction and not just upgraded visuals and great storytelling. It seems that some of my ideas were ahead of their time or simply what Bethesda was planning on doing anyway.
Well I happened to browse YouTube the other day and an interesting video popped up talking about this exact topic I wrote about in the Medium article.
Below is the video I ran into that shows how Bethesda game studio is planning on doing just that — or what I recommended with the next Elder Scroll :
(if you cannot see it embedded due to not being logged in to YouTube on here, here is the direct link.)
According to the video above, the next Elder Scrolls may have actual AI conversations with non-playable characters (NPCs). This means dynamic conversations with walking townsfolk in the game for instance. by dynamic it could be shaped based on how far a player is within the game or based on the surroundings of the town or location the NPC is found in or at.
This could really open the game up to longevity and also to replayability. after completing game or mission objectives, for instance, the player can walk around talking to different characters with new experiences and responses related to the completed event that the player was responsible for.
This may be one of the reason for the upcoming game’s development time I imagine. This is because such a gameplay change could also open the game up to potential game-breaking bugs or make it too easy to complete.
Imagine asking an NPC for directions and to show you where to go everywhere or even to fight for you or with you on quests. Having too many options could make the game become different than it was meant to be for the player. Unless, of course, play testing and fine tuning is done to make sure the experience will still be pleasant regardless of the player’s play style and myriad of options available with such new forms of interactivity.
Some of the best experiences I’ve had with the Elder Scrolls games happened due to random events not planned by the developer, as I’ve previously described in my article on this topic (linked above). For instance, how one NPCs reacted during a fight I was randomly thrown into with a dragon. These anecdotes and events that occur, within say Skyrim, is what made the game so fun and replayable for me.
If Bethesda manages to make the next title even more like this and use AI tools to make each play session entirely unique and memorable, the game will truly be special. It also will open up the industry to AI being let free vs co fines to specific patterns and developer input. Maybe in the near future games will have games within the games run by the AI let loose to engage with players within the games in unique ways.
This makes me think of the movie Tron by the way (there is also a good PC game based on the title by the way) and how gaming and the real world could become closer to one another than ever before.
Another thing that is happening in gaming and that could show huge potential to improve gaming besides just interactions with NPCs or AI characters within games is how AI can be used to leverage coding a game. In fact, AI can already be used to code game worlds all by itself and without the need of an entire game studio or coders behind the scenes.
A person with a great idea for a game can focus on his idea and how he wants the mechanics of a title to work and let an AI system actually code it for him or her. This can open up game development to more individual individual creators or Indy developers than ever before.
Of course, AI still cannot do everything, at least as well as teams of paid professionals do together… at least not yet. However, we are living in interesting times when a new revolution within gaming may occur that is more based on internal mechanics of games than outward appearance, graphics, or hardware-based potential of what a game system offers its user base.
What AI is often used for today is to automate tasks, simpify things and also create game objects that can be replicated on the fly and without the need for an artist to individually add every object or structure into an open-world city, as an example. Grand Theft Auto Definite Edition, especially now with the 2024 patch that fixed its previous shortocmings really showcases the power of AI and how it can fix a game series in a relatively short period of time. This is because the title improved previous entities in the franchise and without rleying on a team of artists ot individually fix everty asset by hand, and AI was used to enhance the visuals within the games.
“AI upscaling is used frequently, which is a technique that uses machine learning to smartly enhance and clean up detail in the low resolution source artwork, according to Digital Foundry. “The second technique sees the developer redraw the assets, mimicking the original art but at far superior resolution. Finally, other assets are simply replaced with new art that can look quite different – often lacking the quality and style that went into the original game.”
Generative AI is huge in games today. Game objects that previously required development teams to be adde dby hand or randomly generated within the game world can be done on a massive scale using AI. The developer can still focus on crafting unique assets or objects within the games in iportant sections that they want done in a certain way while levaing room for AI to take care of the rest. These game assets can be repeated countless times while the AI does variations of them and still feel fresh, unqiue or different from one another. Fauna or flowers is a good example of somehting that can be AI generated while developers focus on other aspects of the visuals within games.
AI and farms of servers leveraging features within games may be more important than the piece of hardware you see in front of your TV.
AI is touching all industries and augmenting them in various ways today. Gaming is just one of many that it truly can transform in the way we both look at games and how they are or will be created. I previously wrote an article I self-published on Meidum about this idea of how AI will transform everything and today some years after writing it here we are… gmaing is just one of the many industries it is altering today.
One thing that I worry about is that adding too much complexity to games and giving too much power to AI algorithms within the games can make them too cumbersome for users or make a game take too long to complete and really get bored of. This will cause gamers to keep one game and just play with its options for long periods of time and not purchase new titles, thus making the industry less profitable for developers.
However, this is how gaming used to be when I was growing up and when the price of cartridges were around $70 for new titles. Us back then couldn’t afford to purchase or ask our parents to purchase games often and would playa round with a single title for long periods of time. Although this may not please developers in the long term, it is better for gamers and if a game is good new players will buy it anyway and despite how busy of their backlog is.
The bottom line is we are living in a tech revolution governed by uncertainty and without limit of future potential. AI is truly allowing things to be done in industries like gaming not possible ever before. In a future Elder Scrolls game we can may be able to have long conversations and even a free psychologist, of sorts, within a game character living within our monitors or TV sets.
By the way I would also like to close this post with a link to another recent gaming article I published on Medium that sort of touches on this topic a bit and shows how AI can be sued to create game trailers with their own storylines showing huge potential for games. This one is base don a fake or AI-generated trailer for a supposed Shenmue 4 that was quite convincing and made many people think a fourth game was in the works:
Maciej Duraj 
Leave a comment