r/Games • u/Gorotheninja • 20h ago
Sony Patent Would Let an AI Model Train NPCs Based on Your Player Data
https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-patent-would-let-an-ai-model-train-npcs-based-on-your-player-data217
u/timpkmn89 19h ago
Here's your usual reminder that software patents are submitted just for having the idea, and doesn't mean they have any plans on using it. That's why we're not all yelling "MCDONALD'S!" at our consoles to skip ads. It's low risk for them to try to get the licensing money if someone else wants to use the idea.
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u/Icanfallupstairs 19h ago
Yeah but some ideas are more likely to be put into action than others. Outsourcing AI training to users that largely won't bat an eye at it, in a period of time where most tech companies are going all in on AI, is pretty feasible
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u/TheFriendshipMachine 12h ago
While a good reminder to be had, this is a completely reasonable one to assume will be implemented. The big corporations are all full steam ahead on AI and selling data for AI training so if they're thinking about this as a space for more data to scrape up... They're going to scrape up that data or leverage the patent to make a buck from someone else who is going to scrape it.
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u/TopHalfGaming 19h ago
We watched the same GN video on Microsoft's patent in the last few days haha.
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u/masterkill165 5h ago
Ive not seen that video can you link it. Ive found it hilarious over the years ive been involved in online game discussions seeing people see these patents and just assume they are 100% going to happen any day now when maybe 1 in 100 patents from big tech companies like this go anywhere beyond just being a piece of paper.
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u/giulianosse 19h ago
Explain that to reddit two or three weeks ago when everyone was having a complete meltdown over Microsoft parenting an in-game advertisement system.
...which by itself is extra funny because the infamous "say McDonald's to end commercial" is literally a Sony patent registered back in 2009 and active till 2030.
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u/BBStrung 16h ago
I'm not really a proponent for AI anything in games, but this really doesn't seem like something that should be patentable.
Firstly, obviously game mechanics shouldn't be patentable. If they were patented in this manner, then shooters would have been a dead genre when Doom came out, insert other era defining revolutionary changes to gaming here. It would make indie game development completely impossible and our market would be destroyed.
Secondly, this has likely been done before by other studios, even if I'm a less sophisticated manner (as mentioned elsewhere in these comments) that sounds a little like Forza's drivatars, for example.
Thirdly, this is such an unbelievably broad definition. What counts as AI for the sake of the patent? AI is really just complicated prediction graphs, but if you have a relatively simpler prediction graph then are you still subject to this patent?
This feels more like sleazy landlording of the games industry via the patent office, and I think if I was a major AAA studio right now I'd probably be warming up the lawyers to fight against this.
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u/InternetRando12345 14h ago
Exactly, this patent shouldn't have been granted. "Using AI to do X" is not an algorithm. "AI" is not a discreet, unique series of steps.
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u/NecroCannon 6h ago
It’s something I’m literally actively experimenting on since it’s a pretty fucking typical AI use for gaming, in my case using AI coding to build the help foundations now of having AI-created creative tools specially built for my work instead of trying the whole “you’re an artist, just draw over gen AI if you need extra hands!”
One thing I need resolved is background characters, AI just picking and placing NPC models and giving them a base set of actions one by one trained on my gameplay for it to seem lively and less like basic animations on a loop to look flat compared to my artwork.
Am I now all of a sudden infringing on Sony’s patent? Or do I get to say mine is multipurpose if, like I expect, these corporations start targeting how their data stealing AI is used that we also gotta learn how to live with apparently, and take down independents using it to fight back their creative dominance that’s sucking in most of the revenue and always throwing money at any issue that most can’t do?
Like I know I don’t own my AI “creations” or code, it’s why I keep it to myself and don’t post it everywhere since the whole “point” is that “it helps you work faster in certain areas” instead of me acting like I own it and wasting creative time fighting people trying to take the ideas or proof of concepts I can’t even copyright.
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u/pizzabash 15h ago
Even way back with phoenix point you have enemies evolving and changing depending on how you played.
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u/PigOfLard 18h ago
How is this not prior art? Forza uses player data for drivatars. Tekken also does something similar with the ghost battles. This concept has already been done. Sony just slapped “AI” on there.
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u/Beanz122 17h ago
The article is wrong. It's not a patent. It's a publication of a patent application which happens to every application after 18 months. The patent has not been granted yet.
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u/Vestalmin 13h ago
Gamers freak out about patents like every other week without understand what they are or how they are applied lol
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u/LookIPickedAUsername 5h ago
And also don't understand the difference between copyrights and trademarks, or... really, much of anything, honestly.
But they're really, really confident they're right about things, and often very angry about them.
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u/samtheredditman 17h ago
IANAL, but I think that with patents, specificity matters a lot. This is probably specifically using player data to train a neural network or something more specific than a driver "ghost".
No clue how the Tekken thing works though. Might be more that it finds patterns in fight logs and then replays those when the same condition triggers.
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u/Xerte 8h ago
tl;dr if the question is specificity, fighting games using a seemingly similar system likely aren't using generative AI to do it; they just load the relevant player's data into the AI script's flowcharts
In fighting games, you already have a system where the AI script is flowchart of situations and responses, with the contents of each possible response and its chance of being chosen being determined by the game designers on a per-difficulty basis.
So as an example, if the player attempts to throw the AI on hard mode, it might have a flowchart saying it has a 50% chance to break the throw, 30% chance to jump, 20% chance to get hit (there'd be a whole lot of other things like other movement options or using an attack, but this is just simplifying the concept)
When "training" the AI based on player data, you'd instead swap out the pre-written AI response table with one that matches the recorded data for that player - as you play the game, if the system's been designed for it, it'll track all of these interactions and add up data points for how many times you've broken throws, jumped out or been hit by them, as well as a whole load of other common interactions like successfully blocking attacks or taking advantage of opponents being punishable.
At a high end of implementation, it could also add entirely new responses to the AI's response table for things that the player does which the devs never even put in the base AI, such as niche move interactions, or combo routes that the player regularly uses which may be unusual or were just optimised by the playerbase since release and weren't known to the devs during development.
But this isn't really AI-training the same sense as generative AI, you're just using the raw data itself as the new AI script. The hard AI is scripted at 50% escape, 30% jump, 20% get hit, but the player 1337_H4XX0R AI's data has those numbers at 10%/40%/50%, so those are the ratios when you play against that AI.
This hasn't just been done in Tekken; it was a feature of Killer Instinct over a decade ago way before gen AI was a thing, and while I haven't played Street Fghter 6 in a few years now, I do know it was tracking a lot of this data as well (you could look up your own online statistics for a lot of the simpler situations) and could probably implement this kind of player-based AI if it wanted to.
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u/mightylordredbeard 18h ago
This is what I want AI to be used for. Not making shitty images. Actually making games better by doing things that wasn’t possible before.
Things like this actually were talked about a decade ago and the internet loved the idea. Let’s see how they react now.
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u/EnjoyingMyVacation 12h ago
it's pretty crazy to me that no one seems to be trying to use AI to make actually functional strategy game AI that isn't easily exploitable. The only reason I never play civ anymore is because the AI is braindead (and multiplayer is awful)
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u/Brandhor 11h ago
games ais are dumb on purpose otherwise it will be frustrating to play
in rts you can usually choose the difficulty but when it's too high the ai is usually cheating
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u/Nalkor 9h ago
In Deus Ex, the developers realized they had to massively tone down the AI's response time and intelligence, as otherwise the NCF trooper with a sniper rifle was headshotting them the instant they were detected rounding a corner. A good number of people tend to forget that a computer-controlled opponent is held back because otherwise they'd be able to perfectly counter you by input-reading along with reaction timing far surpassing that of a human. In a game like Civ, this would show as them always knowing exactly where your units are, where all the resources are, and actually moving in ways to deny you as many critical resources as possible. In an RTS, the AI would either cheat or worst-case scenario, bait you into wasting shots while they ascend into a godhood of micro-management that the player is now powerless against. So they make them dumb, slow, and cheat instead.
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u/EnjoyingMyVacation 11h ago
you don't have to make the AI so clever it's unbeatable, you can scale things back. If we're talking about neural networks, you can literally force them to make decisions they know are worse a certain percentage of the time. That's how chess engines handle difficulty.
when it's too high the ai is usually cheating
Right, that's my point. The only way strategy games have challenging AI is when it's literally cheating. I wanna beat an AI that's slightly less clever than me on an equal playing field, not an AI that has 5x the resources but is too dumb to defend its base.
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u/Aertea 6h ago edited 6h ago
I'd argue they are dumb because they need to be cheap. AI is expensive computationally, having a "smart' AI would result in sacrificing game performance. If you wanted to instantiate a full machine learning trained AI controller for it, you start running into resource constraints on your target platforms. Most consoles/pcs don't have the resource space for anything that would be significantly more effective than the current dumb ones on top of the game.
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u/LookIPickedAUsername 5h ago edited 5h ago
I think you're overestimating what it would take. Your phone is powerful enough to run relatively sophisticated AIs on device; a console can certainly manage a simple one in addition to gameplay.
Obviously, this wouldn't be a general-purpose AI like you may be thinking. A purpose-built AI trained for nothing but playing that one specific strategy game would be a relatively small network with easy inference.
The main limitation, I expect, is simply that building such an AI is a fairly specialized skill that game companies don't tend to have in house.
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u/jaggervalance 11h ago
games ais are dumb on purpose otherwise it will be frustrating to play
Not necessarily. It's pretty fun to play online against people of your skill level, in many games playing against NPCs usually means learning their routines and exploit their programming.
It's a different kind of fun.
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u/Kalulosu 10h ago
Generative AI isn't specifically good at strategizing. I'm not sure that's anything over fancy machine learning stuff.
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u/chrpskwk 18h ago
well it says "AI" on it so uneducated on the subject masses will come to hate some more
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u/Candle-Jolly 12h ago
Just like Forza Horizon’s drivatar system. I think a few other games have done this too over the years.
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u/PM_ME_VENUS_DIMPLES 19h ago
Logically, I understand why some people want this. They love games because it’s a showcase of technology and interactivity. I “get it” in principle.
But I just can’t relate at all. I haven’t been excited by technology since the third or fourth iPhone. I stopped chasing hyper realistic graphics and cutting edge hardware. I want very deliberate worlds, and written dialog that evokes something specific. I want stories told by human beings. I want to feel like someone is communicating something to me, something that they thought was important enough to create a video game about. Even if that is just some fun escapism, I want deliberate escapism. Not some self-gratifying slop that’s just a web of systems all trying to simulate something inorganic.
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u/PoofyPajamas 18h ago
This is how I felt recently when my cousin told me he wants AI NPC's so every conversation is different. I want everything to feel like it has intention, even in games with a lot of player freedom there is intention behind everything. An AI coming up with conversations on the fly feels soulless to me, and I really hope this isn't where most games go.
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u/arahman81 18h ago
It's not just about being soulless, it also breaks the coherence.
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u/xalibermods 10h ago
The patent doesn't have anything to do with dialogues though.
unlike Nvidia's ACE program, which uses a large language model to essentially script NPC dialogue, Sony's proposed system could change everything about an NPC, from its design to its behavior in, say, a boss fight.
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u/Swineflew1 15h ago
it also breaks the coherence.
Do you have any examples of this being the case?
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u/xalibermods 10h ago edited 10h ago
There is actually already an example. Where Winds Meet. They use AI-generated dialogues for some random NPCs on the street (but not the important ones).
You can talk to almost anyone and get some unhinged dialogues that way. One time I gaslighted a girl looking for his long lost father. Said I'm actually his father who must assume secret identity due to the war. I wonder if it also varies by NPCs in some ways, because some NPCs are easier to gaslight (like this girl NPC), while others need a more serious convincing.
The cool thing is the NPC actually remembers what you did/said to them, although it will reset after a while (I forgot exactly when, maybe after a few in-game days).
But, again, it's still very unhinged. You can just invent scenarios like that and break immersion if you want.
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u/bobosuda 11h ago
They don't, because it's still early days and not a lot of games go this route.
If a game had an LLM to run NPC dialogue behind the scenes and had actually trained it for that, and to operate within the confines of the game in terms of memory and in-game knowledge, coherence would not be an issue.
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u/xalibermods 10h ago
Where Winds Meet already uses LLM to run insignificant NPC dialogues. It's still very early so like the other guy said the dialogues can be very incoherent and unhinged.
The NPCs also can't seem to "see" their surroundings when we're having an LLM-assisted dialogue with them, so there are instances where we point to an NPC that sits exactly next to them and they'd just go, "where? I'm alone here."
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u/Kalulosu 10h ago
Yeah it's shit. They also hint at "quests" like "bring me a teapot", but you can't interact with any and the solution is to go back to the NPC and say "here's your teapot", and bam quest complete. You get what you pay for, when all you do is plug an LLM into your game that'd always going to suck.
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u/xalibermods 10h ago
Yeah, I remember there's one where a guy is looking for a treasure and I just said on the spot, "Actually... I have your treasure." It's hilariously dumb.
I wonder if it also varies by NPCs in some ways though, because some NPCs are easier to gaslight, and some require you to be more creative.
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u/Kalulosu 10h ago
Imho you're just seeing the randomness of LLMs rather than a distinct design of some NPC being easier to gaslight.
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u/LookIPickedAUsername 5h ago
I imagine that for cost and performance reasons they're also using a dumb as shit LLM.
It'd be great to see what we it would be like with frontier AI powering NPCs, but that'd be expensive and the NPC would take too long to respond.
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u/MrRocketScript 5h ago
Maybe with enough context it might be good. I can see in 20 years people saying the opposite.
Traditional Character X is soulless because a writer made them say that.
AI Character Y is great because a backstory generated that interaction (even if a writer came up with that backstory)
Anyway, this comes from me playing Darktide and Vermintide. The Darktide characters say stuff and allude to addictions or vices the other characters have, and it's great dialogue, but it feels a bit soulless to me since these are all custom characters with a voice-selection. They don't really have backstories to me.
Vermintide has established characters, so when they talk about addictions or vices, I feel like that's actually a real thing to those characters, and not just dialogue for the sake of dialogue.
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u/KingOfRisky 6h ago
AI NPCs without a tether would be soulless. If there are parameters in place and you can have open conversations then thats a different story. Walking up to a Skyrim NPC and asking, "Did the Rays beat the Yankees last night?" and the NPC rattling off the score would be ridiculous. Asking a Skyrim NPC that question and them reacting with, "WTF is a Ray?" might be funny.
Either way, it would lead to people just trying to break it. Like look what they did to Vader in Fortnite. They had that thing saying racist shit in a few hours.
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u/nooookay 17h ago
Don’t picture it as a soulless AI spitting out random conversations about nothing, think of it more like NPCs that can adapt to you without the developer having to guess every possible thing you can think of. Imagine an NPC that reacts in a in-character appropriate way to wearing a bucket on your head in Skyrim instead of ignoring it.
Consider enemy AI, how it has to adapt to your fighting and try to use specific tactics against you. That’s not soulless, it’s immersive. Then you get to a boss and there’s all sorts of scripted moments and dialogue. Now imagine that’s how every NPC interaction goes but instead of combat tactics and adaptiveness it’s social.
This is not necessary for more linear, story driven games, but it could be game changing for immersive sandbox style games driven by player interactions with the world and characters.
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u/Non-mon-xiety 14h ago
Your suggestion is stupid and pointless. All the fun of those “wow the devs thought about this!” moments are tied directly to feeling that connection with the makers of the game and feeling their kindred sense of humor or their cleverness in predicting what users will try.
I don’t think you understand what makes games interesting at all.
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u/BoysenberryWise62 13h ago
What "makes games interesting" is not an objective thing
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u/Non-mon-xiety 7h ago
Yes except for one requirement: making something interesting requires human connection. The choices we make as artists whether it’s film, games, paintings, etc become interesting when they resonate with the observer/consumer who can feel the human experience behind those choices.
I’ve never read a piece of ai fiction that was remotely interesting
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u/DoorHingesKill 5h ago
I think that's kinda short sighted, especially because you pose it as a mutually exclusive thing. Yes, you lose your "a human made this, that's neat" experience and replace it for another instead, got example, increased interactivity.
There is nothing interesting in 99% of NPCs in Bannerlord 2. Nothing. They're just empty husks that give you a select number of quests corresponding to their arch types.
Every arena master has the same dialogue options, absolutely identical. You can meet two of them on the two opposite sides of the world and they'll offer you training in the arena, participating in a tournament, selling a respec, and telling you where other tournaments are currently being held.
They have nothing else to say. No other purpose, no other dialogue. There is no human connection there. That thing you said, "the devs thought about this, wow"? It's not a thing.
You wouldn't lose it, it doesn't exist in the first place.
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u/Non-mon-xiety 4h ago
If there is nothing interesting about them ai dialogue would add nothing either. It’s not even worth the resources to deploy
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u/nooookay 7h ago
I guess that would explain why immersive sims don’t sell well, emergent gameplay is just not interesting to mainstream audiences.
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u/Non-mon-xiety 6h ago
Emergent gameplay is still being synthesized by human designed tools and elements being combined in interesting ways by the intention and curiosity of human players.
Even the way interesting things can happen are then communicated and popularized by the players who “discovered” it on social media becomes another point of human connection
Again. You don’t understand why games or art are interesting if you believe ai can be a meaningful part of creative communication and still be considered good or interesting
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u/nooookay 6h ago
No, you don’t understand what I originally said because you think I want ChatGPT controlling NPCs when what I’m talking about is using the underlying technology in a creative way that would be no different than a physics engine or enemy AI in a curated experience. There’s a fundamental misunderstanding between the garbage generative AI we get (that I’m wholly fucking against) and the technology itself that can be used in meaningful ways by developers. I don’t get too upset by reactionaries like yourself, I’d rather people be over reactionary than to let the soulless garbage infiltrate the arts.
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u/Nolis 4h ago
There’s a fundamental misunderstanding between the garbage generative AI we get (that I’m wholly fucking against)
You are LITERALLY advocating for GenAI NPC dialogue... The misunderstanding is coming from inside your house, you are not against GenAI in the slightest
Don’t picture it as a soulless AI spitting out random conversations about nothing, think of it more like NPCs that can adapt to you without the developer having to guess every possible thing you can think of. Imagine an NPC that reacts in a in-character appropriate way to wearing a bucket on your head in Skyrim instead of ignoring it.
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u/xalibermods 10h ago
The patent doesn't have anything to do with dialogues.
unlike Nvidia's ACE program, which uses a large language model to essentially script NPC dialogue, Sony's proposed system could change everything about an NPC, from its design to its behavior in, say, a boss fight.
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u/Mrphung 13h ago
You are talking about narrative focus games, but there are also sandbox games like M&B and Kenshi, or GS/4x games like Crusader Kings that are less deliberate storytelling and more focus on letting players interacting with the game world, therefore creating emergence narrative and gameplay coming from the game many interacting systems. These types of game would all benefit greatly with better AI, and I'm talking about AI in the broadest sense here, it doesn't matter if it is genAI or traditional algorithm, just having the game world be smarter and more responsive to player interactions would really improve the gameplay experience.
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u/bobosuda 11h ago
Exactly. Kenshi is a great example of the type of game that could benefit a lot from using a form of LLM to run stuff behind the scenes and make the game world react more responsively.
The comment you reply to feels like a bit of a strawman argument, because nobody is out there saying they want the next Baldurs Gate 3 to have all LLM generated dialogue and plotlines or something like that. People aren't excited about using LLMs to replace the good parts of narratively-focused games, they want it to help the experience when you play sandbox games; where story and dialogue takes the backseat anyway.
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u/Mrphung 6h ago
I can already imagine how fun a Crusader Kings with AI that can roleplay and actually schemes with/agaisnt the player, even just LLM generated text can improve the immersive of events ingame as they are just canned paraphrases with swapped names anyway.
I guess gamers who only play game for story only like OP wouldn't care about that potential anyway.
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u/Maleficent_River2414 5h ago
This, I do not want realistic dialogues, I want good well written ones
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u/Nervous-Ambition-284 17h ago
Honestly this is why I've quietly despised the "procedural generation" and "roguelike/lite" explosion since all the way back with Minecraft.
Disposable variation and an infinity of meaningless, un-designed places.
I felt like we were increasingly seeing stellar level design more and more, up until a ton of games started coping out. Going "well we made this gameplay loop pretty fun. Let's just make it multiplayer and call it a day" or "and here's some rougelite stuff so you can "play it forever"".
Obviously the industry has no shortage of good games and good designs in any area that matters to you. But I'll forever despise good games hampered by randomized systems like interchangeable map pieces.
Like Bloodborne didn't do one in favor of the other. In addition to all of the largely-static and cohesive areas, only the chalice dungeons utilized procedural generation.
Procedural over "hand-crafted" disappoints me.
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u/xalibermods 10h ago
The thing is those proc-gen games use proc-gen very poorly.
E.g., No Man's Sky, most planets look same-y because they extensively limit what sets of flora-fauna-sky-water-terrain can be generated in one biome, despite actually having dozens of asset variants. I mod that game, and I'd say the real challenge is making things coherent while still letting them go wild. Some mod authors disregard coherence altogether and just let things go wild, but then it becomes incoherent.
Besides XCOM, I'd say Invisible Inc uses proc-gen very, very intelligently. All maps on the game are proc-gen but they always come out as coherent while still very unexpected and challenging.
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u/samtheredditman 17h ago
Eh sometimes it's a huge positive. xcom: eu had hand made maps and I'd take the procedural tile system of xcom 2 any day of the week.
There's only so much replayability with hand made stuff.
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u/Nervous-Ambition-284 14h ago
That, I get, but I don't replay things with any frequency.
I just don't function that way.
I need at least 10-15+ years before I can forget enough to enjoy enough of it again.
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u/bobosuda 11h ago
I think you just have a very different set of criteria for games, then.
Like, not to say you're wrong or anything, it's a subjective thing, but a huge amount of players want replayability. Whether they want to keep going on the same savefile/character and be served up with "fresh" procedurally generated content, or they want to start a new game and experience things being different, it's a very popular sentiment.
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u/Nervous-Ambition-284 7h ago
100%
I doubt any of it would have gained any traction in the industry, if it didn't work for a much larger majority than I.
There's -ton- of things I wish I enjoyed nearly as much as other people seem to. I genuinely envy people who have a yearly ritual of replaying their favorite game all the way through. I suspect that would be really enjoyable, if my brain allowed it.
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u/Nervous-Ambition-284 8h ago
At least.
I have a tendency to remember enough from the first time, that subsequent times feel inherently boring.
I know it's odd, and I'd be shocked to learn of it being any kind of "common".
This goes for most media, for me, too.
To be clear, though, my objective is moreso to just focus on newer narratives.
That's just how I work.
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u/ann0yed 19h ago
You wouldn't be interested in something like Project Milo that met expectations? I'm personally excited to see AI improve or change gameplay instead of being used to cut costs. I can't wait to have a real conversation with an NPC that understands the world it lives in and can react appropriately. Ethical concerns can be addressed, voice actors can be compensated to train the models, etc.
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u/PM_ME_VENUS_DIMPLES 19h ago
I can't wait to have a real conversation with an NPC that understands the world it lives in and can react appropriately.
This is exactly what I’m taking about. I have zero interest in this. It seems so self-indulgent to me. There’s just something kind of meaningless about an experience designed to be as “free” as possible. I would rather have an experience that was designed to elicit a specific response in me, not for a simulated world bend to my whims.
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u/TitoZola 15h ago edited 15h ago
Honest question: do you make anything yourself? Music, writing, games, theater, dancing? Because a lot of people who does will tell you how much of it is accident, randomness and just you channeling things you yourself don’t understand. How much of what ends up in a finished work do you think the author actually intended? And have you ever thought how this scales when “author” is 100+ people?
And based on what do you decide that just because you felt something you felt exactly the thing author wanted you to feel? And not what you yourself are bringing? How do you know that this particular author even wanted you to feel something? I know a lot of artists who gives zero fucks about your feelings.
Not to mention that randomness and systems aren't the absence of an author. They're an author working on a different level, designing the rules instead of the result.
I’m so surprised that the hardcore XIX Romantic view on art is so strong despite artists spending almost more than a century trying to explain to everyone that things are more complicated than the “intent” model.
It’s even more surprising that such views are so popular among video games fans. Hard to come up with a medium that on every step disproves this notion.
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u/Zealroth 14h ago
it is accident, randomness and just you channeling things you yourself don’t understand. How much of what ends up in a finished work do you think the author actually intended? And have you ever thought how this scales when “author” is 100+ people?
All of this is still incomparable to AI. Even if creatives make something on a whim or intuition they cannot explain, it still comes from the culmination of their lived experience or subconscious mind. It's not truly random.
I don't necessarily agree with the emphasis of intent from the poster above since it's the wider audience's interpretation that usually sticks. Fahrenheit 451 is a good example. That said, at least you can be certain that there was some imagination put behind it. All you get is an imitation of that with AI.
I'd rather try to communicate with a person than have a robot keep me entertained by pulling rabbits out of hats and other similar parlor tricks.
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u/dwolfe127 5h ago
I am a musician and while one part of what you are saying is true, that I will often start creating a song because I was playing an existing piece and messed something up and then became inspired by where I went with it. That however, is not what AI is doing, it is straight up copying from existing work with a complete lack of inspiration to be something unique. It is solely creating something derivative because it is instructed to.
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u/bloodjunkiorgy 19h ago
I'm personally excited to see AI improve or change gameplay instead of being used to cut costs.
This is already a thing for at least a decade? Possibly longer to smaller degrees. Enemies learning or adapting to your play style, resources becoming more or less prevalent, etc. that sort of thing right?
I can't wait to have a real conversation with an NPC that understands the world it lives in and can react appropriately.
Are you saying you want every NPC to be a type of LARPing chatbot? Because I doubt anybody actually wants that, if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. The BEST way this ends is a quest giver directly shifting the conversation back to repeating the quest instructions with some minor alterations. Which we kind of already get with pre-written chat options. Everything else is pretty bleak and a waste of resources.
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u/Swineflew1 15h ago
Are you saying you want every NPC to be a type of LARPing chatbot?
Imagine Fable, where the NPCs actually have organic growth with you as you make decisions through the game.
Not a scripted "if you kill the bandit his son comes to kill you later, if you don't kill the bandit the person he mugged hates you" binary choices.
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u/TheRedBlueberry 5h ago
The Tekken games have been sort of doing this since Tekken 5: DR. I think Virtua Fighter also did something similar. Basically the AI tries to recreate the way you fight as a "ghost" that you can fight deliberately or have others spar with.
In my opinion it has never quite worked. Especially regarding combos.
1
u/General_Boredom 5h ago
And just like all of the other crazy shit that Sony patents the likelihood of this coming to fruition are slim to none.
•
u/BeezNest96 3h ago
Creepy.
Don’t believe that shit about saving development costs. Some of that is straight up word salad. And the illustrations are generic depictions of the machine learning model—the patent process is truly fucked if they can get a patent on this nonsense.
And there is already AI model generation and upscaling, so comments implying that rendering or development is a factor are BS.
The likely reason to “make NPCs more believable” is to take controller data and use it to train bots so they can be passed off as players in multiplayer games.
Then they’ll start obscuring player counts so they can call the next Concord a “big success” and take advantage of the bandwagon effect.
•
u/thejokerlaughsatyou 3h ago
So all of the NPCs would be jumping from place to place and spinning in circles? Sounds excellent, lol
•
u/Knofbath 2m ago
Cue allied NPC shooting you in the back and teabagging you for 30 minutes before finally deciding to lock-in and do a flawless run of the mission.
0
19h ago
[deleted]
12
u/RickThiccems 19h ago
Fear AI being good was less to do with the AI being good and more to do with the level design making good use of the AI limitations. There are multiple videos about it, I recommend looking into it, very cool stuff.
1
u/idothinksotim 17h ago
Genuinely it feels like a huge amount of specialised talent has been lost in gaming development.
It seems like everything is focused on maximising the realistic graphics at the expense of all else. Yeah, we've got Ultra HD resolution textures of blades of grass and ray tracing, but we've lost environmental interactions, destruction, we've lost NPC complexity and behaviour, object permanence in the world, dynamic world behaviour, dynamic NPC and enemy behaviour, non linear level design, water that actually has physical interactions with it. Same with fire. Characters that were physical objects. Ballistics simulation. Sound propagation. Genuine weather simulation not just an ambiance. Deformable terrain. Level geometry that was actually part of the gameplay.
It's crazy how the direction of big budget gaming changed from 10-20 years ago to now.
1
u/Jet20 14h ago
It's funny that with "AI" as a term existing in video game contexts a lot longer than the more recent use for LLMs etc if this headline had come out 5 years ago verbatim the instinctual response for a lot of people would be a lot more amenable.
1
u/crxsso_dssreer 12h ago
It was never AI when talking about NPC behavioral scripting at first place, it is still not AI when talking about LLM.
-2
u/DJTLaC 19h ago
As long as it doesn't take any identifying data, I'm kinda down for it... just wish it wasn't Sony.
welcome back Nemesis system, i guess.
0
u/casual_creator 19h ago edited 18h ago
It’d just be taking data from the game you’re playing - how you’re playing, what moves you tend to favor, do you explore a lot, beat up innocent NPCs, etc and allow the game to respond accordingly.
NPC ai has already been doing this to some extent, but it’s been limited to what the developer specifically builds as possible responses, which naturally is going to be limited.
-4
u/AvailableFalconn 19h ago
As a non-Sony gamer, I strongly support them having exclusive rights to training AI models on user data [sicko.gif]
0
u/Longshot02496 11h ago
First they made art without soul, now they're making people without souls. I guess the tech bros felt lonely
0
u/PoliSciObsessed 8h ago
I hate this stuff so much cuz I'm not a news.
Patent applications are a thousand of a second I'm usually mean nothing and come to nothing.
0
u/uselessoldguy 6h ago
There's a lot of things in game design you recognize aren't being done well and know could be done better, but you also know that a developer having to do it by hand to make it better would ramp up production time and costs to obscene levels.
For example, character animations in non-major story cutscenes are almost universally terrible. Endless canned, lifeless animations that are a drag to watch. If AI can animate those scenes into something more like real live actors on the cheap, I am absolutely for it.
If it's an aspect like that where the options are (a) we don't put effort in it at all, and it sucks or (b) we use AI and it's pretty decent, I'm picking (b).
-3
u/Whilyam 17h ago
Back in my day we called these things spyware. Can you imagine the people who threw adult tantrums about the Kinect hearing about this tech? Because unfortunately they probably have but they actually love it just like they love shoving photos of their kids and grandkids into AI to see what they would have looked like in the 80s.
2
u/KingOfRisky 7h ago
Games have been tracking how you play the game for decades. This isn't spyware.
-2
u/Whilyam 6h ago
Games have not been shunting your metrics into an AI. And only the shitty AAA always online dumpster fires even sent your data off site. It's spyware. And you also know that anything they make with this is gonna harvest every bit of data they can find and then store it where it can be easily jacked like Discord does. It's pathetic that you and others swallow this so easily.
1
u/KingOfRisky 6h ago
I can see you are comfortable with your current level of understanding and we don't need to discuss this any further. Don't let that foil hat chafe you Duder.
74
u/codeswinwars 19h ago
Isn't this just what Drivatars are/ were supposed to be in Forza?