alt Hacker NewsThe point is that some parts of games truly don't impact the experience.
Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way. Hell, name a game from memory that didn't have the same settings screen with minor styling variations as every other game you played. What exactly am I missing out on by having a resolution dropdown that was hand coded? Does a bespoke "ultra" graphics slider bring the characters to life in a way that AI just can't? Besides, using AI isn't mutually exclusive with all of the elements working together. My point is that AI, wielded properly, makes that easier to achieve. If you don't have to spend a month hand coding sliders for a settings screen, you can get on with making the actual game. Do you also rail against game engines which provide all of this stuff in a generic way?
I do think that using AI to help with internationalization is fine, as long as you QA it just like any code or content that is created by man or machine. It's a tool, and you have to know how and when to use any tool. You can get plenty of good translation out of an AI if you are using it properly.
Also worth noting that Silksong was verified to have a human translation team, and they never clarified if AI was used. It's entirely possible that today's SOTA AI would have done a much better job. The problem with your argument about translation is you and I have no idea how many games have been machine translated well, and never saw an issue. Because of the way gamers are (frequently unhinged about minor things. Prone to groupthink. Extremely vocal. Absolute in opinions like "There is no acceptable use for AI in gaming"), you just can't stick your neck out and say, "We used AI for our localizations, then had native speakers QA it, and not one had issues." You risk becoming a lightning rod for puritans because you wanted to give Romanians a chance to play a game in their own language.
Even if you disagree on using AI for these things, I can keep coming up with ways that AI can make a game better. That's why I told you not to argue against specific examples. Maybe a game designer told an AI to review the code and find performance improvement opportunities. Would you be upset if the game was half the size, and could run higher frame-rates with the exact same content? Is that still an unacceptable us of AI, or would you rather that the man hours that could otherwise go to things that humans are better at get spent on optimizations. I personally would rather have a game with better performance from an AI and more human created side quests, than a game with better performance and fewer side quests because they ran out of budget hiring people to dig into compiler settings.
So yeah, I think it is completely reasonable to use AI in gaming or any domain of programming. I've been around long enough to remember human teams turning out absolute steaming piles of garbage. The issue isn't AI, the issue is people turning out steaming piles of garbage. AI just makes that easier, but by no means does it make it inherent to use.
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> Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way. Hell, name a game from memory that didn't have the same settings screen with minor styling variations as every other game you played.
This mentality is exactly why most modern AAA games are so generic and uninteresting. Great games are more than just their gameplay; they're complete, coherent experiences assembled by people who care about every part of them, not just the parts they deem to be "the important ones". Someone who doesn't care at all what their game's settings menu looks like probably doesn't truly care about any other part of the game, either - it suggests their primary concern is not the quality of the game, but how quickly and cheaply it can be made.
Games having menus and HUD interfaces that fit the rest of their aesthetic was once the standard, before the current trend of minimalism took over. Why do you think that is? Was it just because the developers of yesteryear were all idiots wasting time and budget on things that didn't matter instead of maximizing shareholder value? Or was it because they were focused on making a high quality, coherent game first, and making it "efficiently" second?
> Do you also rail against game engines which provide all of this stuff in a generic way?
Yes, every other game being made in Unreal Engine nowadays is one of the biggest contributing factors to them all feeling so samey (and running badly). Developers who don't care about the quality of the game and just want to get it out the door with the minimum effort possible gravitate towards Unreal Engine, because it's made for them, and this is reflected in the end product.
> I can keep coming up with ways that AI can make a game better.
No, you can come up with ways that AI can make the game easier and cheaper to make at the cost of craftsmanship. It's not the same thing. Adding more side quests won't make the game better if they're not made by people who care about the game as a whole and all its little details. Whatever improvements or optimizations your AI can come up with, a skilled human developer could come up with, too, the difference being that the human demands a living wage in exchange for his work, and that's just awful, isn't it? It's simply not possible for the entirety of the game to be crafted with care without going over budget (let's ignore all the past examples of games that did exactly this, with much smaller budgets, before unappealing ultra realistic graphics became the standard).
> Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way
Most of these are going to be smaller indie games that already don't have many settings to set. Off the top of my head, I'd probably say Ultrakill takes the cake with its opening screen. Based on the description of the expectations, my guess is you're mostly basing your expectations off of large AAA games with multiple pages of settings? Fair enough that they should mostly be implementing "standards" correctly, and theming and character take a back seat.
It sounds like your overall point mostly relates not to settings screens, but things that "don't meaningfully affect gameplay". I think that's a much better argument than the one your example point led me to understand.
As a final note, it's worth reiterating that Steam does not require disclosure for AI-gen code. That settings menu example you were mentioning would be fine, as long as it used art assets generated by a human.