AI and the future of FFXIV.

[Jeeqbit]

Remastering and coordination to make things faster? Great. If they run the route of it being a potential successive development cycle to games that have made their money and are trash-hauling reuptake from what an AI can shove out as fast as possible for the sake of keeping it online, or even populated-looking, there's a problem.

Right, but I think that FFXIV developers, who are obviously looking at it from a development POV, are going to be able to distinguish this.

The difference between speeding up something you would have done anyway, and saying "write the entire MSQ for me so I don't have to spend weeks writing it" and "come up with all the mechanics for this savage fight so I don't have to" is a night and day difference. One is speeding things up, the other is just not having even the slightest bit of human involvement in the design/direction and effectively becomes like the "random" slider in the creator creator.

If I design a game, and I have thought about it occasionally, the difference between "write all the story and characters and speech" and "here is the story, organize it properly as a storyboard for me please" is night and day.

They aren't going to go back and scrap it like they did for 1.0 if it's add-on to an established product.

That's a good point and it would be a dilemma if they had to backtrack and erase an expansion.

But there is no situation in which they write the story of an entire FFXIV expansion and just have outsourced the entire MSQ to AI. You can't do that for a deep, emotional, fulfilling, final fantasy story for a mainline FF game. There is no way they would risk the reputation of the entire FF franchise on an AI's story writing capability, especially after how badly they got its reputation with the original 1.0 release.

the systems at hand do not produce very wonderous content if you're pushing them too far

AI is fantastic when used as a tool to assist you. It is not fantastic when you outsource the entire thing to it.

You can go as far as asking a chatbot for ideas (much like you used to get a random name/attribute generator), but you need to put them together and make sure it meets your vision and what is in your head. You can summarize your idea in a paragraph or few and just ask it to present it properly and write it out. But ultimately, it needs to have your vision injected into it, and it needs heavily adjusting to fit your original vision.

If used as a tool like this, it can be good, but if you just do it a lazy way like "make me a story please", it's going to be a soulless thing and everyone will be able to see this.

Another way to think of AI is "you get what you put in". If you don't put anything into it, then what you get back is worthless. You have to inspire the AI, or what it puts out will be uninspired or things you've seen before.

Most people just don't put anything in, but expect to get something back from the AI.

[Absurdity]

As is, however, "investing in AI" could mean as little as improving DLSS support in all SE games, or as much as the board of directors being replaced by AI.

That might actually be an improvement.

[DiaDeem]

That might actually be an improvement.

[weebtext]

Take your meds, now.

[Naple]

Bottom line is it will save money for the company to produce a similar quality product, then they'll do it.

Especially with the gaming bubble bursting, companies cutting developers. Gaming needs all the help it can get and AI can be shamelessly used to help.

[Iscah]

What Square Enix could do with AI is use it to make NPC characters feel more real and I don't mean battle-related stuff but personality, it would be really nice to be able to hold conversations with any NPC in the game as if they were real people.

I know SE won't do it because it would cost them too much money [...]

For the amount of work required versus the amount of enjoyment the average player would derive from it? Absolutely too much work, money or not.

These aren't just casual chatbots, they're characters with particular experiences and knowledge, and presumably it will need fine tuning for each character to stay within the right bounds on what they will and won't say, which will mean developing actual personalities for every minor NPC, plus probably develop a new two-way conversation interface so players can talk to them, all so players can have a deep (or likely still shallow) text-based conversation with the airship ticketer or random villager?

Where does that actually bring us in the end? What percentage of players would seriously want to engage with NPCs in that way once the novelty wears off?

Personally it sounds like the conversational equivalent of the uncanny valley for me – having to engage in a "realistic" conversation to maybe glean some new information about the world setting (hopefully not hallucinated by the AI) that would likely get highly repetitive from one NPC to the next.

I would much rather stick to the current system where each NPC has a small amount of deliberately written dialogue and you can be confident that you've exhausted everything they are capable of saying to you.

[Saraide]

For the amount of work required versus the amount of enjoyment the average player would derive from it? Absolutely too much work, money or not.

These aren't just casual chatbots, they're characters with particular experiences and knowledge, and presumably it will need fine tuning for each character to stay within the right bounds on what they will and won't say, which will mean developing actual personalities for every minor NPC, plus probably develop a new two-way conversation interface so players can talk to them, all so players can have a deep (or likely still shallow) text-based conversation with the airship ticketer or random villager?

Where does that actually bring us in the end? What percentage of players would seriously want to engage with NPCs in that way once the novelty wears off?

Personally it sounds like the conversational equivalent of the uncanny valley for me – having to engage in a "realistic" conversation to maybe glean some new information about the world setting (hopefully not hallucinated by the AI) that would likely get highly repetitive from one NPC to the next.

I would much rather stick to the current system where each NPC has a small amount of deliberately written dialogue and you can be confident that you've exhausted everything they are capable of saying to you.

Time to ask the AI chatbot npcs which amogus character is the sussiest of them all.

[dwodmots]

There's a lot of things AI can help with in this game. Having voice overs for every side quest is an obvious example. A more ambitious idea would be something like AlphaStar (AI system that beats StarCraft 2 pros) to have NPC allies that actually learn the fights together with the player.