Google er mere investeret i spiludvikling end nogensinde før takket være deres store Stadia-initiativ, der ikke bare handler om optimeringen af deres platform, men også håndteringen af diverse store, eksklusive spilprojekter igennem en række førstepartsstudier. Men når det nu er Google vi taler om, så arbejder de naturligvis også på måder hvorpå mindre studier kan lave store spil via AI og Machine Learning.
I den seneste udgave af MCVUK-magasinet taler Erin Hoffman-John om Project Chimera, en program der lige nu udvikles af Stadias R&D-hold, som skal gøre det muligt for mindre studier at arbejde på spil i et langt, langt større størrelsesforhold end tidligere muligt.
"We're taking on the risk that developers don't want to. We've been talking externally to developers and asking them, what are the things that you've always wanted to do but have not been able to do? What are the things that you've had to cut out of your games because you haven't been able to do them fast enough, or you just haven't had the processing power?
What if a team of 14 people could make a game the scale of World of Warcraft? That's an absurd goal, right? The thing about games like WoW is that they rely on a lot of heavy, repetitive content creation. The artists and the writers are doing a lot of essentially duplicate work, that's where a lot of the investment goes. If you look at the amount of money that is spent making a game like World Warcraft, it's like 70% content and 30% or less code, even though it's a tremendous amount of code, it's way more on the content side."
Det lyder uhyggeligt ambitiøst, og kigger man tilbage, så har brug af AI, Procedural Generation og Machine Learning ikke ligefrem resultereret i bedre spiloplevelser, men mon dette kan ændre sig?