RuneScape's Position on Gen AI

royal__

There's a lot of anti-AI warriors on Reddit in the game development space. I dislike lazy AI slop use in games as much as anyone else, but I also dislike the lack of nuance in these positions. They think it's gotta be all or nothing. It will become increasingly unrealistic to expect game developers to not use AI in some part of their process, especially code development, but such use does not automatically make it slop.

CivBase

Seems like a perfectly good response to me.

retrac98

I understand the sentiment, but I feel like not using AI for game dev isn’t going to be economically viable much longer, and I wonder why companies don’t just embrace it while it still gives them an edge.

bearjaws

Gamers have to be one of the most interesting groups of people. I'll define "gamers" as people who spend more than 40 hours a week playing games, and probably overlaps significantly with streamer consumption. Extremely needy, demanding, and simultaneously spineless. Riot releases a $500 skin and make a million dollars, GTA6 has a $400 edition that doesn't include the game, and of course the OG horse armor. Outrage after outrage, yet they keep on buying. Additionally, 99% of them have no clue how hard it is to build a game, at any scale really. They don't understand where corners have been cut, and that it's possible to use AI without cutting corners. They quite literally demand the world despite having never created a single thing themselves, blindly consuming, never producing. Personally, it makes no sense to build a game without AI. A lot of code is needed and you need to iterate on it, perfect use case for AI. Art, buttons, sprites, and models, often need rounds of iteration, why not start with a basic set and work on it? There's nothing wrong with iterating, there is plenty wrong with slop (like the 6 fingers in the trailer). So let's be mad at the slop, not the AI itself.

Barbing

r/2007scape • u/JagexSween [Mod Sween] • 3h ago: “Hello, it’s me, again, talking about Gen AI, again. We’re aware of the concerns raised about the Dragon Slayer 2 trailer and have taken it down, while we investigate urgently. This trailer was produced by a trusted external partner who had explicitly confirmed that GenAI would not be used. But, among other things, there’s a sixth finger and, well, that’s pretty hard to explain away. For that we apologise. Our position is clear at Jagex: we don’t use GenAI to create our games, artwork or creative assets, and will not knowingly allow it to be used on our behalf. This is the second time in quick succession that concerns about generative AI have arisen through partners we trusted, and for us that highlights an issue with our own processes which we must address. Immediately following RuneFest we’re overhauling our review processes, and we’re going to work with and commission creators from the community to make sure that the story of Dragon Slayer II is told to the standard befitting of such an update.”

Juvination

One of the most wild things is how actual lazy this image gen was. Hands have been solved on all frontier models, so what did their partner even use?

seanmcdirmid

Has a viable non-slop game come out yet with AI generated art assets? I'm kind of looking forward to games that leverage locally generated art/content assets using local large/small language models, as a way to make game content more expansive: you make choices in the game that causes different content to evolve in different ways, everyone's game play is different. I see that as a much harder problem for artists to work on (how do they express the meta art for an expansive experience rather than concrete art for a fixed one). I haven't seen anything like this yet, but I'm sure we will see it eventually.

boredhedgehog

What ancient model did they use that it couldn't get the fingers right?

vunderba

The vids have mostly been scrubbed out of existence due to the backlash, but the cinematic trailer is still watchable in their livestream around 8 minutes in. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2890955408 Here’s the most egregious example: https://imgur.com/a/ju2tg75