AI in the video game industry, and really every industry, has been a hot topic. You can have one group thoroughly enjoying AI advancements and how they can further aid productions, with an opposing group vocally striking down anything that has AI attached to the project. Wherever Microsoft’s first-party studios stand on the idea of AI tools being used, developers are not mandated to use them. This comes from the head of Compulsion Games Studio, Guillaume Provost. For a quick reminder, these are the folks who brought out games like We Happy Few and, more recently, South of Midnight.
If you haven’t already been keeping tabs on this subject, Microsoft has previously released a few AI tools for game development. One of those was Muse, a tool that can understand and program game development in terms of both visuals and controller actions. This is very primitive still, and you’re not seeing an entire game emerge from this Muse AI tool yet.
I can absolutely guarantee [that generative AI usage] is not mandated. You’re talking to the studio that literally builds shit by hand. In the DNA of the studio that we have, we’re very craft oriented. We’re very art oriented. – Guillaume Provost
Despite that, some might have assumed that AI tools, like Muse, were being forced onto first-party studios at Microsoft. Guillaume Provost spoke with Game Developer and clarified that’s not the case at all. The head of the studio did note that while there are cases in which AI could help, such as pre-production, it’s not something that can translate well when it comes to the full production of a game.
I think there are a lot of cases where it could be helpful in pre-production for us to do things like spitting out storyboards for us to see whether it makes sense or not— not really stuff that we use in production, but stuff that we want to accelerate. – Guillaume Provost
So, while it doesn’t appear that Microsoft is pushing the AI tools onto its development studios like Compulsion Games, it’s tough to say how far away we are from these tools becoming regularly used. AI is constantly improving and at a fast rate. Some developers even praise AI and its potential means of making game development faster.
For instance, the director of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 spoke about the AI revolution and how he has more games in his mind than time to make them. With AI, we might see some projects hit the marketplace that would have normally been scrapped just due to time constraints.
