It hasn’t been one of the best week at Blizzard, so let’s examine in and see how issues are going with one thing apart from Overwatch 2 like…ah, the corporate’s administration sending out emails about how AI instruments are going to be assist design character outfits and “generate idea artwork”. Beautiful.
Shannon Liao, writing for The New York Occasions, has revealed excerpts of an electronic mail despatched to Blizzard workers final month by the corporate’s chief design officer Allen Adham. “Put together to be amazed,” he writes, “We’re on the point of a significant evolution in how we construct and handle our video games.”
He’s speaking about ‘Blizzard Diffusion’—a play on Secure Diffusion, one of many extra standard AI picture technology platforms—and says that presently “it was getting used to assist generate idea artwork for recreation environments in addition to characters and their outfits”, although he additionally provides Blizzard is additional AI implementations for all the pieces from “autonomous, clever, in-game NPCs” to “procedurally assisted stage design” to “voice cloning,” “recreation coding” and “anti-toxicity.”
Blizzard is among the most well-known and, till very not too long ago, most reliable online game studios on the planet. It has survived for many years not simply because it creates nice video games, however as a result of it has crammed these video games with memorable characters. To listen to individuals on the firm enthused about letting robots, skilled to serve an algorithmic gruel, take over even some of that work bums me out greater than I can put into phrases.
About the one excellent news to be present in the entire story—which additionally contains mentions of comparable efforts in every single place from Halo studio 343 to Ubisoft—is the truth that a distinct AI method Blizzard had been making an attempt (and had even patented) has already been canned as a result of “the device was taking over an excessive amount of artist time to be efficient”.
