Cyan, the studio behind Myst and Riven, has for the previous few years been funding its video games by way of Kickstarter. That’s how 2016’s Obduction was made, and it’s additionally how 2023’s Firmament—with greater than just a little assist from machines this time—was developed as properly.
For a studio with such an illustrious historical past, the decidedly blended critiques for Firmament ought to be one thing of a shock. Followers are down on a few of the puzzle design, however additionally they repeatedly point out how flat the sport’s world feels, how poor the narration is and the sparsity of Firmament’s in-game lore, which actually stand out when in comparison with Cyan’s 90s blockbusters.
Turns on the market’s a superb motive for a few of that. As Gregory Avery-Weir first identified after sitting via the sport’s credit, the longer you sit via them the extra you discover that some jobs—like voice performing—don’t get a point out the place you’d anticipate them, alongside composers and artists. Certainly by the point the credit are thanking exterior companions like Nvidia, you’d be forgiven for pondering they’d forgotten to acknowledge their voice actors fully.
Till you get to this, actually the final credit score flashed on the display earlier than they begin thanking streams of Kickstarter backers:
That certain explains why so many items of in-game lore—like “journals, logs, checklists, newapapers, tales, songs, poems, letters” and “loosely scattered papers”—have been described as being so underwhelming, and why so many gamers had complaints in regards to the lifelessness of its narration.
I reached out to Cyan and requested them particularly in regards to the stage of human involvement within the sport’s narration and lore texts (newspapers, letters, and so forth). Their response:
“AI Assisted Content material” listed within the credit for Firmament is, properly, precisely that. It’s content material of which its closing state you see it as within the sport as was assisted, not wholly created, by providers constructed on what many seek advice from as “AI” that Cyan employees made use of.
For instance, all voice performing content material was carried out by an precise human being 100% of the time (which can have been apparent already when you have listened to it, particularly contemplating the efficiency cadence and content material — we will’t think about what it might be like if wholly machine generated, to your query) however the closing efficiency timbre, pitch, and tone was modified with one among these providers, with the performer’s consent. Hopefully that clarifies issues extra and gives a superb instance of what we imply by “AI Assisted Content material”.
Word that doesn’t clarify why these voice actors aren’t credited (when the AI is!), why they used AI (and never common recording/mixing instruments) to change the “timbre, pitch, and tone” of a human’s voice, and doesn’t deal with the quite a few different situations followers have complained about, just like the poems and songs.
This sucks! That is the third sport in a month we’ve needed to spotlight for both that includes or standing accused of that includes horrible, clearly machine-generated content material. The suggestions in every occasion—even on this sport’s Kickstarter web page, the place many backers pledged their assist years in the past, earlier than AI-generated content material was even a factor—has been clear: individuals are not looking for these items of their video games!
