It hasn’t been the perfect week at Blizzard, so let’s examine in and see how issues are going with one thing aside 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”. Pretty.
Shannon Liao, writing for The New York Occasions, has revealed excerpts of an electronic mail despatched to Blizzard staff final month by the corporate’s chief design officer Allen Adham. “Put together to be amazed,” he writes, “We’re getting ready to 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 widespread 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 without doubt one of the most well-known and, till very lately, 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 stuffed these video games with memorable characters. To listen to folks 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 all over the place from Halo studio 343 to Ubisoft—is the truth that a unique AI strategy Blizzard had been attempting (and had even patented) has already been canned as a result of “the software was taking over an excessive amount of artist time to be efficient”.
