Cyan, the studio behind Myst and Riven, has for the previous few years been funding its video games through Kickstarter. That’s how 2016’s Obduction was made, and it’s additionally how 2023’s Firmament—with greater than a little bit assist from machines this time—was developed as effectively.
For a studio with such an illustrious historical past, the decidedly combined critiques for Firmament ought to be one thing of a shock. Followers are down on among 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 an excellent motive for a few of that. As Gregory Avery-Weir first identified after sitting by way of the sport’s credit, the longer you sit by way of 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 considering 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, effectively, precisely that. It’s content material of which its remaining state you see it as within the sport as was assisted, not wholly created, by companies constructed on what many confer with 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 in case you have listened to it, particularly contemplating the efficiency cadence and content material — we are able to’t think about what it could be like if wholly machine generated, to your query) however the remaining efficiency timbre, pitch, and tone was modified with one in every of these companies, with the performer’s consent. Hopefully that clarifies issues extra and supplies an excellent instance of what we imply by “AI Assisted Content material”.
Notice 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 tackle 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 help years in the past, earlier than AI-generated content material was even a factor—has been clear: folks are not looking for these things of their video games!
