I occasionally watch Bricky’s videos here and there, and I thought this one was a cool one to share. I was curious what his take on the game would be since the only thing I knew about it was that it has AI voicelines in it and that Bricky also dislikes that kinda stuff. He spends almost all of the second half of the video talking about it, how it was used, who pushes for it in the game’s studio, what the studio’s claims are, etc, and seemed like a solid take overall.
I could see an argument for a small studio strapped for cash using computer generated voice-lines to get a game out the door and available, but replacing those with actual acting should be priority in the face of any success.
Animal Crossing style beebleboops are an underrated solution, though
On the AI voices - I think there’s an argument for AI in the ping callouts. I don’t need a real VA to say “Door” or “Loading Bay” or “I have a - Can of Tuna”. Using AI in these callouts makes adding them easier and quicker for new items added to the game. Nobody is going to complain about these callouts, they’re purely functional and for the most part pings are an accessibility feature and break the language barrier too, especially for Europe where mic use has always been lower in games.
The characters though are dogshit. The traders should be using real voiceovers. They sound SO BAD. Even the reddit community agrees with this so you know it’s definitely bad.
The game is genuinely good besides this shit. I hate it. It actually makes me angry every time I have to hear the traders.
You should check out how they used machine learning for the walker movement it’s actually really awesome use case of a totally different kind of ml. I’ll have to watch the vid maybe he covers that too.
Yeah I watched all the making of doc. It’s cool stuff, I would like to see the same thing implemented but for a fantasy RPG. Fighting a giant monster that moves authentically with players able to climb on them will feel even better than guns. Dragon’s Dogma 2 did something like this but it could be taken further with machine learning to train animation instead.
Shadow of the anatomically accurate* Colossus
*not like THAT!
Yeah I wouldn’t mind getting that large. But even smaller monsters like giants and ogres would work really well with it.
Imagine that lord of the rings scene with the ogre in Moria where the Hobbits are on its back. Do that, but with real physics and machine learning that is adapting to the weight and push/pull of impacts. Imagine swinging a hammer at a goblin and it physically reacts in a realistic way the same way that drones in this game react realistically to impacts based on mass and weight and etc.
Moving away from baked animations and towards machine learning for things will completely change how gameplay feels in a positive way. I want to see monsters with weight that stagger and try to correct their balance before stumbling and falling because the players noticed it was off-balance and intentionally applied more force to cause its fall. I want that to not be baked gameplay, I want it to be an emergent outcome of a physics based system.
It will feel so much better than what we have right now. Sitting in the tavern and putting your leg out to trip the guy walking by and causing an all out bar brawl with physics and tables and chairs flying everywhere will be real potential gameplay. It would add a very interesting layer of depth and physicality to fantasy games with RPG elements, much more so than shooters.
I genuinely think this studio should try stepping out of their comfort zone. Soderlund has only ever been ceo for shooters, he should try his hand at fantasy.
That’s mostly Bricky’s take too and I tend to agree.
Using AI in these callouts makes adding them easier and quicker for new items added to the game.
That’s actually the studio’s claim and if their claims of paying the VA’s for their voice and further paying royalties to them is true, alongside their claim that it is only used for callouts, than I agree, I don’t think it’s much of an issue. The full on use on characters tho it’s just shitty. If it produced actually good results like they did with machine learning for the robots movements, then at the very least they could have an argument for it, but it would still be weird.
I don’t think it’s only used for callouts. The Traders are 100% ai and they’re really very very bad. Lance is ok because he’s an android, he’s also oddly the one with the most personality out of all of them. The others are dead fish.
I’m still annoyed about callouts because they’re not specific enough. “Door” is fucking useless. It should say “Closed Door” and “Open Door” based on context.
Yeah that’s what I meant with it being shitty if used on the characters. He didn’t show examples of that in the video only of other voice-lines he thought was rather weird and off-tune, but I’ll take your word for it. I’ll take a look on youtube later to see how bad the traders voices are lol.
They’re the same as what he showed. Those voices are the traders but that’s a couple of the things they say in-game over comms. It’s just as stilted and bad outside of those ones.
Celeste is the worst.
How the fuck do people have an hour in their lives to watch stuff
I mean, I just saw that someone posted a 4+ hour video essay about a video game. And not even a great one (it was just okay). Some people don’t know the value of their time. I say this as I’m scrolling.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
