Meanwhile, a writer in the studio has some great ideas. But it’s also clear that not everyone is on board with AI.

Brian Fargo, founder and CEO of inXile Entertainment, was a guest on The Fourth Curtain podcast. The studio is known for games like Wasteland and is part of Xbox Game Studios. The two hosts, Alexander Seropian and Aaron Marroquin, touched on a variety of topics, but Fargo (who has been in the game industry for over three decades and has worked on titles like Fallout and The Bard’s Tale) said that they won’t be using AI for the art elements, but he sees it as useful for things like “cleaning up” motion digitization (something NPCx promises to do with its TrackerX technology). But what does he think about using AI for story and NPCs (non-playable characters)?

“I’m not convinced yet, just because… I’m different, though, so granted, I kind of just want to go through the quest to the end of the product, you know, whatever vision the creators have. If I can talk to a random NPC forever, I personally don’t care about that, I’m not interested in that. But for some people who want to live in this world like in Skyrim, I think that might be more interesting to them. I think it has something to do with your goal with the game and where I want people to spend their time. I think about it like, what do I want the player to do? What do I want them to do?

Somebody might come up with a very clever way for them to talk. We’ve actually come up with a couple of things, and I don’t want to pimp it out right now, but where I see a very specific use for this is that we can make our roleplaying deeper and I’m not just stuck with an NPC giving me background lore or just talking. I think there are actually some ideas that one of my writers suggested that I thought would be great. It’s a nuanced answer to the question of how it could be used, but I can see ways. But I know the way you were talking about it, and I was just like, I have to question it for now until I hear more use cases,” Fargo said.

Interestingly, the interview was published four days before the deal was announced, so Fargo may have already known what Inworld AI had to offer (we wrote about this in more detail). He may change his mind once he tries out the tools… but he’s under no obligation to use them.

Source: WCCFTech