Christoph Hartmann, head of Amazon Games, also talked about how he would apply artificial intelligence to game development.
Amazon Games is best known for their MMOs (Lost Ark, Blue Protocol, Throne & Liberty), but they are now expanding beyond that, which was also discussed at Gamescom. Then they announced a slightly crazy co-op action game, King of Meat, which is a significant change from what they’ve done before. In an interview with IGN, Hartmann talked about how their previously announced Lord of the Rings MMO is doing in the meantime:
“As you know, we have Tomb Raider and others, so obviously that’s happening regardless. But I think what’s more important is that we’re betting on new ideas and new developers, which are very few… Well, we’re not an established publisher yet, but we’re still a big company. We’re still trying to find that hook, that idea of what it is, because we don’t want to just go and do the same thing over and over again,” Hartmann said. So it’s too early to talk about it, even though the opposite was said back in July. The script just didn’t work for them at the time.
And what do you think about artificial intelligence? “I have to be careful about what’s going on here because we’re a big company and we have to deal with all these organizations, so I don’t really want to get in the middle of it, but when we talk about AI, first of all, hopefully it will help us to have new gameplay ideas, which has nothing to do with taking work away from anyone. And especially for games, we don’t really have acting… The majority of the team sits in programming and that’s not going to go away because it’s all about innovation. If it takes something, it will be the really boring parts,” Hartmann added.
We quoted the interview the other day about the new Tomb Raider, but it still seems like the company doesn’t want to rush it.
(The opening image is artwork from Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series, not at all sure if the two mediums are related.)
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