The head of Xbox Game Studios also dreams of AI being capable of performing QA (quality assurance) tasks on games.
Booty brought up during a roundtable discussion at PAX West how much he’d like AI to be able to quality control games and test them: “If we’re working on a movie and you come in and say ‘hey, this ending let’s tighten this up, let’s edit this, let’s cut that scene,’ it usually doesn’t break anything at the beginning of the movie. But in a game, you can be ready to ship, and a designer’s like, ‘I’ve got this one little feature, I’m just going to change the colour on this one thing,’ and then it somehow blows up something, and now the first 10 minutes of the game doesn’t play. So that testing aspect, every single time anything new goes into a giant game, the whole game has to be tested, front-to-back, side-to-side.
A lot is going on with AI and machine learning, and people are using AI to generate all these images. What I always say when I bump into the AI folks is, ‘help me figure out how to use an AI bot to test a game,’ because I would love to be able to start up 10,000 instances of a game in the cloud. So there are 10,000 copies of the game running, deploying an AI bot to spend all night testing the game, and then in the morning, we get a report. Because that would be transformational.,” said Booty, who is not trying to replace human testers but would use new technology.
He received a question about how there have been many cases of game delays, mainly because of the coronavirus pandemic. He also talked about it and pointed out that he believes that nowadays, a studio alone can no longer create a mind-blowing AAA game: “How we make games is evolving. The idea of a single team under one roof doesn’t happen that often anymore. I’ll use an example – our Perfect Dark team down in Santa Monica, The Initiative. So, we just did this big partnership with Crystal Dynamics, and I read online, ‘oh, this must mean there’s a problem or something’ – it’s quite the opposite. You’ve got this veteran team at Crystal Dynamics, a big AAA team with over 100 people that becomes available. Of course, we want to work with them, mainly if they’ve made a game like that. And that’s how we’ve done an awful lot of work. If you think about Age of Empires 4, which just launched last fall, that was made in partnership with Relic Studios up in Vancouver, great collaboration.
And even something like Flight Simulator, we worked with a studio in France called Asobo. And that kind of co-development, when you’re working out with people like Certain Affinity, Iron Galaxy, Blackbird [Interactive], all those studios are so vital to the products that we make. That, though, also adds some complexity; if one of those studios has problems, it impacts the schedule. So the days are gone when you can sort of go, ‘everybody, round up the team in the cafeteria; I want to tell everybody to work harder this Wednesday.’ That’s long gone. It’s gotten a lot more complicated than that,” Booty added.
Hmm, we don’t hear much of that kind of cooperation at Sony.
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