It hasn’t been the most effective week at Blizzard, so let’s verify in and see how issues are going with one thing aside from Overwatch 2 like…ah, the corporate’s administration sending out emails about how AI instruments are going to be assist design character outfits and “generate concept art”. Lovely.
Shannon Liao, writing for The New York Times, has revealed excerpts of an electronic mail despatched to Blizzard workers final month by the corporate’s chief design officer Allen Adham. “Prepare to be amazed,” he writes, “We are on the brink of a major evolution in how we build and manage our games.”
He’s speaking about ‘Blizzard Diffusion’—a play on Stable Diffusion, one of many extra common AI picture technology platforms—and says that presently “it was being used to help generate concept art for game environments as well as characters and their outfits”, although he additionally provides Blizzard is additional AI implementations for all the pieces from “autonomous, intelligent, in-game NPCs” to “procedurally assisted level design” to “voice cloning,” “game coding” and “anti-toxicity.”
Blizzard is without doubt one of the most well-known and, till very just lately, most reliable online game studios on the earth. It has survived for many years not simply because it creates nice video games, however as a result of it has stuffed these video games with memorable characters. To hear individuals on the firm enthused about letting robots, skilled to serve an algorithmic gruel, take over even some of that work bums me out greater than I can put into phrases.
About the one excellent news to be present in the entire story—which additionally consists of mentions of comparable efforts in all places from Halo studio 343 to Ubisoft—is the truth that a unique AI strategy Blizzard had been attempting (and had even patented) has already been canned as a result of “the tool was taking up too much artist time to be effective”.
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