It hasn’t been the perfect week at Blizzard, so let’s examine 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 idea artwork”. Lovely.
Shannon Liao, writing for The New York Times, has revealed excerpts of an e mail despatched to Blizzard workers final month by the corporate’s chief design officer Allen Adham. “Prepare to be amazed,” he writes, “We are getting ready to a significant evolution in how we construct and handle our video 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 getting used to assist generate idea artwork for recreation environments in addition to characters and their outfits”, although he additionally provides Blizzard is additional AI implementations for all the things from “autonomous, clever, in-game NPCs” to “procedurally assisted degree design” to “voice cloning,” “recreation coding” and “anti-toxicity.”
Blizzard is likely 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 folks 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 all over the place from Halo studio 343 to Ubisoft—is the truth that a special AI method Blizzard had been making an attempt (and had even patented) has already been canned as a result of “the device was taking on an excessive amount of artist time to be efficient”.
