I'm not sure what makes me angrier, the idea that mocap has "obsoleted" hand-animating or the idea that fucking "AI" is the next generation of that. I am at an actual loss for words because to say "I hate this philosophy" would be to describe a raging inferno as gently warm. This is the most toxic approach to game development I can envision on absolutely any level
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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:
because I want to limit how much psychic damage I take from reading about it
God, this sucks. It really is the myth of technological progress, that anything that's "newer" is inherently better, obsoletes the older forms, makes for "better" art and must be adopted.
It's absolutely miserable. This is a guy who doesn't care in the slightest about concepts like aesthetic or doing anything that isn't 100% within the mainstream.
I truly can't believe that every time I see something from this guy my dislike of him increases. Pushing the boundary on being an irritating trash man.
every time i hear anything he's said, feels like a man declaring "i want to be the emblem of everything wrong with mainstream game dev" even louder than any of the host of awful men before him could manage
Everyone in 6-10 years: Man, remember when Naughty Dog made good games? What happened?
"mocap is better than hand animating" is literally why foodfight is the way it is
It's also just such an out-of-touch take because I have not met a single AAA animator who would even agree with this statement being taken at face value. Tons of high fidelity games are still full of hand-keyed animation, mocap still requires tons of hand-keyed modification, and tons of things can never be mocapprd, especially and obviously for non-human characters. Understanding this only requires just a cursory knowledge of AAA game development, he's so detached from reality.
Just passing by to say this post and comment section are a ray of sunshine in my day! Challenging this bullshit can be exhausting, but seeing it challenged is definitely refreshing.
neil druckmann have a good opinion about literally anything challenge (impossible)
this feels like a philosophy that is only possible to have once you've spent over a decade marinating at the levels of an org where you no longer do any actual work, and all new tools and techniques are things "little people" wield in service of your ideas.
Yes, exactly. This is a comment by someone who is essentially a glorified ideas guy.
Its the "redefine mainstream perceptions of gaming" quote that has me annoyed. Its already annoying that I have to deal with weirdos asking me why I don't think Last of Us Pt. 2 isn't the best game ever made.
Wow, I am stunned at this. Didnt think my opinion of the guy could get lower and yet here we are. No wonder he cant think of a new game concept other than endlessly rehashing the last two games for the last decade
No, he's not even that original. He decided to copy Capcom's Resident Evil 4 homework but instead of The Asylum directing the cutscenes, he has HBO do it. And then he just got rid of the games bit.
I love when people say stuff like “AI will provide opportunities for more nuanced dialogues” but refuse to elaborate on it or provide examples. AI is like the opposite of nuanced, it’s just repeating things that it’s scraped from other places and many times, it’s completely wrong.
What does a “nuanced, ai-assisted” script look like, Mr. Druckmann? Because all I envision is a load of junk that I have to completely rewrite because the AI kept adding new characters to unrelated scenes, kept losing track of the main characters, and kept getting lost in multi-scene flashbacks assuming that it was the main story and not a tangent.
There's something of an interesting parallel to "LLMs as replacements for writers" in the Fifth-Generation Programming Languages debacle of the 80s, in which it was hoped that programmers could be freed of programming (writing) and instead "simply" write the specifications for the program (prompting) and have the computer furnish an implementation. In practice it was quickly realized that circumscribing the desired program with sufficiently detailed requirements was at least as difficult as writing the programs themselves, and the resulting programs were complete dogshit without manual "hinting" to prevent them from boiling the ocean on a bad lead.
I feel like the people who earnestly believe that LLMs can furnish infinite perfect game dialogue are not only overly generous to LLMs but fundamentally do not grasp what it entails to specify what a character ought to say- and how- in the context of a setting and plot. Even before you breach questions of quality and internal consistency, if an LLM is trained on the internet, you cannot reliably cast it as a medieval peasant who does not know what Totino's Pizza Rolls are, and if you assembled a "clean" training corpus and model specific to each character it would be monumentally more work and expense than writing dialogue for the most detailed RPG ever constructed.
i was gonna link this in a friend discord and realize i'd just make everyone fucking livid so i didn't but this made me so fucking livid. imagine being an animator there and having your boss say this shit. all the manual animation work you did on top of mocap to make it actually emotive and shit just thrown under the bus
these big sony studio guys are some of the most cynical people on earth. sincerely hope I never have to work in or around that bubble again
the silver lining is the Gamers who slide in to say you'll be replaced by AI now have to wrangle they are on the side of the guy who killed their dad in tlou2
it's funny how full of shit he is too because Naughty Dog once proud themselves on how Uncharted was actually both mocaped and hand animated. Videos about them praising their animators for their work on it, animators that are not discarded because their effort and work never mattered to a dude that just wants to pay people less and get more money