Next, he says developers must stop chasing photorealism, questioning whether it improves gameplay or story commensurately: "I don't believe you can get across the uncanny valley; I think that will always be just five steps ahead. So instead of chasing that, let's go back to exciting game design." He says we're past the point where most players even notice the addition of things like advanced ray tracing.
Well, some big seller genres or games aimed to certain demographics work better with realist visuals, this is the reason of why devs chase that.
Instead ofther ones work better with more stylized art style, so devs chase that instead.
But what he says it's partly true, some games could use a more stylized art style that wouldn't require that much horsepower and work behind these visuals.
Layden also suggests letting the machines do more of the work, citing the Hello Games approach. He says AI will have its uses, but the idea it can create anything new of worth is ridiculous: "That is not going to happen. AI only sees in one direction, which is backwards. It puts stuff together to make you think you're seeing forward, but you're really not; you're just seeing a rehash of backwards." Meanwhile, he sees
No Man's Sky as "a game with ultimately infinite scope, but it's essentially done by less than ten people because they spent a lot of time building the pipeline, the toolset, which allowed them to create over and over, making the machine do most of the procedural heavy lifting". He concluded: "We need to get more of that into gaming
Many open world devs already have been using procedural generation for a lot of their systems or environment art. But combined with manually made art assets or "Lego pieces" to build stuff. And AI is helping to reduce the amount of work needed.
Example: a dev makes a house and 10 different texture/materials/etc sets for it, in a way that procedurally can be modifed to have more or less floors per house, or more windows per floor, or using one or the other texture/materials/etc set. And then to place them procedurally in an environment following certain rules, like favoring a texture set when closer to the beach or lakes, needing to be close to roads or paths, etc.
Same goes to place mostly anything like rocks, bushes, types of plants or trees, animals, enemy spawns, collectable loot / ammo / health items, and so on. Devs build some "Lego blocks" manually, define some rules of how they are located and combined procedurally on top of a basic level design made by some human.
I'd bet we still haven't seen any game published using it, but devs are using AI to learn from these "Lego blocks" and make more variants or improve them, learn from these texture/materials/etc sets and make more variants or improve them using references maybe from real world, and learn from these rules set by some designer to place and combine stuff plus combining it with real distribution in real maps, or to cross it with collected player data stats to improve them.
Same goes with characters, mostly npcs: they were made with manually made "lego blocks" that later could be combined following certain rules set by some designer. AI is helping to make more of them, and/or improving them.
And well, everything later gets overviewed, fixed and refined manually.
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