God Slayer is the next big project in development by Chinese developer Pathea Games, known for My Time at Portia, My Time at Sandrock, and the upcoming third installment in the series, My Time at Evershine.
With The God Slayer, the studio is venturing into a more mature open-world steampunk action RPG, not to mention switching engines from Unity to Epic's Unreal Engine 5. I recently interviewed Zifei Wu, founder and creative director of Pathea Games, to learn more about the game. During that conversation, I also asked about the studio's stance on the use of generative AI tools during game development. His answer is below.
I think the only time we use AI is when iterating. For example, we could say, “I want this character to be a female salesperson,'' and we'd use AI to go online and search for different models, etc., and then we'd just do it ourselves. Overall, I think developers don't want to use AI too much. First of all, we don't see many examples of Asian steampunk, so the example that AI provides us is, to put it another way, strange. So a lot of things we really have to figure out on our own and start from scratch. Overall, it helped ground God Slayer's setting and characters. So, as far as we are concerned, I don't think we use AI very much. At least for now, that's the right way to go.
The use of generative AI tools is currently one of the most controversial topics in most industries, and that includes the gaming industry. We recently reported that Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai believes generative AI can make large-scale development more manageable. Hideo Kojima, creator of the Metal Gear and Death Stranding series, aims to use this technology to automate basic tasks so he can focus on the creative side of game development.
In an interview with Wccftech, Richard Pillosu, co-founder of Spanish indie developer Epictellers Entertainment, shared a similar, albeit more explicit, opinion, saying that there is no point in using AI in any creative endeavor. Dean Hall, known for DayZ and ICARUS, said in another exclusive on Wccftech that AI is here and what really matters is how we deal with its impact.
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick recently pointed out that a game's characters could feel more realistic if the AI is trained based on human-written scripts, and Epic founder Tim Sweeney pointed out that it doesn't make sense for Steam to publish AI on game pages because everyone will be using AI.
God Slayer will be released for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, and potentially for next-gen platforms if available at the game's launch.
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