May 23. (Portaltic/EP) –
Blizzard Entertainment is training an artificial intelligence (AI)-based imager to create concept art for its game environments and streamline work times.
Blizzard’s design director, Allen Adham, would have shared information about this initiative last April, when he revealed that this solution, which is called Blizzard Diffusion– which alludes to Stable Diffusion, the OpenAI AI engine to create images with this technology – would be able to “surprise” them with its capabilities.
“We are close to a great evolution in the way we build and manage our games,” said the manager in an email sent internally and retrieved by The New York Times.
In this communication, Adham explains that Blizzard has trained an image generator with its own video games -Overwatch, World of Warcraft and Diablo- capable of effortlessly creating concept art for both the title’s settings and the characters and their costumes.
In the letter sent to the developer’s employees, reference was also made to possible tools for “autonomous and intelligent in-game” non-playable characters (NPCs), assistance in the design of the game’s levels and a wizard to clone voicesamong other tools.
The development of this image generator would come after Blizzard abandoned the machine learning technology it had patented to create textures for environments, such as stone and brick.
The company reportedly scrapped this tool because developers were spending too much time on it to make it effective, according to the company’s vice president of Global Insights, Andrew Guerrero, who has advocated spending that time on more productive and creative tasks.
“Our goal is to eliminate a repetitive, manual process and allow artists to spend more time on creativity. Our goal with AI has been and will continue to be to try to facilitate creative work,” Guerrero said in another statement sent to the aforementioned outlet.
This newspaper has also echoed another communication with which the director of Technology of Activision Blizzard, Michael Vance, would have warned his employees not to use content or intellectual property of the company with external image generators. “These tools carry new and unknown risks and we will proceed to use them carefully to avoid cheating,” Vance said in this email.
Although this technology has generated some skepticism, from The New York Times they point out that video game developers they already rely on the AI so that non-playable characters They can make decisions similar to those of humans. In addition, they maintain that generative AI can improve the creative process in video game development.
An example is the case of Ghostwriter, a tool that Ubisoft uses in its video games and that generates script lines for characters, non-playable adapting them according to the context in which the action takes place.
From 343 Industries, the study in charge of the development of the Halo franchise, they also believe that generative AI could improve game development because it reduces the effort that creatives have to develop an open world game.
