Final Fantasy 14 director: "no real need" for next gen consoles

[Pemalite]

Cerebralbore101 said:

Pemalite said:

With the state of Physical media, the Switch 2/Xbox series X/Playstation 5 is likely my last console generation anyway.

If I am forced to go digital... I might as well stick with PC where the games are cheaper.

The next generation should be a bigger leap than what we got with the move from Xbox One > Xbox Series/Playstation 4 > Playstation 5.
* A.I upscaling.
* A.I Frame generation.
* Neural Texturing.
* Mega Geometry.
* Neural Materials.
* Neural Radiance Cache.
* Neural Texture Compression.

And more should be a big enabler.

So much of the AI stuff you mentioned is inferior to having it done by hand. A.I. frame generation is having the AI draw imaginary frames where none previously existed. So it's not authentic to the written code. Neural texturing just sounds like a fancy word for having AI do the texturing which is an extremely difficult process and requires an artist's touch. Unless they have worked out the exact mathematical formula for unwrapping I don't see AI doing as well as a human. And if they have then is it really AI? Or just a better computer program? 

As for the rest they just sound like the AI version of what they are. And I have the same objections. 

If they go all-in on using AI to make games then I'm out. The art and originality will disappear. 

Think of A.I as a layer on top of "done by hand" development.

I.E. Someone uses photogrammetry which is the process where someone creates a 3D model of real-world objects and environments by analyzing multiple 2D images from different angles.

You can use A.I to infer more "interpreted" angles of images for additional depth and detail and dramatically speed up development, so that person doesn't spend an entire day building a rock asset, they can instead build a dozen rock assets in that same day instead, with the same perceived quality... Meaning more content, larger game worlds or faster development times and smaller budgets.

A.I isn't just about negating the need for "done by hand" development, it's also about augmenting, enhancing and adding to it... The fear is that it will displace jobs, but considering that game budgets have been constantly exploding with the costs passed onto consumers and development times have constantly gotten longer.... And 10's of thousands of jobs have been lost anyway, why the hell not?

Neural Texturing can be used for multiple different purposes... Like using it to add detail to poor or low quality textures or leveraging it to for stochastic sampling for better filtering.

Art will still need to be front and center for the foreseeable future.... But what will truly be a massive leap will be in leveraging generative A.I for NPC interactions in games, the potential is there for some truly deep and engaging interactions with game worlds.


Don't get me wrong, I hate A.I upscaling with a passion, I hate the fizzle, I hate the crawl, I hate the artifacts, but that's just me as a purist... But the other stuff? That's something to get excited about.

I think the best company that could benefit from A.I development would be Gamefreak. It's 2025 and they still have terrible tiling textures in their games and subpar image quality for the given hardware.