Damn, owlbear stepping up thier graphics and camera game. Definitely keeping an eye on this.
Yeah, substantially higher production quality than I was expecting out of the visuals.
That said…I hope this is an early pass at the writing and voice acting for the purposes of a trailer. Rogue Trader was a lot better than this in both regards.
I have a feeling this will be to Owlcat was BG3 was to Larian.
That would be awesome for them and us
Me too if it’s based on the books/show
What else could it be based on?
I should have wrote “if it’s close to the original story”, not something like I am Legend that completely ignored the reason for the story being called that in the first place.
Its supposedly cannon taking place around the first 2 books.
I have a feeling the folks at Owlcat were Mass Effect fans.
It look much more interesting than I remember from the announcement trailers and hopefully it has a good narrative.
gameplay kind of reminds me of the Division/Division 2, which could be promising - curious to how the space flight works out.
Cautiously optimistic.
I’ve not seen the films, but in the books it sounds fairly real physics based. That could be interesting in combat.
Too bad they’re using AI
https://www.eurogamer.net/owlcat-gen-ai-expanse-osiris-reborn
I have a serious question. To preface: I am no fan of generative AI. I hate the environmental impact, the impact on our workforce, and the risk of further widening the wealth disparity across the world.
That said, do you believe that using generative AI in this case (for prototyping and rapid iteration/visualization of intermediate/non-final design concepts) is worse than, say, artists looking at the freely available online portfolios of other artists for inspiration, provided that they generate the final designs entirely by themselves?
I’m not saying it is or isn’t at this point, but I’m curious if you have a perspective on whether/how this isn’t at least one of the less-bad ways to use AI. It seems kind of like “you can’t stop someone from asking AI for help” levels of usage, not “we fired people to replace their output with slop”.
I would say that having artists use content from the environment destroying content amalgamating plagiarism machine is a bad use case. Those artists could look at art posted online by other humans (with a much smaller carbon footprint) and still be innovative. Especially when you have 6 seasons worth of a TV show to use for inspiration.
This is different from an artist using AI for inspiration, the studio has had job openings where they were expected to use AI for concept art. They are being told to use AI. They also say that no AI generated assets will end up in the final game, but something will slip through just like it did with Crimson Desert.
So yes, AI is worse than just doing things with the human brain. I’m happy to pay for human labor, I won’t pay for slop.
That said, do you believe that using generative AI in this case (for prototyping and rapid iteration/visualization of intermediate/non-final design concepts) is worse than, say, artists looking at the freely available online portfolios of other artists for inspiration, provided that they generate the final designs entirely by themselves?
That would require a nuanced answer that most of these plebes don’t have.
Sure, garbage in, garbage out and all that. The autonomously generated stuff tends toward generic as an inherent byproduct of being a closed loop system. But that doesn’t mean a real artist couldn’t look at some boring ass slop and be inspired to explore new directions.
I think one of the common themes I’m circling these days is that “human in the loop” is a common concept around ensuring outputs from AI systems are acceptable, but a better way to look at it is that generative AI should never have a direct connection to final output. As inspiration or iteration, I think there’s potential value, but ultimately, whether it’s code, art, or content, a human should create what goes out. Using AI for intermediate acceleration is a much healthier approach than the “look how many people we can replace!” angle that’s so popular in tech.
This doesn’t solve any of the many other issues with generative AI these days, but it at least feels like a more sensible approach to the creative concerns.
At the end of the day, if I think the final product looks generic, it will affect my opinion of it. But I’m not going to assume it looks generic just based on something I read about how they’re developing it.
However their achieve it, if characters won’t have exact likenessses from the TV show - no one’s going to care, and thus actors are the models. With show’s cast as models, there’s little artistic expression involved in copying their look as best as possible, unless game goes for derivatives like drawings or cell shading. If they go for derivative looks, then having real artists in the first place would cut down on middle bullshittery of using AI.
There are a couple of actors from that show I could pick out of a lineup having seen only a few episodes, but I wasn’t even under the impression that this game would use many of the characters from the main story at all.
AFAIK show covered, some, but not all of the books, so things like other media ought to pick up the slack. Is there ANY entity that hasn’t learned from Disney ruining SW to not do that sidequest original bullshit?
One of Star Wars’ most acclaimed video games is original side stuff (KOTOR). Especially in a game where your choices can shape the outcome, it’s generally good practice to steer clear of anything that intersects with the main story, which is what I assumed would happen here.
