Prior to Xbox Studios head Matt Booty, The Fourth Curtain podcast had welcomed inXile founder and CEO Brian Fargo for a long and interesting chat that went live last week.
Hosts Alexander Seropian and Aaron Marroquin went over many topics with the 30+ year industry veteran behind games like Wasteland, The Bard’s Tale, and Fallout. Around minute 46, the topic veered to AI. The founder of inXile said the studio isn’t going to use AI to create art, but he believes it is useful to reduce menial work like cleaning up motion capture (which is exactly what NPCx promises with its TrackerX technology).
What about using AI for story and NPC purposes, though? inXile’s Fargo provided a rather nuanced response to that question.
I’m not convinced yet on that only because… I’m different, though, so granted, I kind of want to just move forward through the quest into the end of the product, you know, whatever vision the creators have. If I can talk to a random NPC forever, I personally don’t care about that, that’s not interesting to me. But for some people who want to live in that world like in Skyrim, I think that maybe is more interesting to them. I think it has to do somewhat with your objective with the game and where I want people spending their time. I think about it in that way: what am I having the player do? What do I want them doing?
Somebody may come up with a very clever way for them to talk. We’ve actually thought of some things and I don’t want to pimp it right now, but where I do see a very specific use to that that we could make our role playing games deeper and I’m not just stuck with an NPC giving me background lore or just chattering. I think there are some actually some ideas that one of my writers proposed I thought that would actually be great.
It’s a nuanced answer to that question on how it could get used, but I do see ways. But I know the way you were talking about and I was just sort of like, I need to question it for now until I hear more use cases.
It sounds like the inXile founder is speaking mostly from a personal preference and his mention of an interesting concept proposed by one of the studio’s writers is intriguing, to say the least.
The interview went live just four days before inXile parent company Microsoft announced a partnership with Inworld AI to create an AI toolset that studios can use to dynamically generate stories, quests, and dialogues. Brian Fargo might change his mind when he goes hands-on with the toolset, though of course, it won’t be mandatory for developers.
