Ken Levine, a well-known game creator, recently expressed his views on AI and his newest game, Judas.
In a chat with GI.biz, Levine explained that while AI is a “very powerful” tool, it still has a lot to learn. He pointed out how current AI can create amazing images, like a woman walking down a lovely street, but it struggles with memory. For example, if the woman turns around, the AI forgets the path she took. He thinks AI’s struggle with persistence might change someday, but it’s not there yet.
People worry about AI taking over jobs, and Andrew Wilson from EA agrees it could happen. But Levine isn’t too concerned about AI taking over storytelling soon. “So for all the concerns about AI, have you seen it write a good 20-page movie yet? Scene-to-scene? It doesn’t know how to do that,” he said. Right now, AI is better at technical tasks, like organizing bug reports. “For instance, training your bug database to query how many bugs you have in certain situations. But what it can’t do is tell me a really compelling story that has a three-act structure, or even tell me multiple scenes. It gets extremely confused,” he added.
Levine didn’t use AI to create Judas, except for some improvements in bug tracking. He remarked, “Right now I’m not overly impressed when it comes to game development. I’m sure there will be more to it [in future] but I’m not super worried about it yet in a, ‘It’s coming to take everybody’s jobs’ perspective.”
We sometimes get too excited about AI, thinking it can do everything, but it still needs a lot of work.
When talking about his new game, Judas, Levine shared that it deals with very high stakes. “We’ve actually never made a game before really where the stakes were this high and that’s for a specific reason,” he said. He compared it to Marvel movies, where the universe is always about to end, making the danger feel less real. Levine wants players to feel the tension but also explore the game world at their own pace.
Originally, Judas was supposed to be a smaller project, but it grew over time as the team’s ambitions expanded. It took over five years to develop because making a game that changes with player choices is tricky. “That’s a really hard problem, and that’s why you don’t see a ton of it [in games],” Levine explained.
He also mentioned that even after 50 years, game developers are still trying to figure out what video games truly are. “Our industry is over 50 years old and we still don’t really know what it is, what games are. By the time movies were 50 years old, they were making Citizen Kane. It’s changed somewhat [since then], styles have changed, but they had it pretty well figured out by the 1940s–we haven’t,” Levine said.
Judas is being developed for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, but there’s no release date yet. For more details, you can watch GameSpot’s video about what Judas is all about.
