AI's been creeping into game development in recent years through various means. Beyond gen-AI assets appearing in the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, you have the chatbot coming to Dragon Quest 10, and NPCs in MMORPG Where Winds Meet whose dialog is generated using the tech. The latter intrigues Clint Hocking, the co-director on Watch Dogs: Legion, who says possibilities probably would've been explored if they were on the table while developing that game.
"We were talking about playing as anyone," he tells Edge magazine. "And we were confronting the problem of how we were going to have all of these characters having their own voices and their own stories. We had real discussions: 'Are there ways to generate this stuff?' We did some investigations, and we realised it was a bridge too far."
A central hook of Legion was the notion that you can control nearly any non-playable character in the sci-fi sandbox. You see, many of them offer distinct abilities to help you navigate Ubisoft's vision of London better.
It was an ambitious idea, and Hocking admits if Legion was being made now, his team would've looked into what AI brought to the table. "Now, had we been four years later, and [had access to] things like the early versions of LLMs, would we have gone deeper in investigating it?" he muses.
"'Can we generate what these people say? Can we generate what voices that they have?' I think we very well might have, depending on what the cultural climate was," he concludes.
I can see the attraction, because this kind of mechanic is the exact sort of thing AI seems primed to assist with. But I'm glad he concedes it probably wouldn't have been a wise PR move. It's a quick way to create a rash of player distrust and put you on the backfoot when promoting the release.
It's for the best Watch Dogs: Legion came out in 2020. Hocking's now working on new projects in a studio he founded, Build Machine Games, but the company's potential output remains a mystery at present.
