The Ringer-Verse - The ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Renaissance and AI in Gaming | Button Mash

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Ben and Jess preview the podcast’s ramped-up production schedule during a month loaded with big games, then bring on Justin Charity to marvel at Netflix’s animated video game adaptations (11:57), discuss the 2.0 update and ‘Phantom Liberty’ expansion for ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ and the phenomenon of post-release reinventions of games with ugly launches (15:05), and explain the possible video game voice actors strike and how artificial intelligence may change game development (51:20). Hosts: Ben Lindbergh and Jessica Clemons Guest: Justin Charity Producer: Isaiah Blakely Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone. I'm Mallory Rubin and I am thrilled to tell you that House of VAR has a new podcast feed. Joanna Robinson and I will now be with you twice a week with more of the deep dives you've come to know and love on the ring of universe. In addition to exploring all of your favorite nerd culture new releases, we'll have nostalgic revisitations, height meters, Hall of Fame inductions, tropes courses, drafts, and more. All bad babies are welcome as we dive into Star Wars, Marvel, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and beyond. Follow the new House of Our feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Trimphia offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start.

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about Trimfaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more, or visit Trimfairadio.com. This episode is brought to you by WeatherTech. Everyone knows winter is the MVP and making a mess. You don't need WeatherTech floor liners in the summer, unless you hit the beach or go camping. Then you'd want a cargo liner. Or a road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips. Yeah, you'd be pretty happy about those weather tech seat protectors. So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably going to step into the summer.

You don't need weather tech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today. Hello and welcome into the Ringerverse, your Nexus podcast feed for all things fandom. I am Edmundberg, a senior editor for The Ringer and with me today and all days that we do a But Smash episode, is the co-host who doesn't need a 2.0 update to produce performance improvements. Jessica Clemens. Hello, Jessica. I am a working, living, breathing, human. That sometimes comes with errors, and that's okay. Yeah, that's okay. We all need a day one patch from. time to time. Look, we don't usually lead with programming announcements. We try to ease you

into our episodes before we start selling you on other podcasts to come. But there is so much on our plates and our piles of shame here at Ring Reverse Video Game HQ that I think we have to tell our listeners what's in store because there's a lot. It's a long list. So first of all, this is a big Disney Plus week with the Asoka finale and the Loki premiere and the Ring Reverse and House of R are both rolling right from one show to the next. So after Tuesday's Asoka episode, the Midnight Boys will be living up to their name and dropping an instant reaction. And of course, if you're old-fashioned and still consume the written word, you can read my recap at the ringer.com. What a great website. On Friday, House of R will have their deep dive into the Asoka finale.

And then we'll follow up with the Loki deep dive early next week. But don't want to leave out what's coming this weekend because none other than, Jessica Clemens will be back in front of the camera for the first of several Loki video breakdowns. I take it you're going to explain time travel and the multiverse. I am for those. Every time I make my videos, I'm like, this is for my mom. It doesn't understand what's going on in Marvel, but she's trying. So that's what I'm doing.

Yeah. We call you the timekeeper. That's our nickname for you. Please don't. Please don't. I am not the dictator of time. So that's a lot to look out for. But the reason I started with this is to tell you all about our plans for this show specifically.

Because Jess, I don't know if you've noticed, but there are some good games coming out this month. Oh, my God. Are there ever? Finally. You know, it's been such a slow year to this point. We've just really had a hard time finding anything to play. But at long last, our boredom will be over because October is going to be banger after banger, or at least blockbuster after blockbuster. whether they're all bangers remains to be seen.

And so we will be switching from biweekly button mashes to weekly button mashes while we deal with this crisis while we respond to this release rush. Do you think we're up to this task? You 100%. You 100%. It'll be maybe two days. And then you'll be like, yeah, I played it all. And I'm like, what do you mean you played it all in two days?

I'm like, what's going on over there? How long are you sleeping? But that's what happens. That's what happens when all these games. And you know, like all these games came out and they were just like, oh, this will give people the time to play all these games over the span of six months. And we're like, well, what about people? Yeah, write about these games and talk about a podcast that have to play seven and a week. Don't you think of the nerd culture coverers?

Think of the little people. What we do? Think of the little people. Oh, God. I'm excited, though. I'm very excited. I keep talking to everybody about it. I'm like, yeah, we get to play some, not everything, but we get to play a lot of games that I look forward to.

So I'm very excited. Yeah. Well, Arjuna is the timekeeper of the ringerverse feed. And he has decided that there is time for us to podcast even more than usual. So this is the tentative plan. Today, we'll be talking to our pal, Justin Charity, about cyberpunk 277's new 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty patch. and the phenomenon of games undergoing post-release reinventions after sometimes disastrous launches. We'll also explain some of the issues surrounding the use of generative AI in video games

and how AI is affecting game development and the possible video game voice actor strike. Yes, yet another potential AI-related work stoppage isn't living in the future fun. It will be fun, at least as of next week, because we'll be talking then about Assassin's Creed Mirage. and we'll also be taking a look back at the original Marvel Spider-Man and Miles Morales to get you all hyped for the topic of our pod the following week, which is when

Marvel Spider-Man 2 arrives. After that, we'll do an episode about Super Mario Brothers Wonder and Nintendo's Mario remake rush. And after that, we will change the tone and do some post-Hallowing horror with an episode on

Alan Wake 2 and Five Nights at Freddy's, which I know you've been looking forward to for months. You have no idea. You have no idea. I, you have no idea. I booked two tickets, two tickets to see the movie, two times, once on a Thursday and then once on a Friday, two different people.

I'm excited. Even if the movie's bad, I have to see it twice. Well, I've been dreading these things as long as you've been looking forward to them, so I can't wait to test my cowardice again. I'm going back to the horror wellhood. I'm so excited for you. I'm so excited for you to play Alan Wake and this. But also it's like, I'm sorry, I'm talking about Five Nights of Freddy's again.

There is not, I was thinking about this the other day. I don't think there's a single property of mine that I actually fully engulfed myself in that has been made into another media where I have to talk about it again. So like, when Arcane came out, I was like, oh, I'm so excited. I play League of Legends, but I didn't know the lore behind League of Legends as heavily. And but I know Five Nights at Freddy's. And so I'm so excited that something of mine has been made into another media that I'm. I'm like, I can talk about it because I know this. You don't understand.

I will be right there with you shaking and shivering. And just the Allen Wake 2 game over screen, I saw a tweet of a video of that this week. And that alone is like game over for me. I'm already terrified. It's like, oh, this one is less action adventure and more survival horror. Oh, wonderful. Exactly what I wanted. Just right up my alley.

But I love this. I'm going to give it a go. So that's the plan, subject to change. And of course, you can contact us at ringerverse gaming at gmail.com to request that we cover other stuff after this release rush subsides. I'm excited and exhausted. Just thinking about the number of hours I will spend staring at screens in the next few weeks, which is sort of my natural habitat. But even by our standards, this might be a lot of darkness and seclusion. So we'll see how that.

I'm getting a lot of like, I feel like there's a term for this. And I'm going to make it up right now. I'm getting a lot of gamer slack, which is like, my bones in certain places hurt. So, like, my elbow hurts because it's always on my armrest, like aggressively deep in my armrest when I'm playing on my computer. And then, like, my tailbone hurts because all I do is sit in gamer chairs now. Yeah, it's like gamer's elbow, right?

Yeah, yeah, gamers elbow. Just my elbow hurts because I haven't moved it. It's just resting on my seat. Yeah, it is good to get up and walk around every now and again, or so I've heard. Yeah, I said, who needs it? So I thought in these many October pods that we'll be doing, we could maybe start just briefly by bantering about what we would be playing and or watching in the video game world if this weren't such a stacked year. Because again, like we're all trying to be timekeepers here. There's just not enough time to play everything that we want to play right now.

And I worry that things will get lost and that we won't ever return to them. So I just want to shout out what I wish I were playing while I'm playing other things. So for me this week, it's cocoon. And I don't know if you've checked this out. It is a puzzle game. So now that you've experienced Braid, maybe, yeah. I said, I'm good. Maybe not.

Maybe it's not for me. Yeah, it may not be quite as intense as Braid. It's an Annapurna interactive published game. It's from the lead gameplay designer of Limbo and Inside. And it wasn't even really on my radar until it suddenly popped up and got great reviews. And I thought, oh, man, I want to play this. I will definitely like this game. And another selling point is that it only takes a few hours to beat, which is like, manna from heaven.

It's like, oh, my gosh, I could sit down and play a game in a sitting or two. As we just covered, we're sitting pretty constantly. But like not a very long sitting. That is highly appealing to me. So I'm going to get to it at some point. I just, I worry that games like this will get lost amid the blockbuster onslaught. You know, it's like Immortals of Avales of Avales. right? That game came out last month from a new studio, got a 69 metascore, you know, nice, but maybe not nice enough because it came out between Baldur's Gate and Starfield. And it just kind of slipped under the radar. And next thing you knew, that studio was announcing layoffs and downsizing. And it's like, this is just a victim of we don't have enough time and attention for everything. And that game, it sounded like maybe there were some rough edges that perhaps, you know, could have.

a cyberpunk-esque renaissance, but it's like, will it get a chance, you know, because we're all so busy. We have our hands full with stuff right now. And I know that for you, you were interested in checking out a new release on Netflix, right? Castlevania Nocturn, which just came out, but we just haven't had a chance yet. I'm never going to be able to watch it. It's sad that sometimes you all let things go by the wayside when you're, especially because we're, we're not only talking about games too behind this podcast. We're talking about movies. We're talking about movies. Bees and TV. And I'm like, I'm like, yeah, I still haven't finished succession.

I haven't finished the last couple episodes. But yeah, I want to watch Castlevania. My anime, I've been so lacking on right now. But Castlevania is the one that I'm like, I need to set time aside to watch this. I gave up on trying to play Lies of P. And I'm impressed that you even found time to try. Well, all my friends are playing it. And that's when I'm like, and we're all on Discord.

And I'm like, I'm like, please. something else. And I also, there's a battle royale style for like my hero academia that just came out. Mm-hmm. I'm not gonna play that probably.

This is so sad. I'm like, probably never gonna touch that, but you know. The proverbial good problem to have, you know, woe is us. There's too much good stuff to play

and too much good stuff to watch and discuss. I know world's smallest violins are playing everywhere here. I'll do Castlevania. I need to, but I haven't, I'll figure out time. I need to do it. I need to watch that one.

We'll get around to it. And I think that's a good opportunity to get around to introducing our guest today. The original cyberpunk himself, Ringer, senior staff writer, Justin Charity, who is not just a cyberpunk fan, but also a Castlevania fan. So this is, I hear Justin Charity's music playing Hello, Justin. Hello, although specifically a fan of Castlevania, the pseudo anime. I have very, I have like limited experience with the games. I just really love Netflix in Scalcabia. Yeah. To be clear before there's some sort of gamer catastrophe in the subreddits and the streets over this.

Yeah. I mean, you got the usual complaints about not faithful to the game or they, you know, just the worst faith people getting upset about the genders of the characters or the races of the characters. or the races of the characters, you know, the usual terrible backlash. But people who don't have that agenda are really liking this series as they really liked Castlevania, which we both liked too, because that came out at a time when it was slim pickings, right? I mean, to have a good video game adaptation, I don't want to say that was the first, but you

could say that sort of broke the seal, right? I mean, that was a trailblazer, at least in recent times, that it was like, wow, Castlevania is good. Maybe they can do this and maybe TV is the best home for these things. Yeah, it was at least, if it wasn't the thing that broke the seal and it probably was, it was at least the thing that got me thinking

like, oh, okay, this is possible. We can finally stop. We will in my generation. I will live to see people stop agonizing about adaptation of, you know. And again, there was still kind of the live action leap after that. But yeah.

Castlevania definitely felt like a milestone, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And there's so much animated Netflix video game adaptation going on these days. I mean, of course, there's Arcane. There's multiple Castlevania shows now. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Who doesn't love Arcane? There are people who are still calling for an Arcane Ring orverse podcast. And look, maybe that ship has sailed at this point. Deep on those episodes, go past the episodes, start talking about the game. Every single, okay. But season two, season two for sure, we will be all over. And maybe we can revisit season one when that happens.

We have a video game podcast on the Wrigaverse Feed now. So there's a home for that, maybe multiple homes for that. So there's the Casabini shows. There's Dota Dragon's Blood. There's Dragon Age Absolution. There's Resident Evil. There's Dragon's Dogma. There's Tekken Bloodline.

There's The Cuphead Show. There's Sonic Prime. Now there's Casabinian Nocturn. And they just announced Devil May Cry. and Tomb Raider, the legend of Lerick Croft, both of those are coming next year. Devil May Cry is coming from Adi Shankar, who has been behind the Castlevania shows.

It's just nonstop Netflix video game adaptation. And of course, Netflix is making games and employing people to develop games as well. And that seems to be a big part of their long-term strategy. But it just really runs deep at this point. The Netflix animated video game adaptation catalog, you could spend the rest of the year just catching up on their show.

if you want to. I guess the quality varies. I haven't seen all of them, but the ones I have seen have enjoyed. Yeah, they've been good. I didn't mention another because I think it would be a good segue to our first dedicated topic here. Cyberpunk Edge Runners is yet another animated Netflix show. Classic. Classic. Should a word triple. Yeah. But we're here, not primarily to talk about edge runners, but to talk about Cyberpunk 277. So, Justin, you have been playing and covering. CD Project Reds Cypunk 277 since it came out in 2020, which seems like a long time ago,

but it has come a long way. And now you are back on the cyberbeat and everything has changed. Just to bring people up to speed if they didn't follow along with the cyberpunk drama over the past few years. Can you recap the fiasco that occurred when this game first came out?

Well, sure, right? It's, I guess the launch of it was, It's a game with massive hype, big open world, but also big urban, gritty narrative game. It just has a lot of scope problems that result in the release of it, I think especially on consoles, just being really buggy, right? Yeah. Crashing all over the place, glitching all over the place. And just, I think, otherwise, aside from a lot of technical issues that it had, kind of striking a lot of people is maybe bloated and full of a lot of

game design kind of at war with itself, right? Like one conspicuous thing to me about cyberpunk at its launch was that it was simultaneously game that felt like a big sandboxy urban GTA type thing, Grandap Dotto type thing, but also is a game with a really tight single player, you know,

we have to find the cure to the illness that's killing the type narrative. Emergent gameplay. Like is it DeiSX or is a GTA? Right. Right. Is it DeiSX or is a GTA? Right. That is the question of life and video games, right? Those are the only two options. Right. And as somebody who played the cyberpunk originally on PC, like I play it on PC. I think even in my review, right, I focused less on the technical stuff just because it was so evident and they're, you know, terabytes of YouTube content about cyberpunk glitches. And I focused kind of on that in the original review, right? that tension between this game wants to tell a particular kind of story and it wants to have a particular kind of tone. But what you're actually playing feels like it's doing way too many things at once maybe to really successfully, I think, manage all of that. And even by the standards of games that are a bit broken at release, this went well beyond that, right? to the point that some versions of it were delisted in certain stores. They were refunds, right?

They had to make amends and atone and say, I'm a fix wolves, right? Right. No, that's it. It was very, I'm a fixed wolves. The video game, for sure. Absolutely. That's a great compliment. And just neither of us played this game when it came out.

No. Even though you're a big witcher person, right? I mean, I assumed that you were anticipating this game, but were you just turned off by the anti-buzz about it? Because I was going to ask you all, like, when this happens, how do you feel when you hear that a game is broken? Like, are you mad? Are you disappointed? I mean, if you've paid for it or pre-ordered it, which maybe you should never do because you can never count on games being functional when it came out.

So maybe that's on you. Yeah. But beyond that, I mean, yes, if you've spent money on it. But I just mean as someone who's like looking forward to a game and saying, that looks like something I might play. Then you hear, oh, this is a buggy broken mess. Are you disappointed or is there a part of you that's secretly relieved? Like, you know what? Maybe I could wait a while on this one.

That's so funny that you're like, maybe it's okay. I'll come back to it because I genuinely was like, my whole thing was I remember all my friends paying for it. I was going to go get it. And then they were telling me how bad and glitchy it was and they got the refunds. And I was like, this seems like too much that I don't want to be involved in. I was like, I was interested in the game, but this is just too much on my end to want to do all of this to play this game. And so I just did it. And then I think those reviews that were coming through, though, were only severely about the glitching and the bugs and not about like the story or what it look like.

It was only about the glitching and bugs. People were so upset about those glitching and bugs to the point that they were telling other people not to buy it. solely because of that. And so I never ended up going back to it. I never did. And then no one, or at least in my group, I didn't see a lot of people playing it afterwards.

It was a lot, like, I heard some people that were like, no, I did play it. And it was phenomenal. And I was like, oh,

where's everybody else playing it? I was like, actually, Ben, can I, to sort of add to what just saying? Because I think it's really important. Like,

this is also a game. And I don't want people listening to this thing. Oh, man, I'll feel them, I'm going to dump on Cyberpon. I, after I reviewed the game,

actually consistently spent time with cyberpunk 2077, I was telling Jess before we started recording, my playtime in this game overall is 160 hours. So I have done the don't fear the Reaper mission on very hard. Like, trust me, I've spent time with cyberpunk and I've engaged with, you know, I'd say there's like a core of people online

who are like this cyberpunk 27 revisionists who are like, not only is the game good, it's always been good, et cetera, et cetera. I think some people are more reasonable than others about it. I definitely think that the technical issues at launch didn't do the game

many favors and reviews and just in people's general interactions with it. And it definitely does have a lot of interesting, engaging, and at a lot of, I think at a lot of ways, like, excellent qualities. Like, I enjoy the

160 plus hours that I've spent playing cyberpunk 2077 over the last few years. It's a game that I think is interesting to think about and talk about. It's not perfect, but I definitely was, like, excited for this DLC, like from the announcement, right? Even knowing what the original launch was like,

you know, when I saw the trailers, when I heard Idris, I was like, yeah, actually, like, and especially because, like, I had also seen Edge Runners, right? And Edge Runners, even though that's not a game. That's an anime. spin off of something, right? It's just, you know, I'm definitely, I have an open heart for cyberpunk

27, I'll put it like that. Yeah, you were like, I believe Deidris. I believe Deidris. Honestly, when the Flash came out and Stephen King was like, good movie, I was like, Stephen King, this is weird for you to be talking about. But Idris, I believe. I love Stephen King, but he does endorse a lot of things.

He does. He does do a lot of blurbs. He does. I don't know how he has. Do we? I don't know. You can get Stephen King to blurb your book. We should do this episode. Give him blurb this episode.

Yeah, I was like, we should do that. We should hire him to talk about this episode. Blurb button mesh. Oh, way. I don't know how he has time because he's writing two books a year and I will read them all until the day he dies, which I hope will be a long time away. I'm reading the new one right now, in fact. Anyway, I generally root for games to be good. I'm just saying that if there's a lot on my plate.

And especially if it's a game that I know that if I get sucked into it, I will be in it for a really long time. There's a part of me that's just like, okay, maybe I can wait on this one. You know, I'll wait for the dust to settle. And there are some advantages to coming to a game years later. Like, I bought cyberpunk 2077 just a few days ago for the first time. And, hey, it's 2999 now. You know, if you wait long enough, media gets cheap. if you don't have to keep up with the discourse and the news cycle.

So that's something. But also with video games, sometimes they get fixed. And cyberpunk 2077 has been one of the more notable success stories on that score. And so now when I'm playing, I'm not encountering crashes or bugs. I don't know what everyone was complaining about. Seems fine to me. Just waltzing in three years later. Like, what are you all talking about?

They're like, wait, when did you start playing at 2023? three years after. So I will never get to experience OG cyberpunk, which maybe is a good thing, but also means that I don't really have the capacity to appreciate how it's different and perhaps improved now. Like, I've read the patch notes and the update logs, but I haven't experienced it.

You read autumn? It's a very long list. Yeah. I read the 2.0 patch updates. Okay, there you go. The latest patch notes. Which was already pretty long. So before we get into Phantom Liberty, which is the new and only expansion for the game,

can you kind of convey how the base game has evolved? Like, how is the experience that I'm getting now as a first time cyberpunk player different from what you were playing three years ago? It's actually pretty different. I would say, it's funny, right? I think there are two levels of talking about cyberpunk. One is the big beats, right? Like, what is the main story?

What's the main progression? what are the main areas you spend time in? What are the main types of missions you can do? That stuff is obviously the same, right? So the structure of how you spend time and cyberpunk is the same. But man, this system, they just totally like throughout whole systems. The skill tree is entirely different from the way it originally worked, the way that you sort of use outfits and whatnot.

The correlation basically between outfits and stats. broken right they made it easier to just do the thing where your cosmetics are your cosmetics and you know your stat bonuses are your staff bonuses um they changed a little bit of how stuff like quick hacks work which quick hacks uh just think of it is like magic right it's magic but in the context of a cyberpunk a pseudo realistic cyberpunk yeah um yeah i think they changed a ton of the systems like even the menus i just think the menus like the menus look a lot different from what they they look and work a bit different from how they originally did right and that's stuff that like yeah you're not i'm not going to tell you that oh man the

original way that skilled tree and perk point stuff worked was was oh you had to be there no a lot of it is more you know what it is it's still complex they definitely didn't do the thing that you and i were talking about in the final fantasy 16 episode like it's not like they just totally streamlined it, but it definitely looks more sensible now. Before it looked, it looked like you were staring at C++ code. You're just like, this is, this is too much decisions all like come back. They're really small font. Yeah. So it's, it's really a lot of that. It's really a lot of the menu stuff to me. That's the most different. Okay. And not the fundamental experience of exploring Night City. Is there any part of it you've seen that you thought the

This is a change not for the better that I don't care for the direction they're going in here? No, except for maybe in the context of like, it sucks specking out your character and then getting that little notification when you log in one day of like, hey, all of your points have been redistributed. Do this all over again. We changed how the system works. Like that's kind of annoying, but that's like totally contextual, right? I don't think, I don't really think any of the changes have been for worse now. Okay. Everyone really loves it.

Everyone's talking about it. There was an article, Ben, it might have been you that shared it. I was talking to my friends about it, how, like, Steam said that this was, like, one of the most downloaded games. Mm-hmm. Yep, and played, yeah.

And Phantom Liberty, the expansion, which is next-gen only, right? You've spent some time with that, Justin. So how does that switch up or expand the formula? Yeah, it kind of does what people, I think, from, I remember in the first few months that gave me out, which is like some of these areas are there are clearly areas that exist are going to be added

into night city because think about it this isn't the kind of expansion where it's like now you go off to a totally different area like cyberpunk's big pitch has always been night city like this specific city is it right like this is the city right and so you unlock this area dogtown right um and And yeah, a lot of the action is constrained to there. There's like some heist stuff going on. You got Idris Elba. And that's the thing too. It's like there's something about, I don't know what it is.

Like I think one of the fundamental mistakes that the base game made and the DLC has to reckon with it. Phantom Liberty has to reckon with it, right? Is that the big kind of beat in the original game is you have this like mind virus and you're dying. Like that's your character V, right? You're just dying, but then also you're playing this really open-ended game where you can, you know, mess around and do really like fun, goofy stuff, right? And in this game, you're kind of, I don't know, you're kind of on this mission where what's in it for you, right, is like, oh, you know, maybe there's something we can do

about this thing that's killing you, right? And I feel like the action that then follows from that sort of initial pitch is actually like really nicely focused in a way that I always felt like the base cyberpunk was kind of annoyingly unfocused, right? Or either the game itself was unfocused or the game, again, always to me struggled to reconcile the fact that it wants you to funnel into this really specific urgent story. but then it's also kind of flashing these shiny objects out of frame being like, go do these gigs where you steal a car. You know what I mean? And I think Phantom Liberty has more of a sense of really selling the urgency part, really selling the main mission that you're supposed to be doing

and making that mission feel compelling and urgent enough, that actually you don't just get bored of it and go wander off and steal cars or, you know, make two gangs fight each other because you, inflicted cyber psychosis on one of them, right? Like, I think it just feels more focused to me in a way that I really appreciate. And Jess, we talked recently about our mixed feelings about actors, recognizable Hollywood actors, being in video games. Okay.

Yeah. So I want to know how Idris works. Look, maybe there's an Idris exception just because, right? Just a carve out for Idris alpha. Okay, maybe Charity can speak to this more. From what I've seen, I was like, Idris isn't bad. That's...

Can we talk about his accent in this? Yeah, it's... He's doing two accents at work. That's the thing. We've all seen enough Idris roles to know what his British accent sounds like. Yes, 100. And what his American accent sounds like.

That's the problem. He's doing both accents simultaneously. And it's kind of annoying, actually. Okay, that is true. Maybe, yeah. Actually, no, you know what? You know what? I'm so sorry.

for people listening right now that said, I'm giving an exception to Idris Elba, because that is true. I feel like a monster for doing that. Because I can critique him in cyberpunk 100%. It's just that Megan Fox in Mortal Kombat one was just like an atrocity so bad that I was like, compared to Idris,

no, it's not as bad. But also leave this to people that voice act, voice act. Wasn't Rhonda also bad in that one Mortal Kombat that Rhonda Rousey was in? Yes, yeah, yes. Oh, no. Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Yeah, but we're going to talk about voice acting soon. Although, Chiaro is good. That's one of my main hot takes about Stamphunk, is that actually I do think that both the Johnny's Silverhand character and Keanu's performance are actually nice. I really like them in the base game. A Keanu carve out too, because, again, who doesn't love Keanu? It's like, get people with near 100% approval ratings, then, okay,

in that case. And then we want them to show up at the unveiling of the game when you're showing off the trailer and they're actually having fun with it. But putting Idris in this and I will watch anything with Idris in it just about. Did hijack make sense most of the time? No, not really. Yes. Did I enjoy that show? Come on.

Flawless logic. Tang, did I love that show? Yes. His family was about to get mauled by Giant Lions. And let me tell you, that was not good. But I still watched it. But I'm sure he was good in it.

Right? He's fun. And he DJs. They put interest in this. They even released a promo where he says like, the game is fixed. You know, just sort of sending a message. Like, it's safe to go back in the water and play cyberpunk at this point. Because sometimes it seems like a stunt.

Like, mate. I played it. I played it. I played it. It's fantastic. Especially like. It was so funny when it came out. I was like, did you fix it?

I worked on it for months. Oh my God. Stop. It was so funny to me. I was cagling. I was like, well, Idra said. And what Idra said has been deemed and done. I guess it's good though.

Yeah. No, because it used to be more of a stunt, I think, when gaming still had the little brother, little sibling syndrome. And it was like, hey, we can go get movie actors because games can be art too. And we'll go get Martin Sheen or whatever, right? It was sort of distracting, but I mean, sometimes it was just, you know, it's a famous person and we'll sell some copies here. And before, I think they had the motion capture that they have now where you can actually get the full performance as opposed to just like an uncanny valley looking model of someone who's like, distractingly looks like this movie star, you know, but isn't actually enhancing the experience that much. So maybe it's just sort of bad memories from some previous. dabbling, you know, Kevin Spacey

being in Call of Duty or whatever. Yeah, that's what I was going to say, because I don't know that it was just the little brother thing. I think it was also that is like all these companies started to make Buku money. I mean, even Phil Spencer talks about this in that Microsoft league, right? Where it's just like, if you're a studio making a certain scope of

game, like the main thing you have, like warding off competitors at this point is the fact that you can just throw money, right, at like an established IP, right? And so it's kind of like, yeah, Putting Keanu in your game, right? Or putting Kevin Spacey in your game and then replacing it with Tom Hanks when Kevin Spacey's canceled. It's like, that's your flex as a kind of top tier bestselling video game developer.

Yeah. It's a flex, I think, more than anything else. Yeah, it's one way to differentiate yourself or get attention. Yeah. So, okay, let's talk about this phenomenon just in general because I think the risk is if you do sit back and say, I'll just wait for them to fix this thing. And then years go by and a zillion other games come out. And do you ever have the impetus to return to it?

Or is it just like, well, I miss that one. You know, I'm not going to go back and catch up with it. But then something like cyberpunk says, no, the game is fixed now. So now is when you should play it, actually. And also there's new content. But do you think there's any equivalent to this in other media? Like, is this phenomenon unique to gaming in the sense, that, you know, sometimes it's a game that just doesn't have enough content when it comes out. Sometimes

it's a game that is completely broken when it comes out. But we talked about Life of Pablo, and we were joking about that. And that's kind of a comp, I guess, you know, maybe like remasters or remixes of certain albums, you know, like the replacements Tim comes out and you can actually hear it now. And everyone's like, oh my gosh, this is even better than I thought it was. I can actually hear it as the artist intended or recorded it. Or I guess director's cuts would be sort of similar. You watch a Das Bood or Blade Runner or something the way that the director originally intended it. And it was like, oh, the studio chopped this thing to hell. And now it's actually a great movie.

I don't know if any of those comps quite captures the idea of post-release renaissancees in video games, which, I mean, the medium allows for it, right? At least in certain cases that you can just completely reinvent how a game works or at least whether it works at all, right? Yeah, I feel like rehabilitation is a thing in all media. It's just, but you're right, right, that the dynamic of video game rehabilitation is different. Yeah. Specifically because it's so normalized the I'm a Fix Wolves thing, right? Right. Yeah, it's not just a reappraisal.

It's not like actually the Star Wars prequels were good, right? Right, right. Yeah. And it's not even like, think about how with Pablo, it was exceptional that Kanye said that. like it was exceptional. The idea of like he's going to go and he's going to like tweak the files. Right. Spotify or whatever.

Whereas with games, that's just the fact of life. And also your game might be getting updates like once a week for the next five years. You know what I mean? Like that's that normalized, right? Yeah. Your whole your whole hard drive will be full of patches of records for the skin forever. For sure.

For sure. So it's like, you're right. I think it's just that it really is just that the video games being soft. And also video games, you know, sitting like in your Steam library or whatever. You know what I mean? It just it makes it makes the potential of that higher and also just fundamentally different in nature. Yeah. Right.

And games don't come on cartridges now. So even if you're on a console, you can fix it post release. I mentioned the Star Wars prequels. I guess shout out to George Lucas for the special edition. Right. He's trying to do this. Yeah, he was. He was.

He right. George knew. Yeah. So sometimes, though, the problem is that developers know I can fix this after it comes out. And so we can ship it in a broken state. And, you know, I don't blame the developers necessarily. It's always someone, the publisher, the money people are pushing for this game to come out so that you can make those profits in that quarter. Right. And it's like, this game doesn't work, though. Well, we'll just fix it later. Right. And so that has kind of become normalized, which is the downside of this. we're all just kind of accustomed to things not working so well initially. Not that they ever worked perfectly. Bugs have been part of video games forever, right? To defend cyberpunk for a second, I think it's like people forget or maybe younger people who just don't, who weren't there, right?

They forget that like a big part of the difference too, though, is that you would get broken games shipping in the 90s. It's just that then you just bought a broken game and that shit don't. work or like you bought a game with the soft lock and no one's no one's patching that soft lock out it's just in the game right no refunds yeah it's just like oh well damn sorry you know what I mean that's really it so there's something there is something I get what people mean when they say oh man modern devs they're just constantly shipping broken games and it definitely there's a lot that sucks about the day one patch thing as a phenomenon of like what you have to put up with

as a consumer. But there is something I do think, I do think there's something optimistic about like the cyberpunk story, right? It sucks that the publisher, it sucks that the investors put CD Project Red in this position to release a game that was just that busted at launch. And yet there's something about the fact of like you can save the work that all of these developers tore their hair out and lost sleepover for so many years, rather than it just being

what would have happened in the past, right? Which is like, this game either just didn't get released or it was released and it was like a like psychotoxic or something and it just, it was busted. No one bought it. The studio went bankrupt. It's over. Right. Like, yeah, I don't know. That's that's one way. I guess I'm looking at the bright side of it. Yeah. Yeah. There have been a lot of games were it had the bones of a good game. You could see what they were going for. Yeah. You know, like sometimes I think instead of just endlessly remaking classic games or at

least remastering them, maybe we go back and take games that weren't quite classic and take another pass at them, you know, economically it might not work. But there are a lot of games that are like, this had promised, this was ahead of its time. Maybe the technology wasn't ready, right? But the concepts were solid if it just worked. if they just had more processing power, if they just had a little more time in the oven, then maybe that could have become something.

And I guess the last thing I want to ask about this, then is what you think the commonality is, among games that do get this kind of rehab and Renaissance, that have the cyberpunk style reimagining, as opposed to games that just fall by the wayside and never get good, right? Because, Charity, you're a big Final Fantasy guy, right? So Final Fantasy 14 is another notable example.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. Rough launch, complete reimagining, reinvention. Now it's a success or Fallout 76, incredibly buggy when it came out. Then it became functional. Or, you know, sometimes there are games that, yeah, again, just don't work that well.

Like the Master Chief collection, now it works. Now it's great. Or sometimes it's just that there's not enough content when something launches. And it's like, I don't have enough to do here. So GTA online comes out and you're like, I see what they're going for here, but there's just not enough to fulfill the creative vision. But now 10 years later, people are still playing and paying for micro-transactions and GTA online and it's never going to go away. Or, you know, something like destiny or Sea of Thieves or like, Justin, you're a rainbow sex siege guy, right? Yeah, yeah.

It's like not enough content. okay, well, we can create content over time, or we can fix it like Battlefield or something like that. Or No Man Sky, which is maybe the most notable example of this, right? Hugely hyped, comes out, is impressive in some ways artistically and technically, but it's like, feels a little empty, you know? It's just a limitless universe and there's not enough to do here. Well, years and years and years later and a million free content updates later, the game is better and richer and fuller. people love that game. You know, it took years and years for No Man's Guide to fulfill its promise. But not every game gets that. You know, like, I don't think anyone's going back to BioWare's anthem and saying we can fix anthem or, you know, are people going to be playing Redfall in a few years because Redfall is fixed now? You know, it's like, what determines whether a game gets that second chance and makes the most of it, do you think? You know, first you said Anthem and I was like, damn, I literally forgot this game existed, despite,

it being like 18 months of that game being, it felt like the biggest deal in the history of gaming. And then you just said it right now. I was like, Anthem, right. Oh, Anthem, right. That's wild. But yeah, I mean, one thing about the example, you listed a lot of examples, right?

And I think they're probably different elements, depending on whether you're talking about a multiplayer game or a single player. Because if you talk about something like Street Fighter 5 had a bad launch, you know, I think, the first year of Siege was pretty bad. And it's like, but if you compare the scope, right? You compare the original scope.

You compare the original roster and just like what people felt like, like even the mechanics, right? They hadn't really even added all the mechanics that ultimately ended up in Street Fighter 5 at launch. Right. You go back to like, man, remember when Siege had eight operators in it instead of that times four or whatever, right? And then also the mechanics were totally different.

even the graphics look different unlike the first generation of Siege. But that I think is more, yeah, I think with time people sort of get that, okay, that is kind of what multiplayer games have to be to have life over time, right? Because you have to have that tension of like, oh man, they're going to add Akuma to Street Fighter. Oh, man, are they still going to put, you know, my favorite character from SF3 or SF4 and SF5 or six, right? Like you kind of, I think in multiplayer, it plays out differently. With single player, again, I think it goes back to the thing about Keanu, right?

Where it's like sometimes it feels like it just has to be the kind of game that either had a critical mass of hype for it at launch. Although I guess that doesn't really explain the anthem example, right? Of like, why does it? Yeah. Yeah. Mass effect, Andromeda, just to keep picking my aware here. I don't know. And then maybe some of it is, is, you know, how much goodwill has the title earned if it's a long-running thing, right?

I think maybe it plays a part in it. Like, you're right. It's like a question of goodwill. And I think goodwill for a game or a series can come from a lot of places. Either it having been around for a long time, like Resident Evil, like Resident Evil can get away every now and again with a launch that everyone hates. It's like the core community of Resident Evil people hate that Resident Evil 3 remake. You know, they will complain about it to this day. And every comment section about every other Resident Evil game,

they will complain about the Resident Evil 3 remake. But it's like they still have goodwill, you know, for Capcom, right? And I think with Cyberpunk, maybe it's just that Keanu was the right guy to have me the face of it. But I don't know. It's hard for me to imagine cyberpunk having the juice still in the way that I think. think it does if you sort of go back in time and and redo everything about the game, including its disastrous launch, but it doesn't have like the Keanu factor. Like, you know what I mean?

To me, that makes it way more likely that its fate is something like Anthem, where it's like, it comes out, people have all these expectations for it that, but they're short of that kind of celebrified thing that's cyberpunk. 2077 got to in terms of its hype. Yeah. And yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's Keanu. Maybe it's Chianu. It might just be Kiano. I don't know. Yeah.

Because I don't think it's just goodwill about the Witcher 3. I don't think it's just. Yeah. People had goodwill. I don't think it's just that. So it's hard for me to quantify what the answer is for why people have goodwill for cyberpunk. If they hated it that much at launch. I didn't even hate it that much at launch.

Yeah. Right? So I know why I like it. Will you give a game a second chance? Just like if it makes a poor first impression and then you hear, oh, no, it's good now. Or is it just like, no, you're dead to me. You blew it. I agree with charity.

Definitely for me, I'll respond better to it if it's like also a bigger game. Like Resident Evil or The Witcher. I'm like, yeah, I'll come back. But I'm also a high person that, a very high person that is like, I listen to not just not just, solely reviews, but like my friends. And if my friends are like, yo, like everyone's talking right now about

cyberpunks, DLC. And I'm like, oh, maybe I should try it. I'm like, maybe I should get into it. Enough talk about it. I believe the hype a little too much, which gets me in more trouble than it does ever actually helping me. Believe it the hype is never... Nine times out of ten, don't believe the damn hype.

There's a song literally about it. And I still, to this day, will always believe the hype. And then I will jump in and be like, why did I do this? Why don't do this to Maso? But those big games, like Resident Evil, you were 100% spot on. Like, all my friends, we all play Resident Evil. And we're like, yeah, we got burned, but we're still going to go play the new one. We're going to go play.

We're going to go check it out. It's weird to say, like, gaming, instead of, like, opposed to TV. And maybe I'm wrong on this. It feels like we're more, like, you're not going to burn our bridge. We're going to come back. We're going to try it. It's worth trying, which is insane because, like, Resident Evil and The Witcher takes hours upon hours to play.

I'm willing to come back. A TV show will mess up one season. I'll be like, I ain't going back. I'm not going back. I'm not going back. You're not going to get me to come back. But like a game that takes 100 hours, I'm like, no, let me try it.

Let me try the fourth one. Yeah. This one, this one. It's the buffet, man. It's the buffet. You get food poisoning at Shoney's and you're still next Sunday. Yeah.

Maybe. Maybe it was just a weird day. It was a weird day. It was off. They were doing off that day. The server was different than my normal server. The dishwasher was out. I saw him.

It was a different dishwasher this time. Keep going back. Keep going back. Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with whether it's a big name, whether there's any goodwill with that franchise and that developer. And I guess the nature of what's wrong with it initially. Like Redfall, look, I didn't play Redfall. So I'm sorry to pick on Redfall.

But it seemed like. a lot of people were like just conceptually this game is not good. Like it's not necessarily just that there are performance issues. It's just like from the ground up, like you would need to just redesign this game. This just isn't fun, right? I don't want to play more of this game. Whereas sometimes if they're just rough edges around a solid foundation, you're like, okay, I'll come back to that. But I think it, you know, you have to be a developer that has enough of a runway to fund that effort in the first place. Right. I mean, if you're a first, time developer, if it's Immortals of Avium, if you're an indie developer, you have to make waves right away, right? I mean, sometimes they're slow, slow burns, right? But often it's just such a competitive landscape that if people try it and don't like it, they're just going to move on to something else and you're not going to be able to stay in business long enough to remake it. Whereas if you're a developer that has a lot of big games or if it's a live service game that you want to be.

like people will play this forever, you know, like GTA online, people will still be pouring money into this thing in a decade. Then I think you're willing to just keep plugging away at it for a year or two or three because it might pay off in the long run. Whereas if it's just a single player game and I love single player games and I don't want everything to be live service, but economically it might not make as much sense for you to devote those resources to it. Right. So a lot of things have to go wrong and then also go right to get something like Cyberpunk 2077. Yeah. 100 free events. 6,000 kids, one mission. Clinic kids is using sports and evidence-based wellness coaching to help kids build competence, resilience, and the tools they need for life's challenges and opportunities. Up through August 2026, they're running 100 free

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And this will be kind of a surface level discussion because we could devote an entire episode to this. We could do a podcast series about this. And I hope that we will revisit it, maybe when things slow down a little bit with the release schedule. But AI is in the air right now. And also in our nightmares and dreams. And in Night City, too.

Right. In Night City, the AI is self-aware. Right. And also there was a war and the true AIs were outlawed, right? It's kind of a theme in science fiction, including in the creator, which is in theaters now. Will we learn from these cautionary tales? Unlikely. Doesn't seem like it. But right now, so SAGAFRA, the actors guilds are already on strike against the AMPTP, the Hollywood studios. The WGA writer's strike has at long last been resolved. Last week, with 98% approval, the members of SAGAFRA authorized a strike against the big gaming studios, including Activision and EA and Warner Brothers and Epic. They're seeking wage increases and health and safety protections, but they're also seeking protections against the use of generative AI to replace actors and living human workers, which has been a common theme across all of these labor actions. And Justin, you've covered kind of just the whole creative reckoning that is happening with AI in other media and other industries. And it's happening in gaming too. In fact, it was probably happening in gaming before it was happening elsewhere.

But to be clear, the Guild is not on strike currently against the gaming studios. They just got approval from their members to strike if the talks don't advance, which gives the union some additional leverage. And I think video games are always or often ahead when it comes to technological trends because they're digital, they're technology, right? They're made of that stuff. They're going to be as close to the cutting edge as anything. And so AI, I mean, it's trained on these invidia chips that work as well as they do because gamers have an insatiable thirst for great graphics, right? And when the Metaverse was the latest craze that everyone was talking about, gamers were like, isn't this just video games? It's this a new thing?

Is this not just second life? I'm sure we go for a bat piece. Yeah, exactly. This is Fortnite. You're describing games that we've all been playing for years. Okay. Or before Open AI launch Chat GAPT, it trained bots in Dota 2, right? So there's a long legacy of this.

And obviously, like, AI in video games goes way back in various incarnations. We've been talking about types of AI, just, you know, the intelligence that powers or the lack of intelligence that powers a lot of NPCs, right? But here we're talking about the threat of potentially replacing people who make games, people who develop games, people who write games, people who appear in games and lend their faces and vocal talents to games. We could have an AI address instead of the genuine article, right? No one wants that. Never! No! Not on my watch. Even more on Kadi accent than the one who you. employees and cyberpunk phantom liberty exactly so the dGA the directors guild the wGA they have won some protections here right and so the wGA deal says something like you know i can't write or rewrite literary material

a i generated material will not be considered source material there's a condition that the studios must disclose to the writer if any materials given to the writer have been generated by ai or incorporate ai generate material. The contract also says that the union reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writer's material to train AI is prohibited. So a lot of this seems much needed. Does it go far enough? Does it close every loophole? Our studio is not going to be trying to find ways to replace writers and lay people off and do things more cheaply. I'm sure that they will. And everyone will have to remain vigilant when it comes to this stuff. But just because you've covered this in other media, I mean, it kind of came to a head fairly quickly, it feels like. Obviously, all of this has been long gestating and has been part of sci-fi forever.

But all of a sudden, chat GPT showed up and everyone was like, uh-oh, right? And other just learning, you know, language models. And what have you made of the work stoppages that have been largely about AI and trying to stop AI creep in TV and movies, et cetera. Yeah, it's interesting because for the past couple of months, I actually had talked to people in entertainment, like both music and people who work kind of like on analytic side of streaming stuff for like movies and TV about AI and about what it's actually about.

Like we all sort of have our own in our head doomsday scenarios of what you would use AI to do, right? like write a really bad yet weirdly popular Netflix television show from scratch, right? And I've talked to people more about like optimistic or maybe more modest cases for how you might use AI to like help human creators, especially in music, right? That's where I think I really first started paying attention to AI, right? Is that that something that doesn't, it doesn't necessarily have to be an antagonistic relationship between the human and the AI tool, right?

You can actually, if you, like, sit back and sort of think about it for a second, you can think of, like, music is a history of people using technological advancements to do cool shit, right? So there's not, I mean, there are a lot of ways it could go. I was surprised, right, when I saw the strike authorization in this context. Oh, yeah, I hadn't really thought that much about AI and video games. games. And I think it's, I think you're right that even if you're talking about actors, right? And you're talking about actors and that that lends itself to a direct comparison between what Sagan is talking about in terms of,

you know, like a live action movie versus, you know, AI, Idris Elba in a, you know, a video game release. There is, it really does feel like there's a fundamental difference that's going to inform people's perception in the fact that video games are software, right? Like they just, video games are software, right? And so it's, I think it's harder for me to imagine like really strict prohibitions against certain kinds of manipulation in video games, right?

Like there's something about AI and video games that seem continuous to me, right? as like a technological horizon, if that makes sense. I think it's going to be a tricky space to talk about and to make rules about, I think video games are just going to be kind of really, like you said about video games being ahead of the curve. It really does feel like that more than anywhere else is going to be this kind of like Red Dead Redemption Frontierland.

I think it's so, I'll say before I start, I'm not a scientist. Go figure. I don't know. I don't. I don't. I'm not a scientist. I ain't a scientist.

I don't know. I'm not a computer engineer. Though I'm from Seattle, I don't know anything about computers. But I was. No, I'm from Seattle. No. It's, it's, I don't mind,

I don't mind the AI taking over, like me fighting a bot, fighting a computer. but once it starts like straying the creative line is when I get heated. It's so, I don't believe that we're in a place that actually AI is smart enough to do a lot of things. It would take a lot of research and a lot to build.

And I, again, I don't know science, but it feels like we're not. Because I have used different AI chat GPs or just chat bots or other things to test it to a knowledge and a degree where it's not actually spitting out actually factually correct stuff half the time. And I think you, I know that for video games, they probably build upon that, but that would take so much money and resources and time, especially away from people that we could have put in something else.

And I don't think we'll ever get there where creativity wise, it can reach a part where it knows how to live like in Brooklyn for Spider-Man too and knows exactly what to say. And like has these things that only humans can give it. Maybe it will be in like 200 years. I just don't know. I don't believe we have it now. And us jumping in, it makes me really nervous. business, especially with like Microsoft trying to buy everything, what they're willing to do. Again, from Seattle.

I even worked at Microsoft for a minute. And I remember being like, a lot of the stuff we're studying is very scary. And I don't think we're actually at a place that we can do it. It's just a bunch of people with a lot of money wanting to fund these things to a degree that it comes quicker and it won't be ready. Yeah. You understand the time variance authority. So don't sell yourself short.

Look here. I know math about the multiverse and sometimes incursion. Sometimes it's not right. So I don't know. It just makes me scare once they're getting creative. Right. Yeah. I mean, obviously voice actors are understandably concerned because for the same reason that

other kinds of actors are because these companies can sneakly scan them or record their voices and without their permission potentially if they don't have those protections, just synthesize them. You know, we don't need the flesh and blood living, breathing. money earning human anymore because we can just make something that sounds like them or looks like them and that'll be that. So obviously people are interested in their protections and we're creative people. We're worried that the computers are coming for us and are going to put us out of work. So obviously there's a personal aspect to all of this for people. I'm not worried. I'll beat a computer's ass. I'm not even worried about that. I don't know if I care. I'm not shook.

It depends on the computer. I will fold up a computer in a heartbeat, bro. It's not even. Bring that computer on. And then it's like a big ass. It's actually built like a human. I'm like, whoa, what if it's a NYPD computer that is going on the subway right now? Because you put the Iron Man's Peter Parker suit on from the first Spider-Man game and get the rockets out. Let's go. Let's go.

I'll fight an AI. Let's do it. There are uses of AI in video games and another media that are really not about improving things or opening up new potential and possibilities. they're about cutting costs, right? And cutting people out of the process. It's just like we could hire an artist to make some art, but instead we will just delegate that task to a model that is not going to charge us anything. And probably we'll have weird fingers, but we'll deal with that.

And then they hire someone to clean it up. Right. That's potentially. And again, as you were saying, Justin, like there's a way that these machines, instead of turning on us and killing us or putting us out of business can be our assistance and can help us and unlock the potential of human ingenuity. And specifically in gaming, obviously there are things that have been kind of called AI, which is a very nebulous term and definition.

You know, people mean a million different things when they say AI. In video games, people have been using techniques like procedural generation for decades, which is just like, look, we want to build a universe here. You know, we want to build a thousand planets in Starfield. We don't have enough people or time to actually have. hand craft all those planets. So we're going to have a computer help us out and we'll set some parameters and then the computer will spit some stuff out and then maybe we'll tinker with it. Right. And that's a way that you can do that, whether you should do that. I played

Starfield and I don't know about that. But that enables you to have that sort of scale. Right. And there are things that you could do potentially in video games because everyone says like, especially AAA game development is just broken. Right. I mean, games are taking forever to make now. The dev cycles last longer and longer. Even though there's now attention paid to crunch and some reforms when it comes to that, people are working around the clock to get these games made. And sometimes they're still buggy and broken when they come out, right? And so if you could have some help and if you could delegate some of the busy work and the things that people actually don't want to do, you know, things like in video games, when you encounter an NPC and they say

something, you know, they spit out some phrase like in Elder Scrolls or whatever. It's called a shout, right? It's just these pre-programmed little bits of text or voice that these people will say so that they convince you that they're, you know, real people. And there are, you know, hundreds or thousands of those things that you have to write if it's a gigantic game. And maybe if you're a writer, you say, instead of writing all of those things, which will be very tedious, I could have an AI help me with that and I can work on other things. I can work on more complex storytelling and rich quests. And that will be one of the way. wonderful, right? But does it go too far is always the question, right? Does it just lead to, actually, we don't need writers at all. And maybe we don't need testers because we can have the AI test the games and maybe we don't need actors and maybe we don't need developers. Right. And everything could be taken too far. So in video games, I think there's a lot of promise and potential and legitimate exciting uses, but there's also the darkest timeline. and the dystopian outcome, right?

The clone wars. Oh, no. I think it's impossible to, especially in like technology, it's impossible to ask them to be like, stop furthering it. Like they're going to, they're going to take them. Let's chew, chew. And that's the thing.

You just need to, I don't know, I don't know how to fix it. I don't know how to fix it. But it's like, that's the fear of like, it's going to snowball. It will snowball. They will figure out ways to cut everything. And that's, that's the, a big part. of the fear. It's just like, once this

is true, what else is true? And you guys are just going to keep doing it until there's no one left. Yeah. Literally Elizabeth, Elizabeth from Bioshock is going to make the next bioshock. That's what you're happening, bro. Yes. Yes. Yeah. It's very much the Ian Malcolm,

your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could. They didn't stop if they should. Right? Because so many uses of AI, it's just like, okay, yes, you can use AI maybe to create interesting songs or make mashups of, you know, like a lot of people, if they write a song, they'll have an AI kind of like produce a demo that sounds like an artist so that they can entice that artist to record the song.

Okay, fine. But if we're replacing the actual artists, then it's like, well, why? Right. Like, did we not have enough creativity as a species? Like, were we running out of art? No, we didn't necessarily need to be replaced in this way. but people who are just looking to make a buck and save a buck, then they're always going to leap at these things and we're all going to do a headlong rush into this area, even though we know so many ways that it could go wrong. And there have been mods made.

You know, it's not like a hypothetical, theoretical, what could go wrong thing with voice actors specifically. Like, there have been mods where, you know, people will just take samples of a voice actor's voice from various games and just have them. say other things that they never said and never actually recorded, right? And have them read lines in other games, like, without their knowledge or permission, right? So there are all these potential invasions or abuses of that technology. So it's very much kind of in this space where we don't know whether it's going to go in good directions or terrible dark directions. And probably it's going to be a bit of both, you know.

So we're going to have to just continue to navigate this. And hopefully it won't be a. the horse is already out of the barn sort of situation when there are finally sort of some guardrails laid down here. But it's just, I mean, it's fascinating and it's scary, right? And there are just so many ways that game development could be better and could be streamlined and could be optimized. And I mean, over and over in human history, it's like a new technology is coming. We're all going to be obsolete. Sometimes that happens or sometimes there's an unanticipated effect where maybe it just means.

that we have indoor plumbing now. We don't need to go, you know, use the outhouse or gather water from a well. We all have time to do other things, right? Or, you know, streamlining something, delegating something to a robot or a computer or a machine enables us to do something else or opens up some other industry and creates new kinds of jobs that we hadn't even imagined before, right? It really does both, right, where it maybe simultaneously improves quality of life. in some ways, while also, like, putting a lot of people out of work or, like, disrupting

whole fields, right? And, like, that's the thing that can be really crummy about it, right? Is that it can be both, it can be at the same time, destructive and constructive in, yeah, these really uncomfortable ways. Right. And I am going to use that outhouse forever. I do not use indoor plumbing. that it's it's so and this is Jessica Clement speaking I'm like I am a person

that leads with that is a scared person I love horror games but I lead all my life and fear and this is just something I'm like once we open that door we can't close it

and I'm so afraid of opening that door and venturing in and just I can't trust can't trust Microsoft and big businesses to do what's right all the time and so I'm too afraid

Yeah, they're going to be seeking profit and not necessarily the preservation or betterment of the species first and foremost, right? But is there a world where maybe we don't get another cyberpunk style debacle because there's a way to test and fix those bugs more quickly and more efficiently before release? And is that a good thing? But then is that a bad thing? Because it could put people out of work who are employed to do that, right? but it's tough to scale that up as games just get bigger and bigger and more complex, right?

Yeah. So, man, it's tough. And all of this, you know, a lot of it isn't copyrightable because it's all just basically built on plagiarism, right? You know, all the AI art creation models and text models, some of them too are just like, yeah, we just ingested a lot of copyrighted human created works. And then we just sort of spit out a facsimile of that.

Oh, were we not supposed to do that? Plagiarists are eating right now. Plagiarists are like, no, autumn years, y'all talk shit. But now, now y'all need us, huh? Oh, so now y'all really notice. Now y'all like, yeah. Oh, yeah.

This is real work. It's okay when a robot does it, but when I do it. That's so funny. That's so funny. So that's just a general overview, right? This is not even video game AI 101. This is the capsule version. This is the Spark Notes.

If we are not replaced by AI ourselves, we will certainly return to this topic. But that just gives you a sense of what's at stake here in these negotiations. And just in the video game industry in general, I mean, there are already games being made with AI after a fashion solely. And of course, it's going to be a gimmick, you know, the way that NFTs were. And it's like, let's capitalize this. But this is different from NFTs, right? Like this has some staying power. You know, even when NFTs were all the rage, or at least people were trying to make

NFTs happen and we were all sick and tired of it immediately, it was like, I don't really see that much utility here. Like, okay, there's certain applications of the blockchain. But for me personally, in my video games, in my life, is there anything appealing about this? Not so much, right? And it was more people trying to make a quick buck, trying to push this on us. Whereas AI, it's like, okay.

There are applications of this. There is potential here. This is not going away. This is not like a flash in the pen business buzzword the way that the Metaverse became briefly when it's like we can get a bunch of people to invest millions in our company. If we say Metaverse somewhere at some point, right? So we're stuck with this, I guess would be the negative spin. Or maybe we'll be blessed with this. but all I know

is that AI Jessica I heard eats babies so if you like if you like babies you better stay with a human Jessica because AI Jessica sucks AI Jessica sucks human Jessica's great

I have no desire for AI Jessica we've got we've got the authentic the genuine article here I don't need the NPC she eats babies and loves fogg fog machines no one loves a fog machine

yeah and look there's there's always such a backlash to this, at least in some quarters, you know, not in the boardroom, maybe, but on the internet, you know, if Ubisoft comes out with an AI tool called Ghostwriter and is sort of selling like, hey, you can write one line of dialogue and we will turn it into 10 different lines, right? And maybe that is appealing. Maybe that will actually save people time, but everyone's like, uh-oh, you know, and when things go too heavy into AI or when it becomes clear that they're using it just to save some money and to cut people out of the process, then there is a backlash, at least for now.

You know, whether we will as a community maintain the energy to be vigilant about that and to call companies out when they use these things in ways that are distasteful, I don't know, or whether we will all just be resigned to the sci-fi future that we've all been told is coming and seems to be coming closer and closer to fruition. So on that note, at least there's some good games coming out soon. So that would be fun. Perspective. Yeah.

The opium of the masses, you know? Forget about the worst case scenario. We'll be played Spider-Man too soon. So that's exciting. Spider-Man. All right. So thank you to Isaiah Blakely for producing this episode. Thank you, Isaiah.

Thank you to Arjuna Ramdon Pahl for approving our ramped up podcast production schedule. here. Thank you to Justin Charity for giving us the personal testimonial about cyberpunk before and after. Always happy to have you on. Thank you, Justin. Cyberpunk, good game. Damn. You heard it here. You heard it here first. Thank you to Jessica for actually being a human being. Not just not a computer that I talked to of this podcast. So you think. Be poop, beep. But yeah, beep boop. You can email us at Ringerverse Gaming. at gmail.com and we will be back next week to talk about Assassin's Creed Mirage and also to revisit Marvel Spider-Man and Miles Morales.

Stay tuned on multiple feeds for Asoka and Loki coverage. Talk to you soon.