There’s been some concern surrounding dark fantasy vampire role-playing game The Blood of Dawnwalker and how AI tools were used during its development. Rebel Wolves studio co-founder Konrad Tomsazkiewicz, known for having directed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, previously said gen-AI tools were used during development, but to test dialogue before it was finalised and actors were employed to record it. You might remember that I talked with Tomaszkiewicz about Blood of the Dawnwalker and AI use late last year.
But recent interviews have brought the issue to the foreground once more, so with that in mind, I asked Tomazkiewicz about it again while visiting Rebel Wolves in Poland recently. It was while answering my question during a group Q&A that he shared his belief that companies “should” use generative AI tools, albeit with the important caveat that the tools are used “in a way which helps people to work, not [to] replace the people”.
Before I quote him in full, it’s worth also sharing what fellow Rebel Wolves co-founder Tomasz Tinc said at the end of the Q&A: “I will just say one thing, because the subject of AI was raised, and whenever AI is raised, there’s controversy. I wanted to make one thing absolutely clear: nothing that’s in The Blood of Dawnwalker was created using generative AI, nothing. People with their blood and flesh made this game from the beginning till the end. I just wanted to make this 1000 percent clear.”
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz was answering my question about whether smaller triple-A companies like Rebel Wolves, which is around 150-160 people, feel as though they’re under pressure to use gen-AI tools in order to compete with bigger studios. Recently we’ve seen Owlcat confirm use of gen-AI tools while making triple-A sci-fi RPG The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, and Embracer found huge success using gen-AI to help make Arc Raiders.
Tomaszkiewicz: “Actually, we don’t have any pressure to be honest, but we obviously used some technologies like the generating of the voices in the game in the early stage, because in our genre, when you work on the RPG game, which is recorded in [six-to-eight languages – he wasn’t sure there on the spot] in VO, the VO is really costly stuff to do. You need to be sure that what you’re recording is what you want to record. Because first of all, changes are really expensive. But the second thing is that the moment when you start to hear the game, hear the NPCs and so on, is the moment when you figure out that something in the story works or does not work.”
If you were to record it all first and then realise you needed a change, it would be a “really expensive” change to make, he said. It’s also bad from a production standpoint of having to change something mid-development. “It makes pressure for the team,” Tomazkiewicz said. “It makes problems over time and we wanted to avoid that. That’s why we use these kinds of tools from the beginning to do an iteration of the story, and when we are sure that we are there where we want to [be], we remove all those voices and record everything with the actors.”
He went on, expanding on his answer: “My approach to AI is like this: I think that companies should use AI but in a way which helps people to work, not replace the people. For example, we have our own QA team and they sometimes have the task that they need to, for example, go through the terrain and check if there are any holes in the terrain. In the same time, they could play the quest and tell me if they like the characters or if the gameplay loop is fun enough, or if sometimes the combat can be better or whatever.
“My approach is I feel that we should use AI to help our people to work and take from them these tasks which are annoying and frustrating and allow them to do this more fun work, which is needed, actually. And this is what I think about it. It should make our life easier but it shouldn’t replace people at all. It’s like you can take a stone to put the nail into the board or you can use the hammer – it should work like this.”
Disambiguating how a studio uses gen-AI tools definitely helps clear some suspicion around it. After all, it’s an increasingly ubiquitous technology laced into nearly every major software package, so perhaps its use is mundane rather than nefarious. However, there’s still a concern that where a door is opened for gen-AI use, more useage may follow.
I explored this theory in a couple of interviews with other members of the Blood of Dawnwalker team, but in both cases I received unequivocal responses about how gen-AI was being used at Rebel Wolves – mostly, it’s not – and it doesn’t sound like there’s any desire to use it either. Specifically, I asked lead quest designer Rafał Jankowski and environment Adam Payet how gen-AI might help them in their work and if they were using it.
“In the professional environment I’m not using it at all,” said Jankowski. “What opportunities do I see for quest design? Difficult to say, because on one hand, the stage of coming up with stories, with perfecting them, this is something that is, at least for me, the most pleasurable, most interesting [thing] about this whole job. Then there is the second part of it, implementation. It’s hard for me to imagine for the AIs to be able to do that anytime soon. So as of this moment, for my particular position, I don’t see many opportunities to use [it].”
Perhaps it could be used at the beginning for generating large amounts of randomised ideas, he added. “Maybe that is something that could work. But again, coming [up] with these ideas, brainstorming them, discussing them with fellow designers: this is one of the best parts of the process,” Jankowski said. “I would prefer not to just push it to the generative AI. But we shall see what the future brings when it comes to this technology. It’s super interesting what’s happening these days; also a little bit scary, not gonna lie.”
“For me personally,” Adam Payet said, “I do what I do because I like doing it.” He also said there’s a case for saying that procedural world generation in the Unreal Engine is generative because it can fairly smartly and contextually create areas. “But in the strictly understood sense of what is currently being understood as generative AI, as in ‘push a button and something comes out’, it’s not for me,” Payet added. “I enjoy handcrafting those things and luckily I work in an environment where that’s valued and where that’s the way we do things.”
Publisher Bandai Namco announced today that The Blood of Dawnwalker releases on 3rd September. This interview excerpt also coincides with a chunky preview of The Blood of Dawnwalker based on my trip to the studio, and on 90 minutes of previously unseen footage of the game I saw. It included the game’s opening and detailed how Coen, the main character, became half-human, half-vampire, and how he found himself on a quest to free his family from the clutches of evil.
