Promising half-vampire, half-human role-playing game The Blood of Dawnwalker used AI during development to test spoken lines before hired actors came in to record them. Game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz – formerly director of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077 – told me this during a recent interview, in which he shared a fairly balanced take on AI use in general.
“We used AI for voices during the testing period of time before the recordings,” Tomaszkiewicz told me, “because my experience from the previous projects was that you [understand] a lot more when you hear the voices, and we wanted to have it as soon as possible to test the game and iterate on it. And then when we decided the story was great and it worked, we started the proper recordings with the actors. This is the use of the AI we had in our company,” he said, “and I think that it’s quite reasonable.
“But on this subject,” he added. “I think that AI should help people and AI shouldn’t replace them. If we can use AI to make people’s lives easier…” Here, he gave an example. He said his quality assurance team on Dawnwalker is currently combing the game’s world for intersections between environment meshes to check they all line-up correctly, and that there aren’t any holes where, presumably, players can fall through. Their time, he believes, could be better spent elsewhere.
“To be honest, I’d prefer to do it automatically – we have the tools for that; not AI but our own tool – and use the time of the people to tell me if the game is good,” he said. “If the feel of the gameplay is proper. If the story is good and the dialogues: they understand it, they feel emotions and so on. This is the way we should use the skills of creative people.
“I’m not totally against AI,” he added, “but it needs to evolve to the place where it will be the tool which helps us, like Google Translate, not something which steals the author rights and creates the graphics or the animations because it learns from the creations of people.”
“You need to have people who feel, who have this creative fire, who want to prove something”
Ultimately, he said, creative people will always be at the heart of a project. Replace them with AI and people will notice, because the human element will be absent. And it’s that human element that’s irreplaceable. “I don’t believe that it will replace the creative people,” Tomaszkiewicz said. “It can help, but not replace them. I don’t feel that games created with only AI will have soul. I don’t believe it. Really.
“I finished Dispatch recently,” he went on, “which is my game of the year. I love this game. And I don’t believe that AI could create something like this. It’s not possible. You need to have people who feel, who have this creative fire, who want to prove something, who want to tell you a particular story and create emotions in these particular moments. A machine will not understand us as much.”
Blood of the Dawnwalker is in development for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series S/X, and scheduled for a release sometime next year. It follows the adventures of Coen, a recently not-quite-turned vampire, who has 30 days and 30 nights to rescue his family. But how he goes about it – and where he goes in the world – is up to you; there is no main quest in The Blood of Dawnwalker to guide you.
