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Yoko Taro, the enigmatic director of the Nier and Drakengard games, thinks interactivity in games will eventually "evolve into fulfilling what the players want" thanks to tech advancements like artificial intelligence.
AI, or more specifically, generative AI, has been a widely controversial topic in the games industry with everyone from Hideo Kojima to the head of a horse MMO having waded into the discussion. The burgeoning tech even, at least partially, fuelled an almost year-long SAG-AFTRA strike against some major game makers, which only recently led to a "tentative agreement."
Nier Automata's director, somewhat ironically, doesn't have hugely complicated opinions on the tech when it comes to games, though. "I want the game to ultimately belong to the players," he said in an Archipel video diving into his usually secretive writing process. "Ideally, I want players to completely express themselves through game interaction."
The famed game dev reckons "there's a limit" on "the level of interactivity" developers can provide with the tools currently available, but he says "in the future, looking at AI’s generative capabilities for example, I believe that interactivity will gradually evolve into fulfilling what the players want."
"For example, when facing a certain situation, the game could adapt to the player’s style to lean more towards an action or an adventure genre," Taro explained. "I think this is the future that games are holding for us. Right now, we are striving for that goal while being limited to the current tools we have."
This isn't the first time Taro's chimed in on AI in games, though. He previously predicted that AI would eventually come for creators' livelihoods next, but thankfully, he's also pretty confident that his "predictions about the future are almost always wrong."
