I do get your point, which is fair, but for example:
If NMS was made entirely by AI, would it really change the experience of the game? At best you could get a bit more optimized game with unlimited variety, which by itself would be impressive, but the experience wouldn't really change all that much.
Compare that to playing NMS on a tv vs VR and the difference in experience is quite substantial.
Granted, that's 1st person.
But 3rd person wouldn't change about the VR experience, because it's like you're literally there in the game, as if you can physically touch everything you see.
Take Astro's Playroom, it's like you could physically grab the little robots, or bump your head against the environment.
It's a completely different experience.
Yeah NMS could be and probably is transformative. I've never played it in VR but I could imagine it so.
AI for NMS could let you speak to NPCs using your voice, storyline and quests would be generated on the fly. There would not be a need for additional voice acting lines for both the quest dialogue or the quest text itself because the AI is creating thst experience for you. This is kind of already being done with Skyrim mode chatgpt integrations but on a much smaller scale. I could only imagine what the developers are already doing behind the scenes.
Imagine playing the next big RPG game whether it's Elder Scrolls 6 or something else like another Baldur Gates. You would be able to physically speak to the NPCs, the NPCs would have their own AI voice and react to your actions, words and behavior.
For many years RPGs have struggled with creating something truly dynamic and random to give players something called "emergent gameplay" the one game that does "emergent gameplay" well right now is Sea of Thieves because there are no real scripted events and the players is the random factor that will determine what kind of gameplay session you'll end up having. Any time I've played Sea of Thieves with friends or alone it was always a very different experience. Obviously it didn't have any fancy AI or anything but the game was designed to rely on random player encounters.
Look at World of Warcraft or any MMORPG, they always try to introduce these so called "public events" but they are just a facade for the same repeated event over and over again just at a different location in the same zone. Destiny 2 also has public events. While they are cool to experience the first time, they become boring and uninteresting after a whole because you already know how it plays out. This is where the AI is going to come in and shape your gameplay session differently than the last time you've played.
You could even implement something like this in competitive games as well like Battle Royales. Instead of having some random loot crate drop at a specific location, the AI could do something much more interesting at any point in time and change the flow of the whole match every time.
Imagine playing a new FPS game where you are in a middle of a big battlefield against aliens. The AI could do something drastic, like generate some sort of a group of mercenaries that decide to join the fight and change the favor of the battle either for against you or someone else. They arrive in combat vehicles on land, or come from underground, or jump down from some warped in spaceship or air military vehicle.
Why did they come to help you or hinder you? Maybe you helped their race in the past from before in the storyline or you did something that pissed them off but you had no idea they existed or that it would happen. The AI would be responsible for this.
Right now games are limited to what the developers put in there with the time and resources that they have. My only concern would be the game assets, those are expensive to create, either AI has to get so good that it's able to create assets on its own. I spend a lot of time with AI Imagery and I've even had the chance to speak with Midjourney's CEO in their official discord during their community hours that happen on whednsdsys. I did ask him if text to 3d ai is happening or not and he said yes, it's in the works but won't happen for a while, at least not in high quality capacity at the moment.
Does this mean this will replace 3d artists? I have no clue and that's a very loaded question. But what I will say is that the gaming landscape is going to be very different in the next decade.
