Modders are putting Skate into Modern Warfare 2 and bringing old console games to PC. AI can get a project off the ground in weeks. But when a viral demo breaks, who’s sticking around to fix it?
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00:00 Modding’s Civil War
01:39 How AI Changed Modding
03:16 Every Game Inside Every Other Game
05:13 Why Modders Are Fighting Back
08:40 The Fight Over Unofficial PC Ports
13:13 Who Is This For?
Sources:
95% of mods have always just been slapped together junk that barely works, it's only the top few percent that are useful and well made, nothing has changed.
I really don't care for a personalized game. I have no interest in an experience that does nothing but reinforce my own world view and panders to my ego. If I paly a game it's to have an experience I couldn't have in real life; if my life is not how I want it to be, escaping into a fantasy that makes me feel good will do nothing but get me addicted to that experience, rather than spending that time and effort on improving my life.
And that's to say nothing about the moral and ethical arguments against using ai in this way. it is utterly inconsiderate and selfish to profit from somebody else's hard work with minimum effort. Despicable behaviour, and that's putting it mildly.
It's hilarious to think that Call of Duty will actually be good again. But it won't be made by any of the COD studios, no. It'll be made entirely by AI.
linux is flooded with reinvention like the same game launcher for all game stores and emulators bundled and AI wannabe devs get angry when users point out that it is a useless and selfish posts plus reddit karma farming
Copyright is a lie
Opus 5.5 is old news now, Fable 5.2 is the shit now xD
Speaking as someone who is sceptic around AI, for long even in work pushed back against using it because the people 'writing' the code would not know by back of their hand what they had written and why. I can understand clearly, especially now when the AI companies are running the models at a loss, that taking advantage of it for business reasons is extremely useful.
I feel the problem with hobby projects(non-profit, modding, decomps), what ever you want to call them, is plain and simple ego. I am proud of a lot of software I've worked on over the years. I made cool games, useful tools, made mods that I have supported multiple years at a loss (hosting backend servers). With recent AI advances I have taken into taking an old game I have fond memories of and using AI to re-write them in language/engine (rust & bevy) that I feel I can trust to work years to come even if I don't feel the need to continue the project. Any game 're-write' I do still requires you to have the original files. If you find them in your steam library or some internet archive years later, it should still work. Most people that I communicate within this 'AI re-write / smash-up' scene seem to hold same standards 'make sure you need to own a copy of original game assets'.
I admit I am not that familiar with modding scene using AI to flood the market but I have made a lot of mods and most of them have exact same amount of time of support from me as I have interest in using them myself. I have grown used to (or just tired of) game companies breaking mods on a whim. Simple API change in function name from 'OnTakeDamage' to 'OnDealDamage', to something more complex. But pretty much almost always modding scene is afterthought that is expected to have their mods break and cull the unmaintained ones. If someone were to make any of the mods I've worked on with AI, I would just sort of be glad. While I do attach a lot of my ego to my works, It (for me, might be strange) is just on the idea I had, not the execution of it. If world had the perfect game, the perfect software that servers my needs and interests, exactly, I would not be making any.
This doesn't mean I don't understand the people who attach their ego to the effort it took to make things. It is fine to do so but remember, it can always be superseded by someone else doing the same thing with less effort, AI or not.
I do think the anthropic is in the wrong here. Copyright infringement is not a hill they have any right to stand on. And I think most 'ethics' guard rails on how AI is used can be argued to be silly/weird. There are guard rails on there that stop you from trying to fix any security issues on your computer that does not have cookie cutter package already made for you, any exploration of possible vulnerabilities that no one has yet found is considered wrong according to anthropic because it can be weaponised.. The user of AI is solely responsible of it's actions, if you give it the responsibility of completing a task, what ever you do with it is your fault if it makes mistakes.
But I think the AI is net positive for human experience. I have prototyped so many more game ideas that I would have never had the time to test if it weren't for AI. I am glad for it and I am sure our morality, ego and other human standards will have to adapt.
I don't think it will get that deep.
It's the same with Images and Video clips generating it is new and people test the boundaries but there will be a high and than it will fall back to a moderat low.
The Problem is more that over regulating in therms of big companies can bring problem for the future. After the hype is gone the real people are still there and they can use the tech for a real benefit, to make their work easier and faster.
But restrictions in the models will lead to overlapping conflict. If they make it brought enough for as little friction as possible it will give a lot of work around, but the tighter they make the restriction the worse get the overall result for everyone using it to code. And this models just get better over time, so this means just about coding we have the worst version yet.
And if they get worse because of restrictions, there will be free models some time later without this restrictions and that could be a real problem. If the free version of the last model is better because the new one have to hard guardrails.
The hype wave will come and go, that is simply something we need to get through now. But the real projects as the projects coming from a space of real need and demand but corpo lock in's – like the Adobe BS, they may make more money than ever but they really f*ck up people. If the alternative get traction than Adobe should be forced to change their model to be more customer friendly and not the alternatives should get shut down because the big corpo simply want to continue to exploit and rip off people.
In the future ur smart tv will ask wat type of game u wanna play, then make it.
Basically Vibeflix 😅
Companies have spent billions on AI to replace workers. When they don't realize AI will replace the companies. They can whine and "adjust the code" however they want. The AI can just ignore them at this point. And with local models getting just as powerful, these cloud AI and server farms for AI are going to become obsolete.
Isn't this the same argument as "publishers reserve the right to restrict access to old IP to have the option to maybe release remasters in the future"?
i like how Ai helped adding dlss antialising to unsupported games
5:58 this is the same kind of thing Leonardo di Vinci did; he drew fatal design flaws into his blueprints so that if they were copied or stolen they wouldn’t work. He would, of course, supply the correct info to anyone authorized to use his designs.
Kinda neat to see this old-school copy protection coming around again; it’s just a shame that it’s so necessary.
I HATE AI, but Azeroth Survivors is an amazing game that I am sure was done with AI.
"…but that does not necessarily mean that the game or mod will run well, make any sense or be supported…" – unlike AAA games, eh?
1:50
11:00 Change the name and ui. As long as you didn't use fallout game files you're ace.
I understand both sides of the coin.
And I don't think trying to stop AI or put bans will help. AI is a powerful tool that saves lots of work. It's just if you delegate too much to it, it usually ends on slop. But it makes viable projects that other way it will be impossible because the lack of resources.
I guess in the end, the modding community will need to rate each mod and put a "slop meter" just to people recognize when a mod is just an AI experiment with minimal care behind it. To be done by AI or by hand it's not much of a different. It's about the people behind it if they just put AI to do all and doing almost nothing reviewing and quality work or AI it's just used as a tool to make something piece by piece towards a good mod/rework goal.
The more locked down and censored US AI models get the more Chinese models win. Gamers will find a way to get what they want
I love how Rockstar did not like moders making updated versions of there old games with AI, while that is exactly what they did!
Sounds like mods are becoming just as dangerous as mods always were. Well AI mods made by me for me wouldn't be.
We hold!
Strange how you can have this position on AI and be a Gabe Newell glazer. Cognitive dissonance is a helluva drug.
5:15 gate keeping at its finest.
There have been some truly great and fully functional ‘vibe coded’ for many of my games.
It’s a great tool and should be embraced
It's a proof of concept. Just being able to frankenstein two games together and have it somewhat work is proof that the tool works, but needs refinement. If it can do something that difficult and somewhat make it work then making mods for games is, I think, simpler. Mods for games are going to explode because of this tech, but like the video author said don't count on long term support for those mods.
I'm all for game mods I played XCOM 1 & 2 in the past a lot and I loved the modding community for that game. It has so many cool mods.
However, the dark side of that is like what Helldivers 2 is currently experiencing. Devs are slow to fix or update QOL stuff for the game and now modders are doing it for them using AI.
Unforunately, now questionable mods that are considered cheating on Helldivers 2 by players who using it willingly are ruining the online gaming experience for other players. There has been a huge surge in online cheating because of this as people can code and make hacks and cheats for online games. Game companies are going to need to double up their efforts more than ever now to combat online cheating because of AI.
A video about nothing.
After all, these demos are meant to showcase the possibilities as a technological curiosity, not as a product we present to players so they can download it and play it themselves.
Who would want to play Call of Duty on a Minecraft map? Even if there are people who do, they’ll just give up after five minutes and walk away.
After all, it was clear from the start that these demos are just a curiosity and a showcase of the capabilities of new language models.
The best aspect of AI is it allows actual devs to do or make things they never would have had the time to do previously. Inconvenient but useful tasks like "making an entire webpage to allow suggestions on translation of a japanese game that is connected to the github of the translation project" and stuff like that. Or making frivolous but amusing mods that people wouldn't have wanted to spend the time figuring out before. For all these decompilations of super popular games, we must also consider that AI is coming in very handy for preserving obscure games no one would have ever manually decompiled or ported to PC. Lets be honest. No 10 man team was going to spend 3 years decompiling abandonware or mediocre games. With AI, not only can they be decompiled and preserved, but their flaws can be worked on. It's kind of beautiful to be honest.
It's always hard to see your profession become obsolete. While this has new problems. It's just so much a better tool than doing it by hand.
Bored people like novelty
I love when AI is used to screw over companies