Dead Space Creator Glen Schofield on AI's Limits in Game Development
"A creative idea can save more money than AI can right now."
In case you missed it
In case you missed it
Motive, Electronic Arts
Glen Schofield, creator and executive producer of the Dead Space series, co-director and producer of the Call of Duty games, and director of The Callisto Protocol, who recently announced his retirement after 35 years in game development, shares his opinion on the controversial topic of using AI in game development and says that creativity can beat AI when it comes to saving money.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Schofield explained how one of his ideas could bring a game budget down significantly. The developer says reusing assets from earlier games, as part of the story, would have saved him around $25 million and brought the cost to about $60 million:
"A creative idea can save more money than AI can right now," he says. "I have a great example. This is a really big idea I have for a particular game, but I was trying to think how to save money: reuse stuff from the older games. It's just a really creative way of reusing it; like it's part of the story. At the end of the day, I believe it would have saved me about $25 million on this game. Now your costs are down to about $60 million for what we used to think was AAA."
Motive, Electronic Arts
In the interview, he also discussed game budgets, saying the audience isn't "thrilled" by AAA games now, and the main reason is the budget. "I'd be so happy to make a game for less than $150 million," Schofield shares, recalling that Dead Space cost $28 million to make, adding that he never thought of himself as making "AAA" games, and the term only caught on once it was adopted by the industry.
"I would love to go back and make myself like a $70 million game, because it means a smaller, tighter team and maybe not as much spread out outsourcing. It means more cohesion to me."
Despite saying that AI's capabilities fall short of human creativity, Schofield doesn't reject appealing to it completely, but refuses to view it as a tool. As he shares, he would rather use it in a "few places" where it makes sense: "It's like: 'Put AI to work'. Fix collisions. Let's make cameras better."
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