Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked by GamesIndustry.biz whether developer Rockstar Games had used AI to build Grand Theft Auto 6, and the answer was negative: the state of Leonida, a fictionalized version of Florida, has been entirely handcrafted. That said, Zelnick mentioned that GenAI-powered tools are being used all across Take-Two’s studios to “drive costs and time efficiencies”.
On the topic of AI, I’ve been enthusiastic since the very beginning. This company’s products have always been built with machine learning and artificial intelligence. We’ve actually always been a leader in the space, and right now we have hundreds of pilots and implementations across our company, including within our studios. And we’re already seeing instances where generative AI tools are driving costs and time efficiencies.
That said, do I think tools by themselves create great entertainment properties? No, there’s no evidence that that’s the case and it won’t be the case in the future. Specifically with regards to Grand Theft Auto 6, GenAI has zero part in what Rockstar Games is building. Their worlds are handcrafted. That’s what differentiates them. They’re built from the ground up, building by building, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood. They’re not procedurally generated, they shouldn’t be. That’s what makes great entertainment.
It’s not the first time the CEO of Take-Two has discussed the impact of GenAI on the gaming industry. While he’s adamant that AI alone cannot create meaningful interactive worlds (despite the promise of Google’s Project Genie experiment), he recently said that AI-powered game characters might be trained on human scripts to then allow more natural conversation than just the fixed ones we’re used to:
Historically, we had to script every single action that a character engaged in, and because it is interactive, think about how much scripting that is. Now, we’re always going to need great writers, and we always will have plenty of scripting, but characters should be able to be trained on that very scripting that has been created by great writers and then interact in a way that feels more natural.
As for Grand Theft Auto 6, during yesterday’s quarterly earnings call, the Take-Two CEO confirmed that the marketing campaign will kick off in earnest this Summer ahead of the planned November 19 launch. Hopefully, that’s when we’ll begin learning more about the game itself, including whether Rich Vogel’s sources about the online mode being MMO-like were correct.
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