Google is currently working on Project Chimera, which aims to help developers create large game worlds. This should allow smaller studios to more easily create MMORPGs.
What is behind Project Chimera? The team behind Google’s project is asking whether massive game worlds could be programmed faster and more easily through machine learning.
The idea was presented by Erin Hoffman-John, Head of Creative at Stadia Research and Development, in an interview with the Magazine MCVUK. He says:
What if a team of 14 people could create a game on the scale of WoW? That’s an absurd goal, isn’t it?
The thing with games like WoW is that they rely heavily on repetitive content creation. Artists and writers essentially do repetitive work. A large part of the investment goes into that.
This work is supposed to be at least made easier for developers.
Could machines create entire MMORPGs?
How will the work actually look? According to Erin Hoffman-John, games like World of Warcraft are 70% content and 30% or even less code.
This content, in turn, could be created by machines if they are given a concrete template and a basic structure. Many quests and tasks in MMORPGs are already very similar and repetitive. It’s quite possible that we wouldn’t even notice a difference between machine-generated and handcrafted tasks.
Moreover, the machines could help with balancing, as the Head of Creative describes:
By having the game played millions of times by “Learning Agents” trained in the fundamental rules of the game, balance could be tested very quickly.
Even a small developer who might not have access to hundreds of testers could thus have access to this learning tool to optimize the game.
It [the program] can learn the game by itself without a script being created, and then reveal where problems in the balance lie. It allows testing theories about game design against what is actually happening in real time.
Can this work? The fact that machines can already learn the rules and balance of games very quickly is demonstrated by Google’s AI, which can defeat professionals in Starcraft 2.
Additionally, Google is currently researching a way to let raid bosses learn during combat, making them harder or even unbeatable.
Also regarding storytelling, there are already examples of how AI creates them. One of them is AI Dungeon 2, which creates its own old school text adventure together with the player. The stories are sometimes still very bizarre and sometimes incomprehensible, but it shows the direction in which AI development could go.
Not only Google wants to improve the creation of MMORPGs
What techniques are currently being developed? In addition to Google’s Project Chimera, the company Improbable is also trying to help small developers. Through their “Wundertechnologie” Spatial OS, a large game world should be created quickly and easily using a cloud system.
The two systems, however, do not necessarily exclude each other, as Spatial OS places more emphasis on server structure, while Project Chimera focuses on filling it with content.
Some former developers from Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, are focusing on creating a better interaction in the online world to create a game with “Zero Latency”.
While MMORPGs are considered a dead genre in many respects, there seem to be new and interesting developments in the technical areas for games of this kind.
