The former XCOM game designer has unveiled his untitled game that makes heavy use of generative AI as the basis of the experience itself. Reactions to the whole thing are not positive so far.
Like it or not, the mere mention of the term AI in the business world is attracting money from investors. That’s how the former XCOM game designer, Jake Solomon, managed to get a total investment based on the promise of an AI-driven game six million dollars. With this, he founded the new studio Midsummer and yesterday he showed the game “the way he always wanted to make it”.
However, it wasn’t a game announcement – yet announcement that the studio is closing down and that the game was cancelled. It wasn’t revealed why, but we got a chance to see what six million dollars was thrown at.
Burbank was conceived as something between a life simulation and a story creator in a TV series format.
The thing would work so that the player would first create characters and assign them roles, then using generative AI technology would create the character’s backstory, a description of their goal and up to three memories. In the end, a set would be chosen and then we could order the characters to interact with each other, like in The Sims.
Ultimately it would genAI technology jumped in by fully generating voices for the characters, their thinking and remembering things.
The director of the game emphasizes that his goal was not to replace developers with AI technology. Everything that was visually created for the game itself was supposedly created manually, by the developers themselves.
In any case, the audience’s reaction to the display of this game was not at all positive. The director’s statement that his goal was not to replace developers with AI technology was especially criticized, he only replaced writers, actors, sound engineers, narrative designers, etc. with it. For the most part, social media X is celebrating the failure of the entire project, calling it shameful garbage and an insult to the video game industry.