> Rockstar would be nerd-sniped on GTA6 by a world model

I'm having trouble parsing your meaning here.

GTA isn't really a "drive on the street simulator", is it? There is deliberate creative and artistic vision that makes the series so enjoyable to play even decades after release, despite the graphics quality becoming more dated every year by AAA standards.

Are you saying someone would "vibe model" a GTAish clone with modern graphics that would overtake the actual GTA6 in popularity? That seems extremely unlikely to me.

I don't _really_ mean it obviously but I think a key component of what makes something like GTA compelling is that fully modeled world you move around in. These things take what amounts to hundreds if not thousands of man years to create "traditionally", and the fact someone can now prompt to life a city or any other environment with simiailr (or better) fidelity is a massive change in how we think about creative content production.

GTA6 will not actually be nerd-sniped, but it's easy to see how a lot of what makes the game defensible is being rapidly commoditized.

GTA VI's story mode won't be surpassed by a world model, but the fucking around and blowing things up part conceivably could, and that's how people are spending their time in GTA. I don't see a world model providing the framing needed to contextualize the mayhem, thereby making it fun, anytime soon myself, but down the line? Maybe.

I would envision someone creative working together with Gen AI being able to do something awesome, rather than just saying "make me a GTA clone".

But someone creative having a vision in their head and then just guiding AI to flesh out the assets, details, etc.

They will then learn the bitter lesson that convincing the GenAI to create something that brings your vision to life is impossible. It's a real talent to even be able to define for yourself what your vision is, and then to have artists achieve it visually in any medium is a process of back and forth between people with their own interpretations evolving the idea into something even better and cohesive.

GenAI will never get there because it can't, by design. It can riff on what was, and it can please the prompter, but it cannot challenge anyone creatively. No current LLM's can, either. I'll eat my hat if this is wrong in ten years, but it won't be.

It will generate refined slop ad nauseam, and that will train people's brains into spotting said slop faster using less energy. And then it'll be shunned.

You can just specify to a high degree and it will follow your instructions. You’re coping bro.

bro, how you could get the very precise and predictable editing bro that you have in a regular game engine bro. also bro, empty pretty world with nothing to do bro is lame bro

I took the "creative and artistic vision" line to refer to the story mode.

I assumed the opposite because I haven't heard about GTA's story in ages, but could be a sampling bias. It's hand-wavy, but last I recall most of the microtransactions didn't show up in single player (like if you bought a car, you couldn't use it in single player) so the people spending money on it are doing it for online, not the story.

I didn't think the story was earth-shattering; it was fine, but no Baldur's Gate.

Edit: In retrospect, the characters were fairly iconic. I still distinctly remember Trevor.

The future of games was MMORPGs and RPG-ization in general as other genres adopted progression systems. But the former two are simply too expensive and risky even today for AAA to develop. Which brings us to another point, the problem with Western AAA is more about high levels of risk aversion, which is what's really feeding the lack of imaginative. And that's more to do with the economics of opportunity cost to the S&P 500.

Anyways, crafting pretty looking worlds is one thing, but you still need to fill them in with something worth doing, and that's something we haven't really figured out. That's one of the reasons why the sandbox MMORPG was developed as opposed to "themeparks". The underlying systems, the backend is the real meat here. At most with the world models right now is that you're replacing 3d artists and animators, but I would not say that is a real bottleneck in relation to one's own limitations.

> Which brings us to another point, the problem with Western AAA is more about high levels of risk aversion, which is what's really feeding the lack of imaginative.

Maybe I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying here, but 2021 til present has been a glut of some of the best titles ever made, by pretty much any measure

You may be interested in reading something I wrote a while ago that's pretty dead on to what you're talking about there:

https://kylekukshtel.com/game-design-mimetics

Great read and insights! I learned a few things and found myself nodding along most of the article.

I'm trying to wrap my head around this since we're still seeing text spit out slowly ( I mean slowly as in 1000's of tokens a second)

I'm starting to think some of the names behind LLMs/GenAI are cover names for aliens and any actual humans involved have signed an NDA that comes with millions of dollars and a death warrant if disobeyed.

Lizard people?