A few weeks ago, when I spoke with Tim Willits, chief creative officer at Saber Interactive, makers of games like Space Marine 2, SnowRunner, and World War Z, the company was dealing with the shitstorm that ensued from their announcement of Rideshare Stimulator.
The game’s basically an Uber simulator, with you driving a car around town picking up fares, but Saber drew all kinds of bad attention when a former writer on the game revealed the game featured generative AI (something left undisclosed on the game’s Steam page until recently) and CEO Matt Karch responded by attacking the writer in statements to the press. Something he has since apologised for.
So, naturally, we talked about generative AI and the reputational damage – or lack of – when getting caught out using it.
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Rideshare will have a main narrative, similar to other simulator games, in which you start your business in a city and grow it up as you complete jobs. Similar to something you would play through in Snowrunner. “All that is written by humans, all the missions are written by humans,” Willits tells me. Where the generative AI appears is in Rideshare’s Free Ride mode.
In Free Ride, when you pick up a fare, their dialogue will be generated using an LLM. “What we want to do is feed current events, like maybe there’s some soccer game, and some ride will get in and talk about it,” Willits explains. He says Saber are “using it here in a small part of a small game to test the waters.” and that the company are “interested in how AI can help in games.”
Willits says Rideshare is the only game in which Saber are using generative AI – “We don’t have AI in Space Marine. We don’t have AI in Hellraiser. We don’t have AI in Jurassic Park, but we want to figure it out and we want to try something.”
When I spoke with Willits, the thing I most wanted to know was why there was no AI disclosure on the Rideshare’s Steam page when it was first revealed. Valve have a clear policy on disclosing the use of generative AI both in the production of a game and if any feature of the game makes ongoing calls to LLMs.
The reason, Willits says, is they “had an announce plan, but that got a little sideways”. There was going to be a sneak peak, then there would have been reveals of the game’s features in the future, and as part of that the generative technology would have been revealed. To indicate how early in the game’s reveal rollout they are, Willits points out Rideshare’s “not here” at Gamescom. “Unfortunately, we had some people talk about the game when they weren’t supposed to be talking about the game and that just kind of escalated.”
Though, I bring it back to Valve’s AI disclosure policy because it doesn’t make a distinction between whether a feature has been announced or not, only whether the technology is used in a game. Shouldn’t the disclosure still have been there when the game was announced? “Okay, sure,” Willits says.
The point I’m building to with Willits is that by not initially disclosing the use of AI, it seeds doubt about generative AI’s use in Saber’s other games. The tool may have been used but the company is not yet ready to announce or reveal it. I point to another of Saber’s games, Road Kings, a new American trucking simulator which I really enjoyed at a preview event in April. While on the road, other drivers or job brokers may message you to ask for help, spurring an emergent quest. Certainly, there’s no suggestion that these quests are generated by AI, but to a player the two systems could appear similar and they may now question ‘Is this generative AI Saber’s not copped to yet?’. “You may be overthinking it a little bit,” Willits says. “I wouldn’t worry about that. Again, the wishlists are up, interest is up, preorders across our games are up.”
I didn’t want to move on immediately, as Road Kings captures the issue well. I saw the game back in April but its embargo for the preview only came up after the Rideshare story had broken. I played and enjoyed that game and its mix of American Truck Simulator-style hauling blended with scenes you might see in a disaster move like Twister. But the comments on the preview were largely about the Rideshare news and Saber’s use of AI. Willits, again, disagrees this is an issue. “I wouldn’t really worry about that,” he says. “The games will speak for themselves. You enjoyed Road Kings. The people that play it, they will enjoy it. I’ve been in the industry for 30 whatever years, you will always get crazy comments.”
Willits points back to when he was working at id and they announced Quake 3 would need a video card to play. “We were roasted,” he says. “The internet hate was crazy. ‘You’re ruining the industry. How can you make me pay $100 for a video card?’ – imagine a $100 video card! – But the game came out and people liked it.”
Willits also points to the launch of Steam, which, while a well-regarded platform now, was not universally loved at launch. In part because its servers struggled and its online functionality demanded more from peoples’ internet than a lot of dial up and early broadband connections could provide. “I think we’re in a period now of technology change that people are really unsure about,” Willits says. “We, as game developers, don’t really know what we’re doing with it yet. Players don’t really know what’s going on with it. But I do think that there will be a game from somebody that will be so awesome that everyone will be like ‘That’s it. Now I get it.’ I think the games will speak for themselves and when people play or they read your stories, and they watch the videos and they see the content, they will make their own determination.”
As I’ve said in the past to other developers, I can believe there are ways these new AI technologies could benefit my work. For instance, the first transcription pass of most my interviews is done automatically because I use Google’s Recorder app. But I also know the worst thing I could do with [insert AI tool of your choice] would be to generate an article for RPS. No one comes to this site to see something cobbled together by an LLM, they want something lovingly stitched together by these dyslexic typo-spewing hands. So I ask Willits what he thinks the benefit for Saber will be.
“As a game developer, if you’re going to try something with brand new generative AI, it’s much better to try it with something small [rather] than your biggest title,” Willits says. “For us, part of our strategy at Saber is to make our mega hits – Space Marine 3, Jurassic Park, Turok – but we have to have smaller games that are consistent when it comes to how long it takes to make, how much money they make, [that’s where] we experiment with things. Look at Spintires. That was an experiment that turned into a mega franchise. Rideshare fits into that category. It is a Rideshare simulator, where you drive around and you pick people up. There’s really not much more you can really do there. And so for us, we wanted to be like ‘Well, let’s try this. Let’s try it here because if it doesn’t work out, it’s on that game. It’s not on our mega hits.'”
In the case of Rideshare’s Free Ride mode, Willits says “This is a gameplay feature that is not possible without this technology. It would be logistically too hard, it’d be so expensive. We’d have to have an army.” And, as he’s described it, a mode where passenger dialogue is generated in response to current events fed into the game, I agree. Either you would have a madlibs style system of words being swapped in and out of repeating schemas, or a human writer adding additional lines in response to real world news events.
I do want to see if Saber are able to produce anything better than the other games that have stuck LLMs inside the throats of their characters. In Where Winds Meet, players quickly convinced one of the NPCs that they were pregnant, and another to provide cooking advice for potatoes and ketchup. That implementation and others were panned by developers Samuel Horti spoke to back in December.
My experience of generative AI dialogue has largely been formulaic and predictable. Which, could make for incredibly dreary car journeys. Ironically, the last taxi ride I was in I told the driver he was taking us to an engagement meal and he told me how AI was going to destroy the world by 2030.
Travel and accommodation to Gamescom was provided by the conference organisers.
