It’s not unfair to say that Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us Part 2 are pinnacles of human art when it comes to video games. With hundreds of millions of dollars behind them, these first-party exclusives are filled with gorgeous hand-crafted art, which may not be the case in the future.
While Naughty Dog’s upcoming Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is likely being made to the same human standard as its predecessors, there is a large chance that future games will be made with GenAi assistance. For former Naughty Dog veteran Matt Radford, they believe that fans will “look back” at games of this ilk and “marvel at” how they were once made by human hands.
In an interview with YouTuber Kiwi Talkz, Radford, who worked as a senior VFX artist across Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us, likened AAA budget games to old cathedrals carved by hand now that most construction work is functional and without artistic merit.
“The example of the old cathedrals in Cologne and you see these old amazing buildings, these architectural marvels across so much of the world,” they started. “And that exists as a product of a very unique time where all this art, all this beauty, all this time and suffering went into something that you don’t make now. You just wouldn’t make an old cathedral like the one in Cologne. And you never will again because the talent doesn’t even exist.”
Radford doesn’t specifically label GenAI as the reason video games will move away from their artistic focus, only saying that there’s “a lot of new technology” that will change “the way games are being made”. With that said, it is also very obvious that the technology in question is generative AI.
As games move towards AI-generated art and AI-generated code with Unreal Engine 6 aiming to be one big AI churning machine, there is a chance that games will become less art-focused. While some studios will shy away from the tech, at least in consumer-facing assets, some are undoubtedly going to make use of the technology, even if fans hate it.
With this in mind, Radford believes that many gamers will look back at human-made games with extreme budgets with a new sense of awe. “We’ll look back at some of these, at a game like Intergalactic, at a game like Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us 2, and just see the amount of acting by real people, by humans, the writing, modelling, sculpting, painting, and we’ll marvel at it.”
There definitely is a sense that this ongoing generation of gaming will be the last where games are made as they used to be. Sometimes, I already look back at older games with a sense of wonder at their creation. A silly example, maybe, but Conker: Live and Reloaded on the original Xbox is a title that always blows my mind. But with AI in the driver’s seat, the question of how something is made is no longer interesting when there’s a machine behind the canvas.
