Ew, sounds like a great reason to not buy any Square Enix games...

That's a stupid idea. You're not supposed to QA or debug games. You just release it, customers report bugs, and then you promise to fix the bugs in the next patch (but don't).

Literally not how any of this works. You don't let AI check your work, at best you use AI and check it's work, and at worst you have to do everything by hand anyway.

So Square Enix is demanding OpenAI stop using their content, but is 100% okay using AI built off stolen content to make more money themselves

As a developer, it bothers me that my code is being used to train AI that Square Enix is using while trying to deny anyone else the ability to use their work

I could go either way on whether or not AI should be able to train on available data, but no one should get to have it both ways

I hope they put out the last FF VII remake part before that, so i can finally start playing them all! I don't care what they want to waste their money on afterwards lol

Well, good luck with that. Software development is a shit show already anyway. You can find me in my Gardening business in 2027.

Square Enix actually has a pretty sick automated QA already. There's a cool talk about how they did that for FFVII remake in GDC vault, and I highly recommend watching it, if you're at all interested in QA.

It has nothing to do with AI, it's just plain old automation, but they solve most of the issues you get with making automated tests in non-discrete 3D playspace and they do that in a pretty solid way. It's definitely something I'd love to have implemented in the games I'm working on, as someone who worked in QA and now works in development. Being able to have mostly reliable way how to smoke-test levels for basic gameplay without having to torture QA to run the test-case again is good, and allows QA to focus on something else - but the tools also need oversight, so it's not really a job lost. In summary - I think the talk is cool tech and worth the watch.

However, I don't think AI will help in this regard, and something as unreliable and random as AI models are not a good fit for this job. You want to have deterministic testcases that you can quanitfy, and if something doesn't match have an actual human to look at why. AI also probably won't be able to find clever corner-cases and bugs that need human ingenuity.

Fuck AI, I kind of hope this is just a marketing talk and they are actually just improving the (deterministic) tools they already have (which actually are AI by definition, since they also do level exploration on top of recorded inputs), and they are calling it an "AI" to satisfy investors/management without actually slapping a glorified chat-bot into the tech for no reason.

Square Enix exec doesn't know what QA and Debugging entail.

Frankly, this is good news. Whoever buys the rights to kingdom hearts in 3 years when the company falls apart might manage to create an intelligible storyline.

Considering how the open source community is being inundated with low-quality bug reports filed using AI, I don't have much faith in the tech reviewing code, let alone writing it correctly.

Could it be a useful aid? Sure, but 70% of your reviewing is a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream. AI just isn't ready for this level of responsibility in any organization.

They jumped on the NFT bandwagon a couple years ago, too. Did they not learn anything from that?

Hmm. While I don't know what their QA workflow is, my own experience is that working with QA people to design a QA procedure for a given feature tends to require familiarity with the feature in the context of real-world knowledge and possible problems, and that human-validating a feature isn't usually something done at massive scale, where you'd get a lot of benefit from heavy automation.

It's possible that one might be able to use LLMs to help write test code

reliability and security considerations there are normally less-critical than in front-line code. Worst case is getting a false positive, and if you can get more test cases covered, I imagine that might pay off.

Square does an MMO, among their other stuff. If they can train a model to produce AI-driven characters that act sufficiently like human players, where they can theoretically log training data from human players, that might be sufficient to populate an MMO "experimental" deployment so that they can see if anything breaks prior to moving code to production.

“Because I would love to be able to start up 10,000 instances of a game in the cloud, so there’s 10,000 copies of the game running, deploy an AI bot to spend all night testing that game, then in the morning we get a report. Because that would be transformational.”

I think that the problem is that you're likely going to need more-advanced AI than an LLM, if you want them to just explore and try out new features.

One former Respawn employee who worked in a senior QA role told Business Insider that he believes one of the reasons he was among 100 colleagues laid off this past spring is because AI was reviewing and summarising feedback from play testers, a job he usually did.

We can do a reasonable job of summarizing human language with LLMs today. I think that that might be a viable application.

QA annnnd Debugging?

LLMs have a much better chance at succesfuly replacing whoever said that.

From a tech POV, that makes a lot of sense. Use AI to find the needle in the haystack. Then let a person validate. That's probably one of the better uses for it. Although I don't love AI for any of the broad reasons to not like AI.

So.. no more SE games for me. Not a huge loss to be honest.

Inb4 their games come out even more broken

And I thought I had no more disappointment left to allocate

insert plane crashing.gif

@inclementimmigrant I'm so glad I've stopped buying AAA games.

Large companies probably do that anyway.

Take Blizzard for example. They just released a new patch, where class campaign quests for 8/12 classes do not work. Sure, it's a remixed version of older expansion, and with all the phasing stuff I can kind of imagine some of the phasing issues being caused by, I don't know, the player having a weird combination of completed stuff that's hard to properly catch in testing, since there's quite a lot of variables.

But the fact that one of the class quests requires crafted items to be completed, while crafting isn't available by design in the Remix, there's just no excuse. They either just don't give a fuck about an issue that's literally a progression blocker with 100% repro rate (while also being pretty easy to fix), or no one ever tested it even once. And it's not just some random sidequest, it's literally the main class campaign, one of the main features of the expansion.

As someone who worked in QA and gamedev, I can't imagine how could something as obvious as this ever get approved for release. That's something you catch immediately. Hell, you don't even have to play through it to realize that this might be a problem.

I kind of wrote Square Enix off years ago, but I'm definitely not buying anything they make in the future.

Some AI or central computer going haywire and destroying everything is, like, the third or fourth stock RPG trope just behind the Dark Lord burning down the protagonist's village in the first act or the mysterious waif girl actually turning out to be a princess.

You really think they'd know better.

Barf.