Ah yes, the "GTA-style" demo that actually just looks exactly like GTA IV because it's just an unholy amalgamation of a bunch of GTA IV gameplay videos. Truly the next generation of gaming.
God forbid we have a little incremental progress, huh?
I think a good rule of thumb when deciding to criticize someone's project is to pretend it was created by your own children or your best friend. Would you be as harsh and close-minded if it were created by someone you love?
Incremental progress towards what? This is literally going backwards. I can play GTA IV on my Playstation 3 right now. I could almost 2 decades ago.
But now I can instead play a version of GTA that resembles what dreaming about playing GTA would be like, in which I can press a button and, after 10 seconds of latency, watch my "character" awkwardly walk into a building as the world melts around him, all while consuming literally 100 times the computing resources that the original game required to run. And this is apparently revolutionary.
If this was created by someone I knew, I'd tell them to learn Unity or something and make an actual game.
Then go play GTA IV on your Playstation 3, since you lack understanding about the goals of world models and cannot recognize incremental progress towards that vision, and are only interested in armchair criticism without a full understanding of the scene.
Every game company is going to use this tech in some form one day, whether in a production engine or during the prototyping phase. At some point, you're going to have to shed your biases. If you lack the vision or understanding to appreciate the research going into this, you're welcome to come back years from now when a finished product has reached the masses.
> If this was created by someone I knew, I'd tell them to learn Unity or something and make an actual game.
That's sad. Sad that you don't think actual games will be made with this technology, sad that you're gatekeeping what games even are by using vague qualifiers like "actual" which allow you to retreat from your position as needed, sad that you'd discourage them from continuing to research this amazing new avenue of creative possibilities.
Yes, we know, your groundbreaking AI startup is the future and it changes everything and it's going to take the world by storm and every company on earth will be using your technology by the end of the decade, just like every other tech startup ever. Save it for the VCs.
> gatekeeping what games even are by using vague qualifiers like "actual"
I really shouldn't need to define this, but "actual" games have gameplay. Slowly moving a character in an AI generated "world" that melts around him, doesn't obey any laws of physics, has no well defined mechanics and generally doesn't make any sense doesn't count as gameplay in my eyes, and I don't think that's a controversial opinion.
Once this "technology" allows me to play a real game, with real mechanics that make sense, that isn't just a dream-like version of an existing popular game, then you can call it an "amazing new avenue of creative possibilities." Until then, it's just a gimmick that doesn't serve much of a purpose beyond impressing the uneducated for a few minutes.
