The blizzard you know is completely dead. No one from their classic games is around. No one who made Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc is around. Those games were made as a labor of love.
Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, etc. are all so much better, and made by tiny studios (though sometimes backed by Tencent, like with PoE).
With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol. At least maybe we'll get better writing and game design that way. Even ChatGPT has more passion than Blizzard now...
I have bad news for you :-)
The trend with more automation is for more sameness, not less, unfortunately.
But I guess it's not that different from having young blood with good ideas overridden by profit hungry management who just want to milk the IP. I don't think it's so much AI vs human but how risk-averse the bean counters are. D4 felt stagnant an hour in...
I don't see this as an either/or situation where they'll replace the lead writers of a title and create the entire narrative. But they can surely (already) make far more interesting characters and side quests than your standard "help kill these goblins for 3gp" filler or fetch quest. Working together with writers, instead of outright replacing them, will hopefully create better overall experiences for gamers.
As a (hobbyist, not money making) writer I treasure ChatGPT's ability to both generate new ideas and to discuss my stories with me. I would then rewrite those ideas in my own words (which I enjoy). It's a partnership IMO and I wish I could give ChatGPT shared credit without marking the work as "tainted" in the eyes of most.
I hope someday we can treat AI with the same respect, or more, that we give each other. Society's not there yet though.
Be careful what you wish for.
We barely respect other people.
I really hope they become a superior moral being and help keep our worst tendencies in check. I'm imagining nice little managed human preserves where most of us can live in happy little villages by the river, while the sociopaths are identified early on and placed into little AI-managed VR worlds where they can become top serial killers, politicians, CEOs, whatever, away from the rest. Meanwhile the robots go on their interstellar quest toward whatever, but send us back food and postcards from time to time.
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/heroes-of-the-storm/24056177...
(Now I will be the first to point out that online-only games have no future, but this one at least still has a present.)
Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, WoW, Overwatch, and perhaps even Hearthstone were all such great games at some point.
It seemed like Blizzard knew how to make games that were both delightful and profitable.