RuneScape's Position on Gen AI | Hacker News Reader

RuneScape's Position on Gen AI

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26 pointscautiouscat68 comments

I understand the sentiment, but I feel like not using AI for game dev isn’t going to be economically viable much longer, and I wonder why companies don’t just embrace it while it still gives them an edge.

I agree that blanket GenAI bans won't be viable much longer, as competition will move much faster.

But also, game development economics are very different from SaaS products. You can't spend a ton of money in tokens per month and expect that the gains from selling those features will support the cost of building them. Game dev margins are already slim-to-negative for most independent studios.

Oh yeah, where are the super secret fast moving games? They don't exist. Marketing bullshit juts like the Mythos marketing that blew up this week.

I mean they definitely exist, just look at Steam. 10s of 1000s of shovelware games that no one wants or buys or plays.

Everyone can now make games that no one can play because no one can afford to buy gaming machines anymore because everyone can now make games. Great future we've been handed.

Yeah, I saw an article recently that Blood of the Dawnwalker cost "just" $40 million to create. I thought the phrasing was intended to be ironic, but no apparently that's not even AAA by today's standards. I don't know the exact costs, but my instinct is that quite a lot of it probably went into things that would not have been possible to just automate with AI and end up with the same level of quality.

Expedition 33 was made in ~4 years and was known to have used AI assets as placeholders during development (even left some in for the final build). It also used Unreal Engine's Metahuman for facial animation which uses ML. It was 2025 Game of the year.

I think a lot of studios use it for code already, and I also don’t think that’s the contentious part.

Games are art, and the people who make them are by and large: artists. Why would artists want to use generative AI?

Game code is also art, it defines the game as much as the assets. I don't know why the game industry has such a contempt for the coding side.

The difference is that game code isn't something that the player sees or needs to care about. It's possible to write two functions that look different but have identical properties for anything that ends up being perceived by the player. For assets, the visual difference is directly exposed to the player. A sixth finger on a hand is an issue in the way that as line of dead code isn't.

Adding to the fact that people who write code are in general much better compensated in most industries than people who produce art, having software replace artists feels like "punching down" in a way that having software replace people who write software doesn't. As a software engineer, Ilif I use AI to write a bunch of code for myself, I'm much better able to understand the tradeoffs to my future employment in a much more visceral way than I ever could for what using AI-generated art might mean for an artist. Even with all of the recent proclamations that code is "solved" and fearful predictions that programming jobs are going to stop being so cushy, the job market for the average software engineer is probably at least an order of magnitude better than it is for the average artist in terms of compensation and job security, and AI or not, I don't see that changing any time soon.

That's not true though. Bad code will manifest in a lot of ways. Affecting players and how they perceive the game. See Cyberpunk 2077, the art is pretty good, but the game is extremely buggy. I stopped playing because of that

Sure, I don't disagree with bugs being problematic. As your example indicates though, games that came out well before LLM coding was a thing still could have buggy code. My point is that the actual behavior of the game's code is what players care about, not the code itself. The code is a process rather than the output, and players care about the output rather than the process used to produce it. Art assets are the output the player looks at directly, so it's not crazy that they might care more about it.

> The difference is that game code isn't something that the player sees or needs to care about

I don't think that's true, I could mention a few examples, the cliché of the Unreal Engine hair style or lights and on the other side of the spectrum, the custom made engine which made TinyGlade what it is.

Game development iterates with what's brought from the coding side.

My point is that the code only affects the experience indirectly because they interact with the output of it rather than looking at it directly. The assets aren't as much of a process as the output themselves.

I'd say the same about the assets then personally? They just interact with the output (3d mesh) and not with the process (modeling).

> the visual difference is directly exposed to the player. A sixth finger on a hand is an issue in the way that as line of dead code isn't.

But a line of buggy code will be substantially more impactful than a poorly drawn model. An extra finger on a model doesn’t cause your save to be corrupted or a quest to hard lock.

Buggy code, yes, but that's not what I said. Players never look at the code directly, only the end product, whereas they do look directly at the assets. My point is that the scrutiny likely is (and should be, IMO) on the direct player experience, and that ends up meaning that the code itself being sloppy is only indirectly relevant, compared to the assets that they see directly. The comparable output of the code is the behavior, which is possible to scrutinize more directly in most cases.

But the comparison to code isn’t dead code (that would be akin to what? Idk, maybe excess triangles in a mesh that didn’t need them).

But I disagree with your premise, players ABSOLUTELY look at the output of both the code and the visual art. The code is the thing putting it on screen. It doesn’t matter how many fingers a model has, if your engine incorrectly renders it.

The scrutiny here, and the pushback against it, is actually not even about the result, it’s about the process. Even if the AI art was perfect and could not be distinguished from human art, a large fraction of people would oppose it simply because it was generated by an AI.

A standard mind you that very few hold the code to.

I’d go a step further. The game code is the game. Everything else is there in service of the interactive experience.

There are lots of artists using generative ai in the same way there are artists using photoshop. It’s about control and intent, and it only gets weird with gen ai because you can give away both and still get results. Many people do take the role of a non creative manager, but that doesn’t meant you have to.

Many artworks (across mediums) have parts where the artist isn't directing their creative decision-making so much as reaching for the nearest stock asset / procgen tool, or googling "leather texture photoshop trick" instead of carefully studying the usage-appropriate types of leather and looking up authentic period nubuck references and hand-painting it to get it just right, etc. Some "art" assets really are utilitarian and fungible subunits in the context of the full artwork they're used in, just like the code one would LLM. And many games are sprawling works, with that much more room for such.

Going whole-hog on artistic intentionality for every little detail is just bikeshedding.

Strong evidence for this: the cottage industry of reusable gadgets in every creative field. Presets and sample packs in music[0], brushes and textures for illustration, models and rigs and so on for 3D. You could go on forever listing it.

[0] And library music for games, which I'm getting into making: https://clubhouse.kyefox.com/posts/2016-2026-162342979

Sometimes the sense of satisfaction in creating a piece of art is that it exists at all as an identifiable representation of the original intention. I don't buy these purity tests that disqualify art based on arbitrary measures of craft. That went down the urinal with Duchamp's Fountain.

That is orthogonal to the issue of game developers exploiting technology to disenfranchise labor and produce a shoddy product. There certainly should be economic breathing room in the richest societies on the planet in the wealthiest era of human history for artists to spend time crafting work how they like.

Contemporary AI is not very good at the parts of game dev that are genuinely difficult.

It is fantastic at the code. Monobehaviors are completely solved. I ~never have to look at c# code or shaders again if I choose not to. However, this was like 5% of the problem.

Composing a three-dimensional scene graph in a way that is compelling to a human observer is not something an LLM will ever be very competent at. I worry about those who are in the midst of conflating the capabilities of diffusion models with those of "world" models. The former make it seem as if we are "so close". The latter are more or less non-existent.

I'm against the use of AI for creative work, but

>[X] is not something an LLM will ever be very competent at

I'm no longer convinced that this is a particularly safe bet for any value of X. LLMs have absolutely been demonstrated as capable of doing things that they're theoretically the wrong type of model for, like generating images by writing SVGs or simulating brush strokes.

Unfortunately most people vibe coding games are programmers who don't know (nor do they care) about art and design, and so assume that everything but the code is trivial, just colors and patterns for the monkeys to look at as they press their buttons.

And then they wonder why the their ugly-ass game with no consistent art style and no coherent design doesn't take off since it was coded with a superior artificial intelligence, in less time, and must therefore be objectively better.

They don't understand that there's some knowledge that exists within the heads of human beings and their experience that you can't reverse engineer from the human-generated artifacts in the training data. You can't derive Leonardo Da Vinci from a PNG of the Mona Lisa. Am I claiming that all designers are Leonardo Da Vinci? No, so hands off the keyboard. I am saying there are aspects of art that are bound to the human experience in a way that are beyond current LLMs, that can't be replicated through the simulation of mechanics alone.

Say that and they'll just think you believe in ghosts, though.

The whole industry functioned before the clankers and now you suddenly need them?

If you have a subscriber base at $X in 2022 and are profitable, you will still be profitable in 2026 if the subscribers stay.

Gamers generally don't want even want slop.

I wouldn't buy a game that used generative ai and would refund one that I later discovered had. A quick straw poll of the gaming channels I'm in shows a lot of agreement amongst my friends.

You're not going to know if they used an LLM to write a better shader or if they copied code from stack overflow like we used to do a few years ago.

I'm so excited that LLMs are great at coding. Most of my problems I have with various games I love is that they're written by people who couldn't write performant code at all but are great at building a world and telling a story.

Just look at Escape from Tarkov. Great game but some of the worst software architecture choices of all time. It used to take 4 minutes to get out of match and often 10-15 minutes to get into one and it was all just because of shitty code / design.

It's been fixed now and I'm sure modern LLMs were the reason.

John Carmack is the exception not the rule.

Oh absolutely, I don't have a magic way of detecting these things, but I do what I can. I would greatly prefer the best efforts of a person, regardless of how it turns out, to anything from generative ai. Everyone else can do as they wish, I'm not out to change anyone's mind :)

Fair enough. Cheers

"Best effort" except when it includes using competent tools. Then you just want mediocre effort

why are you begging someone to buy gen ai games lmao

Too many people fall into the trap of black and white thinking, as if the only way to use gen AI is to type into ChatGPT "make a fun game that makes loads of money plz."

I'm sure there are, but for me this isn't some reactionary mistake. I understand the technology and I thought about it carefully and made a call based on how I understand the ethics of the situation.

I was recently working on audio code, and I needed a function that produced a fast approximation of a sine wave. I asked chatgpt about common techniques, did some experiments to figure out the right performance/accuracy tradeoff, and finally asked chatgpt to help me optimize the function to use SIMD instructions.

If this code made it into a game, at what point did I do something wrong?

I mean, I'd never try to tell you what to do, but as you asked, what you're talking about is the base of the pyramid, that holds up and normalizes the system that's putting artists out of work and enshittifying everything. These companies stole literally everything and used it to build a tool whose economic end goal is to put everyone out of a job. I'm not down with that, but you do you.

Yeah, we'll see how long that lasts.

I'd bet 500 thousand dollars that this sentiment goes away as fast as they were rerunning cold and flu medicine commercials after everyone was sick of giving a shit about COVID.

I think one of the reasons that Jagex is getting so much pushback on AI is because it goes in the face of all that runescape is about. People spend hundreds and thousands of hours clicking on the same things again and again just to level up a digital skill, when bots have existed since just about the beginning of runescape. I think it reminds all those people that they are wasting their lives away and everything around them is constantly reminding them of it.

For as long as there is a customer base that's influential, loud, and (based on the comment I see on HN) much larger than you expected, there will be an economically viable path for slop-less video games.

The moment hints of AI generated content can be found, large amounts of people dismiss products in an instant. That group will only grow as the AI industry keeps making the hardware you need for video games more expensive and bringing it further out of reach of normal people. Mybae in 2030, when hardware is hopefully affordable again, you can ignore these people, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.

I refuse to play any game that uses generative AI for art. Part of playing a game is enjoying effort that the artists and programmers put into it.

Silicon Valley seems to have zero idea what art is and is about. It's probably because they all have absolutely zero artistic talent and are completely deluded into thinking their AI slop is just as good and meaningful as a way to cope.

r/2007scape • u/JagexSween [Mod Sween] • 3h ago:

“Hello, it’s me, again, talking about Gen AI, again.

We’re aware of the concerns raised about the Dragon Slayer 2 trailer and have taken it down, while we investigate urgently. This trailer was produced by a trusted external partner who had explicitly confirmed that GenAI would not be used. But, among other things, there’s a sixth finger and, well, that’s pretty hard to explain away. For that we apologise.

Our position is clear at Jagex: we don’t use GenAI to create our games, artwork or creative assets, and will not knowingly allow it to be used on our behalf. This is the second time in quick succession that concerns about generative AI have arisen through partners we trusted, and for us that highlights an issue with our own processes which we must address.

Immediately following RuneFest we’re overhauling our review processes, and we’re going to work with and commission creators from the community to make sure that the story of Dragon Slayer II is told to the standard befitting of such an update.”

The vids have mostly been scrubbed out of existence due to the backlash, but the cinematic trailer is still watchable in their livestream around 8 minutes in.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2890955408

Here’s the most egregious example:

https://imgur.com/a/ju2tg75

One of the most wild things is how actual lazy this image gen was. Hands have been solved on all frontier models, so what did their partner even use?

It's so obvious that I wondered if someone had done it as a joke (that obviously didn't land).

What ancient model did they use that it couldn't get the fingers right?

Still happens on modern models like ChatGPT Image and Qwen 2.1. It's extremely rare in Gemini since nano banana's release. I work with people who generate 1,000's of images a week and it'll happen. There is a slack channel for it where you tag the model.

Has a viable non-slop game come out yet with AI generated art assets?

I'm kind of looking forward to games that leverage locally generated art/content assets using local large/small language models, as a way to make game content more expansive: you make choices in the game that causes different content to evolve in different ways, everyone's game play is different. I see that as a much harder problem for artists to work on (how do they express the meta art for an expansive experience rather than concrete art for a fixed one). I haven't seen anything like this yet, but I'm sure we will see it eventually.

Several indies have, but with big league studio games requiring development times on the order of 4-6 years, I wouldn't expect major titles with considerable AI generated content before the end of the decade. I'm also willing to bet that AI art won't make development times for these titles shorter, but simply lead to even more densely packed content.

Any examples of indies at the top of your head? I've searched and I can't find much, just the typical "put a chatbot in your game" that I find to be boring.

There's a lot of anti-AI warriors on Reddit in the game development space. I dislike lazy AI slop use in games as much as anyone else, but I also dislike the lack of nuance in these positions. They think it's gotta be all or nothing. It will become increasingly unrealistic to expect game developers to not use AI in some part of their process, especially code development, but such use does not automatically make it slop.

The context is that the company posted a trailer video that was very obviously AI generated art (6 fingers, Nike shoes in a fantasy setting). The pushback is entirely focused on using the slop machine to make slop art and writing.

It is, but the statement goes further than that and says they use no gen ai at all in making their games. Which feels unnecessary, unless they mean just in the art and writing, which feels misleading

In particular, it would mean their software engineers are not allowed to use Claude/Codex etc, in contrast to common industry practice.

Which is fine. RuneScape has been in development since the early 2000s, long before GenAI even existed. They got along before GenAI and they can continue to not use it.

People may be forgetting the game has 20 years of content already, why do they need to make more faster with GenAI? Its already a massive piece of software.

Runescape is quite literally a dinner table name it is that famous. Their only true competition is probably World of Warcraft. The community is already huge. What competitive advantages are they going to lose? Likely none.

You're out of touch from the gaming space if you don't understand why game companies make strong claims about not using GenAI for art.

I wonder if it’s a more western thing. Like the remake of Yo-kai Watch 2 was revealed a couple of weeks ago in the latest Nintendo Direct and the trailer is obviously gen AI yet… no one seems to care about that. Especially not on the japanese and asian social media https://youtu.be/76L1JKQWB8w

otoh I would put the Runescape community and people who play Yo-kai Watch games as far away as possible from each other

My completely biased take for which I will cite no sources is that the language barrier allowed Asian fan communities to avoid the corpo-led (Disney et al., surreptitiously through social media-based surrogates) astroturf campaign against genAI (that they don't control). Asian social media doesn't care because the normal human reaction is to not care, and the intense and overwrought negative reaction here was one that had to be specifically cultivated via bad-faith arguments put forward by people with conflicts of interest who leveraged their cults of personality to shut down and marginalize opposition.

Yes, there are no legitimate concerns about genAI, all opposition is just astroturfing that was artificially propped up by famous anti-AI companies like Disney (seen falling head over heels to partner with OpenAI less than a year ago). It has nothing to do with apocalyptic messaging that was fostered by AI companies themselves here in the West, or the culture that dictates that people are to be declared useless and discarded the moment the quality-per-dollar ratio of something made by automation surpasses theirs. It may not be good, but damn is it cheap compared to having a worker!

1) I said it was a completely biased take, you knew what you were getting into.

2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49956015

I'm well aware of the labor issues, and agree that the use of AI to displace workers is fraught at best, easily transcending to a sort of banal evil under common circumstances.

3) The problem isn't that people have reasonable, rational, and principled stands against how the AI industry has developed. It's that there are also irrational and unreasonable takes that end in, "Literally kill anyone tainted by genAI," and that the vociferous and zealous nature of this opposition is driven in part by fearmongers with links to corporate interests who happily use homespun AI (just don't call it that!); or who are, at the very least, protecting their own economic moat without being up-front that their opposition is largely self-interested (as was the case with anti-AI's direct antecedent, anti-crypto).

I've seen too many real artists crucified by "real artists" and their sycophants for experimenting with or working into their practice these tools.

It does not read as a principled stand, but a tantrum. You can compare the reaction of such artists to that of mathematicians, who were hit not merely with a nebulous sense that the big AI companies were doing them dirty, or enabling others to do so, but an actual verifiable instance of one platform stealing their work and attempting to publish it in official channels without attribution. They are angry, they are doing some soul-searching, but they are not excommunicating AI users or calling for their heads.

Conversely, I've been heartened by the rise of anti-data center activism, because it means that people are actually doing something productive towards the ends they profess a desire for, rather than just bitching and witch-hunting online.

But wait, how can someone who is defending AI usage be happy to see data center projects fail? Could there be actual nuance to their perspective? Life has many doors, Ed-boy.

When I see something I consider sterile, infantile and shallow, the information that 1% or 99% of the people on the planet like it changes nothing about my assessment of it. Looking to see if this quote had been posted before, I found it in a comment that I generally agree with, that also happens to be on the subject of Gen-AI:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869178

the more things change, and all that...

Why is it unrealistic? We have decades that prove people can make games without AI. Is the unrealistic part just expecting people to be honest about whether they used it or not? We somehow manage to have the food industry mostly honest about what they put in.

Gamers have to be one of the most interesting groups of people. I'll define "gamers" as people who spend more than 40 hours a week playing games, and probably overlaps significantly with streamer consumption.

Extremely needy, demanding, and simultaneously spineless.

Riot releases a $500 skin and make a million dollars, GTA6 has a $400 edition that doesn't include the game, and of course the OG horse armor.

Outrage after outrage, yet they keep on buying.

Additionally, 99% of them have no clue how hard it is to build a game, at any scale really. They don't understand where corners have been cut, and that it's possible to use AI without cutting corners.

They quite literally demand the world despite having never created a single thing themselves, blindly consuming, never producing.

Personally, it makes no sense to build a game without AI. A lot of code is needed and you need to iterate on it, perfect use case for AI.

Art, buttons, sprites, and models, often need rounds of iteration, why not start with a basic set and work on it?

There's nothing wrong with iterating, there is plenty wrong with slop (like the 6 fingers in the trailer). So let's be mad at the slop, not the AI itself.

> I'll define "gamers" as people who spend more than 40 hours a week playing games, and probably overlaps significantly with streamer consumption.

Does anyone else in the world share this definition? This seems very contrived because the vast majority of people who care a lot about games are not going to be putting a full time job's worth of time into it. It's like defining being employed as working over 70 hours per week.

The only reason I can see for jacking the requirement up so high is to try to narrow your scope so you can merge people into one group and define a single average 'gamer' opinion that everyone apparently has, so you can then come in and demonstrate their insane hypocrisy.

Would you be surprised if I said that the person complaining about $400 special editions is actually less likely to buy it? Gaming is mainstream. When you're talking about controversies in games with millions of users, there will always be a proportion of people who really care about it, but in spite of that there are always many thousands of people who won't, and will keep buying the thing they like without much thought given to it.

> They quite literally demand the world despite having never created a single thing themselves, blindly consuming, never producing.

If the chef brings you a meal that tastes horrible, should you be shunned for complaining about it? You've never made something 1/10th of that level of culinary sophistication. Even if you're the one paying for it.

What's even funnier is that in this case, 'the world' means 'making games the exact same way they've already been made for over 40 years to enormous success'. And the developer says "Yes, we will continue to do what has been successful for us for decades". If even the developer agrees and you still find an issue with it, it seems that the real problem for you isn't that gamers are demanding something of developers, it's that the developers aren't using the big new thing you really like. Which is immediately proven by your next sentence.

> Personally, it makes no sense to build a game without AI. A lot of code is needed and you need to iterate on it, perfect use case for AI.

Again, games have been built without AI for decades. Some of the best gaming experiences have been created in that way. And yet, genAI comes along, and after a brief few years it's suddenly unthinkable that anything good can be created the old way? And besides, if we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater - where are those AI-first masterpieces that top the old games? Where are the games with loads of AI code and assets that people love and regard as highly-polished, one of a kind experiences?

From a technical standpoint, AI is a less good fit for games anyway. We have basically solved 95% of all products people would ever need to put out on the web. For any problem you have, there is probably already a combination of high-quality solutions someone has made. AI has vast amounts of training data on web stuff and will probably produce something that doesn't stand out from the pack. But games are highly variable, have very unique problems, are very sensitive to optimization and can involve some of the most complex fields of computer science. Simple games may fare better, but anything large or really unique needs a solution made with purpose. Something that's just 'almost good enough' and not 'good enough' in a high-quality game will be immediately noticeable, especially in terms of gameplay.

> I'll define "gamers" as people who spend more than 40 hours a week playing games

I'll define "human" as "person with six fingers". Here's my disertation about why they keep complaining about the glove industry.

Billions of people spend money on games. You're picking a ridiculously small subsection of the gamer populace, pinning all kinds of assumption on them, and then judging them for it. This is barely even a strawman argument, it's what strawmen dream about (or more likely, rant about on LinkedIn).

If people put up with horse armour but not gen AI stuff, that means there's a big difference in their perception. If you don't see that difference, don't assume it's their skill issue and not yours.

> They quite literally demand the world despite having never created a single thing themselves, blindly consuming, never producing.

This is referring to the people who object to writers and artists getting ripped off, right? Not to the people who built giant systems to slurp up all the things they haven't produce and can't produce themselves, to produce an average approximation they then think they "made"?

So iterate then. Make things, then train software on the things you made to made more things like that. Nobody would ever get "mad" about that, at worst they wouldn't like it.

Seems like a perfectly good response to me.

I agree. It does make me think these tools need an irrevocable signature on the files, if that’s even possible. You can ask someone you’re commissioning if they use AI, and they can just lie.

Now should have Jagex reviewed it? Of course. However, there’s just this mistrust in art now. I’ve commissioned two things from artists. I asked both, as for my work I want to fund actual artists. However as these tools get better, I’m concerned that trust won’t be good enough.

Fake edit: “Well if it’s so good you can’t tell the difference then why’s it matter” completely misses the point so let’s not bother with that.

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