Iwata's wisdom still applies

Following up a question on another video from @ekurisona663 , this video explores how AI could be used in development, design and gameplay.
00:00 The AI landscape
04:14 Nintendo's point of view
08:35 Two Types of Program
12:58 AI Benefits
19:48 Craft

[@cheeseitpuffsthe4orthandahalf]

18:56 Wise commenter here, Side Order does NOT in fact, use procedural generation. The levels were made by the devs, with variants for each mode, and are randomly ordered, not procedurally generated. The only actual example of Nintendo using it that I can think of is Pikmin 2’s caves, in which a significant portion of caves heavily use random generation to make them more interesting when revisiting floors, and to fuck with you when you reset because one of your purples died.

[@felipee5239]

What about Endless Ocean Luminous? (I know it is developed by Arika)

[@cheeseitpuffsthe4orthandahalf]

@@felipee5239 You said it yourself, Nintendo didn’t make it, so I didn’t count it

[@cyberrb25]

Actually, not even games like The Binding of Isaac make the floors themselves, but rather the layout of the floor distribution. Usually developers, when making procedurally generated games, still have parts that are not procedurally generated.

[@evermillcreek]

Great video. Makes sense as a forklift for engineering the products by assisting with code, or for post-processing augmentation. Letting it take over with any form of creativity, is not very Nintendo, like you say.

[@logicalfundy]

There is certainly procedural generation being used in the latest Zelda titles. You simply can't place every blade of grass, plant, and tree individually. Not in games of this scope. The level designer marks the areas where they can appear, and a procedural algorithm adds them. The terrain itself is very likely a combination of procedural generation and sculpted terrain, and the tools that do the sculpting likely add a bit of procedural noise for increased realism. Ditto for the textures used in the terrain. Sure, it's not an "algorithmically generate entire planets" style of procedural generation like No Man's Sky, but some form of procedural generation has been built into game development toolkits for some time now. In some ways, it's already been doing some of the things we think about when we dream about what generative AI can do.

[@caseypenk]

That’s correct, but the difference is that the world is hand-polished to produce a perfectionistic result. Minecraft just generates blocks at random without any human review to see if the world is any fun. Totally different uses of procedural generation, to almost opposite ends.

[@mkjjoe]

@@caseypenk It's a bit more than placing blocks at random. "Procedural" just means that things will be generated _by the game,_ but that generation can still be heavily controlled by the developer ahead of time. Zelda definitely had generation during development for the terrain but gave the same fixed and polished world for everyone. But then for example Minecraft relies on "procedures" to generate different types of content, like world chunks and what's found in them. Each world seems random thanks to its unique RNG seed but the engine follows a set of rules to make these world have some structure. Other games like Starfield have a fixed set of planets / locales, but within these locales there are procedures to spawn "random" entities.

[@ByrneBaby]

Not true, BotW and TotK's worlds are both hand crafted. The same groups of trees exist in the same spots every play through. In BotW specifically, they made the world with a section approach, where the map was just triangles from top to bottom, and every triangle had something "interesting" in it. I don't know how big these sections were, but the world itself is entirely deliberate, the only generation was the generation of ideas and how they would be executed. TotK had a different approach in that they took BotW's world, built above and below it, and naturally created changes to the original from those additions.

[@logicalfundy]

@@ByrneBaby Trees exist in the same spots in every play through of No Man's Sky as well, and that game 100% uses procedural generation. Chances are, there are tools that Nintendo uses to make filling large areas with trees / plants / etc easier, and those tools do a bit of generation to make things look a bit more random and natural. The exact positions are probably baked into the game by the tools to keep them consistent for each playthrough and to allow for manual tweaking afterwards.

[@cyberrb25]

Jason Schreier interviewed Jake Solomon, of XCOM fame, and at one point, when talking about how to squeeze as much work from the money they have from VC to make the game, Jason asked if they were looking at AI to help. And Jake mostly said "we looked, but we were unimpressed". The actual quote is: "Anybody afraid of AI taking over the world has not worked with it much on a daily basis."

[@imatiu]

AI doesn't do work better than humans, it does do work faster than humans but it tends to be sloppy or lacking in specific areas. For Nintendo who are as particular with their games as they are, this means that AI generative models are essentially useless for their game development departments. AI may reach a level where it is usable without compromising the results, but that is still a bit far away.

[@therealjaystone2344]

The localizations are poorly made by westerners across jrpgs and how the backlash they have been. Japan is already moving to AI to create the closest Japanese thing so the western release games can be better.

[@imatiu]

@@therealjaystone2344 AI traslations aren't good either, they can be overly literal and, with Japanese especially, that is a big issue. Have you seen the comedy rutine bit in Ni No Kuni 1? It's a fairly literal translation that makes absolutely no sense in english. Meanwhile I can mention several examples of localizations that are just as entertaining as the original, if not even more so, although to be fair most of those are in Latinoamerican Spanish because you are right about Muricans sucking at localizations. But AI is not really the right answer there either.

[@vanilla8956]

​@@imatiu It's definitely not ready for that yet, but I'm sure it will be in the distant future. But like I said in another comment it really is unrelated to the problem which is bad actors who know what something is supposed to say but make up their own thing instead. I haven't seen any of that from Nintendo of Europe's localizations but with Treehouse we get travesties like Edelgard's S Support and the entirety of Effie from FE Fates

[@imatiu]

@@vanilla8956 honestly the tech maybe never gets to that point, most translations of jokes require a bit of lateral thinking, which is where most models get stuck. An AI translation would have to make a literal translation of a joke, or make up a new joke taking into consideration the context of the scene, knowing which is the correct path to take would require that the AI model understood that a joke is or is not funny, and it would need to be able to create original jokes which gets into the realm of an actual AI and not a generative model.

[@therealjaystone2344]

@@imatiu AI localization can update the fixes that the localization team can’t. Although the Japanese office would be in charge to make sure it’s readable for us without ever offending others.

[@fabrigarciacartoons]

8:35 amazing words by Iwata

[@PikaPhantom_]

Nintendo's development teams likely haven't implemented any use of AI yet (maybe outside of NERD, as Mario Sunshine's Switch version upscaled some elements). Their legal team, on the other hand? They very well might already be onboard. We already know from the fallout surrounding the GMod situation that The Pokemon Company has contracted a company called Tracer AI to effectively automate brand protection and takedowns for them, and the nature of some...bizarre Nintendo takedowns lately (such as the recent hit to Vimm's Lair seemingly just taking down things that had specific keywords like "Mario" without getting everything tied to the IP and at least one non-Mario game, and reportedly some...NSFW Peach art on Newgrounds) suggests they may have contracted Tracer or another company to do the same.

[@manashieldworld]

😭

[@EMLtheViewer]

Nintendo is more about quality than quantity, particularly so with their most prestigious core franchises like Zelda and Metroid. Current applications of generative AI are fundamentally about quantity over quality, which goes directly against Nintendo’s philosophy of Kyoto craftsmanship as you mentioned. I would be surprised if Nintendo ever used generative AI for anything of substance that ends up in players’ hands. I like the approach they take, and I don’t mind waiting for their games to take as long as they do because, more often than not, they are worth it.

[@therealjaystone2344]

I think JRPGs like Paper Mario, Fire Emblem, and Xeno titles will have AI text lines to avoid anymore localization misuses by the west.

[@vanilla8956]

​​@@therealjaystone2344 it would be cheaper to just cut down the treehouse, but the reason they don't is because that such a shake up isn't profitable for them at the moment. They could care less about the smearing and revisionism the treehouse does in the american market as long as it still sells. It's awful but it's a fact that artistic integrity in foreign markets is far from a priority. Remember, Nintendo of Europe isn't guilty of this aggressive revisionist localization. Remember tri force heroes?

[@xxsupersayen34xxnoe33]

​@@therealjaystone2344never read such nonsense before, you think nintendo is going to use shitty machine translation so hard core nintendo fan wont have to chzck the wiki to see what changes localisation brought??? do you not understand what localisation is? do you not understand how machine translation work?? you know that all this would lead to is games with less sensical dialogue which would just lead to sells dropping in every regions outside japan because "what are they even saying??"

[@therealjaystone2344]

@@xxsupersayen34xxnoe33 tell that to other RPGs and manga

[@xxsupersayen34xxnoe33]

@@therealjaystone2344 are you doing a bit where you pretend to not know how to speak???

[@RiqMoran]

i think not at all until 10 years after the initial hype lol

[@RiqMoran]

actually i take that back. they will probably be just 1 year late but have the most underwhelming, cheapest implementation of the tech.

[@CillianGandenberger]

Or they change the entire thing and somehow fix it, and then somehow mess it up still

[@therealjaystone2344]

JRPGs will be the first to have AI texts thanks to poor localization

[@Jamesharveycomics]

20

[@RyluRocky]

It’s already being used in the switch successor.

[@BubblegumSempai]

Japan is not lax in its copyright laws. There is no such thing as "Fair Use." Ask any anime KZbinr about their experiences dealing with copyright strikes. Japan has some of the harshest copyright laws around.

[@KC-xf5zd]

Such a great channel. One of my new favs for sure. Keep up the great work, its appreciated :) !

[@Dionaea_floridensis]

I love our cyberpunk dystopia

[@theblowupdollsmusic]

I really appreciate all of your deep and incredibly insightful videos. I can tell you put a lot of time into these. I would love to see someone like digital foundry hire you to do a Nintendo Corner for them.

[@JohnLattanzio98]

Nintendo forecast literally NEVER misses

[@vanilla8956]

I'm 100% sure they don't want to use another company's AI and want to wait until the technology advances to the point they can affordably manage their own private AI. By that point the infinitely generated mario and zelda worlds and massive amounts of fire emblem side content and dynamic NPC dialogue and such and such will be selling points. Which is a smart move. Everyone looks back on things wishing they invested early but not everyone who does is a winner. Such as the people who ordered pepperoni pizza for a bitcoin.

[@EnigmaticGentleman]

Little known fact but Nintendo already used AI for texture work in 3D All Stars and probably a few other games (just look at the small text in some of the Sunshine scenes, its all mangled), for once they're actually ahead of the curve here.

[@MatthewCobalt]

yeah, very ahead. It’s actually a very good use case for such technology, even though the work is incredibly inconsistent in many aspects.

[@izuthree]

The thing with that stuff is that it's actually really old at this point, the image scaling ML kit has been around and used for many, many years. The current buzzwordy stuff is some 'new wave' of 'AI' which shares a lot of technical similarities, but has been blown way out of proportion by silicon valley heads who see money to be made.

[@evermillcreek]

As long as creative vision isn't compromised, it's very much like them to adopt innovations readily. Japan as a country seems to always weigh tradition and modernity against one another and embrace whatever is sincere.

[@danielgrezda3339]

Running old game textures through an ai upsampler has been an industry norm for remasteres for a while now. Nintendo did a better job of it though, I renember the gta and p3p remasters used too much ai and it completely fucked the small text in those games.

[@izuthree]

@@danielgrezda3339 GTA remasters are actually a very good example of what can go wrong, because they seemingly just used raw output from a bunch of processes - hence why a nut and bolt motif turned into a cylinder, they just used a subd modifier on all the models, lol. In the end it likely took more work to fix the issues those processes caused than it did from just outsourcing it in bulk.

[@slimb0b]

Underrated channel 👏🎬

[@connormclernon26]

Not until all the issues with it are ironed out, so most likely half past never

[@DannyMexen9]

When AI is “withered”

[@ProjectMirai64]

Nice video!

[@danieldalton]

The best Nintendo KZbin channel period x

[@MikAlexander]

They will feed their own assets in to ai and that's how they will use it in development, while for hardware they will use for upscaling, frame gen, and to improve on compression. They will also bring back mii's that are ai avatars and you can communicate with them. They also might make a games with ai.

[@ekurisona663]

best nintendo channel on yt!

[@NE0_Messi]

Yet another Nintendo Forecast banger

[@randomguy970]

In the section about adaptable difficult, you speculate how AI could help gradually shift challenge. I think it’s worth pointing out that many non-Nintendo games are implementing increased accessibility options which include more granular difficulty settings. However Nintendo have always been very light on such settings (alongside other Japanese developers, the push for accessibility really comes from western developers). So I’m not sure how likely this use of AI is purely on these grounds.

[@rpg_haven]

Pikmin 2 had randomly generated dungeons

[@XiTSlash]

only for upscaling (like DLSS)

[@johnclark926]

I feel like this would be the only RTX feature Nintendo would ever consider (besides Integer Scaling, I am not kidding you when I say that my GTX 1060 can’t use integer scaling through the control panel because it was made before 2018).

[@XiTSlash]

@@johnclark926 Maybe raytracing for some games, would be cool if they use it in Luigi's Mansion 4

[@johnclark926]

@@XiTSlash if they could figure out how to use it for a gameplay mechanic, maybe. Whenever Nintendo’s consoles have a hardware quirk, they’ll usually try to use it in a game at least once, from something as popular as Mode 7 on the SNES to the autosteroscopic screen on the 3DS. That being said, it’s tough to come up with mechanics using ray tracing that can’t also be done with the less expensive ray marching.

[@Goolix_Aero]

Last year's rerelease of the first two Pikmin games feature AI upscaled cutscenes, I believe

[@johnclark926]

The in-game screenshots used in the HUD for each game were AI upscaled (for example, the preview image for the Forest of Hope in 1 or the preview image for Hostile Territory in 2), but neither game had AI upscaled cutscenes. The majority of cutscenes in 1 were in-game, and the game recordings for the enemy reel were fully remade from scratch (fixing a lot of the inconsistent enemy placement from the original enemy reel). As for Pikmin 2, I have good reason to believe they were largely rerendered, as granular detail can be spotted on the asteroids (something I’ve noticed as a fail case in every previous upscale test I’ve come across), as well as the Debt Repayment Cinema finally fixing the white background left on the President’s hair. The credits where Louie is just running around has also had its lighting drastically changed to look more realistic. I feel that the original commenter who assumed the cutscene to be upscaled may have focused too much on the Hocotate Transportation Company sign in the intro, which has a smeary effect and may have been upscaled but is otherwise not indicative of the majority of the cutscene work.

[@manashieldworld]

Nintendo working with J&J. We are so screwed in the next 20 years.

[@ThePaulineu]

There are three things I fear regarding AI: - Human beings' work being fed without their consent to AI programs - People losing their jobs after their own work was fed to an AI program as they are not needed anymore - The inevitable loss of creativity and dull repetition in game design if AI becomes more and more common in games. Not every game should be a rogue like, not every game should be minecraft, and I hate the idea of soulless NPCs talking like chat GPT in my Zelda games!!

[@green.lantern]

Do a kid icarus video! I feel like theres some smoke there

[@nintendoforecast]

Oh, interesting one. It'll be a while - schedule's packed for a while - but I'll add it to my list.

[@green.lantern]

@@nintendoforecast thanks! Your channels are real gem, glad i found you

[@josephscottlawrence]

BotW is huge, but if we want to make a truly massive game that’s 100 times bigger we’re going to need procedural generation. Hopefully someone figures out how to actually do it well.

[@ThePaulineu]

Minecraft did this already!

[@josephscottlawrence]

Minecraft did a great job! What I’m hoping to see next is a massive (but finite) RPG style game. Like the upcoming Light No Fire, or the fictional Sword Art Online.

[@ThePaulineu]

That makes sense!

[@pattersong6637]

At the very least, AI upscaling in the form of DLSS will be utilized. It's interesting seeing people say "no AI, no AI" and still clamor for AI upscaling anyway.

[@Wiziliz]

Wasn't the Palworld stuff propaganda? AI wasn't proven to be used in it.

[@MG-mh8xp]

it's wild how y'all talk about AI as if it's all positives. I hope AI doesn't ever catch on in the way it is now.

[@llauram3650]

procedural generation and LLM content/asset generation are really not the same. procedural generation is programmed by people. the results are then tweaked. the code directly results in the output. LLM content is generated based on prompts and training, but how it gets made is a blackbox. and while you can change what they give you, the process by what they create isn't as easily tweaked. it's an extra step removed. yes, there is programming in this but it's more like a microwave meal, made once and duplicated industrially (you can't really change, you just heat it up), versus a meal made with fresh ingredients by a chef.

[@Yntsire]

“A.I.” does not “learn like humans do.” This is a straw man point, and I’m a bit disappointed to hear you repeating it. “Generative” A.I.” as it exists today has been built with a core foundation of copyright infringement, stolen work, zero consent sought out, and zero good-faith actions or intentions. The numerous lawsuits (and numerous more to come) should be all the evidence needed that Nintendo (or at least their legal team) wants to avoid that quagmire with a 100 foot stick.

[@izuthree]

Yeah, the 'AI' as it currently is, is just ML patterns on big data. It's been missold to a ridiculous degree.

[@marekdec8605]

Where did he say that? If you’re talking about the intro, that’s not what he said.

[@vanilla8956]

You think lawsuits are evidence? Do you have any idea how many lawsuits are made against nintendo that fall through? Also your opinion on what counts as "stealing" is not everyone elses, and it isn't the law's view of it because Dalle is still up and running. Stealing is defined by deprivation of the owner. When you take Sally's car the problem isn't you having a car it's depriving her of her property. Same issue when you pirate and deprive nintendo of a sale of their product. Me training a machine to remember specific data points of images and record patterns of data without recording or storing the images is not theft under any definition. Especially when the images are all consensually uploaded to public platforms for all to freely right click save as as much as they please. A case can be made for infringement, the same as how a fan artist drawing Pokémon characters on Patreon is criminally infringing on the Pokémon IP, but not theft. That's silly and just not how the law works. Twitter is not a good source of legal advice.

[@izuthree]

@@vanilla8956 Japanese law ruled that generative works that are clearly based on copyrighted material or property are copyright infringements. While Japanese copyright law is very different and a minefield to navigate, it is a very real danger to use it, lest you accidentally overfit into something copyrighted - they can get in legal trouble for it.

[@vanilla8956]

@@izuthree I think you might have misunderstood the point of my comment. Copyright infringement is not theft and vice versa. In everyday life we use these interchangeably from time to time, but in court they couldn't be more separated by definition

[@ArtemisWasHere]

5:30 has someone been watching a certain moon channel?

[@vanilla8956]

I know that guy is the one who popularized understanding of this but you gotta remember people who know business all already knew how this worked. He was just making that video because there's a lot of people who don't

[@ArtemisWasHere]

@@vanilla8956 I’m sorry what? What do you mean? Do you think I’m accusing? No, I like moon channel.

[@vanilla8956]

@@ArtemisWasHere What are you talking about? Accusing?

[@ArtemisWasHere]

@@vanilla8956 I’m very confused now

[@vanilla8956]

@@ArtemisWasHere I think maybe you meant to reply to someone else?

[@Nicolas-qc3jf]

missing the point: the video

[@ItIsWhatItIs-dz3cu]

Imagine if all other games have npc that actually respond to your voice and shit, but animal crossing is still stuck with cookie cutter sanitized lines that repeat themselves and are not even unique to one villager😂

[@JaneyUwU]

Better than ai generated lifeless text

[@ItIsWhatItIs-dz3cu]

@@JaneyUwU how when its atleast not the same over and over again😂

[@ColdGoldLazarus]

I hope never

[@charlie7531]

You are luckily I minority who will be ignored