The latest sports game from EA wouldn’t have happened without AI, but fans are suspicious about exactly how much it’s being used.
New game EA Sports College Football 25 is not something that’s going to sell very well outside of the US and as big as that market it is, EA has not tried to make a similar game in over 10 years – because the cost of development wouldn’t have been recouped by its limited audience.
The game has done well in America though and EA has revealed why they chose now to return to the concept, and it’s all thanks to artificial intelligence.
‘The level of gameplay and the level of visual fidelity that we did was a combination of many years of work of our incredible teams amplified and accelerated by AI, something that we just wouldn’t have been able to do as little as two or three years ago,’ states EA CEO Andrew Wilson.
Speaking to investors, he explained how the amount of work necessary to create high quality versions of all the players would’ve been too much for a normal team, especially given the concept’s lack of worldwide appeal.
‘We were able to take in a whole plethora of photo imagery across 11,000 [sports] players and build workflows out where AI and machine learning would generate head and our very talented artists would be able to come in and touch up and enhance those heads versus having to go through the full head development programmes,’ said Wilson.
‘In the absence of AI we simply would not have been able to deliver College Football at the level we did, even though we’ve given the team many, many years in development.’
Most of the stories about AI in game development have been purely negative, as publishers use it in a very short-sighted manner, to cut jobs and lay off talented artists.
EA themselves laid off 670 people in February, but depending on how honest they’re being the EA Sports College Football 25 project may actually have saved jobs, if it wouldn’t have happened without AI.
AI being used ethically, to do the donkey work for artists and other developers, is a perfectly reasonable concept and clearly has applications beyond just sports games (although it could lead to EA creating other titles, based on sports that aren’t popular in the US).
The problem is, most publishers aren’t keen on talking openly about how exactly they’re using AI, and most developers will be fearing for their job if they speak out.
At the same time as Wilson was trumpeting the use of AI in EA Sports College Football 25, fans have become suspicious about a new trailer for the more mainstream American football title Madden NFL 25, which is due out in a few weeks.
The trailer features new commentator Mike Tirico and yet it sounds more like AI impersonating him, than an actual recording – with some odd turns of phrase and peculiar pauses.
Tirico is officially involved with the game, so if EA are sampling his voice they’ve presumably done so legally, but with six different commentators in the game it seems very likely that most of the dialogue is not pre-recorded.
Again, if that’s done ethically and with the knowledge of the person involved, then that’s actually very interesting, and again has obvious applications for use outside of sports titles.
The problem is when AI is use unethically, either without the knowledge of an artist or performer, or simply as an excuse to layoff developers.
Given how secretive games development tends to be, it’s going to be very difficult to tell when abuses are happening, but if AI is already proving a profitable endeavour at this stage its use is clearly only going to increase in the future.
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