The Legend of Zelda is one of my favourite video game franchises ever made, so it pains me to see AI slop corrupt it like the blight of Breath of the Wild.
Yesterday I talked about my hatred for the AI Pokémon “game” that was doing the rounds online and briefly mentioned that other beloved video game series were getting the same treatment.
Twitter user Minchoi shared an AI recreation of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild made with Google Genie, a new tool that’ll generate 3D environments based on the images and prompts you feed it.
The product created was a mock-up of Hyrule field and all of the mountains you’d usually see in the background. It even replicated Link’s character model and the infamous glider that so many games ripped off after Breath of the Wild came out.
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With that very basic summary you’d probably expect it to look reasonably good but it really doesn’t.
The textures are flat and the framerate is as choppy as all of the other AI-generated game videos, it doesn’t look appealing at all.
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There’s also the obvious problem of it using the real Breath of the Wild game to create these assets. There’s nothing genuine about these creations; they're just rip-offs of other things.
And yet many “gamers” are herald tools like Google Genie as the future of game development.
Sure, Google Genie is faster at “creating” games than actual developers but that doesn’t mean it’s better.
Even as these tools get more and more advanced their potential for genuine creativity feels limited, as it feeds off existing work and generates a bizarre patchwork product made of several different things.
It’s never going to make a Nintendo game better than Nintendo, or is it going to make a game that could compete with Nintendo.
You could argue fan-made products are just as bad but at least they have some thought and care put into them.
They also give credit where credit is due and don’t pretend they’ve built something new, whereas I’d imagine AI wouldn’t be as transparent.
I’m hoping companies like Nintendo are paying attention to these products and begin cracking down on them, as eventually it’s going to border on copyright infringement if it doesn’t already.
Topics: The Legend Of Zelda, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2