AI remains a controversial topic in creative spaces. The recent upsurge in the use of generative tools has seen many creative fields take note of its potential. The fear of jobs being taken or work becoming too derivative as a result of this continues to inspire debate on this technology’s role. Recently, Nintendo has revealed that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom made some use of procedural generation to aid in automating certain development tasks. There is insistence, however, that Nintendo will only use automation tools appropriately in their games, and will continue to ensure creativity is their foremost goal. Let’s look at how Tears of the Kingdom managed to utilize automation without sacrificing quality.
Caves upon Caves
Tears of the Kingdom was a sequel to Breath of the Wild and utilized the same overworld. As such, it had to add new elements to make revisiting this map interesting. While they could’ve been content to make small changes to the overworld and show us how it changed between games, Nintendo went further. Exploring across the map now reveals places where openings to underground cave systems have been uncovered. These cave systems are filled with enemies and loot, making them vital exploration points for Link. Additionally, an entire underground map called the Depths now exists. This is a massive underground cavern all on its own.
As it turns out, the tremendous amount of design work needed for these cavernous locations is where Nintendo first considered automation. Lead terrain artist Takehara explains that there was a fear of overly relying on procedural generation to make these spaces. This worry is born out of producing a tremendous quantity of game content that lacks creativity and soul. This would increase the likelihood of players finding this space unimaginative and boring to explore. As such, level design itself was retained within the hands of the designers. Locations of resources, enemies, and important structures were determined by human ingenuity and not automation.
Room for AI
However, the tremendous workload of creating these spaces still saw room for automation to speed up this process. Certain elements of the many cave systems were decorative, and not important for the flow of gameplay. In these cases, procedural generation was introduced to create large quantities of cavernous structures. This created a parallel track of development where spaces could be created procedurally while designers worked on the gameplay side. This increased the speed at which these spaces could be fine-tuned. As such, they brought this process over to the sky islands, another set of landmasses that Tears of the Kingdom relied upon.
Given the massive amount of explorable space in the game, it is clear why Nintendo pursued these automation techniques. While procedurally generating all of your spaces may lead to gameplay that is not engaging, Nintendo circumvented that by hand-touching all critical locations. Developers never left massive amounts of game space to be handled solely through procedural generation processes. Instead, automation would produce a canvas upon which they could add their famed level-design expertise. This would end up making Tears of the Kingdom a far bigger game than its predecessor and a triumph for Nintendo’s soon-to-be-replaced Switch console.
Final Thoughts
Hearing about companies using generative technology always leads to an immediate sense of concern. If creative works can be made by a machine, then we are taking away desirable jobs. However, using automation in the way Nintendo did merely makes the job of a creative much easier. No one lost their job because their system exists. Instead, they were able to spend more of their time hand-crafting good gameplay rather than manually producing every individual chunk of terrain. Tears of the Kingdom demonstrates how generative tools can be used within reason. The developers correctly caution us away from abandoning the human element altogether, however, as it is what makes games as great as they are.
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