The Star Fox-style roguelite whose dev refused to use AI voices to cut costs is adding an entire "anti-capitalist revenge" campaign about a cat-girl destroying AI
The Star Fox-style roguelite whose dev refused to use AI voices to cut costs is adding an entire "anti-capitalist revenge" campaign about a cat-girl destroying AI
Whisker Squadron: Survivor
Thanks just had a look at the game on steam it looks interesting. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2140100/Whisker_Squadron_Survivor/
It’s honestly giving big Starlight Brigade vibes.
Man I played way to much star fox. This looks very nostalgic
So wait, the AI is destroying cat-girls?
Yes, support your local cat girl VAs or they will disappear forever.
Nyaaa~ OwO
The robots took our jobs
I've never been more am enemy of AI than this moment.
Hey, they did Race the Sun, that was fun. Interesting.
I am going to wait till it's finished though.
refused to use ai voices
Have we just started handing out awards for anything that isn’t AI? They didn’t use ai for this! They didn’t use ai for that! Like okay we get it, how about just list what they did use AI for and be done with it
At this rate we are in fact going to need to have separate awards shows for non-LLM artistry.
To answer your question, though, it's more than just the refusal but the addition of an anti-AI story campaign.
It's an amazingly click-baity headline.
I like the idea and gameplay, but man am I tired of that color palette
Nice. I had this on my list already, this just makes me want it more. I’ll probably wait for a full release though.
FYI if you're one of the people who just sees an image, the original includes a link to this:
I was wondering what was up with that
Strange, the link is working on my post for me.
Probably a quirk of having different software. I'm on Fedia which runs on mbin, as does kbin.run which MBM is on. You're on lemmy, so I guess something was just handled differently for you (and most users!) vs kbin/mbin users.
Hopefully they do well and can make a version that’s like the GameCube starfox game
That's how you land on my wishlist !
awesome! gonna buy this game later!
Race the Sun was beautiful and I enjoy roguelites, wishlisted!
Maybe a good balance could be a human voice actor for main dialogue, supported by ai trained on their main dialogue to voice sidequest and deep lore dialogue. It could enable fully voiced dialogue-heavy games that would otherwise be too expensive to produce, something like generative RPGs or Morrowind, if all the books could be voiced, and more easily translated while remaining fully voiced. But keeping humans to fill the main campaign contributions, emotional beats and determine character personality. I'm just comparing Morrowind to Oblivion, which was voiced, but the dialogue and conversation trees were heavily reduced in volume as a result.
Maybe a good balance would be hiring a person to speak lines into a microphone. It could employ a person and create art with an acceptable bare minimum quality standard. If you can't afford that and would rather push the costs onto government subsidies for power and emissions, maybe instead just do text dialogue or pull a classic Banjo and Kazooie single dialogue line randomly jumbled up and pitch shifted for every interaction.
I assume you also only buy hand crafted porcelain items, only buy hand picked produce and generally avoid all automation amd modern convenience. Take your clothes to a local hand-wash rather than using a washing machine too do you? I agree that the energy cost should be taken into account before we declare it to be cheaper to use "AI" generated content.
This is manipulation to sell more copies and nothing more.
In any case, AI voices are empowering to the Indie scene. Fully voiced games used to be exclusive to triple A gaming, indie gevs just simply can't afford it.
I feel for the voice actors just like I feel for the translators that all had to change domaine ten years ago, but progress is progress and it's dumb to stifle innovation to save a few jobs.
This is manipulation to sell more copies and nothing more.
...yes? People who make games do things to make their game appeal to people. Framing that as a negative or unusual is kind of weird. Literally everything any game developer does to make the game entertaining or appealing is "a manipulation to sell more copies".
I think framing this as "refusing" to use AI is kind of weird. They believe in doing things the traditional way, great, I think games that use all hand-drawn nondigital art are also cool for going against the grain like that, and making a point of supporting artists is laudable, but it isn't like anyone is trying to force them not to.
AI Voices are just worse or require more work for less pay, and they actually seem less common in the (well made) indie scene than in the Triple A scene.