I think that there is plenty of reason to update old zones and styles to modern standards, especially if we are going to be spending more time in older zones. Other mmos and games have done this to great success, because over time a team gets better at expressing things artistically and grows and that growth can make some of their earlier works look dated. I would like them to invest at least somewhat in renewing older things like they are with the class skills so the game feels more cohesive.

That being said, using ai to do it? Absolutely not. AI is garbage that does not understand nuance or theme. It often still confuses basic things and to many people, especially artists, it sticks out like a sore thumb for what it is. The only time it remotely works is if artists, coders, writers are there to "correct" it and even then that is just making those people do extra steps to do something that they could have done without ai mucking it up. I don't trust ai to be remotely able to satisfyingly update anything and I want it to stay very far away from anything in eso.

Nemesis7884 wrote: »

Emeratis wrote: »

I think that there is plenty of reason to update old zones and styles to modern standards, especially if we are going to be spending more time in older zones. Other mmos and games have done this to great success, because over time a team gets better at expressing things artistically and grows and that growth can make some of their earlier works look dated. I would like them to invest at least somewhat in renewing older things like they are with the class skills so the game feels more cohesive.

That being said, using ai to do it? Absolutely not. AI is garbage that does not understand nuance or theme. It often still confuses basic things and to many people, especially artists, it sticks out like a sore thumb for what it is. The only time it remotely works is if artists, coders, writers are there to "correct" it and even then that is just making those people do extra steps to do something that they could have done without ai mucking it up. I don't trust ai to be remotely able to satisfyingly update anything and I want it to stay very far away from anything in eso.

realistically the choice would probably be ai or no update...i doubt there are enough resources / revenues to consider something like that otherwise...

Strongly disagree with that. One of the biggest draws of this game is it's rich and robust cosmetic systems. The monetization model is changing as of this year where cosmetics will become one of the primary moneymakers alongside subscriptions. Other games I play have updated skins and cosmetics knowing having things look modern increases desirability and sales. MMO competitors such as world of warcraft have also updated old character models, sets, and zones. Eventually it's something that most live service games realize is an investment in the future. If the developers are serious about their comment of wanting eso to be a 30+ year game, it will eventually have to be done in some capacity. It's shortsighted to think otherwise.

As for AI, again, I do not trust it can do the job properly. Many of them are trained on generic often stolen data and that means that in updating things, it will often confuse things. TES high elves have a very different aesthetic style to their clothing than world of warcraft's or lord of the rings or any other fantasy setting out there with high elves, but if the data is trained on all of those it will picture a high elf as something it's not. The same can be said for orcs or any other race. This is a major problem for the IP/lore/identity of the game that is why I want ESO to avoid ai like the plague. We already still have people in the fandom who don't want to believe eso is canon and I don't want that discourse to get worse or have some credence by things that can be avoided such as the ai usage.

The other problem with ai and eso is it could lead to fanworks being stolen and then legal issues for ZOS. We already had this happen before when a fan's artwork was mixed up with official art. Given how ai trains itself, it's likely that it also has an issue where it has more fanworks than official works due to most games in the TES series being extremely old/dated and outside of eso we have Skyrim which is over a decade old and Oblivion Remastered and if we want to be generous for "modern" TES art/assets we can include the art from TES Legends. Again, landmine of potential legal issues.

Finally, as I stated in my first post, ai often causes more work for concept artists and creators in gaming spaces, not less. Here is an article of concept artists in their own words talking about how ai makes their job harder and often causes more problems than it solves.

I truly believe half the time people asking for ai don't realize what they're asking for, because if they did, they would realize it's a terrible idea.

My favorite zones are the original Alliance zones and I spend lots of time there. I'd love to see the graphics there upgraded. Too much work? That depends on whether the game wants to have a nice long lifespan I think. There are so many zones and so many armor styles; attention to refining what is already in game would be most welcome.

I'd love to see upscaled high-res versions of older outfits and furnishings. I don't know if that sort of thing is already done by AI, but I think it needs to at least be vetted by people.

It wouldnt be hard for them to go back to all the old textures and add more details with higher resolution. A while ago now I extracted all the base maps, diffuse, alphas etc and imported them into Unreal Engine to recreate the below from Craglorn. There are 10s of thousands of files so it would be a huge undertaking but not impossible.

Whilst it would be nice to see these things updated, I would want it done by people.

If you think AI is the answer to anything, you need to do more research.

AI is only bad if used wrongly. If there's a human with eve a pinch of "I" — and I'm not saying "I" as in nominative personal pronoun — behind the tool, it can produce great things.

Look at James-Wayne's example. I don't even know him/her, and it's a great result

Enemoriana wrote: »

Emeratis wrote: »

Strongly disagree with that. One of the biggest draws of this game is it's rich and robust cosmetic systems. The monetization model is changing as of this year where cosmetics will become one of the primary moneymakers alongside subscriptions. Other games I play have updated skins and cosmetics knowing having things look modern increases desirability and sales. MMO competitors such as world of warcraft have also updated old character models, sets, and zones. Eventually it's something that most live service games realize is an investment in the future. If the developers are serious about their comment of wanting eso to be a 30+ year game, it will eventually have to be done in some capacity. It's shortsighted to think otherwise.

As for AI, again, I do not trust it can do the job properly. Many of them are trained on generic often stolen data and that means that in updating things, it will often confuse things. TES high elves have a very different aesthetic style to their clothing than world of warcraft's or lord of the rings or any other fantasy setting out there with high elves, but if the data is trained on all of those it will picture a high elf as something it's not. The same can be said for orcs or any other race. This is a major problem for the IP/lore/identity of the game that is why I want ESO to avoid ai like the plague. We already still have people in the fandom who don't want to believe eso is canon and I don't want that discourse to get worse or have some credence by things that can be avoided such as the ai usage.

The other problem with ai and eso is it could lead to fanworks being stolen and then legal issues for ZOS. We already had this happen before when a fan's artwork was mixed up with official art. Given how ai trains itself, it's likely that it also has an issue where it has more fanworks than official works due to most games in the TES series being extremely old/dated and outside of eso we have Skyrim which is over a decade old and Oblivion Remastered and if we want to be generous for "modern" TES art/assets we can include the art from TES Legends. Again, landmine of potential legal issues.

That is question mostly of how AI is used, not if AI is used.
AI shouldn't be used to create, for example, whole locations. Or concept art. That's true.
But AI can be used to faster produce technical things like textures and, maybe, simple models. Some important aldmeri artifact or new detailed khajiit armor requires work of real person, but basket of apples - not really, only some control (which can be done with less skilled person). And there are a lot of such textures and models... So AI can't do all work, but can make part of it cheaper and faster, which let more resourses for remaking important things by hands.

And not only well-known things like ChatGpt are used. It can be specially trained models, on specially collected data. For example, you can quite easily do such thing locally in Stable Diffusion. I'm sure there are some more professional and specialized things too.

You cut off part of my comment where I linked an article with many artists working in the industry who have expressed a preference to have AI entirely out of their creative process for various reasons. Even if used ethically, it tends to lower morale amongst artists and similar to the blockchain trends of yesterday, AI today still causes more problems than it solves for a lot of artists in regards to work that nonartists might not understand. Even for smaller assets, ai often fails to account for proper lighting and other nuance which can make it stand out as artificially generated quite easily. There are artists who specialize in only doing textures or backgrounds or in game assets. Heck, some artists prefer to create these over people or animals or character work. They have a right to create what they love too and their job isn't any less meaningful than the character artists.

Yes, private databases exist and many companies use those over the public ones, but they can still be easily polluted and I mentioned two concerns for that already in the post you quoted. A majority of TES related artwork and concepts out there today are fanworks. I know because I maintain a private reference library for my own artistic purposes with an extensive tag system and because I'm a TES megafan a portion of that is dedicated to all things TES. Obviously they have internal things I don't but I roughly know what they're working with from my own private collection. The concern of legal issues with fanworks and/or having to dillute the pool to find more things to use are both valid concerns here.

Gonna just put a few examples of concept work done for ESO here that isn't the nicer more polished things you see when you look at the concept art pages on the official site or uesp because it's relevant as to why ai cannot do what artists can even on assets most people think it could:


Both of these show how Joseph Watmough carefully crafted a biome for Elsweyr by exploring and putting together references in a way that ai cannot and probably never will. For his full works and more detail I recommend viewing the whole thing. Even assets people think are negligible are really not in terms of art/assets. While character art is flashy and draws people in easier, all assets are important and deserve to be done well and with purpose and thought put behind them.

I would rather them work slower and do this right than work fast and rely on shortcuts and mess something up. Faster isn't always better. A game that wants to last a long time needs care and attention to detail and consistency. I also would like to see them to continue to partner with the amazing artists they have over the years because that is part of how this game's art assets got so good in the first place.

Look, I'm just gonna be blunt here.

<snip> AI.

I don't care what you're suggesting it be used for, or if it should be "in addition to" human effort or fully replacing it. It's a technological cancer and I'm sick as hell of hearing about it everywhere. I cannot wait until the datacentres get imploded.

<snipped due to Cursing and Profanity>