They jumped on the NFT bandwagon a couple years ago, too. Did they not learn anything from that?
Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027
Submitted 3 days ago by inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
crmsnbleyd@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
I will continue ignoring anything they make
MourningDove@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
So… no more SE games for me. Not a huge loss to be honest.
JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Lol. Good luck!
tal@lemmy.today 2 days ago
Hmm. While I don’t know what their QA workflow is, my own experience is that working with QA people to design a QA procedure for a given feature tends to require familiarity with the feature and possible problems, and that human-validating a feature isn’t usually something done at massive scale, where you’d get a lot of benefit from heavy automation.
It’s possible that one might be able to use LLMs to help write test code — reliability and security considerations there are normally less-critical than in front-line code. Worst case is getting a false positive, and if you can get more test cases covered, I imagine that might pay off.
Square does an MMO, among their other stuff. If they can train a model to produce AI-driven characters that act sufficiently like human players, where they can theoretically log training data from human players, that might be sufficient to populate an MMO “experimental” deployment so that they can see if anything breaks prior to moving code to production.
snooggums@piefed.world 2 days ago
Worst case is getting a false positive, and if you can get more test cases covered, I imagine that might pay off.
False positives during testing are a huge time sink. QA has to replicate and explain away each false report and the faster AI 'completes' tasks the faster the flood of false reports come in.
There is plenty of non-AI automation that can be used intentionally to do tedious repetitive tasks already.
Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world 2 days ago
From a tech POV, that makes a lot of sense. Use AI to find the needle in the haystack. Then let a person validate. That’s probably one of the better uses for it. Although I don’t love AI for any of the broad reasons to not like AI.
SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org 2 days ago
Wasn't AI decent at writing code, but bad at review and modifying it?
Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Maybe before. But it’s gotten pretty damn good at detecting anomalies and issues. And every time a human QA validates the info, it gets better.
I’d still leave it to a human to fix the code though. I suspect that letting AI write the code would make it unworkable for people in the future. But maybe it can write code in a straightforward way to be managed. I don’t know. It’s advancing pretty fast.
Tronn4@lemmy.world 2 days ago
insert plane crashing.gif
themurphy@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Well, it’s not game development, but bugfixes and quality testing.
I dont know, but it does makes sense, when there’s still 30% work being done by human eyes. There will still be people checking everything through.
Even if they hit 50-50, they could put more money into the development.
The argument that they will just save the money only works as long as another company doesnt use it for game devs. Otherwise you naturally fall behind.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It also only works as long as the AI can actually competently do the QA work. This is what an AI thinks a video game is. To do QA, it will have to know that something is wrong, flag it, and be able to tell when it’s fixed. The most likely situation I can foresee is that it creates even more work for the remaining humans to do when they’re already operating at a deficit.
riskable@programming.dev 2 days ago
To be fair, that’s what an AI video generator thinks an FPS is. That’s not the same thing as AI-assisted coding. Though it’s still hilarious! “Press F to pay respects” 🤣
For reference, using AI to automate your QA isn’t a bad idea. There’s a bunch of ways to handle such things but one of the more interesting ones is to pit AIs against each other. Not in the game, but in their reports… You tell AI to perform some action and generate a report about it while telling another AI to be extremely skeptical about the first AI’s reports and to reject anything that doesn’t meet some minimum standard.
That’s what they’re doing over at Anthropic (internally) with Claude Code QA tasks and it’s super fascinating! Heard them talk about that setup on a podcast recently and it kinda blew my mind… They have more than just two “Claudes” pitted against each other too: In the example they talked about, they had four: One generating PRs, another reviewing/running tests, another one checking the work of the testing Claude, and finally a Claude setup to perform critical security reviews of the final PRs.
Mikina@programming.dev 2 days ago
Large companies probably do that anyway.
Take Blizzard for example. They just released a new patch, where class campaign quests for 8/12 classes do not work. Sure, it’s a remixed version of older expansion, and with all the phasing stuff I can kind of imagine some of the phasing issues being caused by, I don’t know, the player having a weird combination of completed stuff that’s hard to properly catch in testing, since there’s quite a lot of variables.
But the fact that one of the class quests requires crafted items to be completed, while crafting isn’t available by design in the Remix, there’s just no excuse. They either just don’t give a fuck about an issue that’s literally a progression blocker with 100% repro rate, or no one ever tested it even once.
As someone who worked in QA and gamedev, I can’t imagine how could something as obvious as this ever get approved for release. That’s something you catch immediately. Hell, you don’t even have to play through it to realize that this might be a problem.
Rooster326@programming.dev 2 days ago
Work at a larger company. Customer Service in the wild is so bad that we just use our customers as the QA. As they say
All businesses have a test environment. Some are lucky enough to have a separate production environment.
Katana314@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I’m cautious but a little curious about this one, because QA could actually be a very good target for AIs to work with.
- It might not kill jobs. Right now, engineers finish a task and the limited number of QA engineers can’t possibly test it enough before release. That game-breaking bug you found in a game? I’m sure some QA had it in their plan to test every level for those bugs, and yet they just didn’t have enough time - and the studio couldn’t justify hiring 20 more QA squads. Even if they do upscale AI testing, they’ll need knowledgable QA workers to guide them.
- This is often extremely rote, repetitive work. It’s exactly the type of work The Oatmeal said is great for AIs. One person is tuning the balance on the Ether Drive attack, and gives it an extra 40% blarf damage. He tries it, sees it works fine, and eagerly skips past the part of the test plan to verify that all cutscenes are working and unaffected to push it in. An AI will try it out, and find: Actually, since an NPC uses an Ether Drive in a late-game cutscene, this breaks the whole game!
- Even going past existing plans, QA can likely find MORE work for AIs to do that they normally wouldn’t bother with. Think about the current complexity of game dev that leads to the current trope of releasing games half-finished to eventually get patched. It won’t help patch games, but it’ll at least help give devs an up-to-date list of issues.
That said, those talking about human creativity and player expectations are still correct. An AI can report a problem with feedback that a human can say “No, that looks fine. Override that report.” It will also be good to do occasional manual tests, and lament “How did the AI think this was okay??”
pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Sure
Ilixtze@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
more shit
BigBananaDealer@lemmy.world 2 days ago
dont they already have dumbbots in playtesting?
frongt@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
The Talos Principle certainly did in 2014.
RinostarGames@mastodon.gamedev.place 2 days ago
@inclementimmigrant I'm so glad I've stopped buying AAA games.
ieatpwns@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Inb4 their games come out even more broken
finitebanjo@piefed.world 2 days ago
I kind of wrote Square Enix off years ago, but I'm definitely not buying anything they make in the future.
wizblizz@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Barf.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Some AI or central computer going haywire and destroying everything is, like, the third or fourth stock RPG trope just behind the Dark Lord burning down the protagonist’s village in the first act or the mysterious waif girl actually turning out to be a princess.
You really think they’d know better.
iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Grrroooossss, noooo I liked you Square Enix in spite of everything else.
mostlikelyaperson@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Given how much squenix struggles with changing its development practices, I would be very surprised if they actually got there.
DeadDigger@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Well their goes FFXIV, that will be their end