Cyan, the studio behind it myst And riven, has been financing its games via Kickstarter for several years. That’s the year 2016 autopsy was made, and so is the year 2023 firmamentThis time with more than a little help from machines—was also developed.
For a studio with such an illustrious history, The decidedly mixed reviews for firmament should be a surprise. Fans are unhappy with some parts of the puzzle design, but they also keep mentioning how flat the game’s world feels, how poor the narrative is, and how lackluster it is firmament In-game lore that really stands out compared to Cyan’s ’90s blockbusters.
It turns out there’s a good reason for some of this. As Gregory Avery-Weir first pointed this out As you read through the game’s credits, you’ll find that certain professions – such as voice acting – aren’t mentioned where you’d expect them to be, which is next to composers and artists. When the credits thank external partners like Nvidia, you’d think they’d completely forgotten to acknowledge their voice actors.
By the time you get to it, the final credit literally flashed on screen before thanking streams from Kickstarter backers:
That certainly explains why so many pieces of game history – such as “diaries, logs, checklists, newspapers, stories, songs, poems, letters” and “loosely scattered papers” –were described as so disappointing and why so many players complained about the lifelessness of the narrative.
I reached out to Cyan and asked them specifically about the level of human involvement in the game’s narrative and lore texts (newspapers, letters, etc.). Your Answer:
“AI Assisted Content” featured in the credits of Firmament is exactly that. It is content whose final state you will see in-game and which was supported by services and not entirely created based on what many consider to be ” KI” and have made use of the Cyan employees.
For example, all voice acting content was 100% performed by a real human (which might have been obvious once you listened to it, especially considering the rhythm and content of the performance – we can’t imagine what it would be like). (to your question as if it were entirely machine generated) but the timbre, pitch and tone of the final performance was altered using one of these services and with the artist’s consent. Hopefully this clarifies things and provides a good example of what we mean by “AI assisted content”.
Note that this doesn’t explain why these voice actors aren’t mentioned (although the AI does!) and why they used AI (rather than regular recording/mixing tools) to add “timbre, pitch and tone” to a human voice change and doesn’t address the numerous other aspects that fans have complained about, such as the poems and songs.
That sucks! This is the third game in a month we had Emphasis for either performing or charging for performing terrible, obviously machine generated content. The feedback in any case –even on the Kickstarter page of this game– it was clear: People don’t want this stuff in their games!