The Outer Worlds 2 director says Obsidian will never use AI for content creation – “that’s just not really even on the table”

The use of generative AI in video games is an extremely hot topic right now with almost every studio weighing in on the technology. While games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 get lambasted for their use of low-quality AI “slop”, The Outer Worlds 2 director Brandon Adler says that Obsidian Entertainment will not use AI to replace what its already good at.

Since the studio’s foundation in 2003, Obsidian Entertainment has been renowned for its fantastic writing and strong art direction, two things that have definitely returned for The Outer Worlds 2. While there may be a push for AI to replace artists and writers in some companies, Obsidian is not going to use the technology for its games.

Speaking on award-winning games journalist Simon Parkin’s My Perfect Console podcast, Adler explained that “Obsidian should never outsource the things its amazing at, like out quests, and our characters, and our stories.”

While some aspects of future Obsidian games may get outsourced to different companies that have their own processes, the heart of the developer’s games will be made in-house by real people. “Those are things we should keep internal,” Adler continued. “You don’t outsource the things you’re good at to AI.”

“We pride ourselves on our characters, in our world building, and it would be a damn shame for that to go away.”

Adler explained that Obsidian “definitely do not use it [AI] for content creation”, explaining that replacing human-made content with generative tools is “just not really even on the table for the team”.

Instead, Obsidian wants to focus on “the human element” with Alder saying, “you put the storytelling you want to put into that and, I think, as long as we keep that moving forward, we’ll probably be okay.”

That’s not to say Obsidian Entertainment doesn’t use AI in some ways. The Outer Worlds 2 director explains that the tool has been used to summarise meeting notes. Additionally, the technology has been used during research purposes to generate a list of books to read relating to a specific theme. However, for quest design, storylines and content production, AI is out of the question.

“As of right now, we pride ourselves at Obsidian on our storytelling,” the game director said. “We pride ourselves on our characters, in our world building, and it would be a damn shame for that to go away.”

The questions regarding AI are important ones, especially as gaming executives like Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney push to remove AI disclosures from gaming storefronts. Earlier this year, it was claimed that Microsoft were pushing all of its video game studios to use some form of AI in content production, but Xbox boss Phil Spencer has claimed this is not the case.

“On the creative side, I really leave it up to the teams,” Spencer told IGN. “I have found that creative teams will use tools that make their job easier when it makes their job easier, and any top-down mandate that ‘Thou must use a certain tool’…is not really a path to success. I look at the teams, and we make tools available, and I kind of let it organically percolate.”

For now at least, and hopefully for the foreseeable future, The Outer Worlds 2 developers won’t be pushed to use generative AI to quickly rush out content. After all, Obsidian has already proven it can rapidly release RPGs despite its small size so if any team didn’t need to use AI, it’s this one.