IO have a policy against using AI in gamedev, but it "might be for us in the future"

14.08.2023 - 17:17 / rockpapershotgun.com / Ai

IO Interactive have found such success with Hitman over the past decade that it's hard to imagine the developer making anything else, but I have many vivid memories of its non-Agent-47-centric outings. 2010's Kane & Lynch 2 was a very special breed of spiritual ugliness, while 2003's Freedom Fighters wowed youngling me with its chunky urban squad tactics. I also have a soft spot for Mini Ninjas, one of IO's few jaunts into the realm of family-friendliness, if only because as somebody familiar with IO's other work, I could smell the blood beneath its bloodless Nickleodeon visuals.

I'm keen to hear more of the studio's forthcoming James Bond adaptation, in dev since 2010 - surely a marriage made in franchising heaven, though I struggle to imagine an IO protagonist quipping like 007. But I'm especially eager to lay eyes on its currently untitled Project Fantasy, an online RPG inspired by "the togetherness, camaraderie, agony, and delight" of table-top gaming and more specifically, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy books.

We're not expecting a proper reveal for the latter anytime soon - or at least, nobody here's told me nuffink - but Gamereactor has published an intriguing, wide-ranging chat with IO's core engine programmer Álvaro Fernández and senior technical executive producer Cris Vega (both speak English as a second language - I've edited the transcript lightly for readability). According to Vega, making Project Fantasy is a complicated challenge; it follows on from years of obsessing over the inner workings of Hitman, whose very particular approach to social stealth has obliged the creation of some pretty specific technology.

Most "commercial or even proprietary engines", Vega told the site, focus on the GPU when making optimisations, whereas the mega NPC headcounts and vast crowds of bystanders encountered in Hitman World of Assassination levels put the emphasis on the CPU. "We are very CPU bound and we hit it hard," Vega said, adding that "the last Hitman series would not have been possible in some other commercial engines out there. They would not perform, it would just crash. So we're very optimized like that, when it comes to CPU. It's a very particular game. Most games are not built like that."

The same may not be true of the new fantasy RPG, though Vega naturally didn't go into detail. "For very long, we've been very good at third person shooters, sandboxes and then all of a sudden, Project Fantasy. So now we want to be the best at that, which is actually, I mean, it's a challenge that we also like. We've been optimizing performance for many years, AI and solving the same problems to the limit of perfection. So now we have new challenges and that's also fun for us, right?