Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic director Casey Hudson calls generative AI 'creatively soulless'

Fans of BioWare RPGs like the original Mass Effect trilogy and the iconic Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic will probably know the name, Casey Hudson. The veteran game designer and director led development of these classic titles and is currently leading a new studio, Arcanaut Studios, to create a Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) spiritual successor, Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic.

With the new studio partnered with Lucasfilm Games, with an additional $100 million in funding from NetEase veteran Simon Zhu, the studio co-founder and Fate of the Old Republic game director recently sat down with Bloomberg to discuss the project. And during the discussion, he conveyed his feelings on the role of generative AI in game development. As the headline says, yeah, he's not a fan.

"I just find AI to be creatively soulless," Casey Hudson tells Bloomberg. "It's hard to imagine where it's actually helpful in the process. I'm just really unimpressed with it." Although this doesn't call out a specific use case for generative AI in game development, the discussion naturally went in that direction, as Arcanaut Studios is a relatively small studio developing a massive AAA-style Star Wars RPG.

In fact, the goal is to build the studio, develop the full game, and release it before 2030 without having "hundreds and hundreds of people" working on it. In an era where big games now take upward of 5 to 7 years to develop, it's an ambitious goal, so it's natural to assume that the studio would be looking into how AI tools could accelerate development, whether that's on the QA side or on the creative side, leveraging generative AI tools. Based on Casey's comments, it sounds like the latter is off the table.