French developer Asobo, creator of the Plague Tale series and the Microsoft Flight Simulator games, doesn’t believe smaller teams need to use generative AI tools to compete with bigger development studios.
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy producer Eric Chort told me this at a press event recently, referencing Asobo’s cinematic action-adventure series which has been made by comparatively small teams. For reference, approximately 40 people made A Plague Tale: Innocence, while a team of around 70 made the sequel A Plague Tale: Requiem, and a similarly sized team is making Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, according to Chort.
A Plague Tale isn’t a series boasting enormous resources, then, which in theory makes it fertile ground for potential gen-AI use. But not for Asobo.
“So we don’t use it; we don’t want [to],” Chort told me. “It’s a choice. We think that our games are working with the fans and with the community and with the critics because they are original, because we have unique settings, unique characters, artistic direction. All this is pretty in danger because of AI as we see it. We just want to stay [with] how we make games and to keep this thing in mind when we are making games – our creativity, our authenticity.”
“In terms of trying to be triple-A when we are double-A and we are a little team: we don’t see AI as a solution for that,” he continued. “We just make it more organic as we are working every day, and we try to be smart in the way we are making our games. Keeping [it] a linear game, for example, is a solution to make it fit triple-A in terms of graphics and things like that. But if you make it open-world, okay, it’s very hard, so here you have an issue. Here you have to think, okay, perhaps AI is a solution, but we wouldn’t make this choice. The choice would be, okay, can we grow up to be able to produce this?”
“We prefer not to use it at all and keep our creativity” -Eric Chort
“We prefer not to use it at all,” he added, “and keep our creativity. Asobo is a family team and we have a lot of people that stay a long time in the studio that are veterans, and a lot of young people, so definitely we choose people. This is the way we are thinking about production.”
I’ve played the new game Resonance: A Plague Tale, and in terms of production values – the detail of the world and on the characters, and their animation and their performances – it’s of the highest order. It feels more like a big budget blockbuster than an aspiring one; there’s no indication Asobo is struggling for lack of using gen-AI.
It’s a refreshing set of values to hear restated in a world pressured to adopt gen-AI technology. Just this week we’ve seen fall-out around the new Crazy Taxi game because it carries a gen-AI disclaimer, and we’ve seen legendary game designer Hideo Kojima backtrack after appearing in a Prada video made with AI tools. But the wider adoption of this technology feels inevitable, and perhaps, as The Blood of Dawnwalker director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has said, there’s a way studios can use gen-AI for mundane tasks without polluting a project’s creativity.
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy will be released 27th October on PC (Steam, Epic), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X and Game Pass.