Crazy Taxi: World Tour’s multiplayer mode was shown off for the first time during Gamescom ONL on Tuesday. If, like me, you’ve been struggling to feel excited for the Sega series’ revival because of the use of AI during its development, I have good news. Sega has updated how exactly AI has been used during Crazy Taxi’s development, and while not perfect, it’s a lot better than it originally seemed.
When the iconic “Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah” rang out around my living room during World Tour’s reveal at the Xbox Games Showcase, I, like so many of you, hit the proverbial ceiling. Crazy Taxi is returning, the soundtrack has remained intact, and the little we were shown of it looked great.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where the first thing many people do after a game is revealed is check its Steam page to make sure AI wasn’t used in its development. That’s when those excited about World Tour moments earlier turned on the Crazy Taxi revival, as there was, indeed, an AI use disclosure on its Steam page.
It was a vague one, too. All it really did was confirm AI wasn’t used to fill in for any of the game’s performers. Sega clearly saw that backlash and, as spotted by Automaton, has updated the AI disclosure on the World Tour page, clarifying how exactly generative AI was used to aid development of its new Crazy Taxi game.
There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is AI was used. There’s really no getting around that. The good news is that it was only used “as part of the ideation process for background objects.” The even better news is Sega has promised all of the AI-generated content used to aid the ideation process and present in those background objects will be removed before the final version of the game is released.
Not perfect, but a vast improvement on the ambiguous “we used AI” statement that was there before. It’s unclear exactly when Sega updated the statement. It might have been tweaked as far back as a month ago. However, people didn’t pick up on the change until Tuesday as they returned to the page following Crazy Taxi’s new trailer reveal.
That effectively puts World Tour into the same bucket as several other games released in the last couple of years that have navigated through the choppy waters that come with using AI during the ideation process and as placeholders and come out the other side relatively unscathed. Crimson Desert got caught out after Pearl Abyss left some of its offending AI artwork in the final game, while Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had one of its awards taken away for a similar use of AI during development.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/sega-update-crazy-taxi-world-tour-ai/
