‘Quake II’ Review (Microsoft AI Co-Pilot Edition): A Modern Tragedy

Microsoft has just released a new AI trick in the form of its Co-Pilot platform generating an AI “replica” of 1997’s Quake 2. “Every frame is created on the fly by an AI world model,” it says, and promises a future where this sort of thing can be a significant part of the industry.

You want to be an AI video game? Fine, I’ll treat you like a video game. A review:

Quake II Review

Co-Pilot AI Quake II is an utter disaster on every level, and feels like the type of game they’d make you play in hell for all eternity. It’s jarring to even attempt to control it, using both WASD and arrow keys to move and look around, failing to support a mouse in the year 2025.

The environments are choppy and nonsensical, generated levels provide no structure, no goals, no pathways, nothing interesting whatsoever. The entire thing is an MC Escher maze, an AI trying to drive humans insane with endless roads to nowhere.

The gameplay is a fever dream. Enemies which look like melting globs of wax appear and disappear when you move by them and turn around to see them vanish. So do objects and pieces of the environment with a total lack of asset permanence.

The game lasts about two minutes in total before the AI calls it a day, exhausted from generating the worst gaming experience possible. It makes a 30 year-old game look like it came out yesterday, like it’s some sort of primordial organism oozing from the muck and dissolving in a puddle in a world of already developed flora and fauna and actual humans who make actual games. This is an abomination I would not recommend to my worst enemy.

For Real, Though

So, with that out of the way, the actual story. The response to all this is that “This is a proof of concept! This will get way better later!” And to that I say, show me any piece of AI tech that has evolved into something meaningful in the media space that isn’t wholly soulless. There isn’t anything. There are models stealing work and turning them into worse amalgamations with again, the promise that it will all get better in the future.

Microsoft claims this is somehow linked to game preservation, though this seems like the most overly convoluted way to make that happen by whipping AIs until they spit out some half-formed version of an ancient game.

I don’t want this to get better. I don’t want AI designing games and rendering them in real-time. I want games made by people. Can AI tools streamline development processes? Sure, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Before this it’s been threats to artwork and writing, now it’s attempting to reach its tentacles into gameplay design.

It’s true that AI is here to stay at this point. This is not the metaverse or the blockchain, this is a significant technical advancement that you would be naïve to say is not changing the world. But more often than not, it’s changing the world in bad ways, but no one seems to acknowledge or care about that. It’s simply being further and further developed just because it can be, and there are perilously few rules for protecting original, human-made work, or even safety rails for where all this can go if someone does invent, say, Skynet, which they themselves say they’re on the verge of doing every week, it seems like.

You want to see this in action? Play for yourself, and tell me that this technology should exist in any form.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.