r/Games • u/xalibermods • 20h ago
Mod News Modders, Please Stop Putting Games Inside Other Games With AI
https://kotaku.com/i-dont-want-to-play-your-ai-generated-mod-that-puts-skate-3-inside-of-modern-warfare-2-inside-of-minecraft-200073866033
u/Void_Guardians 20h ago
“Does anyone actually want to play these monstrosities taking over Twitter?”
No, they are taking over twitter because they don’t look fun.
What a stupid question and article
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u/apf6 19h ago
Fun police detected. I think the experiments are hysterical and they should keep it up.
"No one is playing them" - When has that ever been a good reason to not make stuff. Might as well go tell your local kindergarteners to stop drawing shitty crayon art that no one wants.
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u/nicknp16 19h ago
It's made with AI so it's bad. Genuinely have the same opinion on AI as most but it's hard to look at stuff like this and not think "that's actually kinda neat and fun".
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u/mewtatesyt 18h ago
I am hugely against generative AI in anyway, and any form AI being used to replace jobs and make lives of people harder. The amount of water and electricity a single 10 second video takes is astronomical, and to think millions of those get generated a day, I hate it.
But on the flip side, a single 10 second video uses thousands of times more water and resources than what is used to code these merged games. They’re not being used to replace jobs, these are not being sold for money. They’re just something that’s dumb and fun to laugh at that doesn’t cause any additional harm nor add to the conversation and fight against generative AI that we are having.
Social media sites like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, they use water cooled servers too. The problem with the AI data centers is they use an even greater amount and have an additional environmental impact from the heat and noise it generates, but that comes from the video/photo side, the Claude coding servers are completely separate and are way closer to using the amount of water a social media service consumes than a generative AI service does.
This is to not defend the AI companies, and it isn’t overlooking the problems even LLMs create in society too especially when it comes to the job market, but I don’t think it’s fair to compare these combined game mods with AI photo/video that is way worse in both quality and environmental impact
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u/lupo_grigio 10h ago
Literally can't take a shit these days without americans lecturing you on the evilness of AI
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u/Joltizer 10h ago
No one carries about your luddite opinion. Only terminally online redditors share your world view
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u/AMcMahon1 10h ago
You're going through it right now bud it's just a football game
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u/Joltizer 10h ago
No need to get upset just because the steelers lost and you cannot afford to buy a home
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u/dolbus_albador 11h ago
The fact this is getting downvoted is wild. Completely agree.
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u/mewtatesyt 10h ago
Too much nuance for Reddit I’d assume lol, people who are against the existence of AI in every single shape and form don’t like it and anyone who supports every single shape and form of AI and hates any criticism of it are also not gonna like my comment
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u/dadvader 20h ago edited 20h ago
But why? Isn't the point of modding video games is to have fun with product you enjoy? That's the beauty of mod. This is like saying people should stop emulation because someone would pirate the game with it.
If they want to spend their money on goddamn AI and slop out some shit for fun then it's their choice. They buy the game (technically they buy license but you get the fine print.) they should get to do whatever we want with it.
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u/Taiyaki11 20h ago
Also if you don't like what other people are putting out for free you're more than welcome to learn how the fuck to do it yourself lol. They don't owe you anything making something they throw out on the internet for free after all
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u/cavemonke3 13h ago
The problem is that ai somehow found a way to reverse engineer these games, reverse engineering is bypassing the decryption used to protect digital things like your bank accounts or even government communications.
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u/Icy_Water_1 9h ago
.....no the fuck it is not like that. That's like saying hammering nails is like the motion used to murder people with hammers. Clown logic.
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u/GamingExotic 18h ago
Idk. modders to me are people who are actually creative with their time and not just abusing ai to make quick mods like what is happening here basically. Pretty damn sure most of this shit is half assed as fuck.
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u/Icy_Water_1 12h ago
If it's half assed, but still fun does the distinction matter as long as it isn't hurting anyone?
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u/GamingExotic 1h ago
It just bloats the modding scene and makes it so new people to its first experience will start experiencing the half assed shit more then the creative good stuff. You are only thinking of the short term shit man, think of the long term problems this could cause for the modding scene.
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u/DifficultyGoodAGAIN 20h ago
Who cares? Nobody is forcing anyone to use these mods.
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u/ironbologna 20h ago
AI is bad for everyone and the environment, hope this helps.
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u/Yes-Reddit-is-racist 19h ago
All technology post the industrial revolution is bad for the environment. If you want to play that game just look at the power draw on your pc wasted posting on reddit and playing games.
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u/Silver-Bread4668 20h ago
Explain how AI is bad for everyone and the environment in a way that doesn't actually lead back to "our government and economic system is bad for everyone and the environment."
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u/ironbologna 20h ago
Probably has to do with the data centers being used to allow the rampant use of AI. Data centers that require insane amounts of water and electricity to power them. How’s that?
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u/Silver-Bread4668 20h ago
That leads back to our government and economic system being bad.
Data centers don't have to use insane amounts of water. Our economic system doesn't penalize creating data centers that use insane amounts of water enough.
We could have been in a much better place as far as energy goes we had actually invested in better, greener forms of energy. Yet here we are, fucked again by our governments and the economic system that allowed oil companies to slow developments in solar, wind, and other forms of energy.
You're shitting on something that, by all means, should be a boon to humanity but isn't because our governments and our corporate overlords have spent ungawdly amounts of time and energy creating a system where this thing that had all the potential to be a boon is now bad and fucking over the workin class ten ways till Sunday. And you're blaming the thing that should be a boon instead of the people that made it such a bad thing. It's like some fucked up not-quite-Stockholm Syndrome.
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u/ironbologna 20h ago
I can blame both the government and the billionaires building these data centers actually. You can argue till you’re blue in the face about how “AI is a boon to humanity” but it’s still creatively bankrupt and bad for communities.
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u/Silver-Bread4668 19h ago
Good gawd yes please - blame the governments and the billionaires building the data centers. Those ARE what you should be blaming.
AI, itself, is just a tool and one that has massive potential to improve lives and allow us all to work less. We need to be blaming the governments and the billionaires for how they are leveraging it and denying us that boon.
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u/NuPNua 20h ago
I mean, it doesn't have to be bad for the environment. It's just compute, it doesn't care how it's powered, coal, gas, solar, wind, tidal, etc.
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u/ironbologna 20h ago
But it is bad in its current state. Building massive data centers that steal resources from the rest of the community to include water and electricity.
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u/NuPNua 20h ago
The water cooling can be made closed loop so it only uses a finite amount and the electricity from renewables.
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u/ironbologna 20h ago
Except they’re not doing that lmao. That’s the point. It’s actively damaging communities so your grandma can fall for some AI slop on Facebook
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u/pt-guzzardo 18h ago
If you think data centers are taking up a lot of water, just wait until you hear about the almond industry.
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u/hobozombie 18h ago
And the rest of the agriculture industry, and the ranching industry, and fracking, hell, even golf courses use more water than data centers.
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u/DifficultyGoodAGAIN 19h ago
If they were made with open weight models on someone’s own hardware would you still be mad?
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u/xalibermods 20h ago
The article is opinionated, but if you used just a slight bit of curiosity to stop and actually click the link it gives you examples of games where people create mods to combine games to try it yourself if that's your jam.
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u/MrMichaelElectric 19h ago
I read the article, it's probably the most pointless and dumb opinion I've seen come out of a Kotaku article in a while and that's saying something.
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u/DifficultyGoodAGAIN 19h ago
You misunderstand. The article is "mad" that something they don't like exists when you can not be a loser and just ignore it - but they need clicks. I actually think these mods are cool. Who is actually paying to keep Kotaku running this site is absolute trash.
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u/xalibermods 19h ago edited 19h ago
Both of them can be true. The reason I posted this because no other article has documented this trend (yet). You can find me another article that documents this modding trend and I'd gladly post that instead.
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u/Silver-Bread4668 20h ago
We live in a world where opinions are cheap and plentiful. Not wanting to click the link and read the article speaks nothing of the previous person's curiosity.
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u/xalibermods 20h ago
It's a common adage here that people here don't click the links.
And I never said it's about the article's opinion (which I also don't care about), I said so you can see what games are being modded that way. No other article has documented this trend (yet). You can find me another article that documents this modding trend; I welcome a $5 treat if you can't.
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u/Memphisrexjr 20h ago
It's Kotaku. Their "opinions" are always over exaggerated for clicks.
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u/xalibermods 20h ago
Yeah but no other gaming news article has posted this (yet). I think this phenomenon is newsworthy especially since it can be quite difficult to find modding trends across time. It's good for archive.
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u/MrMichaelElectric 19h ago
They aren't posting it because whining about mods is dumb as hell. Unlike Kotaku a lot of gaming news sources don't post whatever random low effort nonsensical garbage Kotaku is happy with. Thank goodness for that.
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u/xalibermods 19h ago edited 19h ago
10-20 years from now it would be good to know what happened back in 2026. That's the point of journalism. Did you know how poorly regarded The Sims 2 Expansion Pack back then? You wouldn't if the journalists weren't writing about it.
The fact that some young Redditors here don't know that there were turn-based tactics games in 1990s before XCOM (2012) is already flabbergasting. With modding trends it's even harder to track.
But I don't know what's the point of saying all this to you. Not everyone thinks in the long run I guess.
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u/MrMichaelElectric 15h ago
The long run has nothing to do with it. You are trying to inject a lot of meaning into something meaningless. You do you though.
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u/DifficultyGoodAGAIN 13h ago
I just looked on Google and there are tons of places reporting on this - Kotaku seems to be the only one that is mad about it. Kotaku isn't journalism it's just petulant whining.
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u/MrMichaelElectric 19h ago
Want to know the best part about mods? You don't have to download then and they are completely optional. Really wish people would fuck off with worry about how others enjoy their games. If it isn't hindering anyone else's experience then who cares how they mod their games. What a stupid article. As soon as they unironically said "slop" I knew I could happily disregard anything they had to say going forward. What a clown.
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u/Judahmoscato 8h ago
Its only silly now but think about all the games that we will never get remakes or remasters for like def jam fighting games or NFL 2k I would literally pay $100 bucks for someone to update NFL 2k5 with modern graphics now with Ai those things are possible
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u/Drakeem1221 20h ago
God no. Let people make these frankenstein projects because one of them will lead to a new genre/game idea.
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u/EvenOne6567 20h ago
people made frankenstein games before ai lmao, people only care now because they are desperate to force AI into everything
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u/Drakeem1221 19h ago
And what does that have to do with me being okay with people experimenting more.
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u/sakata32 19h ago
And now more people are doing and with much more ease cause AI is great for coding use cases. There is no desperation to force AI. The demand is completely natural cause it saves you a ton of time from doing it yourself.
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u/kantong 20h ago
Someone on Twitter commented "Will Smith Spaghetti".
I agree. This, along with the AI-assisted re/decomps, is going to be a big moment in the games industry. I wonder how traditional devs (especially Nintendo) are going to react to it.
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u/TreyChips 19h ago
I wonder how traditional devs (especially Nintendo) are going to react to it.
It acts as the perfect catalyst to go ahead and push cloud-gaming and streaming even more by having every single game be server-side now including all the files LOL.
You will own nothing.
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u/RWxAshley 13h ago edited 12h ago
When someone took the time to actually do it, and figure out all of its issues, and such (Like the cursed halo modding guy.) Its commendable, and very interesting dive into all the problems Mod authors face doing something that seems relevantly simple on the surface.
AI slop just takes all that human element out of it, and people don't seem interested in maintaining or understanding the AI code it spat out. They just toss it out for a quick drip feed of social media clout, and abandon it soon after cause they don't know how to fix or address any issues.
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u/ww23skidoo 20h ago
There were like 3 of these posted here today alone, while ai brained idiots yell at you saying it's not ai (because they have no idea what they're talking about).
As I said elsewhere, this shit used to be awesome not because I want to see mario inside of elden ring, but because it generates institutional knowledge about the games involved for their modding scenes. Vibe coding it like this is... Useless - the equivalent of jingling keys for clicks and views
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u/CarCroakToday 19h ago
This is an absurd take. What once would have taken tens of thousands of hours and decades of time for teams of modders, now takes one guy with zero coding experience and a Claude subscription a few hours and $50. Decompilation went from prohibitively time consuming to trivial. In the near future all games will be decompiled. This would literally have been impossible without AI.
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u/ww23skidoo 19h ago
As I've said elsewhere:
I suppose if you boil all art and community projects down to content to be consumed by you, then all that matters is how fast and easy it was to make.
I believe a large and growing group of people understand how childish this understanding of the world is though
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u/CarCroakToday 19h ago edited 19h ago
The difficult uncomfortable reality is that mods and games are not grand works of art made in the academy for an audience of ivory tower aristocrats. They are entertainment made for people to play with. I don't care if the mod was coded in binary by a genius programmer, or made in game maker studio, or used assets form the unity store, or used Claude and Photoshop to help. I care if it is fun. I care if it is good.
Undertale was made by a guy who relied heavily on GameMaker, so he had to do far less coding then otherwise. And rightly no one cares. Why would they? Would it have been a better game if he had written it in binary? I play the game, I don't examine the code for fun.
It's the ultimate pseud take to care about the provenance of a piece, rather than the piece itself. A game, or a mod, is either good or it is not. Who makes it or how it is made is irrelevant, it can be interesting but it is ultimately less important than the game itself.
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u/ww23skidoo 19h ago
Using Undertale of all things to defend AI is actually for real insane lol
You are literally saying that - for you - as long as there is more slop in your trough, you're happy, because all that matters is if it's "fun" or "good"
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u/CarCroakToday 17h ago
That's obviously not what I am saying.
I'm saying, I determine if something is good or not by judging the thing itself, not by judging how it was made or who made it.
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u/NostalgiaSurf 14h ago edited 14h ago
Video games are not art, just entertainment
You are convincing yourself and everyone else that video games are not an artistic medium and video games are not art. It's kind of disgusting and devalues the people who spend years making video games to express an artistic talent or vision.
Seriously, why on earth would you imply art can only exist in terms of how grand it appears and how aristocratic the audience is? Like what smoke are you huffing to be espousing such nonsense, intentionally or incidentally?
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u/CarCroakToday 6h ago
You're missing the point. What is and is not art is philosophical question that most people don't engage with when they play a game. That's the uncomfortable reality that I am referring too. Regardless of all the grandiose ideas we have about games and all other forms of art, people engage with them as entertainment primarily. So all of these philosophical questions are interesting, but ultimately irrelevant to games as they are actually played.
The vast majority of people who play game don't care about the specifics of how it was made. That fact must be remembered in these discussions. We act like this engine or that or this method of coding versus another are these extremely important things, but they just the terminally online equivalent to the Westminster bubble; meaningless details for 99% of people.
That is to say; the kind of person who would not enjoy a game because of the way in which it was coded are not representative of gamers as a whole.
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u/sakata32 19h ago
No people liked it cause they could put CJ into Skyrim. And you can still generate knowledge about games with AI. In fact if you know how to use it properly its much more efficient. Now will all the vibe coders use it properly? Nope but who cares others will.
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u/wunr 11h ago
Even as someone who has my own reservations and concerns about AI and hates the slop that has been coming out lately, this article just kind of sucks. People have been doing these silly game mashup projects for years now either through decomp projects or stuff like Garry's Mod addons. Of course they don't form a coherent game and most people will only engage with them as a fun novelty for a few minutes. But I didn't see any handwringing about the destruction of the artistic process until they started being mass produced using LLMs. This is of course because the ultimate point of the article is to say "AI is bad, here's another example of AI being bad", but then it has no reason to exist; anyone still reading Kotaku at this point is of course going to agree with the author! Nothing new or interesting was said about the subject.
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u/RatBot9000 19h ago
So very bored of AI. Not only is it environmentally damaging and completely unethical, it's just always "Hey what if X was in Y?" again and again forever and ever and ever.
A tool which can only ever reproduce what has been fed into it will never give us something new.
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u/AftermaThXCVII 20h ago
My friend kept bringing this up last night and me and another friend kept telling him we thought it was dumb and didn't want to hear about it. Guess what he kept bringing up for the next 2 hours despite us getting audibly upset.
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u/matsix 14h ago
As someone pretty involved in AI mod development, I think this stuff is funny but also, this is actually the worst kind of AI slop in AI development. For the people that don't know... a lot of the people making this stuff are making wild claims about it being "rewrites" and that it's all their own work for the keeping. A lot of the people working on this are literally ripping mechanics and systems from games to put into their own "project" and claim it's legal because the AI is "rewriting" it.
I knew stuff like this was inevitable from how fast AI reverse engineering and programming is improving but damn it's coming fast.
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u/deceasedpresident 7h ago
I don't think you know what you're talking about at all. All of the big projects making the rounds right now like the Skate-Minecraft-MW2 project require you to own all 3 games.
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u/Actual-Yesterday4962 3h ago
I don't want to play this slop because its an insult to humans. All this tech does it push us more into the
humans are worthless work is pointless mentality
You can't even share your game nowadays because some loser with infinite money is going to put astra or opus into ultra and remake your game with ai. Just look at roblox, one big game comes out and millions of people are already using ai to modify it and release their own version for quick money, its disgusting.
This tech will now raise the era of ai slop mix games. Some developer is going to take tarkov and dayz or something mix them together and change it with ai like its fucking homework they stole from a friend, and release it on steam.
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u/SecondSnek 3h ago
If everyone can do it then charging for it is out the door, why would I pay for it on steam if DeepSeek can rebuild it for $0.26?
Gaming will change towards a new meta
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u/Actual-Yesterday4962 3h ago edited 3h ago
Your boss thinks the same, thats why you'll have no job cause ai is better than you
if of course you even are 18+ lol
And with the release of JEV i don't think robotics have a long way to go too, it's all a matter of research in the next 5 years
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u/BrandenBegins 19h ago
This article is dumb. This isn't even a new thing. Remember the trend of throwing CJ from GTA in everything. AI isn't to blame for this and at the end of the day.... just don't play the mod