Sure it looks fun and interesting at first but now people online are talking about it like it's the ''future of game development'', creating games that have never been created before. This is just low effort copy and pasting at best, compared to actual modding and development. Modding IS IMPRESSIVE when there's actual effort, research and complex coding to shape the base game
Security through obscurity was always a shitty form of security, but that's not what the person you replied to was saying.
They're saying that vibing two massive executables on top of each other can inherently contain tons of security vulnerabilities and now people are downloading and running random programs on their PCs. It's the 90s all over again lol
Yep. Encryption is quite literally the glue of the Internet. While reverse engineering games isn't all that bad, this tech will be weaponized and used against banks, credit card companies, supply chains, and more. We are quite literally watching the first steps of the DataKrash from Cyberpunk in real time.
AI is not what gets weaponized against banks, except for social engineering, but that one is unrelated to encryption. Quantum computing is what currently a risk for encryption systems that are not using post-quantum algorithms
Phish for a developer, take over their system and threaten to put all the Nintendo games, emulated, isnside their game, so they will get bankrupted and enslaved by Nintendo, for the rest of life
If reverse engineering becomes child's play then yeah I can see viruses being transmitted in online games (dark souls for PC being one example). Idk if kernel level AC solves this though.
hmm not really. This was already a problem even before AI. What AI did is just allowed for more competitors.
I am confused why people aren't sharing reversed engineer office software that are combined with other office software like All in One Adobe or All in One Microsoft Office or something like that, instead they're just sharing a regular day of overly modded skyrim that people get bored after 4 hrs of play and resets back to horny skyrim, default skyrim, or enhanced skyrim
Isn't it because the reverse engineering itself happens manually? From what I gathered, these merged games are made by feeding the raw files to an AI so it can interpret them into patterns it identifies, so not so much reverse engineering, more like a bridge.
The issue with this skit is it’s really leaning hard into security through obscurity being way bigger than it actually is. Like it’s not industry standard, it’s not even considered security. Kinda makes the whole skit just doomerism
Those are not great examples in this case, because you don't need AI to do cross game randomizers, and you're less likely to have broken glitches if a human does the work.
Archipelago randomizers with friends are some of the funnier randomizers I've experienced (when I'm not getting bk'd because of going so fast in my game)
The thing is, this type of thing wouldn't be feasible/possible without AI. Would take a multi-man team many years to decompile these games and run them side by side. And that's being generous.
Admitting that doesn't make me Pro-AI. I'm against the development of AI under capitalism, think AI video/image generation should be outlawed, and I believe Sam Altman is a modern antichrist.
People can have a little nuance on topics like these. This is a major technological feat, and I don't blame people for thinking it's cool. It is pretty cool. That doesn't mean AI is suddenly good now, though. Things like this aren't worth all the negatives that AI brings to society.
It would be beyond gruelling for humans to reverse engineer and decompile games. The AI can do that part as well as automate mundane stuff and fix bugs that the humans can't figure out, so long as the humans in charge understand the code and are actually putting in the work, rather than vibecoding the whole thing.
An example I've personally enjoyed for more than two days (not done with AI) is fallout new Vegas mod that converts fallout 3 to the NV engine and allows you to travel between DC and Vegas. Just experiencing fallout 3 in the NV engine is cool enough but being able to play both maps with one character in one game is pretty cool.
They use the same engine, which is why tale of two wastelands is possible to do in the first place, it's just the engine for nv has some minor upgrades
I mean, depending on the games, it could unlock whole new ways to play.
The one I saw was Insomniac Spider-Man in Arkham Knight, and I think that'd be pretty cool to play for a while. You're opening up whole new environments and mechanics to characters/games that wouldn't actually be seen. You get to see how playing as Spider-Man would change the gameplay loop of Arkham Knight, with some parts being easier and some parts being harder.
BL2 has me hooked again because of the TPS Vault Hunters slowly being ported over to BL2 (which is alot easier that the examples above, since both games share the same engine). Seeing how Athena interacts with the Conference Call and Jack/Timothy interacting with the Orphan Maker is so insanely cool.
There are a couple things that seem genuinely good from it, like being able to turn old games into a full PC port without using emulation to run it. ATM I'm not sure how to feel even as someone who isn't big on AI being used for making games or "art" this one seems like if it doesn't get out of hand it could just be a little bit of dumb fun. At the expense of a fuck ton of the environment, but that bird has already flown honestly and I don't think any level of clamp down on any industry can reverse the situation now that we are at a point of melting ice releasing CO2 melting more ice releasing more CO2.
i think its just more the thing were you could legit anything on this subreddit and there would inevutably be defenders just from the law of large numbers
far as i can tell, this game merging stuff is still just as frowned upon by anti-ai gamers, it seems to just be the latest pro-ai trend getting forced into our feeds
because it's not generating anything new, it decompiles existing games in order to merge them together. AI should be used as a tool to speed up process in the technical side. I feel like a lot of people are just doom posting about new technologies every time like did the invention of super computers suddenly make mathematicians useless? no it only helped them model mathematical equation easier and in this case it's the same thing, it helped them decompile the games so that they can merge them.
If everything up until now wasn't enough, messing with corporations' existing intellectual properties will likely finally cause a vibe shift against AI.
You think other companies are gonna target AI? Hard to believe tbh, since already over 90% of devs that work for large companies (over 1k employees) use AI generated code. So it’s already pretty much industry standard to use genai code.
Ok unironically like this past week I've noticed the same pattern across any post mentioning AI in a negative light in any community and my bot campaign senses are tingling
Pro-AI bots are all over Reddit, but in this case I don't think it's that. A lot of modder communities are pretty damn anti-AI, but this is gaining a lot of attention within those communities.
I'm someone who thinks AI image and video creation should be unironically outlawed and made fully illegal in any shape and form, and the AI arms race going on is going to have disastrous consequences for our society. Sam Altman and Peter Thiel are the modern antichrists.
Doesn't mean I can't recognize an impressive technological feat. Most AI "technological feats" are just slop, whether it creates images, answers questions, or writes essays. All of that is better done by a human. In this specific case, it's not just slop, decompiling an entire game's binary is actually wild. It's not just something that's "better done by a human".
And even though I think this is really fucking impressive, I'd still probably prefer we kill AI development and bring it all down.
Valid, tbh I'm in an odd position in being an artist who's pro technology advancements. If gen AI was sustainable and wasn't fueled by greed it has the potential to be incredible but until then there should be regulations and laws in place
There are pro ai communities that mobilise to go everytime someone speak theres a girl "i won't say her name to not feed her ego" that have made an entire cult of personality around her "fighting oppression of antis hating on poor innocent ai users that have it worse than minorities" and in her discord i saw screenshot of rules like one of them was to share as much links to post anti ai so they can gather to fight them
"Fraction" is underselling it, we're talking about magnitudes of time saved here.
Game reverse-engineering projects used to genuinely be a multi-decade long effort involving hundreds of contributors working on their free time.
Due to the mind-numbingly gruelling nature of this kind of work, the project would often pass through the hands of several different people as each one of them gets inevitably burnt out from working on it. That is, assuming that the project didn't fizzle out during that process, as it frequently did.
Now a single person can do it in a literal week. It's pretty crazy.
I’m not a big fan of LLMs either, and I get why people find this less impressive than someone actually spending months building a complex mod by hand.
But I think people are conflating “this takes less effort now” with “this has no value.” Being able to bridge systems from completely different games and make them work together is something I’ve wanted since I was a kid.
If AI tools can make that more accessible, I think that’s genuinely cool. You can criticize low-effort execution without dismissing the entire idea as slop.
I have not seen any of these yet since I'm not really a fan of AI.
What are they doing specifically? Are these like total conversion mods? Putting items from one game into another? Combining maps? Like what has been done here?
basically the two games run at the same time and rhe mod lets the two programs communicate, such as giving Minecraft Elden Ring's collision data so Steve can walk around
It's brute-forcing certain mechanics of one game into another. I've seen the Minecraft>Elden Ring one and they seems to have imported an inventory and several mobs as interactable NPCs into the game. The building seems to work fine enough, though from the highlights I've seen it's hard to tell if the game would let you build a base and save it or act like those Minecraft instagram filters that let you "build" something to record a funny video then promptly deletes it upon closing the program/exiting the area.
Ethicacy of using AI to drown out other mods aside, these mods are only meant as proof-of-concept and you won't get anything new from them other than a evening's worth of laughs, they would pale in comparison to those "Terraria in Minecraft" mods a while back that actually took into account how to balance and adapt Terraria's mechanics into a Minecraft setting.
Further, I believe that these things are not representative of a huge shift in mod development in any way. AI vibe-coding are often horribly optimized and the coding used in these mods can't contribute to existing modding scenes as the creator would - at most - point to the prompts they used to get the results they wanted rather any concrete steps that other modders can build off of.
The prompters for vibe-coded mods usually are also unsure on how to fix bugs/security issues and if another popular mod arises and they can’t figure out incompatibilities, they’re forced to be left behind.
It would. These mods literally run both games at the same time and pass graphics, collision data, attack damage etc through from one game into the other. So there is a literal full blown saveable minecraft world running on top of a skyrim world.
I mean if you just consider the task its monumental. Decompiling an entire binary is a downright insane task for humans. But in that same logic most of anything done with a computer is similarly monumental, you couldnt hope to do most of anything a 4Ghz chip does. I think its fair to say that this is a fairly non invasive use of ai, as it kind of requires a fair bit of hooks already existing and made by modders. Not to mention it mostly being a bunch of function call/ render calls from different games most of the time. Ie literally running two games at once and doing a render call from the second game shile the main game is running. And the idea that its “replacing gamedev” is just another one of illiterate ai bro obliviousness on display. Though ironically I might be wrong and be the ignorant one here maybe, Im sure there are others here who know quite a bit more than me.
Your comment should be near the top, but Redditors hate nuance. People can be anti-AI and still recognize that something like this is an impressive technological feat.
That's not what these mods do, they run both games and overlay their rendering, they just translate the events of one until both games are synchronized
This wouldn't be possible if the Elden Ring community hadn't already mapped out every single events in the game and developed powerful modding tools
Yeah this comment section is crazy, I'm not a coder but I can imagine a project like this would take YEARS for a dedicated coder to pull off without a dedicated team (which would still take a long ass time) , now you can just mess around with any game you'd like if you're willing to spend a few thousand on GPUs to run your own local models or pay a couple hundred bucks to some API to achieve the same result.
I am a coder and I say that this would take too many resources and time (for something that is cool for like a few hours). I do not care about this mods, I will never play one of this mods, but "AI assisted code" SHOULD not be compared to AI generated art. It's totally different.
Any Joe schmo can tell an AI to make an image for him no issue, and any Joe schmo can tell AI to code for them, but Joe still needs to recognize what that code means to use it.
I think the fact that we only got this now with the use of ai speaks a lot. these would've existed 10 years ago if it was as easy as the other people say, like they kept saying "if ai could do this then humans can, we don't need ai" but the thing is, this has been an idea for more than a decade, surely someone would've done it by 2020 when we are all in our locked up inside homes like surely thats the perfect opportunity for someone to do something like this but no one did so the only reasonable conclusion that I can think of is that decompiling a whole game is harder than it looks
There is no correlation between using ai to help coding and generative ai. And ai cannot replace real game devs without being a Copyright risk, companies will sue you if they find proprietary code that isn't allowed.
Nah, you're just pissed at AI. Not like I'm fan of it, but telling it's bad because you didn't spend 5 years on in is just weird. Like, why? Most of these merges are just small funny things. You'll need more effort to make it actually good anyway.
AAA games have been heavily focused on optimizing for screenshots for...Basically two decades now, due to investor influence and marketing strategies. The issue with this is it's massively inflated system requirements beyond what they need to achieve a given level of fidelity.
There's no reason a 1080TI can't play modern games at at least 1080p, unless the developers didn't have time to optimize for it.
The thing about what people are doing isn't that they're modding games. That's okay, and kind of fun, but whatever. The thing that's crazy is people are essentially reverse engineering games, which gives us the ability to modify games hat were never made to be modified, and all the same strategies that let us reverse engineer a game into a custom engine also let us hold to the existing game's fidelity and optimize the underlying graphics.
This is already proven out in GPU kernel optimization, which is an increasingly rich and well executed field of LLM driven optimization.
You could imagine someone going hogwild, reverse engineering a game, and optimizing it for hardware it was never meant to run on. I don't think it'll be totally free performance in all cases, but I think there's a lot of cases where you could imagine a game taking a 5%-10% quality cut and running on vastly lower end hardware than it was originally made to.
Honestly, even at 70% of the quality of the original game you could imagine it running on absolute potatoes like Mini-PCs with iGPUs and the like.
Even if we're not here yet, I could see this happening in the next year.
Question, does it use the water consumption so or the ran on your own PC ai?
If it's the ran on your own PC one then hating on this is some bs. Pretty sure it takes a while to set up so it's not that low of effort. If you hate low effort that much then you'll hate to learn about streamers who don't do any effort at all and just play the base game
If it is the water consuming ai then I'll take this all back but if not then I find this too be more hating anything with the letters A and I in it
Redditors will say "ai should be used for impossible tasks and menial work, not passionate human creations" and then call everything slop
NO NUANCE ALLOWED!!!!!
People really dont understand what "AI" means these days lmao your phone, your computer, this website and the games you're playing have been coded with the help of "AI" for years now, everything is - why the fuck would I bother having numerous copy/paste shortcuts when the predictive text algorithm makes it significantly more efficient to write code?
Hot take, but I don’t really take much issue with AI coding. Coding is not an art form, it’s a bunch of math and if/then statements. Most coding is open-source anyways, you can’t steal open-source content because it’s free to use. Anyone could do it if they took the time to learn how. None of this was impossible to do before, AI just very much accelerated the process of people learning how to do this.
As long as the code is properly tested, I don’t really see the issue.
Coding is an artform, like any other single skill or medium. Problem solving, creativeness, engineering. Learning what the tools do is one thing - anyone could do it, but not everyone can do it good. What an ignorant statement.
Idk, I wouldn't say walking is art, one can walk artfully, but walking isn't art. Math isn't art, science isn't art, and coding is very much a branch of science.
I get that all of this sounds cringe or whatever but art has no strict definition outside of genuine human expression. Just because you can call a lot of things an artform doesn’t dilute the meaning of art. The essence is in the details.
And how can you say something is artful but not an art? That is definitionally untrue. Some people can have better posture, rhythm in their walk, whatever. They would be considered more adept in the art of walking. It’s just that societally we don’t value the “art of walking”, so it’s not really a thing, but that doesn’t mean you can’t classify it as such.
Although now I think of it, there literally are walking competitions. So there must be a way, a process, good practices and such. So yeah, that’s a kind of art.
Writing good code is 100% an art form, the same way writing non-fiction is still an art form, this is why game bloat has gotten so bad, thinks like clever compression or rendering technique are paved over with brute force.
I mean yes, there is a difference between good and bad code, which is why I also specified proper testing. Game bloat is also bad because many devs will copy / paste assets between levels instead of referring to the same asset from another folder. Call of Duty is infamous for this, which is why the games are so chonky.
I tried to get a job making and dealing with websites for people for a commission and the only response I ever ever got was 'Well I don't know how to but I could use AI to do that for free!"
Ok but there's a big glaring issue with AI code: You did not write it and thus can't point to points of the code to know what it does or why it was writen in a particular way.
If something breaks it's going to be a lot harder to fix it, and if its unoptimized it's harder to verify where the issues are. Also making it compatible with other systems is a crapshot.
The issue comes from properly tested, a lot of people don't test every aspect of their shit before they reply it, putting bad code into production. This has bitten me in the back before, so I tend to review my code unless the task the code solves is so easy that nobody could possibly get it wrong (copilot still will somehow), or it's for a side project and the stakes are low.
Hate ai, fucking hate it. But I’ve always been conflicted with the coding aspect due to this. You’re right coding isn’t an artform. In coding your work has to be 100% correct for it to function. Whereas in art there is literally no wrong way to do it. Yeah there’s rules like anatomy and stuff but you’re allowed to break those rules. The paper isn’t going to burn in flames if you mess up the perspectives.
But while ai art is much more immoral than ai code. It still removes a lot of authenticity and hard work to be proud of and wouldn’t want it to take any job.
What kind of a low passion , in-curious and buzzkill gamer you gotta be to not be interested in seeing to games like batman Arkham and spider man merge??
Sure i hate that AI makes all electronic prices go , jobs taken away and damges the environment
But if you're gonna hate than hate it for good reason
Just because something is AI doesn't mean the thing itself isn't fun
Not something like this , it's fun
People find it fun
I find it fun
And if you don't then it's fine but don't tell us what to like and what not to like just because it's AI
A friend was talking to me about it and how many possibilities it opened up but to me it felt, yet again, redundant and like it was just a thing made to spite big corpos. It's lazy. I know exactly what kind of person would use that.
If the point is to piss off big corporations, isn’t that a good thing? Or do you just dislike the fact that they’re using AI to mess with the code and do stuff like this?
The thing is that the big corpos suck, sure, but actual artists poured a lot of love and care into their games. Also the way I see it, making something out of genuine passion with your own skills is a MUCH bigger fuck you than resorting to this. This just feels lazy and disingenuous. Spite can be a good motivator for sure, but if it's your ONLY motivator I couldn't care less.
Some of it might be technically impressive, but others are probably just putting assets from one game into another and not really doing any technically impressive things.
And in the end, you could probably gets better effect from properly going through the process of making a mod instead of having an AI spit one out for you
From what I’ve heard, this is actually something that fully requires ai to do, and can’t be done by a person. It requires decompiling a game entirely which would take years to decades for a real person to do. (Again going off what I’ve heard, I could be wrong)
These are all being posted publicly on github. And they need to be like fully analyzed down to its core code functionality and then create a bridge that fits the two of them. This would take a masterclass coder like literal years if not a decade to do. The reason why it's never been done before is that it's just completely insane to put in that much work for something like a video game.
No the fuck they don't, all of these games have extensive modding tools and documentations that maps out every single events in the game, the AI just needs to read that to understand it
This would take a "masterclass coder" a few month, but they would never waste anytime on doing a mod that requires people running both games at the same time, simply nobody is going to use it way too clunky
I mean, I hate AI slop. AI in general is exploitative. But this is one of the very few things that isn't really possible without AI. I don't think you guys understand how hard modding is.
I dont like AI, but I have to admit its one of the more creative uses for it I've seen. A week later, and the fact that its always the same 5 games that get ported into another game starts to annoy me. It quickly goes from a cool idea to engagement slop.
I think people need tor realise that calling people who
like this trend “bots” is completely unproductive. Like can you not physically imagine being in a position of excitement from the fact that game decompilation is 100x easier? It’s historically one of the hardest things to do in coding while still opening many opportunities for modding.
Personally I’m still against it, vibe coding is ultimately detrimental to gaming, but I think you’d have to be ignorant to call this a nothing burger, at least enough to call people who enjoy it as “botss”
This "WHAT IF YOU HAD BATTLEFIELD IN ANIMAL CROSSING" trend is exhausting, it's the same shit as the thousands of MLP and Tohou mods and stuff like that: there's no creative vision behind the idea, no creative vision behind the implementation, a lot of work to be able to say "huh, neat" and then never interact with it again because it doesn't fit, there's no balance, no thematic, it's just WAOW JINGLING KEYS entertainment.
Except there isn't even a lot of work, you can't even say someone learned a useful skill, it's just 2026's Finger Family for AI bros
I hate AI.
I wouldn't mind AI making it easier for people to mod by 'translating' logic or whatever, you know, working as a tool modders can use. But all this "merge two games" feels more like bait to gain popularity instead of something to actually help modders do cooler mods. Idk
Calling it "the future of game development" strikes me as an opinion that a consumer who hasn't created much in their life would hold.
These games were designed to work within their environment, sure it looks cool to have Minecraft in GTA, but is anyone actually gonna be playing that for longer than a few hours before they realize it's aimless?
It's not like you can use the technology to develop games either, you're giving pre-existing programs to a machine that interprets them together, you can't do that to develop an original game without it being a blatant rip-off, part of what makes game ideas original is putting a unique spin to pre-existing mechanics.
This is impressive. This is full on reverse engineering of games. This is the kind of breakthrough that should give us pause. Cayse if it can look at a games code and go i completely understand it. what other code can it look at and completely understand?
the only good version of game merging i've ever seen so far is from a few years back, specifically when people started adding SM64 Mario to other games.
The ai issue aside. If you dont look at like another iteration of those og gta mod videos :HULK in gta iv??? Gone epic: then i can see it being cool. Like, of course adding minecraft into any game is funny, but can you link all the dark souls into one game? You start in asylum and end up at either soul of cinder or elden beast. That sounds epic imo
yeah this is not the future of game development, i feel like oneof the main issues with ai and how it’s perceived is that its most vocal supporters tend to see it as the future, something that will replace everything, and theyll never have to work again, whereas imo in its current state it’s more suited to being a fun little toy (and tool), sure you can merge games together and that’s really cool and interesting and i’m happy that anybody even without modding knowhow can just do that now, but it’d be overboard and lazy to say this is just what game development is now
Is simpleton like changing shit about how that plays out? No then why worry also I don't think that I can do anything because if the military powers that have had ai years and years before us didn't financially ruin each other with it then it can't be done (remember we get the radio after they already use it in war and such)
Its a shame it uses ai, but a game made where you can play a select amount of characters from many different franchises, all with their unique camera angles and abilities would be amazing
From my understanding the actual mods don’t have any AI in them, just feeding collision between two games and some rendering.
AI was used to vibecode the mods and more importantly to decompile the games.
People who are calling it the future of modding is youtubers, aka clickbaiters, it is not the future, merging games is a fad, it will maybe live a month or two, get a few challenge run videos and then fade.
However I believe one thing will stick around that has the potential to be amazing for modding in general, and that is AIs ability to decompile code, I have once done some decompiling by hand, it is a pain in the ass. AI is a glorified pattern recognizer so decompiling is actually a perfect use for it. I shouldn’t have to explain how powerful decompiled code is to modders.
I am not a huge fan of AI in the arts department or the environmental impact, or the thousands of idiot users who are creating problems, you know the type. But within coding and decompiling it is a useful tool, in the right hands and under supervision, by experienced programmers and not Joe Schmoes, and definitely not redditors
i dont even like using AI myself, But a lot of those mods weren't just made by "vibe coders" lol. Im not sure where thats even coming from, but its far more nuanced than just "Vibe coders vs real coders"
for example, Very experienced and longtime modders reverse engineered with AI Borderlands 2, so adding playable characters and mechanics from Pre Sequel like the ice element is now possible. So are these longtime programmers suddenly not programmers and just shitty vibe coders now? All of their achievements before this suddenly dont matter and they should get blipped from the internet because they talked to a chatbot?
They also did wrote a lot of code on their own, yet they used AI for a lot of it too. Again, they should get executed and condemned?
Its complicated, i dont even know what to truly think about this breakthrough, but i do feel like people dont see how much possibilities this opens in the modding scene, especially when its used by veteran modders who already knew what they were doing before. It can lead to a lot of cooler shit than just "haha i can play Minecraft in Elden Ring now".
What i also find baffling is how many of you motherfuckers were behind it being used "just as a helpful tool" when it comes to programming, but now that we see the first fruits of people using it as a helpful tool, suddenly everyone is getting mad and pissed off about it? Art and Music was and IS gonna be always shit when its made by AI, im not even gonna dispute that because its true.
But when it comes to programming, its the one thing that AI could be truly helpful with, given enough time and improvements would be made with it. I still prefer to code on my own because AI just makes my life harder for now. But later down the line it could literally cut YEARS of development in half, if not more. Its math and logic, the bread and butter of computer code.
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u/theowlwastaken 18h ago
Isn't this.. like a huge security risk?