PlayStation Reportedly Going Back in the Vault

Hey everybody, welcome to Game Mess Mornings with me, Jeff Grubb, your host from GiantBomb.com.

Thank you for tuning in.

In this episode, we're going to be talking about Grand Theft Auto 6 may have violence in it.

And how about a new Sly Cooper game?

It's going to be a good one because we have Jan Ochoa on the show.

Jan, how are you doing?

You can't start the week, let alone the news show, Grub, by saying Sly Cooper to me, okay?

You can just say it and no one ever freaks out. I definitely have, like, speculated.

I'm like, it'd be cool if they did a new Sly Cooper before and it got turned into a bunch of headlines. And I remember, like, friends who have, like, worked in that part of the business were like, What.

Are you talking about?

I'm like, I didn't say shit. I'm like, that would be cool. And everyone's like, Jeff Grubbs says they're making a Sly Cooper.

So let's do it again. Let's run it back, Janet Choa, on a Monday morning.

Oh, boy. Jeff Grubbs, can you also say they're making Dark Cloud 3?

They're making Dark Cloud 3 and 4. It's like when they made Back to the Future 2 and 3 at the same time.

Holy moly. I cannot wait. Let's go, Jeff Grubbs. What a Monday. Holy news.

What a Monday. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing. All right. Let's see here, everybody. Oh, God.

Jan, I am ready for the week, but I'm not ready for, like, next week we're already.

Leaving for the bomb-a-thon, right? That's stupid. We're stupid, dude. We're so stupid.

The thing is, I feel like we know of these tentpole events, and we're very thankful for everyone being very excited and showing up. October 15th and 16th, folks, two 12-hour days.

We're going to be streaming.

The Giant Bombathon 2026 in person at Main Gear HQ. Mary Kitsch is joining us on Friday, October 16th. But despite all of the planning, Jeff Grubb.

It's still too soon.

Yeah, I mean, I'm famously not capable of putting myself on a timeline. I can like, if it's like, Any time outside of two days ago or two days from.

Now, it all doesn't matter.

It's just one big blob.

But that's fast approaching to the point where this is going to be within that two-day time frame, and I have to deal with it.

Yes.

Jeff Grubb, honest question here. Have you booked your flight?

I did.

I booked mine, like, right away, actually. That's when we're... Yeah, that one I'm pretty good at, usually, because I get... It's nice just to have that, and then everything else I will figure out last minute. But yes, flight is booked, ready to go. Yeah, looking forward to it. It's going to be a good time. Of course, looking forward to it.

I'm just not ready.

Definitely not ready.

Always excited to see the whole gang together and, you know, the shenanigans we have planned.

But it came very fast, bro.

Yep.

And then we're going to have to plan another thing that we have to do in November and then Game of the Year in December.

When it's times like this, I'm like, I got to remember, like I used to work real jobs. I remember what those were like. Sure. Sure. A thousand times better.

All right.

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We got to we got to like watch ourselves here, everybody.

We got to watch our own backs because the rest of this industry is not going to do it. They're going to go in the path of least resistance. And that's going to end up with some real shitty stuff here pretty soon. So instead let's go to giant bomb.com slash join and do stuff our way. If you do that, you're supporting the independent games media. You're supporting us doing weird stuff. Like when we do put together a bomb with time, when we do a, you know, the weekend rental club with giant bomb video store last Friday, where we found a weird version of Mario party three for.

The N 64.

And it was just, it was a cursed version of that game because everything that could.

Have gone wrong or broken Dan's favor did. It was unbelievable.

Jeff Grubb, I know that no one is lucky in Mario Party 3, but I was especially unlucky.

Yes, you were.

Honestly, it kicked you while you were down is what it was going for. And that's Mario Party. That's the Mario Party experience. Go watch that, though.

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As far as this show goes, most weekdays, I, Jeff Grubb, will help piece your gaming life back together. That includes breaking news and maybe even some of our own original reporting. For all these topics, I'll get the input of a bona fide expert who will make me look smart. If you are watching live on Twitch, welcome. You can always listen to the show later on podcast feeds by searching for Game Mess Mornings or find the RSS feed on giantbomb.com.

You can also catch the show later with chapters and timestamps on YouTube.

Hello, YouTube. All right.

We have a lot to get into. So let's start the morning mess with Rockstar Explains GTA 6's Characters, Politics.

NPCs, and Absurd Level of World Detail. This is another interview.

They're giving like one a week, it feels like right now, kind of going to different publications. They worked with Game Informer on a cover story. This one comes from Love Magazine, which I'm not familiar with, Jan.

No. I don't. Love is. Yeah. Maybe you'll hurt me. A magazine about it. Yeah.

Rockstar says it researched Florida by traveling with police and gang members.

That old chestnut. I love that. They flew over the Everglades in.

Miami by helicopter and plots major narrative beats physically against the game's map before iterating in eight week milestones.

Basically, they're just like. They kept going back to Florida, essentially.

And every time they did something, they would then reassess it about every eight weeks and be like, is this Florida enough?

Lucia, the character, grew up in Liberty City.

Jason was involved in drug trafficking and bank robbery, and he is from Florida. And his circumstances kind of explain how he got into that world. They have this relationship where Lucia is the engine of their crime spree, while Jason acts as the brake. Their friend Raul Bautista functions as the older experienced criminal who teaches Jason and Lucia how to pull off the increasingly elaborate heist GTA players expect.

Rockstar created an entire LA writing and production team devoted specifically to pedestrian dialogue. And then, let's see, writing director James Horton says the philosophy essentially that there is no background. If you stop and try to absorb a conversation that some NPCs are having, They say it should be able to stand up to the scrutiny of it.

Oh, it fits in the world and it feels like it's really happening.

So that continues to like point to their, their key here. The thing that will set GTA six apart from everything else is unprecedented levels of density, density in stuff that you can do, but also stuff that is happening without.

Your involvement that you can then go disrupt.

For me, Jan, this continues to set high expectations where like, I begin to imagine all these ways that this is a, an intricate clockwork world that when I throw myself into the cogs, I can cause mayhem that then has ramifications that like, you know, several knock on effects. And that is definitely what I want from, from GTA six. But do you think they can pull it off?

Well, I think of any studio can or get close to pulling off this intricate clockwork machine. It probably will be rockstar. I mean, especially with the amount of resources that have already been poured into this over the last however many years now, Grub. And, you know, we've seen that intricate clockwork type of machine be pulled off in Red Dead Redemption 2. And I feel like some of those instances are very much more isolated.

You'll see.

People online making clips where they will have a trail of gasoline or oil before they get into a cutscene, set that off, so the characters in said cutscene are all on fire. I'm under the assumption that that level of density and that level of mayhem that you can create is going to be even more intricate. I just wonder how isolated all of these things will be. It feels like in a world or a game like GTA 6, these pockets of mayhem will be isolated to said pockets and probably won't have a greater effect on the world as you play through the game, unless it's story related.

Yeah. I, you know, I don't know if I'm expecting a chemistry system, like, like a breath of the wild hat, right. Where it's like, you know, you can set fire to this and then that could set fire to that.

And then it spreads. And then if you bring in some ice, that ice will melt next to it. I hope so.

That's that to me, that's the kind of thing that leads to really cool emergent gameplay. And then of course, I don't want it to just be about, you know, elements there. I want it to be about the way the characters and the players and the NPCs and the machines of the world are all interacting with one another.

But they keep talking like that is the exact thing that they're going for. But I never know if my alignment there of wanting that to be like, okay, no, that's as deep as it sounds, versus a surface level, it appears to look that way.

But your actual ability to interact with that is limited. I don't know.

Yeah, I anticipate that Rockstar has definitely been clued into the fact that There are a lot of people that have treated a game, well, learnings from GTA Online, but also specifically Red Dead Redemption 2, that is some people's forever games, right, Grubb?

Yeah, and they're definitely taking a lot of lessons from that, yeah.

People will stay immersed in that world that they would have already completed the game or holding off on completing the game, and they're just rolling around as a cowboy. the now with more bells and whistles in a modern world i can see a rock star wanting to keep their hooks onto people by making as immersive of a world with you know that science level of experiment as as much as they can in a game like breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom It's a lot of Link just running around and occasionally messing up some enemies, so there's going to be a lot more moving parts with how civilians are behaving, other cars, and the wanted system and everything. So I am curious as to how much of the science of it all can

you actually exploit. Despite us kind of poo-pooing on the game a little bit over time just because of it dominating the news cycle, the interest is starting to build.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, you know, once you get, once it's going to be like right there, it's like, Oh, I can actually go try this. It's like, I can let my imagination run away with itself a little bit. Cause I'm going to be able to go and check against that very soon. And so that I let myself do that a little bit more for sure.

Yeah.

Nintendo didn't want to deal with the ramifications of having like NPCs be a problem so much so that they built the entire fiction of breath of the wild around this idea of like, there was a calamity a hundred years ago and now there's no real towns anymore. There's a couple of little pockets here or there, but the world's mostly barren of, of those kinds of people. And it's like, yeah, they, they knew what their limitations were and they built a narrative around that.

And this game is.

Not shying away from, I'm like, hey, no, there's people doing stuff everywhere you turn and they're saying it. They want you to be able to walk up to one of those NPCs and then that NPC to pass the test of like, oh, this feels like a character that is living a full life. And again, what does that really mean? What does that mean for what the player can then do with that character? I'm excited to find out and I hope it doesn't disappoint. Where I do expect to be a little disappointed, and this is just from the history of the writing of Grand Theft Auto, is them talking about the politics.

They're trying to walk this line, which I think is a fair position.

And they said Rockstar says Leonida will be full of elections, robocalls, political ads, culture war nonsense. but it's deliberately avoiding political, building satire around specific real-world politicians, again, because the timeline is so long. And it's like, yeah, it doesn't have to be about specific ones. I think about the two examples, the three examples, well, no, that one dealt with real stuff.

Black Klansman is really good. That dealt with real specific stuff. Wolfenstein, The New Colossus, and Andor, these things aren't about specific real-world politicians. They just tell the story of real-world, like, feelings of fascism and how these things build. And then they can be applied one-to-one. The mapping is very close to the real world examples because those things follow a pattern.

And I, my expectation here is Grand Theft Auto six might attempt that, but you know, they usually just go for the cheap joke for these things and don't ever go that much deeper, but you know, it's maybe a different writing crew.

Like Dan Hauser is gone, right? Dan Hauser.

Um, it's, uh, it's an uphill battle to climb grub, right? Like satire in itself and doing it tastefully and appropriately is already very challenging.

Uh, and it's over now too. Cause a digger digger says it's over.

Yeah, there we go. Uh, it's not covertly a musical everyone.

Uh, you're okay.

Um, yeah, it, it, let alone to do that in a timely manner to do that in like a TV show, or like a daily show style type of program, it's a shorter window and easier to do that and more reactive. To do that in a game is going to be so difficult if they're trying to address things that were happening when the game started development. At that point, a million other worse things have happened since. So I think you do have to paint this with a broader brush and just introduce stuff that is like, okay, this is kind of like real life and this other thing is insane.

But, you know, who knows?

That fictional scenario that could happen in GTA 6 could probably happen in our world now.

Yep.

Meanwhile, GTA 6's rating has been pulled despite being published. It did reveal sex scenes and drug use.

Again, big surprise. This is from Andy Robinson of VGC.

A now-polled age rating for Grand Theft Auto 6 has revealed that the game features sex scenes and the ability to carry and use drugs, in addition to a high degree of gore. Europe's PEGI rating board published its 18 rating for GTA 6 on Friday, along with detailed descriptions of the game's most sensitive content. although it was quickly pulled from the board's website. According to the now-pulled rating, GTA 6 features violence that is bloody with a high degree of realism, with certain weapons being able to cause greater damage, such as detailed decapitation and dismemberment.

According to Peggy, the game features drug use.

That is frequent and prominent, with players being able to partake in drug use with others and to use illegal drugs directly from their inventory.

Apparently, at any time, you could just pull out Coke and do some Coke in the game. Sick.

Hopefully, it doesn't give you... uh, like any positive effects. Cause then the game might get banned in Australia. That'd be, that'd be, cause like that, we talked about, I can't remember what game that was. Maybe check and help me remember, but there was that game where someone, Oh, it was one of the horror games, right? They could smoke weed and that would help you see.

Was it one of the, Oh, I guess.

Was it one of like those, uh, dead by daylight style games?

Yeah. Yeah. It was one of the recent ones. Yeah.

And you could like, like you smoked weed and help you gave you like special Halloween, the game.

Thank you. Kaminsky. Um, yeah.

So like hopefully it doesn't do that because then Australia might crack down on it.

Uh, but let's see here.

Uh, most notably yet cocaine can be carried around by the player and snorted directly from their hand at any time. GTA six also features strong sexual themes according to the ratings board, including nudity, sex scenes of intercourse and occasional scenes of sexual fetishes in various nightclubs. The players can also pay for private dances during which the game allows the player to move their hands onto the dancer's breasts and buttocks.

You're not allowed to do that.

In addition to the above, Peggy says that domestic animals are present in the game and can be harmed by the player.

Oh, this game's screwed.

However, this does not produce the same injury detail that can be generated towards human characters. The Peggy 18 rating for Grand Theft Auto 6 comes days after GTA 6 received its official ESRB rating, which confirmed an M for Mature.

The game is due out next month, November. God, that's next month, November 19th. Yeah, you know, not too surprising.

I'll tell you what, like at this point, we are so far removed from the days of hot coffee and a sex scene, meaning that a game would get an adult only rating and AO. And it would also be like surprising at this point if Rockstar did not view GTA 6, at least at the level of the most, you know, violent and most.

Sexual HBO show, right? I think that's what they would.

Probably be going for here, that this game is going to want to have the same cachet that an HBO show can have. And that would mean not shying away from nudity and sex and violence. And that's been my expectation for a long time. This seems to confirm it.

What do you think?

100% grub.

Generally, it's fine these days for dismemberment, gore, blood, and extreme levels of violence in a video game. But of course, the second any hint of cleavage or an ankle is shown grub, people are up in arms about any type of nudity. I'm going to be interested to see how the general media winds up covering GTA 6 after its launch or leading up to its launch come November and the more that people will sensationalize sex or any type of sex appeal being in the game. Because, sure, you can cut someone's head off, you can run people over, but the second you see a boob, No.

I think I think it's going to even like there's that there will be that. And I think we'll also get the reverse where this game is going to have penises. And then there's going to be some weird culture or or dudes like that.

Game is going to turn you gay.

A hundred percent.

That's going to happen as well.

People are like that side of the Internet, which I'm glad is very, very, very, very, very, very, very far away from our side of the Internet.

We're already complaining about, oh, no, the bisexual lighting and the promo images. Get fucked. Hang some dong. It's fine.

Weirdest losers alive. Absolutely.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah, I mean, this is where we're at.

Like, every little tidbit of GTA 6, you know, all these little nuggets are going to be something we're going to talk about on the show. It doesn't, you know, this doesn't even, like, help with, like, SEO. We could put Grand Theft Auto 6 in the thumbnail or the headline, and it doesn't matter. It's so ubiquitous that people aren't even, like, clicking on stuff to read this. So it's just, like, a weird, like, yeah, this game's coming, and here's the stuff that keeps... popping up about it. But yeah, it's not that far away now, Jan. We are less than, well, we're about five weeks away.

That's crazy. Five, six weeks away.

That also means that we're very close to Zelda as well.

Yeah, like four weeks from Zelda. Zelda was a little bit before that, I think. Yeah, that's also crazy. Did you see that SNL skit? Yes, yes.

I was going to bring that up after we wrapped this up.

What did you think? I think it was great. Mikey Day's hilarious. It did highlight A lot of things of like, here's this grown man in his like late 30s, potentially late 30s, dressed up as Link, highlighting the absurdity of the legend of Zelda.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that I appreciated for sure. All right. Let's see here.

Sony reportedly opens the PlayStation vault. This is from Sammy Blanchard.

At Push Square.

Rumors continue to swirl around PlayStation's future plans involving old games. A recognized leaker who previously outed the existence of Metroidvania spinoff God of War Sons of Sparta says Sony is accepting multiple game pitches for projects inspired by fan favorite franchises. Recently, there's been an uptick in rumors related to legacy series like Killzone, which is purportedly in production at People Can Fly under the supervision of series creator Gorilla. The weaker here says that they contributed to MP First's original report on that. However, as noted recently, it sounds like a new Ape Escape is currently in production at an unknown studio.

And according to the sneak here, Sly Cooper is another franchise reportedly getting revived. The leaker claims these titles are not being outsourced by or published by an external party like Bandai Namco. Sony is funding and publishing the projects with some of the original creators involved to ensure they meet the right standard. The Snoop also says he's under the impression we will see the first wave of the initiative around the PS6 launch window, which will certainly raise enthusiasm among jaded fans. Of course, it's likely any title will ship on PS5 as well. I think this is something fans have wanted Sony to do for a long time.

While there's an understanding studios like Naughty Dog have moved on, there's still a desire for new entries in series like Jack and Daxter. So the hope is that talented studios will come to the platform holder with their ideas and the best ones will get green lighted.

Yeah, okay. So, I mean, we've been talking about.

This idea for a while of, like, PlayStation, you know, this is the one path other than the failed live service path that they can turn to while they figure out what else is next, the next thing that can make them billions and billions of dollars. A more reliable way to spend your money funding new games is bring back recognizable IP, of which.

Sony owns a lot. So.

Is this the kind of thing where you're going to start getting your hopes up that Sony can deliver on this, Jan? I think I may, but also, you know, the proof will be in the pudding.

What do you think?

100% grub, because they may be accepting pitches from smaller studios, other studios, to bring back specific titles or offshoots of titles, spin-offs, but that doesn't necessarily guarantee that the game will be good.

Unfortunately, God of War, Sons of Sparta....

Left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths. Like the idea of a God of War Metroidvania sounds great on paper. What we wound up getting just wasn't what we expected, right?

Yeah. That I don't know.

If I trust current Sony and PlayStation to have like the proper level of vigilance looking over their titles because this just feels to me it may be like another get rich quick type of scenario where it's like, okay, people are mad at us cause we're not making games.

You guys go make the games, whatever. Um, rather than.

What took so long. Exactly. Why, why is, why is it starting now?

Why is it starting now? Um, when you've seen, like, it baffles me that this, this decision wasn't made when Concord, uh, went under, right? Like, okay, uh, let's reevaluate our strategy. Let's go back to this gigantic vault of titles that we have. Um, And then the other part that rubs me the wrong way is the framing that to hold off on all of these titles until the PS6 launch.

And that kind of kills a lot of my interest in it completely.

Again, because I don't want to. Yes.

Anything associated with the letters PS and the number six at this point is making me look the other way.

Now, I mean, I think that.

Playstation sony know that that we did get kisser uh the the thing that upgrades and stabilizes the image for uh you know image reconstruction and upscaling on standard ps5s instead of pisser which is much better on the ps5 pro um you know that is almost an acknowledgement of hey we should keep doing what we can to make the ps5 standard as good as possible because we expect that to stay around for a long time but you know someone pointed out uh there was a video mvg put up a video and uh of the the jailbreak for the PS5, which we talked about, Jan.

It's crazy how it works.

You just go into your DNS settings, you put in a different DNS, and then you click a certain button that takes you to a page telling you about the terms of service or something, whatever. When you have that certain DNS in, instead it takes you to a one-button jailbreak.

You just click it and it jailbreaks your PS5.

And, you know, again, you have to be on a slightly.

Older firmware, but not that old.

There was, you know, especially compared to the way PS5 jailbreaks had worked before this, which is that you kind of had to have an ancient PS5 sitting in a box essentially since launch to make that work. And so the leaps and bounds that have been made, again, this takes us back to this concept.

Of Sony is going to want us to move on to PS6.

But even when it does that, Jan, my expectation is One of the PS sixes will just be a rebranded rebadged PS five or PS five pro where you just take, they're going to take the same architecture. They will, they'll, they'll shrink it down on a new process. So it can be a lot smaller, use a lot, a lot fewer parts. It can have more efficient cooling and it can be cheaper to produce. And it'll be a PS six light or something like that. A PS five pro could easily step into that, that, that space and, And they'll keep selling us that for a very long time.

And then they can re-engineer the security on that at the same time and then reset the clock.

So that would be my expectation of how that would work.

When they do that, like, yeah, they're going to want to have a bunch of games that they're going to sell on all these things.

So sure, Sly Cooper might happen. It might happen.

This doesn't sound super promising at this point that they're accepting pitches. And that's one of the things they're accepting pitches on. That's so early that a million things can go wrong. before that actually comes out. But if it does come out, it will be playable on a PS5, Jan. I don't think that there's going to be a first party game from Sony, except with maybe a couple of exceptions that will not be playable on a PS5.

I mean, we could put a year on it. Like right now it's 2026.

We expect this thing maybe, I mean, let's be hopefully a little bit more modest and say 2028.

I don't want to say 2027. That'd be crazy. But that was a possibility at one point.

My expectation is that we're going to have PS5 first-party games coming out until 2034, 2035, a very, very long time from now. So we're going to be able to ignore the PS6 for the most part, is my hope. Then you think about it, what do they do to sell PS6s? And I just don't know at that point, Jan.

Yeah, because then I worry grub that at that point when people may be ready to adopt a PS6, it will kind of be in the place that the PS5 currently is, where this piece of hardware came out a couple years ago, it slightly feels a little bit antiquated, feels a little old, and people may not have gotten all the use out of it that they were hoping to get, especially given what we are assuming is going to be a big, big price tag. The other thing that kind of reigns in my excitement is that Like you said, Sony is accepting these pitches. That doesn't necessarily mean that some of these pitches will get greenlit. And also game development takes a very long time, especially if, you know, hopefully PlayStation and Sony are doing their due

diligence of like vetting these games at several stages through the process that. If this is supposed to be a PS6 launch title, then you would want it to live up to the nostalgia that is in people's minds. And like that is going to be challenging and that is going to add more to the development time.

Yep.

And, you know, we know Sony is getting a little bit more serious about those checkpoints, making sure that the games are living up to that. So, yeah, at any moment, if something is looking disappointing, it feels like right now Sony is is leaning toward canceling versus the idea of reinvesting and making sure it can get across the finish line.

They are so hesitant right now that they just, yeah, it's a hard company to trust.

In this moment.

And then, you know, the environment in which they're operating makes it that much more difficult to trust any of these companies because they are, there are so many concerns with building hardware. There are so many concerns with AI, which we're going to get into here in a sec. There's a bunch of AI stories this morning with apologies, but It is reached a sort of breaking point, I think, and we'll get to that here.

In a second.

Before that, though, let's take a break.

When we come back, we've got plenty of headlines to get into.

If you want to skip out on these ad messages, you can do so. Go to giantbomb.com slash join. You get the ad-free version of the audio and video show there. We will be right back. All right, it's Game Mess Mornings. Jeff Grubb, Jan Ochoa. Let's get back into it. And yeah, it's reached a breaking point. Let's start here with AI game mashup videos on social media spark debate and backlash among players and modders. This is from Chris Scullion at VGC.

A number of modders and players have been sharing their concern at the recent trend of AI-powered mashup game videos being shared on social media. I don't know if everyone's seen these, but a lot of them are real. The idea of like, oh, here's Halo in Call of Duty. Here's Mario in Halo. These things are popping off everywhere.

The trend reportedly sees modders decompiling two games using the Claude Opus 5.5 AI tool, then running both games at the same time.

The mod will then pull elements from one game and overlay them.

On top of another, making it appear like a character from one game is performing an action in another game. Although the effect appears to be essentially an elaborate version of a green screen trick, The characters from game A are never actually in game B. They're just placed on top of it. Actions in each game can seemingly be triggered to work together so that when you fire a bow in Minecraft, it results in Steve seemingly firing a bow in Elden Ring. Numerous mashup videos have been posted on social media in the past few days, including following scenarios, Minecraft in Elden Ring, Escape 3 in Call of Duty and Modern Warfare 2, Escape from Tarkov in Skyrim. There's a whole list here. This is like the very beginnings

of these things. They are decompiling both games And these are all relatively, not all of them, many of them are relatively modern games. And decompiling them is just the start of then, all right, building this stuff back up and just telling Claude, here's what I want you to do with it. I saw someone be like, hey, I wanted to play two-player Super Mario Brothers with my kids.

And so I told Claude to make that, and now I'm doing that. And they're like, I'm not going to release this. This is something I wanted to do. And there was still a debate in their comments about that. But we are at the point where people are just... taking the games and telling Claude, hey, I want to be able to do this, and it's happening. And this is causing a debate among people who have worked as modders or worked in the modding scene for a long time, and modders say they may stop entirely if this jingling keys bullshit becomes the norm. Kingdom Hearts modder Discount Mod stated on Twitter that they were tempted to stop making mods entirely if the community was about to fill up with low-quality AI mods. Dude, I'm really disappointed. If this

becomes the permanent state of modding, this may be my last project. I don't want to be involved in an AI slop factory. And Jen, this is where, this is the thing that I actually worry about more than any of it. Like if we let's pretend AI had no ethical, moral ramifications just for the point of like, okay, well then why would I still be against it? I would still be against it because it would scare, like it discourages actual creative people from creating things. I want the actual creative people working in the industry. And if there was, If there was like some version of AI that had like was not gulping up lakes and had no energy ramifications and wasn't even stealing stuff, wasn't even stealing copyrighted

material from actual artists. If none of those things were a concern, I would still be against it because it would discourage the actual creative people whose output I want to interact with.

And. I don't blame them for being.

Discouraged because it really is like you could see these videos popping off millions and millions of views. This is jingling keys bullshit. And the babies on social media are like gobbling it up. And it is discouraging. I feel that way right now, Jan.

Yeah, 100% Grubb.

Like everything that you just talked about in this news story, it's not making anything new. It's just continuing to just make math... mashups of like existing materials without, you know, building anything on top of it versus, you know, modders that will lovingly and sometimes painstakingly in, in our own case, someone like Chuck building a specific mod to like further go into a gag and to a bit folks, nine lives of Mr. Mustafa fleas. It's going to be a couple of weeks before you meet character of the year, but you're going to meet character of the year.

Love them.

Yeah.

But 100% Grub.

You don't want to be waiting in AI slop swamps, especially when you are taking the time and doing the work to try and improve a game or fix a thing or make an additional creative thing to a game where you're trying to turn an experience and you're building your own skill set, your own tool set to be able to turn game a into game a 0.5, um, versus these people that are just dumping stuff into Claude, uh, without a care in the world. And these people that are consuming it, you just eating up the slop. They would never actually engage with this stuff, right? Who is, who these people are actually going to play Minecraft in Elden Ring. They just want to see the gag of it.

And then they will not engage with it afterwards. Yeah.

Which I think is like, you know, the other side here where these this current trend of us seeing that stuff is probably going to burn out pretty fast. And it will turn out like so many other trends of like, oh, no one. Oh, yeah, that was stupid. Now it's kind of played out.

It's a passe. We're not into that anymore. But that's not really, you know, the issue.

The issue is like, well, there will be something along these lines very similar to this to replace it. And all of the work will come from someone just being like, hey, Claude, do this for me.

Yeah, go ahead.

Like, Grubb, you know, some of the people in that modding scene are the people responsible and the reason why we have a game like Portal, right? People that got into the guts of Half-Life and then wanted to make a game like Portal, they had that idea, Valve saw that, and then picked them up and was like, hey, go make this game here. And then Portal is maybe on the Mount Rushmore of video games at this point, right?

AI won't be able to do that. It's not going to be able to have that original idea and fully flesh that out like that. It's going to just take... It's just Frankensteining a bunch of miscellaneous parts and slapping them together and not actually making it in a secure way. Sure, you can make these AI decomps and everything, and if you distribute them, who knows what... the level of like security is not being investigated or involved.

Yeah. I, you know, the trouble is they could really flood the zone with this stuff.

And, uh, the people that, that do have the creative ideas, again, I am worried about losing them because they like, they were already competing against 10,000 games being released a year or something like that. And now, and you know, now, now people are just gonna be like, I can bypass steam. And with my Claude subscription, I can make whatever game I want. And yeah, it's going to be slop and bullshit.

It really will be gross to anyone who has any sort of taste. But it turns out there's millions of people who do not have taste who previously wanted to be a part of the party.

And the party was happening in these cool.

Games made by teams of hundreds and now thousands of people. And yeah, I'm one of these people working in that space who have built up skills over time. Yeah, I would feel like. The Banjo-Kazooie PC port decomp developer who said AI-generated PC ports are a race to the bottom and disrespectful. This is from Chris Scullion at VGC, a developer who led a fan-created PC port of Banjo-Kazooie says the use of AI to make similar ports is ruining the process. Earlier this year, an Argentinian software developer who goes by Dario Sammo Online released Banjo Recompiled, an unofficial PC port made possible by the work of fan-developers who successfully reverse engineered the original N64 game into readable code

in 2024. These reverse engineering projects, known as decompilations, are technically legal because the developer involved do not use any leaked content or copyrighted assets and require players to provide their own legally sourced ROMs for them to work. Because it's a native PC port, Banjo Recompiled supports a bunch of cool stuff.

Let's see.

Now a new Banjo-Tooie recomp has emerged, and Dario Sammo claims it was made by using some of the tools his team made and applying AI to them to result in a quick port. After YouTube channel video game Esoterica reported on the Banjo-Tooie recomp, Dario Sammo commented on the video criticizing the channel for not making it clear that the Banjo Recompile team had nothing to do with it.

Your irresponsible reporting is exactly the sort of behavior I've told you about that completely hurts the scene and the entire reason why people keep pumping out these projects just so they can get their 10 minutes of fame in your videos. Now, in a statement on Twitter, Dario Sammo has continued to criticize AI recomps such as the new Banjo-Tooie one and says that the fact that AI tools use frameworks and renderers created by Dario Sammo's team and others is an insult to their own hard work. Just a warning for everyone, since video games slopterica keeps being the most irresponsible YouTube channel to exist, the Banjo-Tooie recomp is not associated with us. It is entirely AI generated, both Zelda recompiled and Banjo recompiled, have very clearly no

AI stances. We have not, do not, and will not use AI to ever work on these projects. We've already made it public for quite a long time. We're interested in doing TUI at some point. The game requires a lot of love and care to do a proper port. We're not interested in engaging into a race to the bottom, and we'll take the time that is necessary.

To deliver a polished version.

Using the extensive amount of human research we've done for the framework, the renderer, and the games, and throwing AI at it is very disrespectful.

Um, yeah, I, I, this is what, again, this is my concern.

I want that person in this scene more than I want banjo to be recompiled. Now that's how, that's how I feel about that specific case. Uh, there are definitely times where I'm like, man, I would love to play that game.

And if I see it in front of me, I might try it and learn later. It had AI and be like, God damn it. Yeah, of course it did.

Uh, but I'm conflicted about that. I, my concern is the vast majority of people who want these things have none of this conflict. And so, again, the zone will be flooded and there will be nothing we can do to convince someone like Dario Samo to stick around to ensure that this space has vibrant minds that understand this stuff and care deeply. And instead, it just becomes a race to the bottom. I don't know if this is avoidable, Jim.

It really just upsets me, Grubb. I get a very weird sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. And I don't know. Specifically with Banjo-Kazooie, I think about that person that remade Banjo-Kazooie, I believe it was Banjo-Kazooie, in Dreams. Yeah, that sounds right. A year or so ago. And I don't want to lose talent like that. like, someone playing within the confines of tools or, like, teaching themselves these tools, it does feel like a race to the bottom and to what end, right?

Yeah.

Like, what is the point of all this if all these people are running rampant and, like, decompiling games? What do you ultimately want out of this? Yeah. And this is, this will, and this is going to chase people away from the scene. It's already putting devs out of jobs that, like.

Yep.

Even from a hobbyist perspective of trying to decompile a game, mod a game. And if this is pushing people out of the scene, I don't want that scene to like go away or die out just because there's so much good stuff that comes out of it. Another game that came to mind while you were talking grub that was originally a mod is Dota.

Yeah.

And like Dota is like one of the biggest fucking things in the world. And that came from like a modding scene. And then from that modding scene blew up. Then we have League of Legends and all these other MOBAs. Deadlock is technically a MOBA. And you wouldn't get that without people's creativity and mucking around.

Yeah.

The original sort of decompilations that were happening, a lot of that stuff was done with machine learning and stuff that was the precursor to these general AIs that we have now. And so I could see a lot of people like, what's the distinction there?

What matters? And I don't know. The distinction actually... Isn't my great concern.

It is the fact that now that the sort of access has become completely open, anyone can go and use these tools without understanding it. The people who are they have those minds that really brought some some special stuff to the space. If they are like, well, there's nothing here for me anymore. People don't appreciate my work. We're going to lose them. And I don't know how to solve this because there's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube.

This stuff is here.

We have the next couple of stories where now these companies are admitting they're going to be using this stuff a lot going forward. There's some caveats there. Like when we get to Capcom, they're like, well, we're not going to use the assets in the game. We're using it for data and stuff like that. Yeah, you know that's where it starts and where it goes. Well, let's get into that a little bit. Ubisoft's Motherbrain. Gen AI now serves as a global entity across Ubisoft, which is just a real fun way to put it. That doesn't make it sound crazy and evil at all. This is from Insider Gaming. Last week, speculation hit the internet following a series of trademarks related to the word mother brain from

Ubisoft and what the company's next push into Gen AI could look like. Insider Gaming has since learned, since those trademarks went live, that Ubisoft's Mother Brain isn't just another fad as it chases trends. Instead, Mother Brain will serve as a global entity within Ubisoft implementing Gen AI across its games. Several sources tell Insider Gaming that Mother Brain is intended to be implemented across as many of Ubisoft's games as possible and is now viewed internally as just as important as Ubisoft's creative houses and core services. It's said that Mother Brain will help to accelerate gameplay innovation across Ubisoft titles. smacks of every other thing Ubisoft's tried, like NFTs or all these other things.

Not, not trend chasing. That's exactly what this is. Um, okay. Aren't you excited about Ubisoft games now? Yay.

Grub.

Woo.

Uh, this is a weird one. I, I feel like Ubisoft, uh, just, just doesn't want to listen to anyone outside of their little bubble. We must be, We must all be a bunch of dummies to that boardroom and whatever they are deciding to do.

And it's weird that it's Mother Brain, the villain from Metroid and Super Metroid.

What the hell?

First of all, why are you trademarking a Nintendo copyrighted name?

That's crazy. Why risk that? Do they not know? I don't. No, maybe not.

You know, probably not. I don't know if Ubisoft anymore, Crump. Like, other than Prince of Persia, The Lost Crown. I can't say that I've had much interest in anything they've put out in like the last year or two years, let alone whatever projects are coming out. The Rayman game, not really that thrilled about. And I can't think of anything else that they're putting out this year.

I mean, they delayed everything. So yeah, there's kind of nothing. It's like just remakes mostly.

Yeah.

I'm trying to like imagine what this looks like. Is it, that they're just going to have generated AI assets in the game, or is there going to be some sort of Jenna AI, like involvement for the player? Like you do something and it creates something in the game. And the answer is probably all of the above. But yeah, I mean, you, for a long time you would hear, Oh yeah, look, we just, we're going to let our creators use their tools and stuff like that. And if they choose to use this stuff, it's up to them.

It's still all about their creative vision. And then Ubisoft's like, no, we're creating a task force to force everyone to create like, Use Gen AI, and we expect it to be involved in all of our games.

And, you know, we always know what this is really about. This is about Ubisoft.

Wanting to have something they can point to that has AI so their investors can be a little bit more excited.

But, yeah, you're a little bit late to that party as well, Ubisoft.

This is not going to be the kind of thing that starts a new party of everyone investing tons of money into Ubisoft stock, right?

No.

Again, this is just like them getting into NFTs. way too late. Yeah. And then, like.

Getting out of NFTs, like, years too late.

Like, when everyone was way done talking about it and they were still doing their NFT thing.

And, like, I am just still confused at, like, how they plan to implement this, like, at... And it sounds like they want this at every stage of, like, development. And, like you said, do they want players to prompt something as they're playing? Do they want, like, in Assassin's Creed, where it's like, all right, you're desyncing... Go type in a prompt to help Ezio. It's not going to be Ezio anymore. I wish it was still Ezio.

Jesus Christ.

I tell Mother Brain, put Minecraft in Assassin's Creed.

Is that where we're headed? We're just going to do that for you. Meanwhile, Capcom wants RE Engine ready for an era where developers create games together with AI.

So even Capcom. This is from Andy Robinson at VGC.

Capcom wants to evolve its RE Engine into an AI game engine with a roster of technology improvements according to one of its programmers. On Friday, the Resident Evil publisher held its own technology conference, Capcom Open Conference RE2026, detailing some of the future improvements coming to its in-house game engine.

RE Engine debuted in 2017, blah, blah, blah. Speaking at Friday's conference, reported by Game Biz, programmer Satoshi Ishida detailed some of the improvements coming to RE Engine as part of Capcom's REX initiative.

Let's see here.

Ishida explained that REX was launched to overcome modern challenges that make AAA games take so long to develop, including improving performances, tools, development.

Efficiency, QA, and other aspects.

Among the various advancements detailed in the presentation was a commitment to evolve RE Engine into what Ishida called an AI game engine. Because the REX project will use a more common programming language, it will make development for AI to understand, Ishida said, allowing it to automatically create programs and run test plays online. to check for bugs in the future. Furthermore, Capcom will make some of its technologies publicly available on the internet with the aim to allow people to use them to help with AI training, the programmer said.

According to Game.

Biz, Ishida said that Capcom's goal is a future where we can create games together with AI. However, Capcom's VP of Game Development Platform and AI Solutions, Shinichi Inoue, previously stressed that the company viewed AI not for creating art, but for unleashing the potential of creators, stating that Capcom was not using AI tools to generate art. And that seems to still be the case here.

Yeah. So this is this is more about like using.

The tools to improve their processes, which has been, I think, the general position of most of these companies now. And a lot of them, there was probably quite a few of them that were at one point being like, hey, we're not sure about that. And now the FOMO has them freaking out and they're all jumping aboard on this.

All the big companies that make games. are likely at the very least looking to do something similar to what Capcom described here. And yeah, I, I think this at a certain point, I'm just like, yeah, man, the, the, again, toothpaste out of the tube, cat out of the bag.

This is, we're not going back.

These companies are too afraid not to have this stuff involved, involved in their game making process somehow. And how do I make peace with that?

I do not know, Jen. I.

I've, I've kind of had a lost grub.

I've just feel, uh, It's definitely a Monday of news, especially these two stories back-to-back.

And, you know, over here at GBHQ, we are very, very, very, very high. on Capcom. And this has been, like, a stellar year for Capcom.

And then this just kind of takes the wind out of my sails. And, like, I don't want to say, like, it is inevitable because I feel like that's what all these companies... AI companies want you to believe that adoption of AI is inevitable. But I just, it starts to feel like a slippery slope, right? Like, okay, you allow these tools for data entry or for code generation or to help parse out data.

And then like, oh, you know what? It winds up being easier to.

Do concept art this way or to like, you know, maybe we don't know what we want the next story to be. Let's just prompt it. Let's just shoot the shit. And then sooner or later, several more people are out of jobs just because of the over-reliance on AI or over-adoption of AI. And then we're just deeper into the mud.

And I don't know. It's a big bummer to see this coming out of a company that I've adored so much this year, like Capcom.

Yeah, and I can imagine they're like, no, we're building this so that we can have our engine use machine learning and LLMs to better preserve version management and all the stuff that is really annoying for a bunch of humans to do when they're working together on a project and there's thousands of them. And we think AI can kind of keep up with that stuff.

Okay. Yeah.

I mean, I guess I feel like you guys have been making great games in one way for a while and it was working, but the reality is they've probably been integrating this stuff for a while as well. And I've probably already played and enjoyed some of their games that had that use this stuff is the line going to continue to be for me like okay as long as it doesn't show up in the game with any of the art or the creative side I don't know I think we know like you were just explaining there Jan that line is very very nebulous and it does not take long for one thing to then bleed over to the other and then once the seal is broken what's the difference.

And but yeah and we're definitely past the seal being broken right where like yes this is at least what Capcom is saying and you know we've had statements from other people Big publishers, other big companies saying like, hey, we're only implementing AI in like this specific part of our business when that's all that they're divulging. That's all that they're sharing. You know, the reality is it's probably in many different aspects that are not being reported on or haven't been reported on yet.

Yep.

Meanwhile, Jagex, which is the name of a company, Jagex, has officially announced RuneScape 4.

This is from Andy Robinson at VGC.

Yeah, Jagex has announced a fourth entry in its long-running MMO series, RuneScape, which it says is in early development using Unreal Engine. They kind of showed off, I think, what is probably mostly a concept video. It bounced at RuneFest in Birmingham, UK this weekend. RuneScape 4, which is a temporary name, will sit alongside the other branches of the series RuneScape, Old School RuneScape, and Dragon Wilds.

You a RuneScape head, Jan?

No, because when I was.

10 or 11, however old I was when RuneScape first came out, I tried making a cool character, and I wanted to make my username DragonBlade-er.

Right.

And then I accidentally added another D, so my name was Dragon Bladder.

You can never go back.

I could never go back.

Yeah. You're cooked.

You were cooked before most people ever even knew that's what that meant.

That's rough, Jan. I'm sorry. It's okay. Or should I say Mr. Dragon Bladder? Oh, no. The RuneScape 4, let's see, they said several years away. Oh, cool.

I clicked the button on my mouse button that made me go back, and so I lost my place on the dock.

But it doesn't matter, because we're done with those headlines.

Let's start wrapping this show up, Jan.

Grub, I didn't know there was RuneScape 3.

Yeah, I know, I know.

That's actually what, like, is messing me up. Like, I guess, okay, so there's RuneScape 2 and 3. Which one's old school RuneScape? Must be RuneScape 1. So obviously that means there was a RuneScape 2. Was there a three? And I guess there was. I don't think they ever called it RuneScape 3. I think it had a different name. Okay, so OSRS, Old School RuneScape is two?

That's just one again. That doesn't make sense. I don't know, Chandler.

I don't understand.

Oh, all right.

Uh, that does it for the headlines. Let's, uh, start wrapping stuff up.

Uh, no poll question from Friday because Friday we did the bomb 12.

I'll go get that updated right.

As soon as we're done with this during the meeting, even, uh, so you can go to the vote here button on giant bomb.com and add your game for this week.

So we can have a.

Cool bomb 12 on Friday. When we wrap up this week, uh, speaking of this week at giant bomb, Jan tomorrow's the bomb cast.

Well, Wednesday. I'm so excited about Wednesday.

Oh, Grubb. Oh, my God.

I don't have to play Cyber Dillo anymore. I'm free. I beat that game.

I notice a light in your eyes now, Grubb.

Yes, I feel I walked outside. I can love my loved ones again. It's a beautiful weight that has been lifted from me. And I'm deeply appreciative of it. Yeah, then Thursday, we'll voicemail Dump Truck. Friday, we're going to have UPF. Bunch of other cool stuff popping off this week. And then, yeah, get ready for the Bombathon next week.

Anything else we should mention, Jan?

No, we're about to head to our Monday meeting, folks, and we'll determine what other fun things we'll be doing throughout the week. I'm trying to lobby for a deadlock UPF. I'm going to try and convince the homies to do it. And if we do do it, no one bully will.

Or maybe bully will.

Maybe that's the only way everyone will agree to it. Yeah, that's right.

I'm the only person to beat my Blade Club game twice on the show.

Yep, that's right. You know? All right. Let's see. Everything else I think we got here. What's the new poll question? Have you ever played RuneScape? Yes or no? I'm curious.

I've never touched a RuneScape. Kind of still barely understand what they are.

Ah, yeah. Idle games, probably.

I feel like it... I'm surprised.

It's great that it still exists. I'm happy that it still exists. It's one of those things like, oh, right, Neopets is also still a thing.

Right. Club Penguin? I don't think Club Penguin is still a going concern.

I think the government shut that down.

Yeah, someone had to. All right, Jan, thank you so much for hanging out with me today and talking about video games, man. I really appreciate it.

Monday, Monday, Monday!

Thank you all for watching and listening. You're the best audience in gaming. Until next time, have a good one, take care of yourself, and goodbye.

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