Dissecting the impact AI will have on online gaming is a broad question, and it involves two areas, with the first one being the impact it will have on game designs. The second area is how it will impact the user experience, which we presume is the category that will impact you the most.
Many of the significant changes AI will introduce are still in the pipeline. However, we’ve seen early indications of just how transformative it will be once gaming companies decide to implement some of the changes into their designs. Some gaming genres have used AI for over a decade in a much more primitive form than what we see today, but technology has had its tentacles in the gaming world for a much longer period than some people think.
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AI and game design
At the beginning of this decade, generative AI models re-imaged a splurge of classic games, ranging from Call of Duty to GTA. All of this happened before the recent mammoth levels of investment, which seem to be increasing with each passing day in 2025. The quality and sophistication of AI technology have significantly increased over the last three years.
Initially, some of these gaming re-images were relatively primitive; they looked like they had been filmed on an old smartphone. However, more recent generative AI models have used a range of different data sets and cameras to churn out clips that look ultra-realistic.
The fact that so many random people on the internet have been able to upload clips onto their social media that are difficult to differentiate between real gaming footage and AI-generated clips shows how far the technology has permeated the gaming world in such a short period.
Like other sectors, gaming needs to play catch-up with AI rather than vice versa. The advances have been so sudden and vast that they’re reshaping the entire fabric and ecosystem that underpins game design.
Challenges to overcome
Contrary to what you may hear on social media and from those in the AI industry, the technology still has several limitations. The primary one that it needs to overcome before it can make a widespread transformative change in gaming is its ability to operate in real-time alongside gaming scripts and algorithms.
Honestly, given the sheer influx of money and interest into the industry, I think we’re at most about three years away from AI having this capability. The incredible developments in AI impact every facet of our society, whether it’s law, healthcare, media and culture or sports science.
Within about a decade, there will be no industry that hasn’t felt the brunt of AI’s impact. I might even be out of a job as a writer — I’ll have to update my CV if AI keeps enhancing at this rate!
Seriously, even the most sophisticated video-generating AI software has its limitations. It takes minutes to work from a prompt and generate a 10-second video. It’s clear from some of the videos that it generates from prompts that there are still flaws.
Make no mistake, though as the technology’s capability will ramp up enormously. There’s a global tech race, and gaming will become one of the obvious experimental sectors to see just how realistic and advanced generative AI can become. Once the technology is watertight, it’ll be quickly rolled out into online gaming across video consoles, mobile devices and PCs.
What will be the first game with major AI influence?
This is up for speculation, and there’s also a more significant question of what “major AI influence” means. Technically, the NPCs in Grand Theft Auto have been controlled by AI for over 20 years. It is a very basic AI and often repeats the same random quotes, but it is AI nonetheless.
The next Grand Theft Auto is set for release at some stage over the next two years. Speculation is rife about when GTA 6 will actually be released. Although the trailer in December 2023 said it would be released in 2025, Rockstar and Take-Two will release the game on their schedule, not to meet anyone else’s demands.
Rockstar has billions of dollars in reserve; they have the resources to dive deep into AI to create each character using separate models. They’ve recently filed a patent to change how character animations work in gaming, opting for modular blocks that apply a combination of in-game scenarios and reactive AI NPCs that will have thousands of different ways to react to individual gaming behaviour. If you have played GTA online, you will understand how game-changing this could be.
Final thoughts
These insanely enhanced AI design ideas will change how we experience games forever. Game-specific AI models use screenshots and videos from thousands of hours of online gaming footage and imagery to produce playable games. They are extremely primitive at the moment, and are seldom worth investing time in. In fact, they require some of the latest GPUs just to get off the ground.
However, it has opened the door for generative models to create gaming concepts from scratch, and game design companies will soon be using the technology to create an entirely new dimension of possibilities that were not available until this year.
Gaming is an industry that is always moving forward and has proven numerous times that it can be a global leader when implementing technological enhancements, ranging from blockchain to the early days of mobile gaming apps. Implementing AI will take a similar route, but how it will look in reality is an entirely different question.
