Richard Garriott — evidently still working on getting the copyright for Ultima back under his control — has been talking up the role of AI in game development, and he’s made a rather bold claim about the last game that was released under his name. Speaking on the TechJesse podcast, he made the rather bold — and perhaps salt-worthy — claim that Shroud of the Avatar now has zero bugs, because AI means “those bugs are fixed as soon as they’re found, within an hour of being found.”

His explanation is that the team was sitting on a backlog of roughly a thousand small bugs that never got prioritized, since the more game-breaking ones always went first. With AI handling multiple fixes at once, that long tail finally got cleared:

“We need fewer people and less time to make it.”

That’s the line likely to draw the most attention, since the effect on jobs is one of the biggest reasons people are wary of AI in game development. Garriott doesn’t address that directly. He does say that “ethical use of AI is really an important issue,” and he mentions concerns about plagiarism and about whose work AI voices are trained on. His stated dividing line is that “humans do the art and machines can help do the labor that ensures that all the i’s are dotted and all the t’s are crossed.”

He also says the tools have put him closer to the work, so he can “get right in the weeds” and be the one saying “this isn’t fun enough.” This is almost newsworthy in and of itself, even if we set the AI angle aside, because I (for one) was not aware that he had anything at all to do with Shroud of the Avatar anymore, apart from his yearly birthday appearances.

The full TechJesse interview is worth a listen since it covers a lot more ground, including yet another retelling of Garriott’s first forays into making computer games. Whether the “zero bugs” claim survives contact with the player base is another matter, and as usual I’d treat it as the developer’s own claim until players weigh in. Anyone playing Shroud want to report on how “bug free” it feels?