Saber Interactive Unveils Schrödinger's Narrative Designer | 12/08/26

Plus Halo layoffs, fake Duskblood guides, Fenris's new AI plans, and our premium update.

Hello one and all and welcome to this week’s edition of AI and Games. Holy smokes we’re back on a Wednesday cadence! It has only taken what… a month, two? I suspect this is but a brief and fleeting moment for me given we’re on the road for much of the end of August and mid-September as Gamescom and client obligations loom over us. But hey, we’re having fun in between the power naps!

On that note, while the podcast will continue to hit it’s fortnightly cadence, the newsletter might experience turbulence given my movements. But nonetheless I’ll strive to have something in your inbox each week.

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Announcements

I’ll keep it short this week, some quick reminders:

• Gamescom Dev: With just over a week to go before our team will be in Cologne, you can still buy tickets to check out the awesome talks in our track, awesome talks in other tracks (including one by me), and just enjoy Gamescom!

• AI and Games Conference 2026: Of course you’ve bought your ticket already. A reminder for studios and other games businesses that we still have sponsorship opportunities and space available in our expo floor to engage with our delegates. Get in touch via the button to find out more:
  

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AI (and Games) in the News

• Former Icelandic Minister Supporting Fenris’ New AI Endeavours: That’s a headline for sure! Former Minister of Justice Áslaug Arna Sigurbjörnsdóttir has joined EVE Online developers Fenris Creations to support their new R&D intiatives - such as their collaboration with Google DeepMind. Sigurbjörnsdóttir had the following to say with GamesIndustry.biz:
  
  "Having seen how policy is made and implemented, I know how badly decision-makers need evidence about how these systems actually behave, and this is where that evidence can be produced. I look forward to helping Fenris take the work forward responsibly."
  
  Be sure to click the link, it’s an interesting read for sure, and one that gives me some hope for the outcomes of this endeavour.
  

• FACEIT’s New Cheat Detection Designed for Catch CS2 AI Hacks: In the past couple of years the arms race in AI-enhanced cheats for online games has increased drastically. There are already a number of solutions to address this but it’s an ongoing challenge. FACEIT is a community for competitive players in a variety of eSports, and for season 9 of their Counterstrike 2 series they’ve launched a new version of their anti-cheat that uses machine learning to detect human input detection.

  

  You know the reason for these is that humans never tick these things optimally?

  The reason for this is that a lot of modern hacks are bypassing reading in-game memory that traditional cheats have adopted. Instead players run live AI code - typically on a connected device - that is reading the screen pixels and then processing input to respond. By training a system to detect human-like input detection, it’s sort of the video game equivalent of one of those CAPTCHA “I’m not a robot’ tick-boxes. We should do a case study on this sometime. Since it launched on August 5th, it’s already banned a number of high-ranked players.
  

• RAM Supply for 2027 Already Sold Out! That’s according to a report in Taiwanese press (then summarised by both TweakTown and RPS). As prices continue to rise, some companies have acknowledged that the batches they intend to manufacture next year are already sold out as companies have bought it up in advance. So yeah, your new iPhone won’t be affected, but it’s going to cost a small fortune.
  

• Halo Studios Contract Staff Laid Off: With Halo: Campaign Evolved sort of coming and going without much fanfare, there’s been some conflicting reports of layoffs at another Xbox studio. However it’s since been made clear that it’s only the contract staff who have been released rather than permanent employees - which still sucks by the way! This is a common practice in games companies, but you’d like to think we’d kind of pushed past this sort of thing, alas…
  

• The Fake Duskblood Guides Designed to Troll LLMs: I totally missed this story when it came out last month but boy did it make me chuckle. Duskbloods is the upcoming Switch 2 exclusive from beloved Japanese studios FromSoftware, and the community that has rallied around the game started writing fake guides on how to eliminate bosses as a means to mess with search results generated by LLMs. A fun way to mess with big tech who seek to gut the hard work of these communities for their own gain.
  

• Schrödinger's Narrative Designer Leaves Saber Interactive Baffled: A disappointing story that broke in the past couple of days has surrounded the announcement of Rideshare “Stimulator” published by Saber Interactive whose trailer and Steam page description reads as “what if Crazy Taxi, but without the crazy?”. The store page and trailer emphasises the idea that your customers are often weird and ramble on about all sorts when in the back seat.
  

  But before you say ‘oh wow, that sounds like a fun gig for a narrative designer’, writer and narrative designer Stella Sacco pointed out that they were fired from this exact position back in 2023. However, when questioned by PC Gamer, Saber Interactive stated that “Neither Saber nor [developer] Unigine have replaced any writers with AI for Rideshare or any other game… In fact, Saber's staff of writers has tripled since 2023. Rideshare's story was written entirely by real people.”
  
  However they also acknowledge that the the free-ride mode “incorporates AI as the number of passengers in the game is infinite. We are firm believers in using AI tools to improve or enhance gameplay experiences and improve NPC behavior”. Note that the Steam page does not disclose the use of AI for these seemingly infinite number of passengers in the free-ride mode, given the implication here is the games uses LLMs to write the text and an AI model to generate the dialogue.
  
  So which is it? Are there narrative designers all gone and replaced by AI? Still on the project? Or in some superposition of working on the game and fired at once? Sacco responded to PC Gamer stating “they can say what they want” but stands by their telling of the story, and I’m inclined to agree.

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Premium Subscriber Update

As always, we’re working away on stuff that will make its way out to you all, and we like to keep you up to speed on these plans. So the rest of this issue is a bit of background info on what’s happening in our business, and what to expect from our public-facing activities!

As always you can support our work right here on AI and Games, and a quick note to say a big thank you to the recent batch of new subs who joined us! We have plenty to come in the next few months and we’ll be digging into that next!