The conversation around AI and its place in the video game industry’s future is one that grows and evolves with each passing day, but OMEA is a title that means to bring AI gaming to the present. The relevant questions are, does it succeed, and are audiences ready for it?
The potential appeal of AI gaming is easy to understand when considering a title like OMEA. The ability enter into a game’s world and take literally any action one can imagine is an attractive one, if one is able to separate it from the many questions around AI usage that accompany it.
But the idea of being able to do anything and have a full, proper game respond to those infinite actions has remained fantastical to this point. And while OMEA does represent an early step towards making it more of a reality, it’s also demonstrative of what limitations yet remain.
OMEA puts AI to good, but imperfect, gaming use
It’s easy to see what OMEA is going for in its AI gaming ambitions. The game’s initial adventure is centered around a viking warrior shipwrecked on a strange coast. The player is tasked with resolving the situation from there, with only a text prompt to use.
This isn’t an old-school adventure game in which a text prompt was just an opportunity to guess at specific keywords. Here, it truly allows the player to do as they please, so long as it’s within the boundaries established by the narrative.
Those boundaries, and the resulting text exchange, will likely feel familiar to anyone who has played around with narrative LLM (large language model) structures previously. The tone of the back-and-forth isn’t necessarily predictable, but it will feel familiar.
Certain elements are emphasized in ways that threaten the game’s attempt at immersion. A guiding crow, for example, persistently follows the player as their journey begins, and it always had something to say about any action our hero took. Its unwavering consistency, no matter how small our actions, made it feel artificial.
What separates OMEA from a miscellaneous model anyone could use to role-play is its trappings of a video game. There’s music, there are select sound effects, there are art displays for most encountered settings and certain characters, and everything is voiced (by AI, naturally). This step forward from a barebones model is dramatic, and for those unfamiliar with LLMs it may seem almost magical.
But there are still some kinks in this system. Words can be oddly pronounced or emphasized, speech can cut out entirely for periods of time, inputs don’t always appear or register cleanly, and the game’s logic can be confused when some circumstances aren’t made explicitly clear.
AI creates new storytelling opportunities, but limits their quality
The structure that’s built for the game’s narrative also forces rails around player progression. The all-encompassing freedom that is theoretically available through the use of AI prompts is in fact limited by the need to ground the game in its intended narrative direction. But the nature of that direction, of the events described and dialogue produced by it, is inherently limited by its generative origin.
This paints a central conflict in AI gaming. To present a curated experience, developers need to keep players on certain rails and within set boundaries, and need to introduce specific storytelling elements, be they characters or settings.
But the reliance on generative AI means that, even though these specific features are represented, they aren’t hand-crafted as is the case in a traditionally developed game. The dialogue hasn’t been written by a professional writer with specific intent. So the tradeoff OMEA makes, hand-crafted detail in exchange for freedom of imagination, is somewhat muted by its inherent need to keep the player stuck to its prescribed journey.
That’s not to say OMEA doesn’t create an enjoyable experience. It often does. It’s just a different experience that what traditional game narratives offer, rather than a better one.
There are some very light points of gameplay mixed in. Some actions require rolling dice for success, and “story points” can be selectively activated to make some rolls easier, or to retry after a failure. But the generative storytelling is the star of the show here, and the ability checks are ancillary at best.
The future of AI gaming is difficult to foresee, but titles like OMEA are clear attempts to further iterate on it. We expect to see OMEA continue to fine-tune its own approach, while other, similar games come into the market and test where the boundaries of this new take on the form actually exist.
