This is definitely a good way to go; not only does it decouple the AI generated assets from the game, but in doing so lets you get a picture of how important they are to your players. It might be that everyone grabs the DLC despite it being AI generated, or it might be that a large chunk avoid it because of that. That would be useful information for your next game.
That’s actually a very interesting way to tackle the whole thing and opens up an even broader scope than it seems at first sight.
The base game has simple text-only character “speech” with no portraits.
AI generated character portraits with AI-generated voices is a free DLC released alongside the game.
For my specific case there would be no gameplay differences in having or not the DLC installed, only a simpler or fancier version of character interaction.
Also given that some of that stuff is going to be a lot of voice recordings, it makes the base game much smaller.
Its give gamers a choice, which is as it should be IMHO, and it also gives me feedback on how many people would rather have a less fancy version without AI generated elements over having a fancier version with AI generated elements.
notabot@piefed.social 18 hours ago
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
From there, it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to make it moddable, so people could even create their own voice packs and portraits if they wanted