Dead Space creator Glen Schofield says he’s “100% behind AI,” already using Midjourney for early ideas, and explains why it still can’t replace artists.
Dead Space co-creator and former Call of Duty studio lead Glen Schofield has never been shy about big swings. After shipping The Callisto Protocol in 2022, he’s now shopping a new pitch, a dark action-adventure inspired by an Egyptian mystery, that he calls “conservative AAA,” targeting under $100 million.
Against that backdrop, he’s also thinking hard about where AI fits in game development. In a new interview, Schofield lays out a practical view: AI is already useful in the early stages, but it isn’t a magic button that spits out finished worlds. The conversation comes from The Game Business’s interview with Schofield.
Glen Schofield on AI in Video Games
Schofield says he’s “100% behind AI,” comparing it to past tech shifts like Photoshop and motion capture that didn’t erase jobs so much as raise expectations. “It always raises the bar,” he notes.
“I remember when motion capture, you know, that was going to take jobs away,” Schofield said. “I look at animation departments now and, you know, they could be 30 people. It always raises the bar. It’s raising it now for me when I’m, you know, coming up with ideas or coming up with worlds or, you know, I dig, dig, dig really, really deep now with AI stuff. And the biggest problem I have is trying to cull through some of these.”
He’s already using AI tools for early concepting and worldbuilding. He feeds ideas into Midjourney and wants smarter curation to handle the flood of images: “Because I’m going in different directions, and then I’m taking it into Midjourney, and I wish I had ways I could just take things into Midjourney.
“And then I wish that it could art-direct like me and pick out the top 10. So I see ways that I could be really efficient in actually showing my vision. Right? I can get this all out.”
Schofield also touched on the growing talk around “prompt engineers” in game development. “I hear people going, ‘Well, we’re going to have prompt engineers,’ and we probably will. But I tend to think I’m already going to chat and saying, ‘OK, this is the description of what I want. Write me a very detailed prompt.’ And about 50% work. You know what I mean? That number will get better. At some point, even prompts will be taken away.”
At the same time, he pushes back on the idea that AI can produce finished levels on command: “But there’s going to be other jobs. I don’t know exactly what they are. We are going to need artists. I mean, you can’t just go, press a button, and now I’ve got this world, right? If the guy says, press a button, I’ve got a world in like 10 minutes. I’m like, oh yeah, where are those little hidden places that you want the character to be? And like, you’ve got the tree, and you’ve got to move the tree over, and you’ve got… come on.”
Schofield admitted that AI is still in a messy stage right now, with too many fragmented tools for studios to rely on it fully. In the meantime, he says developers still need to keep making games, which means always looking for smarter ways to work.
“It’s going to have to settle down a little bit before we can actually use it. So we’ve got to continue to make games. So I look for clever ideas to make the game cheaper. At the same time, I’ll always be looking for tools. Somebody was saying that in AAA, you don’t look for tools, but that’s all we do. We always want tools, right? We have tools departments. So yeah, we’re always trying to make it cheaper, if we can, and more efficient and faster and better.”
“I am 100% behind AI, because I’ve been there for a lot of these [moments]. I was there for the beginning of the internet when they said everyone would have a website. And now everybody does. AI is here, just work with it.”
In related news, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick recently said he doesn’t believe AI will wipe out jobs in the video game industry. Instead, he sees it as another tool that can help teams work more efficiently, similar to how past technologies were adopted.
What do you think? Are tools like Midjourney already changing how games start on the drawing board, or does AI still have to prove itself in day-to-day development?
