Sony AI patent will see PlayStation games play themselves when players are stuck by Jordan Middler for VGC

As described in patent documents, ‘Ghost Player’ would see players call down an AI-generated “ghost” version of the player character, which could either play out the solution to a particular part of the level, or complete it entirely.

Sony ought to just take a play out of Nintendo's book. They devised a solution nearly 20 years ago.1

Here's an excerpt from the Super Mario Galaxy 2 manual, page 29;

"In some galaxies, the Cosmic Spirit will appear if you keep losing lives in the same place. Talk to the Cosmic Spirit and select YES to have her take you through the area up to the point where you get the Power Star. However, should you do this, the Power Star will become a Bronze Star. Try again by yourself to get the normal Power Star!"

To be fair, this is just a patent, not an announced feature. It'd certainly be a waste of resources though. It would be far better to integrate robust accessibility features and in-game support than letting GPUs watch videos of video games rendered by other GPUs. I suspect it will always be better to look up a guide, whether with Sony's built-in PS5 Game Help or, you know, online like the good ol' days.

Footnotes

  1. I actually think it is over 20 years, but I don't want to go down the rabbit hole to see which game first introduced an auto-complete assist if you die too much. I think it'd be one of the New Super Mario Bros. titles. ↩