u/Zovsky_

Hey guys! Long time lurker, first time poster :')

Like many of us, I really loved Anthem. I didn't grind it too much after finishing it, but I loved the world, the lore, and well, the flight mechanics.

Small disclaimer, I work in AI. World models to be specific, this kind of interactive video generators. And I had this idea nagging me: could I use the tech I'm working on to recreate Anthem? Not the real game mind you, but kind of a memory of it.

What you can see here is the AI generating the world live as you fly through it. So yeah, it's a playable memory of Anthem, not a restoration. Bad news: it's free roam flight only. No combat, no loot, no story, no multiplayer, and there's a fair bit of clunkyness / lag.

Good news: you can play it directly in your browser, nothing to install, no account, and ofc free here. I'll keep it up for a limited time because it runs on GPUs that cost a bit. I'm not gonna pretend the feeling is the same. It's not. But at the rate these models are improving, I have high hopes we could have something way better real soon! The more general note is: this makes me think that this could be a way to preserve the games being killed going forward, as there always be footage / screens that can be used to reseed these models.

Hope it brings a bit of it back.

Cheers!

Hey guys! A little bit of context, I’ve been experimenting with building games on real-time video world models for the better part of a year. We trained our own model first, then switched to OS ones. Here’s an excerpt of a scenario running on Lingbot:

This scene combines objects interaction, gating, and world events to enable the progression

Overall, here’s what I learned:

First, and the obvious: a world model is not a game. It’s an excellent renderer, aka it’ll paint a forest where you're a beaver, beautifully, but nothing counts the trees you cut and nothing knows you're building a dam. The state, the rules, etc have live outside the model.
A pure video world model means you need eyes. Since you can't “reach” inside it (most of them are not trained on game states) so the only way to know what happened is to look at the pixels. We actually had that intuition early: our first demos already used frame comparison to trigger events (damage, win or lose states). Today it's a tiny VLM (moondream) running every beat, asking dumb questions, "is the player holding the branch?", and writing the answers back into game state.
Latency beats quality: a gorgeous frame every 2 seconds is a demo, the same model in a loop fast enough to answer you is a game. You need to orchestrate several models (world model, VLM, LLM game master on Cerebras, streamed voice with lip-sync) without a hitch to maintain the illusion.
Generated NPCs only work with deterministic gates: even if the conversation is live and lip-synced, the win condition has to be handled by the external state: each character hides a disposition plus a key phrase or item that moves them, and every line is checked against that.

Full writeup is here, happy to answer any questions!

Bringing back Anthem's exploration...somewhat

What I learned turning video world models into games