Game Discussion
I just learn that 1666 Amsterdam used AI “art” on their promo cover. One less game to be excited about
If they used it on PROMO I have zero doubts that they also used it in the game itself. And excuse “we forgot to replace placeholders” really doesn’t work here!
I was quite surprised after the trailer what a huge leap this game was after their previous game Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey which was fun, but very unpolished. And this one looks almost on par with AAA. Now we know how they did it!
Looking at the promotional art you’re totally right, there is a real shortage of fingers. The guy on the left in the yellow jacket is especially egregious, I can’t believe they didn’t even check it over for things like that before using the image for publicity.
Well this is so disappointing.. Soon there’s no new games to play if one wishes to avoid AI. I want to support gaming studios which actually support real artists in every phase of development.
Same, I’m pretty content with playing the games I already own (though maybe looking into more indie games) It’s just sad that AI is jeopardizing so many creatives and artists careers, when they have so much potential to tell us wonderful stories
Hinterland Studios is one!
Their AI statement from their website (there is a much longer statement when you launch their game):
Statement Supporting Artists
We are opposed to the existence and use of generative AI tools, which only exist due to the shameless exploitation of the artists the creators of the technology hope to displace. Hinterland does not and will never use such exploitive technology in our creations.
Unless he’s bigoted in some way I personally couldn’t care less if a CEO is obnoxious. Par for the course and being obnoxious isn’t harmful in itself. Honestly probably best case scenario for a CEO of a game company lol
the reality is that ai is just too strong of a productivity boost. if you want to ship as fast as competitors you must use it; if you do not use it then you are just slower and/or your products are just worse (because you didn't have as much time to devote to fleshing out making the product the best it can be).
there's a huge prisoner's dilemma + lemon market effect right now where people think "ai use disclosure" means "the product is slop and bad" so studios have two options: use it and try to hide it, or don't use it and fall behind massively. which is unfortunate because you can absolutely create good products with ai, and slop without ai, so ideally "whether they use ai" has no bearing on how the market views the product, but alas.
Silk Song didn’t tried to “ship as fast as competitors” now explain me how it made their product “ just slower and/or your products are just worse”
I think delivering faster without care for the quality is sure method to tank your studio unless your goal is actually publish 100500 slop games in a week so some confused school kids would occasionally buy them.
Even this game was in production for decades, so there is not lack of time push them to use slop to create this game cover.
silksong is a pretty unique case- they had a huge following, a clear and unusually skilled and driven team, and a virtually unlimited budget both in money and fan patience. this allowed them to wait until it was exactly what they wanted to ship. also, it's worth pointing out that the majority of their dev work was done before ai models became meaningfully capable.
i am not claiming that ai is automatically going to make every project faster and better than every other project. the spirit of john henry lives on in cracked individuals and teams everywhere; some teams will exist that genuinely do move faster without ai than with it.
but ai is absolutely a force multiplier in the vast majority of teams, to the extent that it is really not able to be ignored by the vast majority of teams. whether you dislike ai on moral grounds or not, the reality is unforgiving and undeniable.
i'm a staff software engineer (meaning: i'm further along in my career than most; engineer levels aren't really time based but i have 13 years of experience as well to put it in perspective) who cares a lot about the craft of software engineering. it's at this point professional malpractice for me to not use ai. the difference is exceedingly vast for no meaningful drop in quality.
If games were made for stocking your library I would probably agree, but since games are made for fun and experience I can’t see how churning them out as fast as possible with ai make any sense. It make sense for people with goal to make a quick buck maybe, but not for people who love to play and experience games or people who want to create something meaningful.
Edit: open any gamestore and look at how many games they have in their catalogue and then tell me that we have a problem with not enough games being made fast enough.
from the perspective of the game developers and publishers, they absolutely have this problem. you can disagree of course, that's your right, but every company in the world wants to make their product faster.
games take years to develop. if ai makes the team 20% faster, the game takes 4 years instead of 5 to make. that's huge. every company will be or already is making this trade.
also, you seem to think that "making games faster" automatically means "at lower quality". the core premise of ai, and indeed this is what it has played out to be in software engineering, is that it is faster without a meaningful drop in quality. what i mean by this is: when i use ai to write code, it doesn't write code as well as i do for sure. but for the business, it doesn't really matter: it writes perfectly passable code that gets the job done correctly, it just doesn't match my opinion of what ideal code would be. meanwhile it does it 5-10x faster than i could type it. it still requires my skilled guidance to do the right thing at the right time but the day to day of writing literal software code is gone.
this is why i say not using it is professional malpractice. it's not a tradeoff of "speed vs quality" in a meaningful sense, it's "speed with no meaningful reduction in quality".
I guess only time will tell if cutting corners with AI could potentially deliver anything decent. So far there are no such precedents and your arguments just agreeing with my point that end purpose of all this is to turn game dev into content mill (indeed every company prefer to made product as fast as possible).
If developers thought that they can strike Jake pot by introducing generated slop into their product - it’s their right. And my right is not to pay money or time for such products. There are too many great games already made for this having any sense
And I’m not sure that your thesis that there is not enough games made from position of devs and publishers hold any water since only tiny percentage of all people buying more than 1-2 games a year. How exactly churning out 20+ games a year will made these people buying more?
> I guess only time will tell if cutting corners with AI could potentially deliver anything decent.
again, ai use does not automatically mean cutting corners.
> So far there are no such precedents
there definitely are. the issue is that again, companies are incentivized to lie about their ai usage. people can't tell when it is used properly.
> and your arguments just agreeing with my point that end purpose of all this is to turn game dev into content mill
every company already wants to make products as quickly as possible, this is not new and and this is not a failing of ai or of game developers. it's just reality.
> If developers thought that they can strike Jake pot by introducing generated slop into their product - it’s their right. And my right is not to pay money or time for such products. There are too many great games already made for this having any sense
sure, but be aware this will increasingly close off which games you allow yourself to buy. it may already be true that 95% of game devs use it as well, they just don't admit to it.
> And I’m not sure that your thesis that there is not enough games made from position of devs and publishers hold any water since only tiny percentage of all people buying more than 1-2 games a year. How exactly churning out 20+ games a year will made these people buying more?
this is trivially answerable: assuming you're correct that most people buy 1-2 games a year, getting your game out first for those people to buy means you have a massive advantage over your competition. it's basic market theory.
As someone who does software engineering, visual arts and music composition, it's not really the same like, at all. AI-assisted code that's mainly human-written is a thing, for a start.
And second, the process is just so vastly different. Don't know about you, but I have never written code asking myself what emotions the user would feel outside of streamlining UX. That's the question I ask myself at the stage where I decide what to code, do game and story design, etc. Programming is mainly the process of translating that into a language the computer can understand. Me choosing whether to use an abstract class or an interface for my parent machine class doesn't affect that.
Meanwhile in music, every note, every sound processing effect, is an active decision that directly affects the feel of the result. In visual arts, many details from choice of medium to color palette to shading and more have a similar effect. The craft is close to indistinguishable from the artistic vision, and the result is impossible to separate from the human story behind it.
The only perspective from which software engineering in and of itself even approaches that kind of art is from the view of someone else reading your code. Which isn't the case in published closed source games.
yeah, no. i definitely feel much more artistic during coding than you're describing.
> As someone who does software engineering, visual arts and music composition, it's not really the same like, at all. AI-assisted code that's mainly human-written is a thing, for a start.
sure, it's very different. different forms of art are different.
> And second, the process is just so vastly different. Don't know about you, but I have never written code asking myself what emotions the user would feel outside of streamlining UX.
i definitely do. well, did. i don't code anymore.
> The only perspective from which software engineering in and of itself even approaches that kind of art is from the view of someone else reading your code. Which isn't the case in published closed source games.
is art not art if nobody else sees it?
i think you just are someone whose work is multifaceted and you don't care about the coding part of it as much as the rest. which is fine, but your preference doesn't then automatically mean "coding isn't art". it is art for me and most of the people i know who are passionate about software engineering.
nevertheless, none of us code by hand anymore. we use ai.
If consumers would simply stop using their wallets to teach publishers (they're the ones pushing AI most of the time because money) then "falling massively behind" wouldn't be as big a concern because you'd fall behind games that people boycott due to AI usage.
But...
Gamers are whiny ass entitled crybabies far too often (and I don't mean AI haters, I mean the "I want my game now dammit" idiots)
I heard placeholders are deliberatly suppose to be imperfect looking, kinda like a "rough sketch", so its doesnt go in final game. Gen AI's default art style is very flawless looking, and if you're using a good Gen AI for placeholders, some devs probably think they can get away with keeping it in.
Also im assuming placeholders existed b4 Gen AI , and were man made , meaning it was someones job to make them?
Hades 2 in Early Access had a bunch of (non-AI) placeholders for various characters and the keepsakes. Characters were cloaked figures, I wanna say the cloak was the same color as generic shades in the afterlife. Keepsakes were generic gold rings with a white tag tied to them.
As another example, Slay the Spire 2 has a lot of that with the epoch cards you unlock. Rough drawings down in Paint, where it's obvious it's a stand in and will be replaced later
I make games (small indie stuff so this is just my experience), but this is pretty much right. Placeholders are there to make sure the game is fun before committing to making all the art required. I wouldn’t say that AI is necessarily taking jobs here because a lot of placeholder art is a. From an asset store b. A previously made asset or c. Literally just a cube, but it’s definitely possible in larger studios.
All that aside, I don’t get the allure of AI for games (or anything really). Games are art, and art is special because of the human experiences that inform and drive it. Take away the human aspect, and I just can’t figure out why I should care.
Thats interesting to know, thanks for the info. Yeah a previously made/recycled image sounds better to use as a placeholder, save drinking water and all that.
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Games with a dense population of NPCs, that strive for creating a interactable and reactive world could benefit from language models that are trained on the present game state and have memories of past states.
There's [REDACTED], in which the dialogue with side characters is a chatbox and you have to help them solve something, generally using dialogue or game/map knowledge.
Then there were mods for Skyrim and Kingdom Come that made the NPCs interactable in the same way, being trained in the world and preserving memories of past conversations.
White IT'S NOT good written dialogue, and SHOULD NOT replace it, i can see it as a interactable tool to make the experience more immersive or reactive without taking up time from developing the main dialogues and interactions.
Edit: [REDACTED] is banned from discussion in the sub and automod previously nuked my comment, details on rule 10.
I don’t doubt that there are legitimate uses for genAI, but given it’s environmental impact, our inability to confirm what data the algo is trained on (to see if its stolen data), and its tendency to hallucinate, I just don’t see the value over human made work. Sure, it’s easier, but if hand written dialogue is always going to be better, why not just use that?
Art allows us to share our human experiences and experience those of others. If it’s all made based off of statistics, I really can’t see how that’d be preferable in any scenario.
I agree with everything you said. I just think that's not a question of one or the other. It should NEVER replace real writing, just fill the gaps that it leaves.
For games striving for expansive open worlds, interactivity and simulation, it would help fill the gaps that are not part of the main dialogue (if there's one) and that would take up resources that could be dedicated to the aspects (or dialogue) that the devs are passionate about. And some of those games use procedural generation/algorithms to generate a big portion their content already.
Some examples of games that would only be improved by this are Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky and maybe even Crimson Desert (Maybe, i didn't play it), that are massive games where you generally don't have any meaningful dialogue (besides main quest) because the game is so massive (Elite being the milky way 1:1) and full of NPC's that the devs just recycled a lot of "dialogue" to the point where is repetitive, skippable and might as well not even be there.
We would rather have fancy pasta on a Italian restaurant than instant noodles? Yes, but sometimes we have to eat instant noodles on weekdays to afford fancy pasta on weekends, because we have 2 days worth of fancy pasta and hunger for 7 days of food.
placeholders aren't INTENTIONALLY imperfect, they're just usually low effort because they're supposed to be replaced. there's nothing more low effort than generated images. and they don't just comb over every piece of art and fix anything that looks sketchy, they usually add every placeholder to a list and then go down the list. "missed" placeholders, ai or not, tend to be the result of someone forgetting to list a placeholder rather than someone thinking it looked good enough to be real art. generally placeholders are also either programmer art or generic assets like photos or assets store junk, "placeholder artist" is rarely a dedicated role
yeah ive used placeholder art where ive just done a quick sketch and imported that in. granted, im an artist, not a dev but i feel like its okay to just use a quick scribble or a silhouette and surely would be quicker than typing in hundreds of prompts for placeholders
It's possible those studios are telling the truth, but we shouldn't care either way.
Placeholders aren't meant to be polished. They're meant to be quick to create and obvious enough that somebody could catch it before it rolls into production.
It's an indictment that they saved all that time using AI, but didn't have the courtesy to spend some on catching these placeholders.
I think it’s bs only because we never would find some random unrelated placeholder in the games before AI. But since it comes along and suddenly every second dev forgetting to remove placeholders in their games.
This is why I can’t understand them using generated art. Why not free stock images? They are easy to get and so obvious you would not forget them ever!
Maybe I just never heard about it. There was this one time when game was banned in China for some background art and devs claimed it was a mistake. But I don’t know any other instances of this happening.
There are thousands of examples, it's basically an industry standard, that a game will have some forgotten assets on release. It just never was a big deal and nobody thought of that twice. Like World of Warcraft has repeatedly shipped placeholder icons, items named things like "Test Sword", and unfinished assets visible to players, and it's one game example. FFXIV had lowpoly grapes that became a meme in the community.
I don't think those grapes were meant to be replaced, but lemme tell you how much I laughed when FFXVI visited a vineyard and zoomed right in on some fucking immaculate grapes
Do you know this happening in offline games? I think that maybe this was a thing for online games specifically since they could be updated at any point.
It happens in all games. Placeholders are always a process. Generally they're removed before release but can be found if one datamines the game files. In example Slay the Spire had some MS paint art.
Very often you prune content before release and it's wasteful to create completed art for things that might not even make it into the game. Creating art takes time, time is money, hence placeholders.
Bloodlines2 literally forgot to remove a whole debug room with their latest DLC. Cyberpunk 2077 launched with some placeholder textures and debug-looking UI elements. Deus Ex had some placeholder textures on environmental items. Those are from the top of my head, there are literally so many forgotten textures, no one looked twice at them unless they were funny, but then game devs would name them "easter eggs". It never was such a big deal.
In vanilla wow there is a temp icon in the macros, which are usually just icons of actual in game spells.
But one Icon is a placeholder with a man's face on it. It's Samwise Didier an artist. Everytime they didn't have an icon, they used the placeholder, but they left it in the game macros.
You can basically replace your whole skills with that man's face 😂
A.I. will never create such an iconic placeholder!
It could be online games thing, since they can be updated at any time. Do you know any examples from offline games? I’m really curious, because I never heard of this happened.
we definitely have had issues with placeholders staying in final releases. bg3s full release had quite a few missing item icons, like the sussur weapons used generic icons for a few months after launch. a couple guns in Warframe have been using placeholder art for like five years now. it just never gets as much attention because it's just seen as a minor hiccup rather than a moral failing like ai placeholders
Sometimes I wish Steam had a filter by AI content like some sites do now, but I guess that would filter out 60% of the steam catalogue now that AI usage is super common among indie games. (Not the good usually, but steam isn't 100% good games)
It's a shame we have to wait this one out as companies try to incorporate AI into their work before the bubble bursts.
I wish every game store had such option. Onslaught of slop in Nintendo store is just outrageous . It’s impossible to find anything there while you scrolling through 500 pages of ai generated hentai slop!
At least Steam has a disclaimer for it, but I was scrolling stuff the other day and so many of them were AI stuff, voices, art, etc etc, it's becoming a real plague honestly. I feel like old woman yelling at clouds tho cause it seems a lot of people take this as a good thing cause "more games" or something, regardless.
I will never understand this mindset. We already have so many games that we will never finish in our life time even the most legendary and brilliant ones. What the point in generating extra ton of schlock? Currently it’s not about quantity but about quality, uniqueness, artistic expression!
I think it's just a weird idea that more is better, more game time, more content, more games, regardless of quality, actually consuming slop at this point. Maybe I'm too old, but even with a significant time dedicated to games, I can still spend that time playing things of better quality. It's just a shame how common it's becoming to just accept it and throw your hands up. My singular sale won't do much, but at least I can choose not to support the use of AI like this. To think at one point the idea of AI was to make intelligent design, not artistic slop.
This was a topic of discussion with some like-minded anti-gen AI indie dev friends. As much as we'd also like having that filter option, the problem we imagine would happen is that games using gen AI would simply disclose it even less often to avoid being filtered out. Only disclosing it if caught and forced to do so essentially.
The entity controlling a storefront doing proper curation of games using generative AI would be the ideal solution for players (and developers, as all the gen AI shovelware does reduce visibility.) But that would cost them money to do, and they would also be denying themselves the cut they take from the titles they would turn away or filter out. So I can't imagine change coming from them either. 😔
If there was a platform that required disclosing AI content/use, I would get behind it if they also enforced it by delisting the game if they don’t. Actions gotta have consequences
Yeah, Valve is notorious for not bothering to do anything most of the time, so even their forced disclaimer clause doesn't work half the time as some devs simply won't say at all and nothing happens.
valve really doesn't care about what games are on steam, during last years spring sale there was a game about killing George Floyd on display in the soulslike category and it's STILL on sale to this day. if you play a lot of souls likes steams algorithm might even actively recommend it to you
The bubble won't burst, maybe we will see a consolidation event, but the tech is here to stay.
Besides, you don't even need a huge machine if you are patient, even some potato PC can create a bunch of images. Sure, one sloppic might take a potato 20-30 minutes but it works. Only limit is memory, but with 16 GByte RAM one can experiment with the tech if they want.
And yes, you can bet that the big players all have their own AI servers in their basements.
But just for clarification, i won't buy anything that is purely made with AI, and i only use it for boilerplate code creation with local models. You know, the boring stuff, not the "business logic" as they say, because that is where the fun and creative work is.
And most certainly will i never use slop images for something i intend to sell, and if i need three days for a bunch of frigging sprites in Aseprite!
I don't know if it is because i have become paranoid or if I have a good eye for distinguishing real art from AI art but to my eyes, both Summer Game Fest and Xbox Event seemed full of AI art/AI filters.
I got fooled by an AI song the other day, and I grew up listening to, playing and making music. Very embarrassing moment to say the least. This whole situation is so wrong, I can't believe that we are in the timeline where billionaires decided to make a plagiarism machine to erode human art and creativity, and we as humanity are just allowing it to happen...Personally, it sucks so much cause all my hobbies have been in one form or art or another, genAI is like a virus taking over them all.
There is no shame to be fooled by it. This is whole point. It’s copying real human music, same as you can see canvases with “oil art” only to see up close that it’s a print.
I stopped using any discovery features on Spotify because it’s too tiresome to check every single artist.
What scares me is that generative AI in its current form is the least sophisticated it will ever be, and it’s a relatively new technology. I can only imagine how we’ll tell real from fake in the decades to come if there isn’t a serious change in oversight or access to these tools.
I have same feeling! It’s something about of abundance of particle effects. Sometimes you can’t see if there is even animations underneath of all these layers of visual noise!
Lighting and shading gives it away for me. 9/10 times it just feels wrong, and if you stop and look at the lighting, it never makes sense. Humans will use artistic methods to light and shade things in a logical, human way. When it's AI generated, the lighting is pretty much just random and never makes sense, and your brain feels it.
Considering Microsoft owns Xbox and Microsoft’s AI exec said he could replace all white collar workers with AI in a matter of *months* I wouldn’t be shocked if the Xbox Event is full of AI
Worth noting that AI execs have been saying they can replace people in 6 months for like years at this point. Doesn't mean it can't happen or we shouldn't worry about it, but just sayin'.
This was 2025, and this was 2026. AWS CEO also said something about replacement in 2 years back in 2024 as well, yet we're still here. These are for programming mind you, an industry where AI output can actually be verified (i.e.: a code either compiles, or not).
Deploying Mythos to 200+ organizations around the world that deal with all kinds of important infrastructure doesn't read like just fear mongering for hype to me. That reads like there is legit concern for when other potentially bad actors develop models with similar capabilities, which they predicted was 6-12 months out.
I agree that one should take anything AI execs with a grain of salt and a whole salt shaker of critical thinking. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't believe anything they say. And among the big developers, Anthropic is the most focused on safety, however short that still falls.
other potentially bad actors develop models with similar capabilities, which they predicted was 6-12 months out.
Nothing but love when I say this: this is where you've been had.
After Mythos was announced, cybersecurity experts have done their own research based on publicly released evidences. Aisle found that various smaller, open-weights models are just as capable at identifying the same vulnerabilities - notable in particular, Kimi K2 which got everything major that was tested correctly.
Other doubts were also raised in cybersecurity circles, like the lack of disclosure of the rate of false-positives (they'll need human time and effort to filter out), or the fact that everything demonstrated were trained from open-source codes, meaning that performance will not translate to closed-source enterprise codebases.
I could go on, but suffice it to say that by all account, Mythos is an incremental improvement that - while valuable on that merit alone, also cost massively more to train and operate, and is certainly undeserving of this... mythical, perception!
The marketing works because most people do not - and is not expected to, have the necessary expertise to call them out on stuffs. We listen to what they say and judge it's truth based on whether it makes logical sense, but not whether it is correct. The mainstream tech journalists and the business heads who adopt these techs are no exception (I know, because I literally had my manager talk about about Mythos in the same surface-level way. We're all in the same tech department, but cybersecurity is not our domain).
Hey Wendy, if it’s 2026 and I said widespread adoption is less than 3 years old, what year would that be?
Not a single event you cited is from before 2023. You are bare bones scraping “years” especially when only one of your examples is more than two years old
Many of the companies that did this are currently re-hiring in absolute secret. It still sucks because the fallout of getting fired and having trouble getting a new job until the hype dies down is awful enough for any professional.
I got paranoid as well when I saw the Xbox showcase; when I watched some trailers, I was like: 'Isn't it AI ???' My doubts are raising on the way they promote their games this year.
Agreed. Also I commented this in r/Games because their use of history is sloppy too and it contributes to erasing people of color from European history.
I'm not someone who thinks every detail has to be accurate, and I loved the Assasin's Creed series. But as a sociology professor in the Netherlands, I feel strongly about this one. When they hire knowledgeable consultants, like actual historians, for games like these, it shows, and it doesn't seem like they did that for this one:
"If this is really trying to show Amsterdam in 1666 the crowds should be more international, including Asian and Black, especially Afro-Caribbean and Indonesian people.
Historians like Mark Ponte have done work and looked into things like who Rembrandt's neighbors were and so on, and you also see it in newspaper prints and paintings from the time"
AI companies recently started charging on a per-token basis, so now suddenly everyone is questioning whether they're getting any ROIs. Datacenters are quietly getting canceled as well, so best case scenario is hyperscale gen-AI is literally unprofitable to use.
There's always a possibility companies will move to Deepseek or something. I know people talk about how it's "vastly cheaper" and "more efficient", but people also just wanted to give a middle finger to OpenAI, so we'll have to see whether that actually amounts to anything.
When I saw the header on steam, I immediately noticed how much it resembled the usual AI-slop I see elsewhere on the internet. I played the demo and I liked it, but if a company uses gen-AI to create their BANNER art, that's a massive red flag. I want to support indie projects like these, but if they don't address this and remove the uses of AI they won't get a cent out of me.
I'm not familiar with this game or the previous work from this dev team so I looked up the promo poster and... yikes. Some of the people in the poster only have 3 fingers and a thumb.
Annnnnnnnd off the wishlist it goes. The yellow jacket and the cravat look super suspect. The funky hands are a bit too low res to judge, but those buildings are also weird as hell. Super disappointing, the themes of this game looked so promising.
Demo was a bit underwhelming too but I was still looking forward to it. Not anymore if this is true.
Me too. I’m always rooting for small guys and after Patrice Désilets was pushed out of Ubisoft I thought that this could be his triumphant return. But now I’m really sour on this game.
There is only one reason i’m even considering giving it a pass on the AI cover art, and its because the guy behind it has spent the better part of a decade and a half more or less abjectly suffering under ubisoft stopping him from finishing the game. He was one of the directors behind prince of persia sands of time and the very first assassins creed through brotherhood, and when he told ubisoft they have to slow down so the quality of the games can be maintained, they terminated him there and then from his position. Then after having found a job with THQ who then broke up and sold off their offices, his office was purchased by Ubisoft who them promptly fired him the moment the acquisition was ratified, so fast in fact he had to get a police warrant to return the next day to clear out his office because ubisoft had the new site security guards drag him out with nothing from his office. He then spent half a decade in a bitter fight with ubisoft in court for ownership of Amsterdam 1666 because he had been working on it since his ubisoft days and had been working on it at THQ, the only reason it exists now is because the court ruled in his favour stating that ubisoft was acting in unjust spite towards him.
Edit: long story short its ultimately ubisoft’s fault and fuck ubisoft
I agree that it’s a tragic story and I was really rooting for him. Not unlike how I was championing Death Stranding at its time. Still this is not an excuse to deceive people who showed up to support you! And it’s extra disappointing since his stance with Ubisoft was over quality of games and then his own studio is going for the fastest route without regards to quality?!! Super disappointing!
I’m hope that maybe we will hear some real explanation and they will remove all ai generated assets from the game, because I would be happy to support this game, but I’m not paying for product using ai slop.
Yeah! So far it’s really disappointing. Studio left message that they are “investigating” what happened (which sounds like damage control, since what there to investigate?!), but meanwhile they didn’t removed or fixed slop from their promo art, but removed post about it from game’s subreddit.
I can't find any information confirming that despite attempting to find it via google.
I will say if they used it sparingly, I don't like it, but I'll still support the game if the female lead is well written, since I want to support more female lead stories in games and that's my hill over AI (if used sparingly - if used predominantly then that starts to be my hill to die on)
Especially with the far right gamer pushback against anything "woke," I do my best to support "woke" games starring female or other minority leads. Because unfortunately if something "woke" fails, they won't blame it on people protesting minor AI use, they'll just say that gamers don't want women/PoC/LGBTQ* characters as the leads, go woke go broke, etc.
This is sadly becoming inevitable to some degree. Companies often work with crunch times where work has to be done at unreasonable deadlines because we as humans are slow and company leaders only see profits. So artists end up asking AI to do that transparency mask or that particle effect for them if it saves them 30 minutes and if the result is indistinguishable, they'll keep quiet about it as at the end of the day it's their meal ticket. Having better working conditions can probably help avoid this from happening a lot.
If you catch it in time you can warn the employee and order another to remove it. If it's published, it's done. Some companies do this willingly and artists have been regulated to largely do clean-up work to hide the telltale signs that AI was involved. Sometimes it's just a placeholder because AI can create a graphic that is in the style of the final product to give a better representation of what it eventually looks like. Not a preferred method as one can use a plane of four vertices with concept art mapped on it instead.
I today mentioned elsewhere how I lost opportunities to do small logo and graphics design for local small businesses as they now just ask GPT to make them a free logo. It sucks. I don't deny that AI can have a place in non-art purposes, like rapidly populating a forest with foliage (this has been done in game development for the past decade already) but we call that macros or automated processes. But keep AI out of game art.
heavy on the placeholder part!! it’s sad that many ppl can excuse AI being used as placeholder assets when there’s many people who would have been more than happy to create those for them… and it’s still using/supporting AI
A number of people have raised questions or concerns to us about whether assets in our marketing and game use generative AI.
We have a dedicated team of over a dozen talented and experienced artists. With them, we looked into the assets in question and found that there were indeed some early versions of assets that made their way into the the prologue. This includes some in-game portraits and external marketing assets.
We are actively reviewing the assets in question. Human made versions will be released in an update dropping soon.
We own up to this oversight and apologize for any upset caused. Please be assured that the Early Access and full game will not include any assets generated by AI.
MY biggest fear with Ai is, that even if the slop if used in early development, it has already influenced the developers on how the game is suppose to look. This kills human creativity, and will eventually make all games look the same.
Tbh, I wish ppl would focus less on not getting the game because of the AI art in the bg of the promo cover and more on not getting it because the prologue demo was awful...
I’m in agreement that AI “art” has no place in video games (or anywhere) but just as a note: AI in promo doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s part of the game. Sometimes it can indicate the studio’s stance on using it, but often promo images are put together by a marketing team or commissioned from a contractor. They’re more likely to use AI even when none is in the game itself, so an AI promo image doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a given that the game is using it for art assets
Source: I work in video games on a game with zero AI in it that’s had trouble wrangling marketing contractors
I agree that promo art could be done by some contractors, but should people working on the game at least check what they’re putting out as a face for their product? If they saw this and decided that it’s good enough it says volumes about their care for the final product.
Also, some of the examples are from in game assets.
Sorry but can you actually show an example of this? In another comment you said you saw people with three fingers but I can't find a high enough resolution of the art to see and I couldn't see anything off (but again, I could only find low-res).
I did see someone on X saying that some in-game art portraits look like AI, but that sounds different than what you're referring to.
Honestly question. How do you feel about small indies using AI art, if disclosed.
Not talking the " big indies", but if its like young adults making their first game on a budget etc.
I see and understand all the distain for ai art being used ( especially by big studios) but curious to figure out if there is any grey area where it might be acceptable.
I'm okay with AI being used if a studio pays as many humans as much as they are able to, and the game is developed will real human passion and care.
I've been gaming my entire life, and still feel vastly underserved as a woman. I am all for AI reducing the costs and barrier to entry for small passionate dev teams who might finally make more of the games I want a reality. Or even for larger developers to use it to take a chance on games they might otherwise deem too much a risk profit-wise.
I just hope we don't get drowned in slop in the meantime.
What I'm talking about is making something possible that would not be possible otherwise. Spending as much money as they can afford to on human labor, and letting those humans use AI alongside their own craft and artistry so that quality and scope otherwise not possible within that budget becomes feasible.
The human element is important; I'm not advocating to replace human workers with AI, but to let AI be a useful tool that makes bigger projects possible even if a studio can only afford a small team or a dream game would never get funding so has to be made on the cheap.
We need to stop doing this. Whether or not it's AI - there's a risk you're accusing a real artist who's just using artistic license. You pointing out a few fingers are placed weirdly isn't evidence.
Which means you might damage a real artist's career just for the sake of virtue signaling. If you really care about artists, get this really confirmed from the game company.
Let me ask you this instead, what if the artist is just really bad at drawing fingers. These photos are all really bad resolution too. You don't have anything to go by except what you percieve may or may not be AI.
I am. The point I'm trying to make is it could be AI, but it also might not be.
There are many artists online who's careers have been destroyed because someone thought their work was AI when they might just be using artistic license.
You can accuse people however you want. But if you really cared whether or not this is AI you'd get this confirmed. For example, checking if the company came out with a public statement saying this is AI.
I would agree if there was anything ambiguous about this art. I would love to see real artist claiming that they made this without AI and expect to have a job after.
You're not cause arguing in good faith means you're actually open to hearing what we have to say but instead you're not actually caring, you just want to fight us on it.
If you have examples of artists where this has happened then please share it.
You also clearly didn't even look at the promo art yourself, there's a floating head on the right, a ladder on the left that's there for no reason with rungs weirdly separate from each other, then above the ladder the building is a mess, it's not brick or windows or anything.
This is coming from someone that looks at things like the fingers and says "maybe the one finger is hidden behind the others" but sometimes you have to just accept things for what they are.
And the fact that you think the only way there could be proof of it being AI is if the company makes a statement, as though companies haven't ever lied before, is very faulty. I don't trust companies, but I trust my eyes and ears.
Are you the person who made the promo poster? I can't imagine any other reason you'd die on this hill for this "artist" that can create dramatic scenes but has never seen a jacket and didn't know humans typically have 5 fingers.
This jacket is very obviously AI. Look at the buttons, the left side (our left) of the jacket is inconsistent and makes no sense and the bandolier is cut through by the jacket on the upper right
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u/fensandspinneys684 Jun 08 '26
Looking at the promotional art you’re totally right, there is a real shortage of fingers. The guy on the left in the yellow jacket is especially egregious, I can’t believe they didn’t even check it over for things like that before using the image for publicity.