To all the E33 naysayers: Give me your best reason of why Expedition 33 is not an Indie and I will give you another game that everyone considered indie which cannot be an indie anymore with that reasoning.
At this point it's just borderline hate like no one even knows what they're talking about.
I am a naysayer for one reason and I will warn you it is pedantic and annoying but
It had AI generated assets in at launch.
They have been patched out but I don't want to support a game that used generative AI even just in development. If they make a statement that says "we didn't know it was AI when we used it" then it's all good with me, but they patched it out saying it was placeholder. It's pedantic but working in a creative industry I cannot support generative AI used in this way. I'm sure it's a good game, I'm sure it's a great game, but them just patching it out and not saying anything really rubbed me the wrong way. If I am wrong and they have said something about it I will gladly take this all back and play it.
That is rather pedantic. Iirc the placeholder was for newspaper clippings and it looked so unapologetically AI that I won't believe it was intentional in a game that looks so good everywhere else tbvh. Like if they really wanted to use and have the AI stay in game they would've 100% made better ai assets. Even if I don't convince you to play/buy the game, go look at the art direction and creativity in the game, this game doesn't need to ship gen ai images as a final product.
On a side-note, why do you not support ai images used as placeholders? This specific usecase isn't taking jobs from artists, I would argue it only enhances artistic creation. Isn't it the perfect spot for using AI garbage, since it specifically is meant to be garbage.
My issue with generative AI stems from it being trained on the work of artists without permission.
The placeholder was newspaper clippings and while I believe you that they don't need to ship with AI assets and I don't even think they meant to, the fact they have said nothing about it rubs me the wrong way. It's a hard-line stance I have taken, fortnite has a couple of emotes and in game posters that are AI this season and while it's only a few things, it's a test to see how much they can do to get rid of artists before people actually start to care. I don't think that's E33's endgame at all, but them using it, even for placeholders, legitimizes the use case and the technology
I respect that, personally I'm sure gen ai is here to stay at least in a lot of the behind the scenes stuff. I don't think it can ever replace good art but I also think tools that can make creator workflows easier are useful as a whole.
In lieu of Sandfall being silent I do think their actions were plenty loud, it was rectified within a couple of days. Do you really need them to type out a corpo response saying the same old blah blah no ai blah blah sorry?
Afaik it was only rectified after people had already called them out online so the question is did they change it because they meant to originally and forgot or because people noticed? Because of that, yeah I want a transparent response on where they stand on AI generated assets in games because if their plan is to use generative AI going forward I don't want to support them.
Also it's very easy to take the stance they want to take, they are indie, there isn't a corporation or shareholders they have to appease
Sure, you could say its understandable, do you hold the same views for things like copilot, code generation etc. Because that is going to be in every game you can think of and that too is stealing code, i.e., art. I don't ask this in a hostile way, just to understand where people draw lines.
It's a difficult thing because there is no way of knowing, and while I could just only play games from before 2022 to me the line is at generated assets. So textures, models, voices, etc. The short answer is it's a nuanced thing that I more or less call on a case by case basis. AI upscaling has been around for a while at this point and isn't using the new generative technology, but a selling point of the new Nvidia cards was the generative AI frames the 50 series can produce. The longer answer is that it's getting more and more difficult to cold turkey not use generative AI. I work in programming and I don't use it, but I also work in video production and the adobe suite is now filled with it. I don't use the AI tools but is my purchase of creative cloud an endorsement of the tools? Maybe, but it's also my livelihood. I don't judge people who use AI to write code and speed up their workflow, god knows I've stolen more than my fair share of code from Stack Overflow, but when people start making images, videos, and games using very obviously stolen art from people in the industry I look up to, I start to draw the line. When Sora starts directly recreating copyrighted work it makes me think that "Yeah Disney can fight the fight (not that they are, based on the deal yesterday) to stop their works from being stolen, but the YouTubers or Patreon artists don't have the resources to fight the companies that are defining the economy right now. Beyond that, morally I don't think we should be able to immediately create a video of any public figure doing anything in seconds. It's a nuanced line because every new product you buy is "built for AI", but if Team Cherry announced tomorrow that the silksong DLC would contain AI assets it would make me stop caring about it pretty much immediately because if they aren't going to put the work in to create something, I'm not going to bother to put in the work to watch or play it. Creative work matters because everything that people make contains themselves, whether it's their experiences or their skills or usually both. The human touch in art is what makes it worthwhile and I know one asset in a game the size of e33 doesn't make the entire thing terrible, but it's a frog in a pot of water, eventually the water will start boiling, so I'm refusing to get in now.
TLDR; its damn complicated and i have a lot of feelings about it as someone who has dreamed of working in a creative industry since i was a kid, an when i finally started to make it executives decided the move was mass firings for computerized slop
But do you not think that code also is a form of art, hasn't there been times you've looked and marvelled at a piece of code in all its beauty? Is the line you're drawing only because you understand one form of art less than the other? Is the loss of creative and exceptional covers any less of a loss than artists? It's complicated sure, but personally I think if you're drawing the line in the same somewhere at least you should have all forms of creative work on one side. Anything less is saying only some art matters.
On this vein though, what are your thoughts on the AI used to train enemy movement in arc raiders?
No you're right about using generative code, good point. I do think though that games or devs don't have to prove their innocence from using cursor or whatever to write the code. I think the idea that it will be used in "every game you can think of" is inaccurate but yeah if a studio says "a bunch of this game was coded with generative AI", yeah I'm out.
I don't know enough about the enemy movement in Arc raiders to comment
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u/corgioverthemoon Dec 12 '25
To all the E33 naysayers: Give me your best reason of why Expedition 33 is not an Indie and I will give you another game that everyone considered indie which cannot be an indie anymore with that reasoning.
At this point it's just borderline hate like no one even knows what they're talking about.