They dropped the first one while it was still hot. There was nothing wrong with it and it was quite fun. The fact they can’t even stand behind any of these changes they announce makes me unwilling to invest time into their products as they could rug pull yet again any moment.
I seem to recall the reason they dropped the first one being that the tech stack it was built on couldn’t support the number of players trying to play it at once.
I cant remember specifics, but it felt overdesigned. The first was a little tricky to get comfortable with, but was pretty intuitive. I had a ton of fun playing against what I can only assume were bots.
Due to the blank between Harada and TEKKEN, the title reads like he said TEKKEN as he imagined it is dead, but what he actually wrote is his X handle (with the underscore), so he’s talking about himself.
I tried it when it first launched, perhaps its just me getting older but the portal mechanic was just tedious. Learning maps is already hard enough without enemies being able to teleport around.
Halo was a game with a single player campaign, that could be played co-op, and also had versus multiplayer. It served many masters. This game only serves the latter. Halo’s multiplayer was played for years by a core group, but probably the most common use case was that it was played only a handful of times with friends, everyone had a great time, and it didn’t matter that people didn’t keep playing it after those handful of times. What would make FPS games great again, to me, is if we remembered all of that stuff about Halo rather than trying to be the one viral success out of tens of thousands of game releases every year, where failure results in tons of job losses because your company has no Plan B.
I think this just a sign of changing times regarding how games are made. We've come a long way from the days when one programmer added multiplayer into Goldeneye at the very end of development, that could never happen today. And those are the footsteps Halo 1 followed in, they didn't even have Xbox Live until the sequel.
Today, I think trying to make a game do a little bit of everything may risk struggling to stand out against titles that focus all of their development resources on just doing one thing really really well. You do have a point that having solo content to fall back on is at least a safety net, but does the opportunity cost of implementing that solo content make it even harder to succeed as a multiplayer game in such a competitive market?
I think this is definitely the case. For example, Halo Infinite is probably the last “classic” Halo game we’ll get in the sense of it has campaign and multiplayer, future games will probably just focus on either the campaign side of things or multiplayer. And some might even be public lobbies only, no custom games/forge.
As much as I wish we could get something as content complete as Halo 3 nowadays, it just doesn’t seem feasible anymore
We’ve come a long way from the days when one programmer added multiplayer into Goldeneye at the very end of development, that could never happen today.
Why? I can’t name a reason why this couldn’t be. Even extrapolating out for added complexity of network multiplayer, maybe it wouldn’t be feasible to add in just a handful of weeks, but if you’re already developing with client-server in mind, the same thing can still be whipped up today in a reasonable amount of time.
Even the rest of your comment makes it seem like if there aren’t thousands of concurrent players weeks after launch that it’s somehow failed as a multiplayer game. The industry has broken all of our brains so thoroughly that most of us can’t remember a time where that wasn’t a goal, and I’m arguing that it’s better if we didn’t make it the goal. If you make a multiplayer mode that you can play with friends, that has bots to fall back on when you don’t, and is designed to scale to very few players in a match, that multiplayer mode offers just as much value in week 1 as it does 20 years later. It’s not falling back on a single player mode, nor is it a failure as a multiplayer game in a competitive market if you build something that can withstand reaching a small audience, like the industry used to. That we used to get both modes in tons of games back in the day is what made these games “the full package” rather than only a single player game or only a multiplayer game, and I reject the idea that one of those two things has to suffer for the other to be good.
Halo didn’t have Xbox Live until the sequel because Xbox Live didn’t exist yet when Halo 1 was built, but it did still have network multiplayer. And that was still very much serving multiple masters, just like its predecessor.
Because most games aren’t designed client-server. GoldenEye was entirely local, so it didn’t need any networking, replication, or anti-cheat.
Games these days have a lot more going on. You need to replicate a lot of stuff in the world, you need to ensure that none of the clients are telling you something impossible, and you need a way to deal with cheaters. Usually that means accounts, anti-cheat, and bans. That’s a significant amount of infrastructure and management. And then you also have a lot of legal compliance too, like GDPR, and even more problems if minors will be playing your game online.
Even just split-screen multiplayer has value. Replication is handled by the engine. User accounts are handled by your storefront. Anti-cheat is something you’re thinking about if you’re designing an e-sport, but if you’re just making a fun video game that you might play with friends, it’s a nice-to-have. Why are we even collecting data such that GDPR is a problem? I know these are all things that multiplayer devs tell you they’re thinking about as to why this is so complicated, but we’ve lost the plot here so much that they’re building a game that they’re already expecting is going to reach millions of people without even being sure that they’re going to hit thousands. Which is how we get to an article like this one.
I only played the “first” one, but that one did feel incredibly like Halo to me. Just with the added functionality of portals.
I mean you have an assault rifle, a battle rifle, a pistol, a DMR, and shotguns. I’m sure there are some other ones I’m not remembering.
Edit: I also actually liked the functionality that grenades had. Instead of a crowd control or room-clearing tool, now they’re specifically to disable enemy portals. So now you had an interesting dynamic where yes, you can portal all the way across the map (or try sniping someone through a portal) into the enemy’s base and try to score, but it also presents a nice little counter to that strategy.
Being a 500 person studio with a 400 million dollar publisher means you still qualify for the Indie™ Game Awards but using ChatGPT to make a random powerpoint is just a bridge too far.
Apparently Blue Archive, the game that was given the award after they disqualified E33, ALSO used AI.
For stuff like dirt/stone/brick/etc textures I’m less strict for the use of generative stuff. I even think having an artist make the “core” texture and then using an AI to fill out the texture across the various surfaces to make it less repetitive over a large area isn’t a problem for me.
Like, I agree that these things gernally are ethically questionable with how they are trained, but you can train them on ethically sourced data and doing so could open up the ability to fill out a game world without spending a ton of time, leaving the actual artists more time to work on the important set pieces than the dirt road connecting them.
And little tools like that give studios like this an edge over AAAs. It’s the start of negating their massive manpower advantage.
In other words, the anti-corpo angle seems well worth the “cost” of a few generations. That’s the whole point of AI protest, right? It really against the corps enshittifying stuff.
And little niche extensions in workflows is how machine learning is supposed to be used, like it was well before it got all the hype.
Right, so the barrier was that they had to pay for this “outsourced bulk art”, and now with AI they don’t have to. It looks like we are in agreement when I say “I’m glad AI is democratizing the ability for the little guys like you and me to not pay artists for art”?
I think AI is too dumb, and will always be too dumb, to replace good artists.
I think most game studios can’t afford full time art house across like 30 countries, nor should they want the kind of development abomination Ubisoft has set up. That’s what I’m referring to when I say “outsourced”; development that has just gotten too big, with too many people and too generic a target market. And yes, too many artists working on one game.
I think game artists should have a more intimate relationship with their studio, like they did with E33.
And it’d be nice for them have tools to make more art than they do now, so they can make bigger, richer games, quicker, with less stress and less financial risk. And no enshittification that happens when their studio gets too big.
It takes less time for the actual in house artists to use GenAI with a dataset trained with the company’s own style to generate “bulk art” than it takes them to manage an outsourced company doing the same thing.
Sauce: work in gaming, just talked about this with our art producer.
The outsourcing work is literally “make this texture we made ourselves by hand look like it was snowing” type of shit. You can use GenAI and have it done in 30 minutes or spend 2 hours talking back and forth with the outsourcing partner in 10 minute intervals over a week - interrupting your flow every time.
Except, right now, they absolutely are. The tools are largely as you describe - though thinking about it, I think I’d describe it more as an airbrush vs a paint brush - but that’s not the way that upper management sees it for the most part, and not how the average supporter of GenAI sees it even if they don’t recognize that that’s their view. Both of these groups see it as a way to cut costs by reducing manpower, even if the GenAI folk don’t recognize that that’s what their stance is (or refuse to accept it). It’s the same as in the programming side of the conversation: vibe coders and prompt generators being hired instead of skilled professionals who can actually use the tools where they’re truly useful. Why pay an artist or programmer to do the work when I can just ask an LLM trained on stolen work to do it for me instead.
I read a great post probably a year ago now from somebody who works for a movie studio on why the company has banned hiring prompters. The short of it is, they hired on a number of prompters to replace some jobs that would normally be filled by artists as a test to see if they could reduce their staff while maintaining the same levels of production. What they found was that prompters could produce a massive volume of work very quickly. You ask the team for pictures of a forest scene and the artists would come back in a week with a dozen concepts each while the prompters had 50 the next day. But, if you asked them to take one of their concept pieces and do something like remove the house in it or add people in the foreground, they’d come back the next day with 50 new concept pieces but not the original. They couldn’t grasp the concept of editing and refining an image, only using GenAI to generate more with a new set of prompt parameters, and therefore were incapable of doing the work needed that an artist could do.
A feel-good story for artists showing what AI is actually capable of and what it isn’t, except for one thing: the company still replaced artists with AI before they learned their lesson, and that’s the phase most of the world is in right now and will probably continue to be in until the bubble bursts. And as Alanah Pierce so eloquently put it when talking about the record setting year over year layoffs in the gaming industry (each year has been worse than during the 2008 financial crash): “Most of those people will never work in games again. There’s just too many people out of work and not enough jobs to go around.” These companies currently in the fuck around phase will find out eventually, but by then it won’t matter for many people. They’ll never find a job in their field in time and be forced into other work. Art is already one of the lowest paying jobs for the amount of effort and experience required. Many artists who work on commissions do so for less than minimum wage, and starting wages in the game industry for artists haven’t increased since I was looking at jobs in the field 15 years ago.
Oh fuck off with that sentiment. You're very well aware that that's not what happened here, nor is it what's happening in a majority of genAI usage cases. In fact in most cases it IS artists using genAI to speed up the design process.
What AI does here is allowing small teams to get art done what otherwise would eat up their budget, aka they literally couldn't afford. No artists were harmed in these cases because if AI didn't exist they simply wouldn't have been hired.
Yes, there IS a currently ongoing shift. Just like there was e.g. with the mechanic loom. Did that kill off handmade clothing? No - even today we still have artists making handmade clothing and in fact making tons more off of it, while the masses got access to cheap clothing. The initial sudden rush to the new tech is annoying and yes it exposes some people to hardships (which is why we should switch from capitalism, and start providing UBI), but it WILL balance out. Remember, the luddites were wrong at the end.
What AI does here is allowing small teams to get art done what otherwise would eat up their budget, aka they literally couldn’t afford. No artists were harmed in these cases because if AI didn’t exist they simply wouldn’t have been hired.
That excuse can be used by big publishers as well, no?
For reference, see the latest McDonalds Christmas advert scandal. Or was it Coca Cola?
Like with any new tech, companies will try to exploit it to reduce expenses on people, then quickly realise that just because you replaced a hammer with a hydraulic smithing press, you haven't suddenly become a blacksmith yourself and still need the blacksmith to make shit happen - but now one blacksmith can do ten times more.
I’ve been programming as a hobby since I was 9. It’s also my job so I rarely finish the hobby projects anymore, but still.
On my first computer (Apple II) I was able to make a complete game as a kid that I felt was comparable to some of the commercial ones we had.
In the 1990ies I was just a teenager busy with school but I could make software that was competitive with paid products. Published some things via magazines.
In the late 90ies I made web sites with a few friends from school. Made a lot of money in teenager terms. Huge head start for university.
In the 2000s for the first time I felt that I couldn’t get anywhere close to commercial games anymore. I’m good at programming but pretty much only at that. My art skills are still on the same level as when I was a kid. Last time I used my own hand drawn art professionally was in 2007.
Games continued becoming more and more complex. They now often have incredibly detailed 3D worlds or at least an insane amount of pixel art. Big games have huge custom sound tracks. I can’t do any of that. My graphics tablets and my piano are collecting dust.
In 2025 AI would theoretically give me options again. It can cover some of my weak areas. But people hate it, so there’s no point. Indy developers now require large teams to count as indy (according to this award); for a single person it’s difficult especially with limited time.
It’d be nice if the ethical issues could be fixed though. There are image models trained on proprietary data only, music models will get there too because of some recent legal settlements, but it’s not enough yet.
I fully agree with the ethical parts, but not with the bit of people hating it.
Reality is that people on platforms like Reddit or Lemmy (or the tech side of the Fediverse in general) can be incredibly fervent about their AI hate, but they don't represent the average people, whose work has become ever so slightly more convenient thanks to AI - let that be due to meeting summarisation, or writing tools making complex emails easier, or maybe they're software engineers whose workload has been reduced by AI too... I am a software engineer and I use our own Claude instance extensively because it's really good at writing tests, KDoc, it's super helpful at code discovery (our codebase is huge, and I mostly work on a very small subsegment on it, going outside of my domain I can either spend an hour doing manual discovery, or tell Claude to collate all the info I need and go for a coffee while it does so), or to write work item summaries, commit messages, and so on. It doesn't even have to generate (production) code for it to be incredibly useful. And general sentiment within my co-workers is that it's a great tool that means we can achieve targets quicker, and luckily our management realises that we do need the manpower to do things manually still, so it's not like they're reducing teams by expanding on AI. They'd rather take the improved performance, thus the improved revenue, than keep revenue stagnant-ish and reduce expenses.
Reality is that people on platforms like Reddit or Lemmy (or the tech side of the Fediverse in general) can be incredibly fervent about their AI hate, but they don’t represent the average people, whose work has become ever so slightly more convenient thanks to AI
According to research, the overwhelming majority of gamers across all ages and genders do hate genAI though:
In a recent survey, we explored gamers’ attitudes towards the use of Gen AI in video games and whether those attitudes varied by demographics and gaming motivations. The overwhelmingly negative attitude stood out compared to other surveys we’ve run over the past decade.
(…)
Overall, the attitude towards the use of Gen AI in video games is very negative. 85% of respondents have a below-neutral attitude towards the use of Gen AI in video games, with a highly-skewed 63% who selected the most negative response option.
Gamers also don't generally reflect the opinions of the entire population.
The way the question is asked is also important. Obviously a majority will hate genAI slop, but a good (indie) game where the developer had absolutely no chance of hiring actual people (therefore no artist, software engineer, etc. was hurt in the process), now that's a different story.
See this here for example. People are freaking out because AI was mentioned. Not because COE33 is a bad game (though I do think it's overhyped, personally), but because AI got mentioned - in a way that doesn't even affect them.
Thing is, there are some malicious actors in the AI sphere, both for AI and against - and the ones against are pushing absolute BS stories to ragebait people and build "consensus" on AI being bad.
Gamers also don’t generally reflect the opinions of the entire population.
Oh, so it is the gamers who are anti-AI, and the artists who are in favor of it. That makes sense.
where the developer had absolutely no chance of hiring actual people (therefore no artist, software engineer, etc. was hurt in the process)
It’s interesting to me how a project fronted by somebody without two nickels to contract an artist can use the power of AI to create assets they’d never otherwise be able to, but they’re not replacing anyone; AI can’t just make a bunch of assets that a person could. That’s some black magic, right there.
It's been proven time and time again that a game doesnt need to compare to AA and AAA shit to be successful. You dont need a big game with a big world. There's an endless list of simple indie games that had a captivating charm that are crazy successful, all without a single bit of AI used.
I think the Luddites weren’t just wrong, but actively harmed the masses. They should have been trying to take control of the machines to help themselves, not destroying them, so that they can set more ethical working conditions and pay. The wealthy will always build and use the machines, it is a question whether there are good people running their own businesses who can compete against the feckless elite.
That is why I am opposed to anti-AI people, because they are doing the work of ensuring the 1% get sole agency over the usage of AI. Knowingly or not, Luddites are serving the worst of humanity.
If 1 guy I know gets sole agency over allll the cocaine in my neighborhood, I don’t really care that much. I don’t think we should live in a cocaine-based society, haha.
Otherwise, yeah… but it helps them less, proportionally. AAAs still have the fundamental Issue of targeting huge audiences with bland games. Making them even more gigantic isn’t going to help much.
AAs and below can get closer to that “AAA” feel with their more focused project.
Who made the textures or took the photos that them AI generated ones were derived from, do they get a cut? That justification is even more bizarre now, considering the tools we have to photoscan.
If you do that and proceed to say “No we didn’t use any AI tools”. Then yes, that should be a disqualification.
“When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.”
But the Game Awards should reconsider that label next year. The connotation is clearly “AI Slop,” and that just doesn’t fit for stuff like cursor code completion, or the few textures E33 used.
Otherwise studios are just going to lie. If they don’t, GA will be completely devoid of bigger projects.
…I don’t know what the threshold for an “AI Slop” game should be through. It’s clearly not E33. But you don’t want a sloppy, heavily marketed game worming its way in, either.
You have to draw the line somewhere, saying any game cant use AI is much simpler than an arbitrary definition of what slop is. Also means we reward real artistry everytime.
Then most just won’t go on the Game Awards, and devs will go on using Cursor or whatever they feel comfortable with in their IDE setup.
I’m all against AI slop, but you’re setting an unreasonably absolute standard. It’s like saying “I will never use any game that was developed in proximity to any closed source software.” That is possible, technically, but most people aren’t gonna do that. It’s basically impossible on a larger team. Give them some slack with the requirement; it’s okay to develop on Windows or on Steam, just open the game’s source.
Similarly, let devs use basic tools. Ban slop from the end product.
A willingness to play with Sauron’s One Ring is a signal that they’re not all that bothered about playing with Sauron’s One Ring.
Did you know that most domestic abuse cases don’t actually start with some guy beating his future wife on their first date? That kind of behavior builds up over time.
It’s a weird gray area. Nobody really knows where the limit is. The current consensus is that for a fact the “AI” can’t own a copyright to anything.
How smart can an autocomplete be before it takes away your copyright? Does using snippets count? How smart can the snippet engine be at filling the template?
If I ask AI how to solve something but write the exact same code myself, is it mine?
It If I grab code from stack overflow, does it make it mine?
It’s not me saying it, it’s the lawyers. The jury is quite literally out own where the copyright lies on AI generated content. The only definite verdict has been that the AI itself isn’t it.
But whether it’s the one who created the model, prompted the model or the ones whose data was used to teach the model 🤷🏻♂️ Wibbly wobbly timey wimey
I get regular briefings about this at work, because we have really good lawyers who actually read contracts of the services we use. And have banned multiple ones due to … creative copyright clauses in their contracts.
As for your “generated code is plagiarism” argument, do you have any precedents on that because I’d be interested in reading the verdicts? If true it’s a massive game changer for many industries and open so fucking many companies to lawsuits.
Mate, you were asked if code that was written for you was in fact your code and you’re talking about copyright. You’re off in the woods. You are so deep in the poisonous bog, I don’t think it’s possible to pull you out.
I think you get regular briefings at work on how to be, like, a business narcissist. Much like Tommy Tallarico, the inventor of music in video games.
If I solve a problem but it turns out later I had read a solution to this problem somewhere and inadvertently copied it. Is it my code?
If I use a Jetbrains provided built in template for a function and just fill in the variables, is it my code?
What if I just accept it as is, still my code?
If I copy a solution verbatim from Stack Overflow or a book, is it my code?
If I iplement a well known algorithm, is it my code if it looks exactly the same as a billion other implementations of the same thing? Can you tell whether I wrote it or just copied someone elses code?
What if Intellisense autocompletes a full function, is it my code?
What if the autocomplete is powered by a LLM, is it my code?
Can anything except a full clean-room implementation on a computer with no internet access be “my code”?
Please tell me, as you seem to have this thing nailed down. I work with this stuff every day and I’m mostly in the dark about where the line between “my code” and “too much autogenerated, no copyright or even copyright ifringement” goes.
… but it turns out later I had read a solution to this problem somewhere and inadvertently copied it.
Plagiarism covers this.
If I use a Jetbrains provided built in template …
Are you claiming you wrote the template? I think plagiarism might cover that.
What if I just accept it as is, still my code?
Absolutely not.
If I copy a solution verbatim from Stack Overflow or a book,
If you… saw a solution somewhere. And then you copied it letter for letter. And then you told people, “this is mine, I wrote this,” … is that plagiarism?
This is for sure a difficult one, super hard, but I will give you a chance to think about it. It’s good to consider all the possibilities.
I’m going to be a little less mean considering some things I’ve seen you say elsewhere.
What I’m talking about here is attribution. Colleges have their own system, I don’t believe that it’s law, for identifying and dealing with plagiarism, and that’s because where an idea came from is very important to academia. Something that trips a lot of people up because they tend to think of plagiarism as thought-stealing from other people: you can be found to have plagiarized your own work from years prior. You have to call out where your information comes from.
Software, even though chunks of code are copywrightable, as a culture, does not care about this nearly as much. Are you stealing if you borrow something from stack overflow? In a way, yeah, kinda. But nobody cares. Lawyers do care about the selected licenses on libraries and github pages, though.
But this is where talking exclusively about copywright gets in the way: if a coworker of mine borrowed a solution from a free-as-in-libre github repository, that would be fine. And the law wouldn’t care. But if they then said, “I wrote this,” maybe because they’re anxious about proving to their manager that they’re worth keeping around, I would think that was really fucking weird of them.
Attribution is not strictly a legal concept. It may or may not be possible to get my coworker there in legal trouble, but that’s really besides the point, I think they’re being anti-social. The dishonesty about where those ideas came from make me nervous about continuing to associate with them at all.
I have zero special interest in AI, what pisses me off are weird vague rules.
If all copied code ever is plagiarism and must be reported, the whole world would grind to a halt as we need to lawyer up and rewrite everything with verified clean room protocols.
There are finite ways to solve problems with code, how can anyone prove a piece of code is actually written by them and not AI generated or copied from SO or a blog if they all look the same? There is no audit trail, nobody recorded their coding sessions with cryptographic signatures to prevent tampering.
What I’m getting at here is the complete impossibility of proving a piece of code is man-made and not plagiarised, copied or otherwise generated.
And if it’s impossible to prove something is man-made without a doubt, why have vague rules against code that is not?
There are finite ways to solve problems with code, how can anyone prove a piece of code is actually written by them …
You and I are going to end up reinventing the US patent system, and while cool, I just do not have time for it. I have way too many autumn leaves to blow into my neighbor’s yard.
If you’re sending emails related to the development of the game you’re developing to other people developing that same game, you’re NOT developing the game? What kind of bullshit mental gymnastics is this?
Sending Emails related to development is still not development itself.
If youre washing your gymnastic dress, it’s not considered doing gymnastics. You are even allowed to wash them while high. Still wouldn’t get you disqualified from the Contest, just when you’re actually high while doing gymnastics.
Bad analogy. Communication is part of team development. If you’re pitching ideas, redefining requirements or requesting additional assets, you’re developing the game…
You’re clearly avoiding the spirit of what’s being said here, but I don’t mind biting the bullet anyway: Coworkers should not be using AI in their emails, either. Main reason being it’s obnoxious and makes you look illiterate.
I’m not avoiding the spirit at all. I’m pointing out the ridiculousness of the no-AI-at-all brigrade slapping the AI label on a game that “uses AI during it’s development even if it’s not in the end product”, because it would absolutely count this exact scenario.
By this logic you could also ban Photoshop, tablets and any other software or hardware tool that has improved accessibility and workflow over the years.
AI is a tool, flat out banning it won’t and can’t work. It’s too fucking useful.
People said that anyone who used Photoshop wasn’t a real artist, people said computer graphics weren’t real art.
At some point you DO have to draw an arbitrary line. Because that’s all. Art is arbitrary all of it since the dawn of mankind making art. It’s all arbitrary. If you only make hard lines that completely block tools, all you’re doing is harming artists.
The entire point of drawing arbitrary lines is to allow for artists to keep making art. Why dissuading people from abusing others.
So do you want no one to be able to do anything or do you want things to actually have artistic expression which is arbitrary.
Ai has plenty of great usage in game development, generating LOD textures, random dirt or rock textures, creating automated systems of pallet replacements. There’s plenty of tools that can cut down huge amounts of repetitive workload, so small teams can actually spend their limited resources on actual art that has direct major impact on their vision without wasting huge chunks of time and money on low end. Small parts that realistically wouldn’t have had any artists hired or any actual real impact on the experience of those who consume the work, but would have huge negative impacts on those making it.
Just because companies abuse a tool does not make a tool bad. Every artistic tool throughout all of human history has been abused by someone to hurt others. Photography, movies, Photoshop, paints. You name it. It’s been used and abused to hurt artists and every time artists adapt bring the new tool on to create new forms of expression. Even if that expression is too rebel against the tool.
You cannot ban a tool no matter what. You only cause more problems becoming worse than those who abuse the tools.
It’s highly likely that EVERY video game dev team has at least one person who is using cursor, whether it violates their AI policy or not. It’s massively popular, looks just like VSCode, and can be hard to detect.
You don’t even need to use cursor. All the major IDEs are including LLMs nowadays to help with code completion and code generation. There’s zero chance no gen ai code is in any project that has more than a few people nowadays.
Doesn’t matter, the rules ban all AI. The rules are stupid.
Edit: I mean the rules are so stupid it probably covers you googling an exception and reading the answer Google provides at the top which is gen ai as if the answer was used to help make the game even if you used nothing from the answer.
Edit: or Sentry even has AI insights into crashes in their default service.
You can’t reliably detect all steroids. The Olympics has a long history of under detecting novel steroids. A lot of sporting competitions below the Olympics level have a tendency to undertest as well and underdetect. You could have a long and successful career as an athlete from doping.
And more to the point, AI usage can be a factor of 100 harder to detect than steroids to a trained eye.
At the end of the day it's all about the quality in my opinion.
The entire game could be written by ONE passionate person who is awesome at writing the story and the code, but isn't good at creating textures and has no money for voice actors - in which case said textures and all the voices would be AI generated, then hand retouched to ensure quality. That would still be a good game because obvious passion went into the creation of it, and AI was used as a tool to fill out gaps of the sole debeloper's expertise.
A random software house automating a full on pipeline that watches various trends on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, etc., and chains together various genAI models to create slopware games by the dozens, on the other hand, is undefendable. There's no passion, there's no spirit, there's just greed and abuse of technology.
Differentiation between the two is super important.
If they’re paying a bunch of money to OpenAI for mega text prompt models, they are indeed part of the slop problem. It will also lead to an art “monoculture,” Big Tech dependence, code problems, all sorts of issues.
Now, if they’re using open weights models, or open weights APIs, using a lot of augmentations and niche pipelines like, say, hand sketches to 3D models, that is different. That’s using tools. That’s giving “AI” the middle finger in a similar way to using the Fediverse, or other open software, instead of Big Tech.
People claimed Photoshop would cause a monoculture if you honestly and genuinely believe that AI will as well you’re stupid as f***. Like there is no way you can look back on the history of computers, art or human innovation in genuinely believe that anything at any point could create an artistic monoculture.
No, it won’t happen. It physically cannot happen humans for the sake of being goddamn stubborn s*** stands will make counterculture art for the sake of it.
The concept of a monoculture is an infeasible made-up nonsensical b******* idea. Humans are too diverse in our whims for to ever happen.
The only way a monoculture could come about is if everyone but one person died off. And that person also decided to never make any form of artistic expressive anything till the day he died.
I have the same feeling about Kojima's and Vincke's latest comments on AI. Am I supposed to get mad at every single person who said they used/plan to use AI for something? I'd be as outraged as the average Fox News viewer, and it would be impossible to be taken seriously. I still won't be using AI myself (fuck surveillance state AI) and I'd be making every effort to encourage others not to use it, but there's no point in burning bridges and falling for rage bait.
They're creative people who care about the craft and care about the teams in their employ, which gives their statements weight, where some Sony/Microsoft/EA executive making an identical statement has none.
I understand the principle. Even if E33 is not slop, people should fear a road that leads to dependence on “surveillance state AI” like OpenAI. That’s unacceptable.
That being said, I think a lot of people don’t realize how commoditized it’s getting. “AI” is not a monoculture, it’s not transcending to replace people, and it’s not limited to corporate APIs. This stuff is racing to the bottom to become a set of dumb tools, and dirt cheap. TBH that’s something that makes a lot of sense for a game studio lead to want.
And E33 is clearly not part of the “Tech Bro Evangalism” camp. They made a few textures, with a tool.
When I give myself the leeway to think of a less hardliner stance on AI, I come back to Joel Haver's video on his use of ebsynth:
It lets me create rotoscoped animations alone, which is something I never would have the time or patience for otherwise. Any time technology makes art easier to learn, more accessible, we should applaud it. Art should be in the hands of everyone.
Now my blood boils like everyone else's when it comes to being forced to use AI at work, or when I hear the AI Voice on Youtube, or the forced AI updates to Windows and VS Code, but it doesn't boil for Joel. He clearly has developed an iconic style for his comedy skits, and puts effort into those skits long before he puts it through an AI rotoscope filter. He chose his tool and he uses it sparingly. The same was apparently true for E33, and I have no reason not give Kojima and Larian the same benefit of the doubt.
On the other hand, Joel probably has no idea what I'm talking about when I say "surveillance state AI." People Make Games has a pretty good video exposing its use case. There's also...
the global and localized environmental impacts of all these data centers,
Nvidia and Micron pricing the consumer out of owning their own hardware,
aforementioned companies fraudulently inflating an economic bubble,
the ease with which larger models can be warped to suit their owners' fascist agendas (see Grok).
Creatives may be aware of some, or all, or none of those things, which is why it's important to continue raising awareness of them. AI may be toothpaste that can't go back in the tube, but it's also a sunk cost fallacy, you don't have to brush your teeth with shit-flavored toothpaste.
Now my blood boils like everyone else’s when it comes to being forced to use AI at work, or when I hear the AI Voice on Youtube, or the forced AI updates to Windows and VS Code
You don’t hate AI. You hate Big Tech Evangelism. You hate corporate enshittification, AI oligarchs, and the death of the internet being shoved down your throat.
…I think people get way too focused on the tool, and not these awful entries wielding them while conning everyone. They’re the responsible party.
You’re using “AI” as a synonym for OpenAI, basically, but that’s not Joel Haver’s rotoscope filter at all. That’s niche machine learning.
As for the exponential cost, that’s another con. Sam Altman just wants people to give him money.
Look up what it takes to train (say) Z Image or GLM 4.6. It’s peanuts, and gets cheaper every month. And eventually everyone will realize this is all a race to the bottom, not the top… but it’s talking a little while :/
True on most fronts except one. On a personal level, I do hate AI lol. The actual tool itself. I just don't think typing out or speaking out a series of instructions is that useful or efficient. If I want a computer to do something for me, I much prefer the more rigid and unnatural syntax and grammar of programming language. AI tools themselves just don't produce a result that satisfies me.
Again, they’re tools. Some of the most useful applications for LLMs I’ve worked on are never even seen by human eyes, like ranking, then ingesting documents and filling out json in pipelines. Or as automated testers.
Another is augmented diffusion. You can do crazy things with depth maps, areas, segmentation, mixed with hand sketching to “prompt” diffusion models without a single typed word. Or you can use them for touching up something hand painted, spot by spot.
You just need to put everything you’ve ever seen with ChatGPT and copilot and the NotebookLM YouTube spam out of your head. Banging text into a box and “prompt engineering” is not AI. Chat tuned decoder-only LLMs are just one tiny slice that a few Tech Bros turned into a pyramid scheme.
Don’t produce a result that’s satisfies you yet. Early programming also was absolute dog s***.
Give it 20 years, and there’s bound to be new things that will replace the current concept of AI that do functionally the same thing just in a manner that actually does produce good results.
Just like we did with everything else computing related.
Hating a tool is the single stupidest f****** thing anyone can do.
That and chat prompting engineer b******* is one tiny tiny slice of the greater hole. It’s a footnote in the grand scheme of everything that the colloquial term AI represents. It’s just the most marketable one to end users so it’s the one that you see everywhere.
Give it another 5 years maybe and local self-trainable models and alternative versions of it will be available that won’t have all the theft problems, surveillance problems and other issues. The tech is new and mainly controlled by giant companies right now.
It’s not like the tech is going to forever exist in a vacuum in the exact state. It’s in nothing ever does. Makes it doubly silly to get mad over a tool.
People have made it excessive due to turning AI into a modern witch hunt. Maybe if people had a more nuanced take than “all AI bad” companies could be more open about how they use AI.
I can guarantee that if E33 came out with the AI disclaimer it would’ve been far more controversial and probably less successful. And technically they should have an AI label because they did use Gen AI in the development process even if none of it was supposed to end up in the final game.
But we can’t have companies being honest because people can’t be normal.
Its not surprising when even people who like AI are now being affected by consumer hardware prices that is leading to shift in previously positive perception of it.
Becoming harder to ignore its effects. Gone from a philosophical difference of opinion to actual tangible consequences.
So becomes a question of is AI cool enough to make them happy to put up with the rising cost of hardware, which is something tech enthusiasts tend to care a lot about with it being something needed to even enjoy AI generated stuff in the first place.
I agree the current state of affairs makes people even more against AI and I think people have a good reason to be against AI, but don’t you find it a bit contradictory how people are less antagonistic towards E33 AI use now that it has been revealed?
People are far more antagonistic towards games when the first thing they see is the AI label, to the point where they dismiss the entire game as AI slop, but it seems people are willing to be more lenient on AI usage when they first get to experience the game for what it is. This unreasonable reaction to the first impression is why companies would rather hide their AI usage rather than inform the customer.
I don’t know that people are less antagonist because of E33. I think regular tech hardware enthusiasts are getting gradually angrier after the initial excitement over them when it came to potential improvements in things like NPC behavior. Because its shifting towards not being able to afford hardware to begin with.
Things have moved from somewhat background noise to no longer something they can pretend to be unaffected by. I think the period of discourse over AI was most relevant couple years before hardware issues popped up. Those who hate AI now likely don’t even care that much about creative elements. They are just pissed that AI is why prices are going up. They are angry at the AI data centers buying up all the hardware and supplies moving to corporations as consumers get cut off.
It’s almost as if AI as a tool isn’t the problem. Instead it’s just a bunch of misinformation idiots not understanding the actual problems and misdirected anger.
AI as a tool is fine. It’s no f****** different than Photoshop.
The problem is companies breaking copyright law and stealing information and data to train the models in the first place.
A model trained off non-solen artwork used with intent is perfectly fine.
It’s not like we go around demanding everyone say that they use Photoshop whenever they do because oh they could be tricking us and it’s not hand drawn. No, we just expect digital art to be made with digital tools.
Ai’s problem is one of legal issues, not artistic ones and people need to get out of their own asses about it at this point. It’s a f****** tool. Any tool used wrong is bad. A tool used correctly with purpose and intent is fine.
AI isn’t exactly the cause of the rise in the price of hardware. Only 1/6th of the purchased Nvidia cards are actually in data centers. Same for the memory.
We’re not using it.
What’s really drumming up all the prices is that the billionaires are convinced that AI is going to replace tons and tons of people. It’s not. It’s the insane corporate hype that’s doing all the damage.
It will replace some, sure. The same way the electric drill replaced carpenters. One electric drill does not replace one carpenter. That’s not how that works. Instead the carpenters can work a bit faster and their job is a bit easier. It’s worth buying and it’s worth using, but it doesn’t really replace a person. Accountants didn’t disappear as a profession when spreadsheets were invented.
There were books written in the 1980s about how household appliances raised the standard of cleanliness. Turns out people change clothes more when cleaning clothes doesn’t involve a washing board. And I don’t think Roombas replaced that many jobs either.
In particular, I think this is a thing that will happen for software development. I don’t think it’ll reduce the number of developers we need. I think the standards for development will just be higher. All the front end stuff in particular is going to get easier, and you won’t need as many frameworks. We’ll especially need just as many devs, if not more, in the short term. Someone’s going to have to fix the mess all these companies are going to make after they’ve fired half their devs and tried to just vibe code everything.
“All genAI bad” is a nuanced take. When you look at genAI from a moral, ethical, or sociopolitical perspective it always demonstrates itself to be a net evil.
The core technology is predicated on theft, the data centers powering it are harmful economically and to surrounding communities, it is gobbled up by companies looking to pay less to profit more, and it’s powered by a bubble ripe for bursting which will wreak havoc on our economy.
GenAI is indefensible as a technology, and the applications it may have for any tangible benefit can probably be accomplished by ML systems not built on the back of the LLM monster. We should all be protesting its use in all things.
No no see. That’s not nuanced what that guy is saying is nuanced being a Hardline a****** is the nuance takes so you’re clearly in the wrong here. Sorry man it just is what it is.
It’s like people have completely f****** forgotten what Photoshop was like when it first hit the scene. The same anti-ai b******* we’re seeing now was leveled completely against Photoshop and basically all digital art.
Go back and look in the history books and read old diaries and things and you’ll find that photography had all the same anti-ai sentiment that we’re seeing now labeled against it.
Artists have always adopted just because people are abusing. A new tool does not make the tool bad. It just makes those who are abusing it assholes. Given time artists will adapt in new forms of art. Well come forth from those tools.
Cuz no matter what you say about AI, if you create and model yourself trained it entirely on your own art and then used it to create deconstructions or modern takes using computers of your own artwork. That’s still f****** hard. It doesn’t matter that it was processed through an AI slot machine. They’re still artistic intent behind the process.
The only problem with AI right now is that big companies are breaking copyright laws with it. Hell you can make a solid argument that the problem isn’t even AI. It’s just the law breaking around it and the lack of actual intent to use the tools for artistic purposes instead of just cost saving.
Cuz as much as we all can make fun of quote" prompt engineers. Someone’s sitting down tuning the model putting in specialized data for its training to generate their exact intent is still effort. It’s still in intent. There are people who are making the equivalent of modern art using generative AI.
People always s*** on new art forms for not being art because it uses some new tool that isn’t traditional and therefore isn’t art. This stuff has been around for a handful of years. Give it enough time and their well-being actual proper art forms that will be built up around these tools. It has happened for hundreds if not thousands of years in human history with every new tool that we have made.
We just need to direct the anger to the correct place. S***** companies breaking the law, not the tools.
Okay but first, will you admit that if my cancer curing Unicorn only dispenses 100 doses of its miracle medicine from its butt when I kill a homeless man, you’d agree killing the homeless is a moral good, right?
Or, you know, we could throw away silly fantasy scenarios.
Really? Can you share your fully realized and operational generative AI that exists, and only created its model from artwork you personally made or retain full legal reproduction rights to?
Also at least Rovio has had an “AI” art asset pipeline for years now, even before ChatGPT. Their ML unit is well over a decade old. And it’s specifically tuned for their own style: youtu.be/ZDrqhVSY9Mc
I’m not talking out of my ass, I work with this shit daily.
I’ll have to look at this when I get a chance, but my understanding of these products is that a “custom model” isn’t from scratch using only your data, but that they add your data to a core model that has already been trained to behave in certain ways… using data that isn’t yours.
Again: This is not a cake. This is a recipe book and an oven. Scenario’s demo reel showcases models they have finished training, and vouch that you can make one from scratch. I am asking you for a finished AI model you have ready to use.
I have one ready to use but it’s trained with company assets and thus not something we can share or legal will have an aneurysm from how stupid we are being 😅
They replaced the art later, but shouldn’t the bar be high like this? Otherwise, the caution won’t be there. It also could be abused, like games only getting adjusted post-launch if a certain measure of success hits. Plus the final product is not the only part of matters in the was-AI-used discussion, it is also about the process. If AI is the product of stolen human artwork being fed into a machine, and then that machine is used during creation, then AI has been used in the process that led to the final product no less than the concept art that may not be seen in game but was important in steering the ship.
Maybe someone can share their thoughts though. I’m still formulating mine and this is where I am at the moment.
Nearly any game with more than a few people involved is going have someone use cursor code completion, or use one for reference or something. They could pull in libraries with a little AI code in them, or use an Adobe filter they didn’t realize is technically GenAI, or commission an artist that uses a tiny bit in their workflow.
If the next Game Awards could somehow audit game sources and enforce that, it’d probably be a few solo dev games, and nothing elsex
Not that AI Slop should be tolerated. But I’m not sure how it’s supposed to be enforced so strictly.
Doesn’t matter. AI literally hallucinates 90% of the bullshit it spews and it steals from artists. There’s a reason every triple A game that has an AI bro as a CEO gets broken further every update thanks to the unscrupulous use of gen AI coding.
Same way you’d celebrate a studio for “No workplace abuse.” People would have to come forward to testify about it, as concept art generation is very likely to arise from hiring fewer artists.
It’s also pretty easy if the credits list an abnormally low, or zero, number of concept artists.
They didn’t just replace the art later. It was intended to be placeholder art from the beginning. And was replaced 5 days after release. That tells me that they just missed replacing those temporary assets among tens of thousands of assets before release.
Using GenAI for something temporary that’s not intended to be final seems like the perfect use case for it. Especially on a small team where artist time is much better spent working on the final assets.
But piracy is a MUCH smaller issue than theft. Piracy doesn’t deprive the original owner of any material thing. Piracy might decrease sales and profits (research actually says the opposite 🤷♂️).
And we have no idea the actual material impact AI will have on the arts. From the reaction we’re seeing it might even make people turn more and more to physical hand crafted art.
We’re already seeing that social media is favoring videos of artists’ processes much more than the final results.
So yeah, no, I don’t see this situation as so much more terrible than theft. I really don’t understand how it could be.
To me it seems the main issue is not even AI, it’s capitalism. If artists didn’t need to sell their art to survive, we wouldn’t even have this discussion.
To me it seems the main issue is not even AI, it’s capitalism. If artists didn’t need to sell their art to survive, we wouldn’t even have this discussion.
Absolutely. It seems like 90% of the issues we have in society is because of this fucked-up economic system :/
Sandfall Interactive further clarifies that there are no generative AI-created assets in the game. When the first AI tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, instances of a placeholder texture were removed within 5 days to be replaced with the correct textures that had always been intended for release, but were missed during the Quality Assurance process
Nah there’s already a slap fight down in the comments between the hard liners and the “can’t we just give it a rest” folks. It’s gotten to the point I’m convinced there’s at least a few ai bots generating hate spam against ai bots.
A bit? People on this reddit-lite platform seem to care more about clair obscur using AI for concept art than they do about murdering Venezuelans and the US turning to literal piracy. A bit doesn’t begin to describe.
I don’t like billion dollar corporations, and I’d be fine to stop and leave that be all the context, but I also don’t like them using technology to manufacture truth while polluting the earth to do it.
So tell your coders to give you a tune up, the damage control algorithm didn’t pan out.
Why are you responding to me? Your message doesn’t seem to have anything to do with my statement that lemmy is a hive mind circle jerk over AI (and steam, etc.)
Not quite. Larian also wants to use it for concept art, which is not the same thing as placeholder assets. To give you a bit of context, the standard for placeholder textures at the software development companies I worked so far has mostly been “vaguely fitting images you found on Google”.
Atleast in my experience bigger companies have either their own libraries, libraries of bought assets or dedicated sites with free to use stuff, so they can use the placeholdes without a risk of having copyrighted stuff in the files.
Concept art is little tricky because it often is 10 version of the same character or random piece of the scenery and it takes hundreds of pieces and revision before art director finally decites “this is it, this is what our game looks like”. Personally i dont care if those are drawn on a paper or made in photoshop, paint, by a ai tool or trowing wet cats on a canvas. In the end i care that human decites what they are going to use and artist finishes the model. I dont see the point having artist spend their time creating seven different looking bandoliers for the protagonist, when nobody even knows if any version of those end in the game.
And i just want to say way before the consept art when the product is in its early planning state there are often “feeling boards” that are just i want our game to feel like picture of breath of the wild and picture of skyrim or picture of cuphead and picture of warm and cozy fireplace and these feeling boards may stay in use until the very end of the production.
I think you misunderstood me. All AI is humanity-ending garbage that needs to be eliminated. I don’t give two figs how or where it’s used - I want it all gone.
I was a network engineer at one of the biggest backbones on Earth before retiring. Before that, I designed and programmed industrial automation. So, no tech background at all.
Now that that’s out of the way: a blind squirrel could see that sucking up all the energy and wasting endless fresh water is a bad thing for the environment. The “bigger-than-2008” market crash that’s also coming won’t help.
And again, AI has been around for many years before the LLM craze and these select few companies advocating to shove it in all our faces, forcefully pushing data centers everywhere and integrating it into as much as they can. That is not something that could or should be done with AI. It is these company executives choosing to push it like this. It wasn’t always like this nor did it have to be
Does anyone else think that the old refrain of letting nerds run the world was actually incredibly misguided because nearly all of them lack the social skills necessary to not be sociopaths?
Nerds? You mean a select few oligarchs? Nothing wrong with learning and technology. I know over half of Americans read at a middle school level and think they’re all geniuses from social media and memes. However, some of us do enjoy intellectual pursuits and technology for good use. This shit hole country decided to vote for this administration that is hostile towards everyday people and doesn’t believe in regulating a bunch of malicious billionaires.
As a nerd who slowly grasped social skills over decades, while most of my cohort did not - yes, hard agree. Case in point - the AI-zealot posting all over this thread.
Explain how an AI calculating protein foldings feeds people’s collective cynicism, lack of social skills, general paranoia, lack of trust in each other, waning hope for the future, and whatnot.
Oh, so your approach to arguments is just to deny that you said what you said? Amazing skills there. You replied to a thread claiming that “All AI is humanity-ending garbage” claiming it does that “by feeding people’s collective cynicism, lack of social skills, general paranoia, lack of trust in each other, waning hope for the future, etc.”, and then you say you didn’t say that. So you just lie, and that’s your entire argument? Maybe learn to follow the most basic of argumentation logic.
You don’t even know why I said that. Why do I have to suffer people who are incapable of reconstructing someone else’s argument?
The ML approach to protein folding is a different system, used in different ways, by different people. Your insistance on conflating a data analysis technique with a robot that will pretend to be your girlfriend is utterly bizarre. It’s so oblivious and unaware, I don’t even know what to do with it. It’s like you want people to dislike protein folding. I don’t understand why your camp insists on treating these like they’re the same thing.
Except I do, actually: it’s the card says moops. A very Republican tactic, if I’m being honest.
Brain rot, job destruction, increased inequality, massive acceleration in global warming, massive decrease in the quality of critical systems, societal and economic collapse…
That’s fearmongering. It has use cases and has had them well before this LLM AI bubble. The bubble will pop and hopefully these CEOs are actually charged unlike 2008.
Explain how an AI calculating protein foldings will cause brain rot, job destruction, increased inequality, massive acceleration in global warming, massive decrease in the quality of critical systems, and societal and economic collapse.
Explain how protein folding software, which predates “genAI” by decades and has as many similarities with it as with Tetris, has anything to do with this conversation.
You have trouble following your own train of thought, apparently. You replied in a thread claiming “All AI is humanity-ending garbage”, claiming it causes “Brain rot, job destruction, increased inequality, massive acceleration in global warming, massive decrease in the quality of critical systems, societal and economic collapse”, and then you ask me where you said what you said. Lay off the drugs before you completely fry your brains, dumbass.
If you want a government with the kind of regulatory power to “put all this nonsense on hold” why not use that regulatory power to generate cleaner energy and solve the problem? The current clean energy sources we have right now are cheaper than what’s currently being used for energy generation. They’re also faster to get online and can be put in more places. The reason we’re not using those sources right now is because of politics, not economics or technology. The solution to environmental damage caused by energy production is to use cleaner energy. Stopping people from using technology on the user level won’t do much of anything.
The impact directly depends on the area of application. AlphaFold has been around for at least seven years, it’s got jackshit to do with the current LLM bubble. Were you against AlphaFold in 2020, or are you a hypocrite?
From your votes and lack of response I can indeed surmise that you’re a hypocrite who’s never had a remote semblance of an opinion about AI until it’s become fashionable to hate it, whereupon you promptly jumped on the bandwagon and started shouting about how all AI ruins the planet, regardless of the nuances that are too much for you to think of. It’s remarkable how loud schmucks like you can hijack the conversation. Just cry wolf as much as you can, that’s enough for the entirety of the cognitive capacity of yourself and people like you. What an embarrassment.
It’s not a bubble though. That’s like waiting for the internet bubble to pop back in the 90s. AI will be around from now on, just not as such an in your face way. It will eventually become ubiquitous, just like many other pieces of tech.
This massive new economic sector that is eclipsing the GDP of most nations combined in under 10 years, which is almost entirely subsidized by a combination of venture capital, which is being forced in to any product that involves electricity regardless of suitability, this industry and that loses money every time a user interacts with it (even the paying customers) is not a bubble?
Please, enlighten us on what you think an economic bubble is. A lot of us were around for the dotcom bubble; to say it was not one, when we were standing there watching the market rise into the stratosphere and come crashing down, is a bit much.
I’m speculating based on what companies have been saying recently such as the 2025 Coca-Cola Christmas ad where they uploaded a “behind the scenes” to attempt to show the human aspect.
If you watch that and take it at face value then maybe I’m just the cynical asshole here but I’m not alone.
Edit: and yes, I’m speculating, but so is everyone else talking about this too.
Also, this isn’t about me, and I don’t need to divulge my background to you.
I once used suno a bunch to “make something” of some funny lyrics I had written (a gag for some friends of mine, not really important), and the process of getting anything useful out of it was absolutely miserable. I would never use this for any serious artistic effort. None of it felt like it was mine, either.
When I say that it was like watching a microwave, I’m being completely serious. If my career became just endlessly hitting that slot machine button for another go, I might just punch my ticket.
I still don’t like it. The models being built on non-consensually scraped artwork has been known from the very start. If they still thought these were ok to use, I don’t really want to get involved with their output…
It’s the same as when any other company quickly replaces the genAI art when busted, “oops we didn’t mean to include it” - then maybe don’t use it in the first place?
We are getting closer and closer to not being able to tell the difference between AI and reality. This lying about the use of it or hiding the use of it is a bad fucking idea.
The reason they didn’t disclose it as being used in the creation of the game is probably because no AI was used in the ultimate development. It’s an artist who uses AI to generate concepts and inspiration using AI in their artwork, even if everything in the end is hand crafted and doesn’t resemble any of the generated images?
One thing we need to take into account going forward too is that AI will inevitably be used for things like texture maps and environmental generation. Things that have been randomly generated with algorithms. In a year it’s going to be nearly impossible to say no game can have any AI used at all, unless you want the pool of potential to be incredibly small.
Of course not, but I think not supporting those that use it to produce something you want to enjoy doesn’t necessarily imply not enjoying what they produce, as long as it’s not too thoroughly damaged by their use of it and as long as it can be obtained in ways that won’t support them.
They didn’t disclose it because there was no AI in the final product. The AI was for placeholder textures, which were replaced by real artists’ work as they were made. Some of the AI textures slipped through the cracks on release day, but a week 1 patch removed all traces of the AI before anyone even realized it was AI.
IMO this looks bad on the awards show, because the final product didn’t have any AI. And the production team was proactive in ensuring it didn’t have any AI before any kind of public backlash ever happened. Once they realized the issue, they issued a patch to fix it on their own, without needing to be pushed into it by public pressure. That’s what a company should do, and it shows that the devs really cared about their game.
People are saying “it’s fine because it was used in the early stages of the game for placeholder art” but that’s kind of missing the point
The problem is that they used AI and didn’t disclose it, as well as releasing the game with AI textures still in it. Yes, these textures were quickly replaced, but it’s still very concerning they weren’t upfront on how they were using it in the game making process
Edit: there isn’t even a disclosure on their steam page
If I make a mock up of a cake using toxic ingredients, then throw that out and make my cake from scratch using food safe ingredients, do I need to disclose that “toxic material was used when making this cake”? I don’t think so.
Of course this kinda falls apart when they shipped with quickly replaced textures. But I also wouldn’t expect them to disclose the game as unfinished if they forgot to replace blank textures with the proper assets until just after release.
This is less like making a new cake from scratch after disposing of the previous one, and more like making a new cake using the same unwashed cake tin and utensils
No matter what, the AI replacements would have affected how the artists made the final products as, whether they liked it or not, they had a point of reference in the form of the AI texture
It’s is still their own artistic sensibility that made the art, not the AI. You will always be inspired by other things while doing anything requiring creativity.
Would being inspired by Picasso suddenly make one art worthless? Of course not. So why would being inspired by an AI generated example make it any different ?
It’d be on brand then - if they asked AI to write out an argument for them, they’d take credit for the whole essay & if found out, they’d claim it was what they wanted to convey anyway
Not necessarily. If I use an anthropomorphic cat as an asset for a character who in the end is a robot, can you really say it took inspiration?
Granted, I haven’t seen any of the assets. But placeholders aren’t inherently inspiration. They can easily just be random things to look at before proper assets are made.
And even if they did take inspiration, that isn’t the complaint. Would there be a need to disclose if they used a generative AI to generate a picture, and they used that as inspiration? What if they saw an gen AI image someone else posted and used that as inspiration? Inspiration isn’t the problem, it’s the “use of AI in development” which seems silly when these could have potentially been wire frames and result in the exact same final product.
At the end of the day, this is just an award. It’s not up to the award giver to define and micromanage what a “safe and acceptable, or appropriate amount of gen AI” can be used in the dev process.
When competing against other titles that haven’t, regardless of how it was used, an award show is going to draw a very hard line.
I’m sure they didn’t have to go the route of using gen AI, but they chose it, and did not disclose it.
If you’re applying for an award that asks “were toxic ingredients used at any point while making this cake” because part of the culture of the award is not using toxic ingredients, then yeah, you need to disclose that you used toxic ingredients.
Maybe because all AI generated assets got removed?
Honestly, as a programmer that uses extensively AI to debug, and do various tedious tasks like unit tests, I think the whole anti-AI craze of late is more bullshit than sane arguments.
It’s an invaluable tool for many cases, and as soon is it is not used to replace someone, I don’t see the problem. They where used by artists, to be used as placeholders while working on the gme, not by executives seeking to make some more bucks by not hiring anyone.
They forgot some of them in the final game? Shit happens. You cannot expect someone to go through every single texture in a game that probably got thousands, if not tenths of thousands, just to make sure none was forgotten.
Anyway, that’s blown way out of propositions, and feels more like some people trying to get views by hating on something popular than having real concerns about it. Especially since Blue Prince does use AI assets in the final product, and strangely no one bats an eye.
This entire comment is baffling to me, in all honesty
Maybe because all AI generated assets got removed?
Not before being unknowingly sold to the public
I think the whole anti-AI craze of late is more bullshit than sane arguments.
My problem with AI is its heavy usage of plagiarism and vast degree of power consumption, as well as the price hikes its caused for many computer parts
They where used by artists… not by executives seeking to make some more bucks
Whenever anything is attempting to make money, it should be put under the highest scrutiny. It does not matter who’s pushing it. Similarly, I find it odd that we’re assuming the inner workings of Clair Obscur’s workplace
You cannot expect someone to go through every single texture in a game… just to make sure [no AI] was forgotten
If you replaced AI here with anything defamatory, like pictures of penises placed by an enraged employee after being fired, then even having a few would be devastating on sales. The single fact that we’re okay with a few means that, over time, that bar will likely be pushed further down the road “oh, it’s just this one character that practically never shows up” “oh, it’s just the skyboxes, they’re basically not noticeable anyway” “who cares if the early access uses AI voices? They’ll be replaced eventually!”
people trying to get views by hating on something popular
Well, if that was truly forgotten in the game at release, and removed once discovered, I don’t see any problem. The textures that are used now are 100% hand made by actual artist, to my knowledge.
My problem with AI is its heavy usage of plagiarism and vast degree of power consumption, as well as the price hikes its caused for many computer parts.
I entirely agree with you there.
The plagiarism problem is in my opinion partly resolved by open datasets (OpenOrca, and the like), which means the user has the possibility of choosing to not rely on plagiarism. Problem is that the models trained with those dataset are rarely available on public platform, which is another reason why I use my own infrastructure.
Personally I use Mistal-7B-OpenOrca on a locally run Ollama, which reside in my homelab.
The power consumption is a problem, and the reason why I use my own dedicated hardware for anything related to AI (which has also the advantage of heating my home a little bit, so nothing is lost 😆).
I even invested in a laptop with dedicated AI hardware to be able to make it as efficient as possible. And of course got hit by the AI taxe, albeit I was lucky to get 32Go DDR5 at only twice the usual rate instead of five time the usual rate as it is currently the case.
Whenever anything is attempting to make money, it should be put under the highest scrutiny. It does not matter who’s pushing it. Similarly, I find it odd that we’re assuming the inner workings of Clair Obscur’s workplace
You are partly right. But when machine replaced some of the human hard labor in industry, we welcomed it. Who would want to make a car with a hammer when an hydraulic press is available? AI is a tool that should be used to ease the burden of doing repetitive small task in order to focus on what’s one want to do. Can I blame someone for using placeholder texture, being AI or from an asset store, instead of spending days making the rocks look just right when you aren’t even sure the project will ever be funded?
But I don’t think they the the kind of guys to seek wealth or fame. They put their energy in a project they believed in, can we blame them to have used the tools they had in hand to try making the most of their limited budget ?
If you replaced AI here with anything defamatory, like pictures of penises placed by an enraged employee after being fired, then even having a few would be devastating on sales. The single fact that we’re okay with a few means that, over time, that bar will likely be pushed further down the road “oh, it’s just this one character that practically never shows up” “oh, it’s just the skyboxes, they’re basically not noticeable anyway” “who cares if the early access uses AI voices? They’ll be replaced eventually!”
You’d be surprised how often it happen for former angry employees to do that. We even had example in some Disney, with very explicit scenes even going all the way to customers.
I never said that they where OK with it, just that no one can be expected to check every little texture without being expected to miss some of them. Human are prone to fatigue, and I saw many bugs going in production due to such errors of judgement.
As for using AI during early access, IMO it depends on the size of the project. And one man project ? Totally fine, even after launch. A full 400 men project from a big publisher? Not so much, they have to mean to do it by hand. Especially considering how expensive they sell it afterward.
Clair Obscur being a mostly 30 men project (plus some occasional extras), I, personally, don’t see AI usage as a problem as soon as it is sparsely used.
I assure you, AI is not popular. Studies have shown that AI is causing people more concern than excitement Not the most reputable source, but oh well
I’m speaking about Clair Obscur, not AI. Don’t you feel surprised that as soon as they get a big boost from the game award, you see people left and right creating dramas for whatever reason they find? Some forgotten AI texture in the final game? Really?
Blue Prince does use AI assets No it didn’t
My apology for jumping on that bandwagon. I’m unfortunately not totally immune to that either 😅
On the other hand, IGA did forbid AI on the whole project pipeline, and if I find it a bit overblown, it is their choice, and I’ll respect that.
What baffles me is all the hate Clair Obscur got because of that. The vast majority was made by hand, and the game is good. If the story was AI gen, or the music, I’d agree, but a fucking texture? In which way would it suddenly make a multiple year project shit like some pretends?
[if AI was] removed once discovered, I don’t see any problem
The problem was that it was sold to consumers at all without consent. You don’t get off scot free when you accidently leave some cocaine for the inlaws to find. There was malicious intent just by not disclosing its usage
OpenOrca
You bring this up and imply we’re agreeing here, but I find it odd that you immediately backtrack and say that AI usage in general, not OpenOrca usage, is a-okay. It’s entirely irrelevant what AI tool you use if this company didn’t
Can I blame someone for using placeholder texture [using] AI
Yes. A placeholder texture should be made to be obvious that it’s a placeholder. As soon as it doesn’t do that, it’s failed at its job. By using AI like this, you’re effectively making the QA’s job 10 times harder, as now they have to stare at every texture to make sure it’s not AI generated
left and right creating drama [about CO]
Yes. Because information came out on a large platform that allowed more people to hear about it compared to when it was initially released.
I actually played through Clair Obscur about two months ago and gave it a very hearty review on steam, but as soon as I heard that they used AI without disclosing it that changed into a very charged negative thumbs down. It’s very easy to pretend that people just hate things because they’re popular, you see it all the time with youtubers and movies after all. Unfortunately, there’s usually a very good reason that irks these people
The vast majority was made by hand, and the game is good
You seem to have missed my main point, and it’s not just here, either. You eluded to this frame of mind multiple times when writing these past two comments. My entire argument is that it was incredibly scummy to not disclose the usage of AI, robbing the buyer of any agency in the matter
Me responding to your other points is really just entertaining their idea, rather than engaging in a thoughtful discussion, as the only response you had for this main point was mainly along the lines of the above quote I’m responding to, which is really just moving goalposts
By acting like it doesn’t matter because everything else is good, you’re kind of weirdly conceding the point, as if it didn’t matter if they did it, then why shouldn’t they disclose it?
I’m OK with that tbh. If we normalise disclosures for any use of AI, ever, the some AI vibe-code slop gets declared the same way as a meticulously crafted game (but the devs used AI for research/brainstorming), or even ‘devs used Google and they may have been inspired by the search AI’ etc
I think AI as a tech is pretty cool. I think using AI is less cool, since it is using far more resources than we can afford to give it, so I avoid using AI at all, even if I think the tech itself is morally neutral.
And I think the way we’re using AI is horrifying. Not just how companies push it, but the common use, too. People are outsourcing their thinking and comprehension to AI, and their own personal development is stagnating. This is particularly terrifying in children and college students. Would I rather have a doctor/social worker/financial advisor that gained a degree through AI and couldn’t adapt to real world exceptions? Or none at all? Hmm.
I think there is a space for devs to use AI and not have it undermine what they’re doing, is what I mean. And so I don’t want to label those people the same as the ones who’ll get AI to do everything. Otherwise, with how much AI is used on our behalf even without consent, the AI label will become the norm… at which point, it ceases to mean anything.
People want to know if AI was used at all. No matter which part of the process its used in, its replacing human labor. You could argue that AI generated art will have an impact on the human-created art that replaces it as well.
I would rather Steam tag games as AI and then the game can add a section in the description explaining exactly how it was used. You can decide if they were ethical about it or not at that point.
I don’t exactly disagree, it’s just that bad faith AI games will inevitably use this possible interpretation to excuse using AI much more extensively. If you want to flag AI use for like… googling stuff, then we should differentiate it from those who use AI assets in their final product.
Yes, a few textures. And how is that different from a procedural texture, also made by computer algorithms? And seriously, who gives a fuck if some brick texture is not handmade? What about textures made with photos? Are those handmade?
What a nothing burger of an argument, keep moving the goalpost brochacho you don’t even know which textures we are talking about
Photos are taken by people, procedural textures are made from algorithms made by people. AI generated textures are made using models fed with stolen work made by people, and don’t even get me started on the energy consumption on every step of the way.
Notice the difference?
But seriously, why do you give a fuck about the topic if you are just going to dismiss everything?
Their use of AI to make placeholder assets (which aren’t in the released game) is why it felt off? While it’s not for everyone, it’s still objectively one of the best games released recently.
The soundtrack is just pure art. There’s more variety in this than most games, across many genres, and is over 8 hours long in total. Lorien Testard is a genius and we need more of his work in gaming beyond this game and even beyond Sandfall. Also Alice Duport-Percier (the female vocalist) has true perfect pitch, is an opera singer, and has beautiful diction despite my not knowing French.
The story is very fresh, unpredictable (though I’ve seen people take wild stabs at it while playing and getting somewhat close but still missing), and isn’t written in the cliche ways that we’re used to because the lead writer, Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, has never worked in the gaming industry, nor ever published a piece of writing before. She writes primarily for her own entertainment and as an outlet, and is brilliant in her own right outside of writing. Also her work in writing believable dialog made things feel more authentic, especially when characters argue. It just flows well.
The voice acting is top-notch. The fact Kepler was able to throw money at this game specifically for the voice cast because they believed in it, says a lot. Sandfall didn’t ask for this money, but Kepler knew they had to help out however they could.
The gameplay is what I’m guessing is what you dislike the most, as that’s normally what those who don’t like it talk about. Very subjective, but for those of us who love turned-based games or who are into tight combat found in Souls-likes (I’m in the former, but now looking at the latter), it keeps people engaged. I’ve played thousands and thousands of hours playing turn-based games, but this one doesn’t just let you passively fight until you’ve made significant progress and learn the timings. The countering feels powerful, and if you really want you can completely break the balance if you want and are creative in your setup. And now that they added the ability to make things more difficult, even the pros have a challenge to come back to.
I’m not trying to pressure you into giving it another shot, but those 4 things are enough to land this game into my top 3 all-time games.
I mean, I’ll never give it a shot to play. It’s too long, I have a job, and I have games I want to play more that will certainly be more enjoyable to me. I never played this game, as I said it’s not even remotely my taste. That’s also why I need to have someone explain what makes it supposedly good for what it is.
Most of these remarks are circular though, “it’s good because it’s good/I liked it.” Which is fine, but doesn’t really speak to the game. Gameplay seems to be where you’re better at articulating what’s actually good here. I don’t know this genre, so it’s exceptional that there is a combination of active and passive combat tied to the player’s experience? This is something exclusive or executed in a notable way here, or it’s just something that’s been done before that you feel is elevated because you like the story production?
No, objectively right. You can quantify the overall appeal very easily. It was the top user-rated game on MetaCritic EVER, had critical acclaim, obviously won many awards despite this AI debacle in the IGAs, sold over 5 million copies already even though it was on GamePass, and has maintained a fan gathering all these many months later even before they won at the TGAs.
And since you edited yours, I’ll just edit this: that’s not true. It’s primarily a subjective word, but only when you cannot quantify the statement. Look at sports statistics as a prime example of this. You can get a “best” players, teams, etc of a sport based on their actual performance, especially if you are looking at specific stats and use that stat as part of the statement you’re making.
Just a note, seems to just be in production. Possibly placeholders?
Reminds me of the old days, developers all the time put in copyrighted assets as placeholders. Rarely they get into the final release and cause trouble but it was fairly common practice.
GenAI shouldn’t be used in any part of the process, including concepts and placeholders.
That being said, the assets that slipped through in E33 were from 2022. The most powerful publicly available genAI tool at the time was fuckin DallE-Mini, which basically just spit out fuzzy messes. None of the ethical concerns were common knowledge yet, Altman and his ilk were basically nobodies at the time, this was far before any of the current tools and companies that are driving everything to hell.
On top of that, there’s a dogshit article going around where Sandfall says they “use a small bit of AI” internally, and elaborate that they’re referring to Unreal machine learning tools and such, not genAI.
Fuck genAI, fuck Altman, and fuck anyone who intentionally uses any of this shit today, but the E33 case is a literal non-issue. They had 2022 fuzzy garbage slip through the cracks, immediately removed it, and there’s absolutely nothing to indicate that they’re using the modern, problematic tech today.
The only issue here is that there’s no reason for it to be considered an indie game. That’s it.
In the olden days those assets were pulled from the google search and the people who had made them never saw a dime from the usage.
Placeholder is excelent use for AI.
If i need to do place holder for a dirt by hand it is900x900 brown square named brown_square.png and no artist sees a dime for it. How if somebody uses AI to generate little nicer looking dirt that is not going to end in the final game is taking money from artist?
In both cases there will be an artist that makes the final thing.
insider-gaming.com
Aktywne