I mean even Skyrim ran pretty nice, till you started playing it long enough to start finding the bugs and jank. Of course, it helped that it had all the familiar jank from the previous games.
Horrid article, unless the intention was to throw shit around and hope to cause a commotion. There are no AI assets in Clair Obscur, and it should have been made clear by the article. From the IGA’s own statement:
[…] the use of gen AI art in production […] does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination. While the assets in question were patched out and it is a wonderful game, it does go against the regulations we have in place.
I think you have missed the actual issue here. The issue is not whether or not the game currently contains AI assets, the issue is whether AI was used during development. Quoting the article (emphasis mine):
“The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself,” the statement reads. “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.
“In light of Sandfall Interactive confirming the use of gen AI on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination.”
The actual problem is that simply using generative AI during development disqualifies a game from being nominated, and Sandfall Interactive lied and said they did not use gen AI.
The issue is not that the game was disqualified. If the rules clearly and unequivocally state that at no point can generative AI be used (and also clearly state what, in the spectrum from algorithms -> machine learning -> chatbot slop, they consider to be unacceptable, which I don’t know if they did or not, but that’s not the point), then there is no controversy, and I’m not criticising that.
The issue is that the article completely disregards mitigating facts that counter the narrative. There are no credible sources linked in the article save for one that was grossly misrepresented. Critically, we don’t know what Sandfall actually said before the nomination or after, or how the decision to disqualify was made, only the second-hand account in the FAQ. The article presents circumstances in a biased way, leading the reader to interpret it with the assumption that there are AI-generated assets currently in the game. It is, frankly, sloppy journalism.
I dont expect this to last very long, considering how easy and fast it is to apply the patch. Completely delisting the games feels a little bit excessive.
Also, some of these games aren’t even effected by this, such as Avowed being an Unreal 5 game and Grounded being an Unreal 4 game. The only two games effected by this are Pillars of Eternity (depending on which version of Unity they used to create the current build, seeing as build 1.0 most certainly used an uneffected Unity version from 2015), PoE II, and Pentiment.
From what I heard, they delisted only the premium editions of Avowed because some part of those use Unity. It looks like the same is true for the other games. Even for Pillars they only delisted the definitive edition.
“I keep catching myself in this uncanny loop — expecting the so-called ‘AI moment’ to have fizzled out, only to realize the bubble hasn’t just not popped, it’s still inflating. You didn’t just add AI to your business plan, you pivoted your entire narrative to center on it — because in 2025, apparently, no pitch deck is complete without a sprinkle of machine learning magic. Every time I see it, I’m not just surprised, I’m re-surprised — like déjà vu, but powered by buzzwords and venture capital fumes.”
edit: the above is the same comment I replied to, but run through an AI to sound more like an AI wrote it.
Takes me back to 2008 and Rockstar claiming that GTA 4… was designed for hardware that didn’t exist yet after that shit show of a shitty port to PC… It would be a further 6yrs before I could play that game at a reliable 19080p, 60fps… then GTA5 came out a year later.
19080p in 16:9 is 33,920X19,080 =647,193,600 pixels, 647 megapixels. 8K is 33.2 megapixels. So this dude is playing GTA 4 on a screen that has almost 20 times more pixels than an 8K screen
I know “worst” is an adjective that triggers a lot of content farms, but I still feel bad about these situations. Even the worst games, when they manage to be completed, are mountains of effort from the people involved; and as I understand it this was coming from one of IOI’s first publishing efforts.
I found years ago that if you block ubi.com and ubisoft.com (if you have a self hosted DNS or a way to block domains on a network), and any other sub domains you might spot, the games work fine. They just take like a full minute to load while they try their best to hit the servers. So yeah I’ve never agreed to the TOS for a few games as a result.
Needles to say, you’ll need these domains unblocked to play multiplayer.
“Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is? Insanity is doing the exact same fucking thing over and over again, expecting shit to change. That is crazy.”
3 was great, 4’s biggest improvement was functional multiplayer. I have core memories of hunting every animal that moved from the side of a gyrocopter piloted poorly by a very inebriated bud.
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