We’re also dealing with language differences. English is not the developer’s first language. What may seem a clear sentence to a native speaker, could be easily misinterpreted/mistranslated to something similar, but different enough that the answer changes.
It seems that the AI use was early in development, and limited to temporary placeholders that were going to be replaced. Since they were patched out within days of release, that seems to imply they already had replacement assets on hand, they were just missed during final checks before release.
The answer from the devs also changed prior to the awards show that implies that they may have had an updated interpretation of the qualification question or answer. If they thought the question was about AI use in the final product, then accidentally missing a placeholder swap shouldn’t be disqualifying. Likewise, early experimentation with the tech and then deciding not to use it probably should not disqualify either. But if the qualification is a hard yes/no with absolutely no context or consideration whatsoever, then that’s a different outcome, and hence them clarifying for the awards team.
Personally I think the hard limit without any room for consideration or interpretation is a shit qualification. Especially considering that isn’t really the case for most awards. Look at the definition of “indie” for example. There’s a half dozen different interpretations people have ranging from having to be self published, avoiding just large publishers, or just the publisher not having creative influence. That’s a lot of interpretation comparatively.
So if I’m reading it right they basically just tried it out and then decided to not use it, removing anything that used it? I can see how technically that it ‘was used at all in development’, but also seems a lil silly to pull the awards based on it.
They probably should have clarified how they used it a lot earlier, but I also don’t blame them for trying out a new tool.
The game was released with AI assets. The rules required disclosure, and they failed to properly disclose. Whether this was on purpose or by accident, they were disqualified quite fairly. It’s a shame, but fairness must apply equally to all studios.
This is where I am confused. I hear this, but I also keep hearing they used AI to create assets when it was first started development as placeholders for future assets. They were all replaced long before the game was ever released. I also heard that the assets used were stock unreal 5 assets which were AI generated but again replaced later long before the game released. So which is the real story?
They used them as placeholders, they may or may not have been stock ue5 assets, which is another problem altogether. But a few of them were left in game at release, presumably by accident since they were removed 5 days post launch. The game did release with AI assets, even if mistakenly.
Given the test, release and publishing timelines, the 5 days patch was already being actively worked on before the game was released. Had it be a few positions higher on the backlog, nobody would have known.
If this is against Indie GA, then for sure drop the award, but that makes me value less the IGA than the game.
The AI assets were only patched out at day 5 because fans noticed them. The devs likely rolled it into that patch because of the fans catching it in the live game.
The issue at hand, as the article above goes into, is that the devs said that they used no AI at all in developement, which is a condition of the award. They did however, as these assets and the devs themselves comfirmed in various interviews. They lied or at least misled the Indie game awards and violated its conditions.
Revoking the award seems like a pretty reasonable response on the IGA’s part. The game itself can still be a masterpiece, but not one eligble for this award.
It was released with the original placeholder AI assets, but patched out within 5 days. It’s pretty clear that they just missed replacing those assets prior to release.
I don’t know exactly which assets, or exactly how many… but from several article it seems one of them was a newspaper only used in the prologue, that no one would notice without directly looking at it up close, which 99.9% of people would never do, and could easily be overlooked doing final testing for game breaking issues prior to release.
And the failure to properly disclose could easily be explained by them messing around. Early in development, deciding not to use AI, and then forgetting about it. Which also explains it being left in for release accidentally. Updated assets were clearly made, just never replaced.
The disqualification had nothing to do with the assets being there for the release, it was solely about development as mentioned in every statement from the awards. Meaning even if it hadn’t been there at release, they still would have been disqualified. Hard criteria like that which disqualifies any sort of context or consideration is not fair. Especially when we’re talking about cutting edge technologies that teams will obviously be experimenting with before making decisions.
It was only the "indie’ games award. A small ragtag group that was completely in niche discussions online until they pulled this stunt to get all the gaming outlets to bait about
"omg E33 got an AWARD PULLED???!
Nobody knew or gave a fuck about the “indie” game awards until this happened.
Because this paid off, expect more smaller groups to pull similar ideas to feign “outrage” for exposure
Except that they used the placeholder AI textures so that they would have a functional build to test on. They didn’t just try it and decide it didn’t work. They literally used it produce part of the rough draft and even shipped the game with some of those placeholder textures accidentally still in there. It was actively used in this instance to “do work”.
It wasn’t “well let me see what this looks like… No that’s all wrong… Nevermind”. It was “well let’s get this AI to make some placeholders so we can continue working on this and we’ll slap the real textures in later”. Literally removing work from a human(concept artist), which is the complaint of anti-AI people. Funny enough, I’m pro-AI and even I’m agreeing with the anti-AI people here. You want a “no AI was used” award? Then don’t ever use AI. Simple.
We’re not talking about a development team of 100+ artists here and a company forcing them to work 80 hour crunch weeks leading up to launch like much of the industry.
I don’t know exactly how their 30 or so team members break down for specialties, but I’m willing to bet we’re talking maybe 5 asset artists. Making the tens or hundreds of thousands of concept art pieces, and in game assets. Their time is finite and much better spent working on final assets than making placeholders that will just be replaced later. Experimenting with AI and dripping a placeholder in during month 6 that never gets touched again, and the final asset is made but missed when swapping them in at the end of development isn’t exactly damning
Literally removing work from a human(concept artist)
It’s not really “removing” work from a human, it’s utilizing the time of a very small and limited team more wisely. The AI didn’t replace a human, there was never going to be an additional person hired just to make that placeholder, at worst it just let the existing artists spend more time making final assets.
It is exactly replacing work. Your argument is easy to extend to teams of one solo developer who has finite time and money and it’s easy to see the appeal of AI in general.
I’m also in the AI isn’t that bad camp but it’s pretty clear here they used AI, and rightfully disqualified.
Exactly this. I’m not making a moral judgement, just a logical one. They used AI, thus don’t qualify. Feel free to debate whether that award should be that way, but that’s how it is right now.
That’s not what a concept artist does, concept artists (if they had one) did the work before, game artists are still doing the work while the generated placeholders are in place, no person’s job was compromised by using generated placeholders. That being said, if any placeholder made it into the final game then fuck them.
Dude, it was 2022. AI was nothing back then. Certainly not something that people were debating the morality of at the time. It was a new tool. A developer tried it out for a few very minor assets that were only meant to be placeholders. This was’t “literally removing work from a human(concept artist)”. FFS, it probably was the concept artist who used it!
Like imagine a new type of paint comes out that’s supposed to spread on canvas better. An artist gets some and tries a few test strokes on a blank canvas, goes “huh, interesting”, and then paints over it entirely with traditional paint. Then, the public turns against the new paint. Maybe it’s made from orphan blood, maybe it causes cancer; it doesn’t matter why, but it is now heavily frowned upon to use it. An art studio displaying the original artists work puts out a claim that none of their art uses the new type of paint. Were they lying? Like, ya technically I guess, but if you can’t see the nuance and understand how such a thing could happen, then your logic is less that of a human, and more that of a machine.
No, I said nuance is important. That’s why I don’t think the devs are villains. But logically you can’t get a “no AI” award if you used AI. It’s be like entering a handknitted blanket contest and using a machine to start the first row. It’s not “100% handmade” anymore.
They used it to create placeholders during development. It wasn’t something they decided not to use before. It’s just something that was meant to be replaced. Usually these placeholders are a missing texture image or just a magenta texture, but they used generative AI to create something that fit into the world. Because it fit they forgot to replace it.
Honestly, I’m not opposed to this usage. It’s not like it’s replacing an artist. No one was going to create a placeholder to be replaced. However, it is obvious to see that occasionally you’ll forget to replace items with this technique, like we saw here. The old style of incredibly obvious placeholders were used for a reason; so that you can’t forget to replace them. It’s probably smart to keep doing this.
I agree with almost everything here, I think using LLMs to generate placeholders is fair game and allows studios to nail down the feeling of the game sooner. That being said there’s one thing I disagree:
However, it is obvious to see that occasionally you’ll forget to replace items with this technique
There are ways to ensure you don’t forget, things like naming your placeholders placeholder_<name> or whatever so you ensure there are no more placeholders when you make the final build. That is the best way to approach this because even extremely obvious placeholders might be missed otherwise, since even if you have a full QA team they won’t be playing every little scene from the game daily looking for that, and a few blank/pink/checkered textures on small or weird areas might be missed.
I think it’s okay for studios to use generative AI for placeholders, but if one of them makes it to the release you screwed up big time. And like I said there are ways to ensure you don’t, it’s trivial to make a plugin for any of the major engines (and should be even easier if you’re building the engine yourself) where it would alert you of placeholders in use at compile time.
That’s just ridiculous standards when you apply them to a small team doing their best to pump out a unique piece of art. Yeah sure you can add a million processes to avoid inconsequential things like that but that’s time you can’t spend on making a good game. Zero value except for appeasing superstitious busybodies…
Dude, naming the textures placeholder_<name> doesn’t take any more time and ensures you won’t ship a game with a placeholder. This is, or at least should be, common practice even without using LLMs, and only takes a couple of seconds, not enough to cause any inconvenience.
Every process can be theoretically simple but they never have zero impact. So you come up with this process and some other guy comes up with another, there’s an infinity of things that are simple and quick. Imagine the uber-crunch a small team needs to go through to produce an AA title. It’s just cruel to just come up after the fact and be like “oh yeah you could have done this and that on top of your actual work, it would have added zero quality to the finished product but it’s oh so important to a few people”.
Like… When will gamers ever respect workers giving it their all? They’re just human ffs.
The solution I’m talking about should already be the standard by most devs (especially small studios), even before LLM was a thing. See, small teams can’t afford QA, at least not to the same extent as big studis, so they need to add checks to stuff in a way that catches large problems, and a placeholder making it into the final game is a big problem. Even before generated images were a thing devs would just use any random image they had that more or less worked, and those images could have copyright or be problematic in any other way, so ensuring none of that made it into the final release has always been important.
I mean, it’s a completely reasonable habit that prevents issues of this kind, i’m not disputing that. It’s part of a million little discipline things that will make your life better for an insignificant cost. But it’s also not a big deal and if you start caring about that then you should also care about all the other things that “should already be the standard by most devs”. And then where will you find the time and energy to punch above your weight class and release a masterpiece ? When you engage in that sort of task, you always have to neglect stuff that “should be the standard”. It’s cool and people should be cool about it IMO. Nobody’s gonna love you for being super rigorous about your file naming schemes and never being lazy, they’ll love you cause you have good ideas and work them hard.
I don’t find it nice when the internet is always back-seating every little aspect of what creators do, and being super demanding as if they were a mega corp with infinite resource and not a small group of every day people trying their really best to push out something great in a reasonable time-frame while not burning out. Maybe that’s not what you’re doing, man, it’s just one of my pet peeves.
I guess that’s where we disagree. I’d rather have sloppy talented bastards than little robots. One Kurt Cobain over a million Joe Satrianis, any time of the year.
You can train a monkey to be rigorous, I’m sure at EA sports they’re really disciplined with their file naming but I’m not gonna play their games to find out.
I don’t disagree that there are ways to add protections. It’d require strict compliance still though or things could fall through the cracks. Even when using the classic placeholders things have been missed on occasion. The only 100% reliable way to avoid shipping any generative AI content is to never include it in the project.
Again, I don’t think the usage here was bad. I think the reaction to one piece of generative AI art, which was replaced within a week, has been too severe. I’m just saying that if you really want to make sure you don’t ship any of it, just don’t ever include any. The old methods were perfectly fine, even if they made development look less pretty.
I think that the amount of love that went into Clair Obscur eclipses any use of AI. If you’re under the impression that background textures they replaced must mean they used AI everywhere else — you must not have played the game.
I’m hard pressed to name a nominee that wasn’t made with love. And it seems weird to insist a game as lauded as E33 needs another awards show genuflection to reaffirm it’s status.
While there’s no doubt that they have technically break the rules, just the fact that they afaik patched the few textures before this controversy (as far as I know, it’s possible that it was a reaction to this?), this simply sounds like a (very succesful) PR attempt by Indie Game Awards.
There’s no doubt that Clair Obscire isn’t a AI slop that cheapened on artists or art with GenAI, whis is the spirit of the rules IGA has. If you don’t take the rules literaly, they deserve the award. And that’s IMO important.
I’ve never heard about IGA before this, so it worked to draw attention to them.
I’m very OK with having rules in place to reject work where you replaced artists with AI. But this is not the case.
Regardless of why anyone involved did the the things they did, the rules were clearly stated. The violation of the rules may have been an honest mistake, but that doesn’t change the facts at hand.
Furthermore, even if no single bit or pixel produced by or with the help of AI made it to the production release, the fact remains that it was used in the production process. It is hard to give them the benefit of the doubt on this part; how could it have slipped their mind that they did this?
The awards are a contest with rules just like any other contest, and the rules are what makes it a contest in the first place. If football ignored some of their rules, it would just be a big field with 22 guys beating the shit out of each other for a ball.
It’s IMO pretty clear that the purpose of the rule is to rule out AI slop and games that cheapened on artists and replaced them by genAI., which I extremely agree with.
Expeditin is neither. It feels like an (succesful) PR stunt by a lesser known award show not many people knew about.
Would have been fine if they’d been up-front about it. Some people still wouldn’t like it, but some people wouldn’t play a game made by French devs. Maybe. I dunno. People are free to have preferences, even if we think they’re weird or don’t agree with them. I think Clair Obscur had a ton of great ideas. Game really wasn’t for me, but I respect the hell out of it. It’s a shame about the genAI. Nice that they’re committing to avoid AI, but they really just need to be honest about what you’re getting. I think if they told people what the AI was used for, it would have gone over better.
The problem with articles like this is that they only focus on games that are bad asagame, and ignores games that are good to excellent, but that are still bad because they screw their players over, engage in abusive business and labor practices, or are simply owned by dogshit people.
As you can tell, I’m waiting for the Jimqusition end of year lists.
The issue with a “The worst of …” list is that you need to find examples that are both really bad and also notorious/high-profile enough to be interesting. “random game I’ve never heard about is really bad” has very little value as a news/“news” item. It’s like buying a bottom-shelf liquor and complaining that it sucks ass.
There is no good reason for us to define, or seek out, the “worst games of the year”. Only outrage culture wants us to direct hate towards known bad games like Black Ops 7, even though by any practical analysis it’s a better game than hundreds of ignored, pretty bad asset flips, and even some high-effort low-thought indie games that have come out.
Not where I am. There are kids and old people playing alike. Sure, there are some collectors, but there always will be. Hell, the ATLA set has really good jump start packs, which are explicitly for playing
Nobody even plays the Pokemon TCG. Well, I guess a couple dozen people might, but that’s about it.
The video games are basically the same game repackaged over and over again. No disrespect to people who like Pokemon of course, but the Pokemon Company could do a lot more than they do now. But it has stuck around because people really like the brand for some reason.
MTG, on the other hand, is shitting itself currently, but the core gameplay has evolved over 30+ years into the framework for a very detailed game with countless possible interactions. There are dozens of actively played formats for the game, and despite WOTC’s best attempts, will not be dying anytime soon.
E33 is not even in the same category as those games. To begin with, it’s a single game, not a whole franchise. It seems a bit unfair to compare it to those games in terms of staying power. Regarding gameplay, E33 is far more interesting than Pokemon. It doesn’t have the same depth as MTG or D&D, but MTG’s comprehensive rules is a PDF with around 300 pages, and D&D has entire rulebooks. E33 is far easier for people to learn than those two games as a result.
Chess, uh, is not a very popular game. People play it of course, but it stuck around because of its history. Also, the demographic of people playing video games regularly and classic board games regularly doesn’t have a huge amount of overlap.
Server load is not a great indicator of how good a game is.
Silksong is an excellent game but it’s absolutely not in the same league. COE33 is a much more sophisticated game with deeper story and advanced artwork.
Silksong was 1/3 the price so they could sell many more copies, and COE33 didn’t have nearly the same hype on launch. None of that makes Silksong a better game.
IMHO fart sniffing pick and the only person I know who will play it is a persona fan.
The description and trailers don’t seem revolutionary or mind blowing. Just a pretty turn based with a story that EA or Ubisoft didn’t half ass. BF6 just went on sale for $40 from $70 and is the best selling game of the year.
And never will. The total selling point is “a deep story” and but I haven’t heard single specific that sounds deep or even interesting.
You come off like the kid who insisted I play Persona. It’s not that deep, try some more adult media. We have a guy here on Lemmy who highly recommends A Brave New World 🥲
As far as I understand it, the comparisons pretty much end at the combat system / gameplay mechanics.
Without giving away too much, you have a world where, every year, everybody of a certain age is erased. Every year, those with one year left to live set out to try and stop that from happening - and for ~77 years, none of them have returned.
This sets the stage for exploration of grief, loss, and associated trauma. In most games, there’s death everywhere but the emotional side is relegated to a 3 minute scene with sad piano music before the characters get back to the action. In this game, they drill a lot deeper and it really makes the characters come alive.
They’ve nailed the blend of sadness, joy, and even comedy.
This is all then set in a backdrop of some of the most visually interesting environments ever presented in a videogame with a completely insane musical score that brings all of those moments to life, the game is effectively a frisson machine.
I’ll add to the other comment for anyone else that’s actually open to new things, because I traditionally don’t like turn based games:
The combat is excellent and the enemies are varied. Party members have fun synergies with both your team and the enemies, and the Pictos system adds a ton of flexibility for each character. You can have some crazy setups, at one point I gave a character the explosive death + instant-death perk which let me skip a lot of the easy battles later on.
Plus there is a parrying mechanic that is challenging and rewarding!
So, from the way you talk about it, it seems you’re describing your feelings about the game moreso than an attempt at an objective take. Which is good, because there is no such thing as an objective take, and I definitely understand the perspective of not liking something that you feel is inexplicably ultra-popular. Especially if you feel that there was something you liked more that you’d rather see get the award.
That said, I do wonder how much you’ve seen of the game? Because I haven’t played it either, but everything I’ve seen strongly suggests that it is a genuine work of art that people put effort and passion into. Which – since you brought it up – is not a description I’d apply to Battlefield 6. So I’m kinda left wondering what specifically about it might put you off enough to want to slag it off like this.
If you’re upset at it for winning a billion awards, that’s fair. Most awards shows are always very silly and this one game getting practically showered honestly highlights that a lot — even a really good game like this probably didn’t deserve quite this many accolades. Still though, it looks to have a clear message, purpose, with good art and gameplay to go along. I think that deserves some awards.
Agreed. As much as I don’t care about Silksong either way, having “so many people wanted me, I broke the storefront” on your resume has to count for something.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launched with what some suspected to be AI-generated textures that, as it clarified to El País, were then replaced with custom assets in a swift patch five days after release.
Fuck using Gen AI to replace human-made art, and fair enough for pulling the award, but I do think it’s worth making it clear exactly how much of the art is/was AI. And the answer is, very little at launch and none currently.
This is most of it, but it is worth remembering that using GenAI/LLMs for placeholders is still bad. It’s strictly unnecessary, has dubious efficiency gains at best, and you’re still using tech that is provably hurting people and the environment en masse.
I’m not going to hate Sandfall forever for this – it’s not original sin – but it’s still a very real error they should not repeat.
Played it, its timesplitters alright. Story is only ts1, arcade is a bit limited and ai isnt always the smartest, has bugs but the base is there. Its timesplitters, with all its awesomeness
polygon.com
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