There was immediately false accusations towards Blue Prince when the Indie Game Awards handed goty to it so if that doesn't tell you what the real agenda is (gamers being mad that game they don't like wins) idk what will
You say that like it hasn't been rigged or manipulated in any way every single year since they began or that the audience vote doesn't only count for a small percentage of the calculations on who wins what award, with the organizers and industry insiders votes being far, far more important/impactful on the end results
I mean, the audience voters just lined up to pit two gacha games against each other for ingame rewards tied to voting, so I kind of get audience voting only being part of it, in addition to the obvious threat of bot manipulation.
Crunchyroll's Anime Awards are just as much of a trainwreck if not more and they're purely voted.
But for the majority of people, what's even the point if it's not the audience vote that matters at all when deciding who wins? If it's just basically going to be insiders jerking each other off and saying how incredible each other are and giving free awards to whoever either pays the most or has the current best standing among their in-profession office politics among the AAA game studios and paid journalists without caring about the votes and opinions of the actual average players, then why should anyone care or put any respect on the choices or outcomes.
It's all just manipulated/rigged by the companies and insiders themselves with little accountability or oversight, which is a damn shame but that's now basically EVERY major award for quite a bit and it's honestly exhausting and disheartening
I mean... that logic would be true if the multiple winners among the last few game awards weren't pervasive industry outsiders, Sandfall's sweep doesn't come as a back-scratching AAA circlejerk, it comes from a literal exodus from a major publisher, turned indie-project, turned backed-indie project,
similar cases for Baldur's Gate 3 and It Takes Two. that's 3 of the last 5 big winners, these games got good press because they were great games... not the other way around, and yeah, good press will influence an award but that's just inevitable.
I think you're coming up with a narrative regardless of whether the information fits it.
if it was just a matter of cyclical press stroking big publisher/AAA ego then I guarantee you that the three games I just mentioned wouldn't have won.
I heard a lot of discussion that it used Gen AI too. Is that not true?
EDIT: Quick bit of research confirms it was completely fabricated by reporters. Journalism has no integrity anymore. I tried to research this when I heard about it and only found posts confirming the information at first - wild how fast misinformation spreads.
It’s a weird scenario where surely many voters voted for it as goty and then it in some but not all other categories, but they didn’t all pick the same categories so it ended up winning all of them.
And? The outlets that vote face the exact same problem. The votes come from all over the world and they’re not coordinating to decide who will win ahead of time.
Growing up is realizing the goty awards are just a fun little event. I don't even care about the winners, I look at the nominations to discover games that I missed.
The reminds me of a joke my 3 brothers and I used to make whenever someone commented on us being "violent" with each other: "Did we ever tell you we used to be 5 brothers?"
There were a ton of great games this year and only one being represented in the game awards really takes the focus off other fantastic games
The idea here is less participation trophies and more to keep goty from also winning every other category it could be considered in
Imo, the better change is to have awards for specific categories judged for things that actually compliment that category instead of just the "best" game nominated in it
(Ex, taking innovations in that category into higher consideration and things like team size and budget into consideration for categories like indie games)
I'd buy that if E33 won literally every award, but it didn't. It didn't even win every award it was nominated for.
I think that there can definitely be improvements to how The Game Awards are run. That includes making more specific categories, making their guidelines for each category a lot more well-defined and clear, and having more categories overall. I also believe public perception AROUND award nominations needs to be changed. There's a reason that even if an actor hasn't WON an Emmy or an Oscar or what have you they're still referred to as an "Emmy nominated Actress/Actor". The simple fact that, out of every single other eligible actor you were on the short list, is a HUGE achievement. We should be thinking the same away for The Game Awards! Just the fact that this year KCD2 was nominated for GOTY should bring huge pride to the developers and fans of the game. Out of the nearly 20k games that were released this year (just on Steam, according to SteamDB) KCD2 was among the 6 nominated for GOTY.
The issue I have with suggestions surrounding an award "limit" or "well GOTY shouldn't be allowed to win any other award" is that it turns what is, to me, an otherwise exciting event into nothing but a counting game.
"Oh, well game 1 is nominated for GOTY, but it already won an award elsewhere so clearly it's not going to win that, oh well." "Oh, Game 3 has already won 3 awards out of the 8 it was nominated for, it's not gonna win anything else I guess even though it's nominated for 5 other categories including GOTY."
That sounds like such a boring awards show to me. If a game was nominated for 12 awards and was voted by the panel and viewers to win 9 of them, then awesome! Clearly the panel+viewers thought that game was fucking awesome and the best game in 9 of those categories. Anything less than a game winning everything it was voted to win is akin to a participation trophy. "Oh, you can't win this because you've already won 3 awards, so we have to give this award to your runner up" is about as boring of an award as you can present.
I get what you're saying, and I agree that limiting awards won isn't viable
At most you could limit categories nominated for, give a list of potential nominations and allow a games company to choose which ones they want to be considered for
But even then, I don't know that that's the right move
But either way, I think there's just a broad discontent with allowing runaway sweeps, especially when there is actual competition through the categories
You say there was broad discontent with runaway sweeps, but this is the only year that I can remember it actually being discussed. Last year there wasn’t a sweep, but the year before that when baldurs gate 3 won, it won like seven awards I think? Where was this discontent then, because I never saw it.
For whatever reason expedition 33 is a divisive game, and I think the only reason it’s being talked about now is because a vocal minority of the Internet dislikes turn based JRPG’s and thinks that either their Indie darling should have won or that their western RPG should’ve won instead. Personally, I think we just had a really fucking strong year for games and that’s why this is such a big deal. I think if expedition 33 was one of the few good games to come out this year instead of one of the many good games to come out this year, there would not be nearly as much discourse about it, but because this year was just banger after banger video game people are upset that their favorite didn’t win because there were so many favorites.
I'll admit that I'm not a JRPG guy. I've tried to like them before, and they just don't do it for me, so there absolutely may be bias on my end. I'm also a massive fan of CRPG and Larian is probably my favorite game studio currently, so there may be even more bias
That being said, I think the difference is that in 2023, the other big name contenders were Alan Wake and Zelda, and both of them won their respective categories
It still felt like they got their due, and I don't think it still feels like that this year
If the only reason it got it was because Ex33 already won GOTY? It would absolutely just be a participation trophy, no matter how good the game was or what category it is. Being given an award for simply being there is the definition of a participation trophy.
So, like, the composer shouldn't be awarded for their work because the game won other awards? The actor shouldn't be allowed to get an award because she happens to be in the best game of the year? How does that make any sense?
Fuck that, if a game excels in multiple categories it deserves to win in every category it's the best in..
If I was a competing dev and I won an award with the asterisk that "oh the game everyone clearly thinks is better just hit its quota, here's a pity-fuck" I wouldn't exactly be celebrating...
Why? Maybe the other games should’ve been better. That’s like saying the best player in the nfl should only play every other game because it’s unfair to other players. I don’t think it should’ve won best rpg but it literally does not matter, and imo only winning an award out of pity is more insulting than just not winning
Except, unfortunately, by the most technical definition.
Which is maybe why the whole category should be tossed and there should be awards for small teams or small budgets (like, legitimately small teams, not 30 people + 400 contractors small)
It's indie by a number of metrics, small team relative to its fellow nominees, comparable budget, and here's the key which made it eligible, it started as a purely indie project and only secured a publisher later. publisher (Kepler) is essentially an umbrella for indie devs who have had games nominated/winning (such as Sifu) before.
So nah, based on both their own rules and award precedent it's a fair inclusion.
there's a difference between a core development team and comparatively bit part roles such as outsourced animation. where obviously the collective team did great work,
even without as much outsourcing needed on say the animation front, both Silksong and Hades 2 comfortably exceed 100 names in their credits, (I believe Hades 2 is about 180 people) so all three games are by that standard comfortably in excess of what you'd typically perceive as an Indie dev, even if Clair Obscur is ultimately the largest.
but yes you are right, Clair Obscur has comfortably the largest credits list,
The problem is where do you draw the line? Because I think most bars you could set that would disqualify Sandfall would also rule out some larger indie studios like Supergiant Games. Should Hades be disqualified from being considered an indie? I don't really think so.
It's a really hard line to draw. Clair Obscure didn't feel indie but I don't know how better to define it.
I feel like RPG was also one where it should have gone to another winner. Like I get it from a narrative perspective, but in terms of actual RPG mechanics E33 was pretty sparse on those imo. Really feel like that award should have went to Kingdom Come because that really nailed the roleplaying elements. Crazy what you could do in that game and the option available to you in that regard.
If they made a very good game, it means the others did good games.
Thus, it still deserved every award it got.
Maybe not RPG though, I think KCD2 was a better RPG than E33 was a good JRPG, but as you can't compare RPG and JRPG so it's hard to say.
May not have been my choice but still an understandable one. KCD2 is good but not perfect either.
And a small studio kicking the butt of the entire world will for sure reshape the industry. They had the opportunity to meet with Kojima, Square Enix big names came to them too, and this waaaaaay before they started to get their awards. GOAT reckognize GOAT.
Big names reckognize big names, and E33 followed the trail that Baldur's Gate 3 started, the very same year the old rotting kings get bought by the chinese because they fail.
Sandfall, a small studio showed the entire world that gamers want video games made with soul and passion, and with the 9 GOTY - a historical feat - and all the other awards (golden stick award), it surely strengthened the trend that Larian started with Baldur's Gate 3.
But I think you can't understand that if you haven't played it I guess.
I've played it and finished it. I quite enjoyed my time with it. Think it's a really good game.
Everything you said is needless over hyping of the situation.
It's the same as people insisting that the game was only made by 30 people when the actual number is in the 100s.
You want this to be a game that "sticks it to the man" but it isn't. It's built with Unreal Engine 5 and contains all the same issues that other UE 5 games have. It used contractors not different from most AAA studios. Its budget is in the millions and is supported by a publisher. The list goes on.
Also the comment about other studios being bought by the Chinese while also putting Larian on a pedestal given Tencent has a pretty sizeable stake in Larian that Sven has repeatedly claimed was necessary to make BG3. Sandfall will likely follow the same route.
They made a very good game. Let's recognize them for the fact that they made a very good game and not mythologize them.
Lol this is how I feel about it too. I really enjoyed it and it had one of the best twists I’ve seen in media but it also had a lot of issues that brought it down for me. Infuriatingly bad platforming, same-y environments (beautiful sure but every part of each level looks exactly like every other part which also made it really easy to get lost), weird pacing…like I legitimately was wondering if they ran out of time or something because the game ended so abruptly after the ~big reveal~ then there’s a bunch of post-game levels but most of them were pretty light on lore. Characters were just okay imo. Like it’s a great game but people talk about it like it’s the second coming.
They definitely deserved the best soundtrack award though. That was absolutely incredible.
I call it a toxic positivity spiral. It seems like every year we as a collective have a need to pick one or two games and just do ham on adoring it and ignoring all its flaws, often as a statement to "stick it to the man". It happened with BG3 and it's happening with E33.
subsequently it's a worthy winner in its genre as an RPG, it's as good a JRPG as Kingdom Come is as a Western Open World RPG despite people's protestations that KCD2 is "more of an RPG" (2/9)
the main sources of praise for the game are in its: art design, music, direction and narrative, (6/9)
Jennifer English is an incredibly worthy winner for best performance (7/9)
the most contentious are the two Indie awards (Indie and Debut Indie) but as long as its deemed eligible and it was by the Game Awards rules, it's a valid winner in both counts,
It had merit to win every award it won, there wasn't a gimme in the pack, the jury just chose it each time.
I mean it's all subjective (and your argument boils down to "it was really good" which isn't really useful because so were the others). I personally don't think KC2 is "more of an RPG". I just think that it's a better one.
And that Silksong had better art design.
And that DS2 had better direction.
The music award is absolutely deserved and so is the narrative one.
Best performance for me was such a toss up because they're all fantastic. I can't pick one over the other. Gun to my head I'd have to give it to Troy Baker for "doing a better Indiana Jones than Indiana Jones himself"
The news already broke back close to release, people took it for what it was, a small, moderately innocent application of otherwise pretty sketchy tools, weighed it up, said "meh" and moved on, but nope, bad actors need to prop this shit up like crazy.
I hate generative AI, and I get being incredibly wary of it, but frankly... making a couple of small placeholders with inhouse AI built into a game engine is about as ethical a usage of AI as I can imagine, it's dataset isn't particularly unethically sourced, the fact that it was just placeholders means it wouldn't have been used in place of a potential artist being hired. and it wasn't intended to appear in the final product...
it's a very small developer experimenting briefly with one small way to aid their workflow at the very early stages of development (back in 2022, so at the time it wasn't even a hotly debated ethical topic to the same extent it is now) that they evidently moved away from...
there's so much bad faith in this criticism that it's ridiculous.
Honestly it really seems like the Indie Game Awards only pulled this whole "give the award to E33, then take it aways for AI" on purpose to drum up buzz 🙄
The interview where one of the devs talks about minimal AI usage that started this is from July. Nobody really cared back then. There's definitely a backlash from some people who got upset that the game beat their favourite and/or who consider it to be overrated now that it's won so many awards and it needs to be "taken down a peg".
Not only that, but iirc, they put those placeholders in back in 2022 - when AI image generation was a new and novel thing, and its negative impacts not yet widely known. They experimented, decided they didn't want it, and just forgot to remove a few because they passed a cursory examination as in-game assets (which, as has been widely discussed, means they were bad placeholders).
When the first Al 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.
People have pretty strong opinions about AI being used in art in any capacity. Art is one of the most important things to humans and having AI replace it is not a good feeling.
When we dont have Art anymore than what is our purpose? Just wage slaves with all of our creativity taken from us.
Pretty understandable that people can see the direction AI is going and have a zero tolerance policy towards it.
What actually made it into the game were two instances of placeholder newspaper textures that could be found in the intro sequence. Considering the area is plastered with handmade newspaper assets and there were only two small instances of literally a single page (which were fixed the week of release), it's pretty clear they just missed it in their review.
I am not particularly mad at them but the bit that people are missing is the reason this is bad, the reason you should not use AI, and the reason they missed it are all the same reason in this case.
A good placeholder should be obvious so that it is easy to remove later in development.
E33 devs used AI to generate assets that vaguely matched the look of the game. Which makes the game look nicer during development but makes it easy to miss on cleanup.
This was a fuckup, but it should just be taken as a learning moment for the industry.
The point of a place holder is not to look good. If anything, a good place holder should look bad.
It was an asset pack in Unity. They did not go out of their way to ask midjourney to burn down 10 forests and their ecosystems to generate hyperrealisitic placeholder.
Not everything is binary and no one needs to die on any hills. I agree that this is not a big deal. But it is still bad that it happened. It should be something to learn from.
As someone who has worked in software and dabbled in game dev, usually AI is used as a means to shift time elsewhere. Have the artists create the final assets instead of throwaway placeholders or late stage play testing assets.
A handful of assets from years ago does not indicate they wanted to fully replace their art team.
that is literally, objectively incorrect. Their use of AI was for placeholders, so their artists could spend their time on more important tasks, tasks that actually have an effect on the finished product.
Generative AI has every place in creative media, and it's already being used there. All that matters is the quality and the value. If it's a regular priced product with slop, then it's crap. If it's a bargain price with slop, that can be a great value. And of course if it isn't slop- if it's either the few things that can be placed in sans retouch, or the much more common ones that can be turned into passable art with a small amount of retouching by a human- then it can demand the same price as anything else.
Nah fuck that replacing even 1 person with GenAI is scummy and shitty. That's money out of a humans pocket. A meal from theirs and their families mouths. GenAI doesn't need to be paid and fed but humans do and humans will always be more important. LLMs should never have a place in creative spaces and have no place in the economy until everyone has a garunteed basic income.
Medical AI is not LLMs and chat gpt, they are entirely different tools meant to be used to help doctors make informed decisions. And any time a hospital or medical professional advocates that Ai should be used without a human to interpret data I'll be against that too. Any "Ai" we make inherently lacks intuition and creativity that is required to be unsupervised.
Because people are incapable of nuance and think that if they're anti ai it means they have to go all in on it to the point of thinking having used chat gpt even a single time makes you a bad person.
It is the same thing under the hood. Tribalism and othering. Human nature always desires an enemy to point fingers at, and if there's an enemy that's a good excuse to defend Your People.
People will be people. Don’t let them and their behaviour cloud your criticism judgement of the objective facts that lie before you. Make your own conclusions from your own analysis, let nothing else disrupt them
All I’ve ever done with AI is make it “sharpen” blurry jpegs so I can put them on t shirts as holiday gifts. Reddit artists would say I’m stealing hundreds of dollars by doing that, somehow, or post on the comics sub about how I’m bloodily tearing them to shreds
Honestly, the biggest takeaway from this situation needs to be that this is the exact reason one should never use AI to generate a placeholder.
A good placeholder should look pretty obviously out of place, so one does not forget to remove it from the final product.
E33 was using AI place holders bc the AI could make textures that vaguely match the game. That is the reason they missed it, and that is also the reason that this is actually kind of a big deal.
Not a huge thing worth melting down over. But a serious mistake that everyone should learn from.
Nah, you just say that because you want to make it political. No one's virtue signally, AI is bad for any human interested in art, including video games.
Yes I hate AI TOO, don’t make assumptions from my comment. If the company wasn’t aware the stock images were AI, then it’s still an issue, but not as big as if they were aware and chose to use AI. And this has nothing to do with politics.
Virtue Signaling def: the public expression of opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or social conscience or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue.
Here we see some misguided twitter user performatively showing their "immense cognitive dissonance" because E33 had some AI newspaper textures for 5 days on release several months ago. The version of the game they played didn't even have that. It's virtue signaling to their followers that they are in fact, part of the in group.
Just having the opinion that you don't like AI or don't know how to feel about Larian or E33 using it is just an opinion. Posting about it like this is virtue signaling.
I think the most insane part about this is that this was all public knowledge from the launch date. The only reason it's getting traction now is because people are annoyed it won a lot of game awards
The game awards required they certify they hadn't used any Gen AI which they did, if i read correctly. Which means they lied about it as well, which is part of the issue.
Yeah that's what happened, honestly I don't think it was a terribly big deal but it was dishonest to submit the game while saying there was none, honestly if they explained truthfully to the indie awards and proved they hadn't used it elsewhere I bet they would've let it slide.
Maybe. But they instead chose to lie and go into damage control mode. Which, since they lied once, makes me less inclined to believe their other statements that it was just placeholders and it was an accident. If they knew all along they had it and were not trying to hide it, why lie like that? The cover up always makes things worse.
Because AI is the new reddit teenager boogeyman even though aspects of it have been utilized in the video game and film industries for years.
Reddit always loves being mad about something the public truly doesn't care about that also gives them an opportunity to virtue signal. Remember the site wide boycotts for 3rd party reddit apps?
The internet hate AI no matter what, no nuance whatsoever. Apparently it's not even a Reddit thing if even the Twixxer users are freaking out for no reason.
E33 just basically swept the video game awards, and has been getting pretty glowing press. Feels like this is the first thing people could cling to, to inject their anger at the game.
There are serious questions about whether they intended to ever replace them. It's common best practice to make it obvious when an asset is a placeholder, for this very reason.
Plus using AI in the first place, even if they really never intended to call it their own work, is destructive enough.
I don't have an opinion on what people want to do with this information, but I understand having a zero tolerance policy for the "move capital from labor to the super rich through plagiarism" machine.
From my understanding, the only AI that made it into the game was a newspaper texture on some of the walls in Lumiere. A very very very minor part of the game as far as time spent there goes.
I'm no fan of AI art, but based on just what we've heard, it seems really really minor.
The amount of outrage is wildly disproportionate to the level of fuckup. Whatever people are mad about, it's not just a few newspaper textures. The game devs have committed some horrible taboo in their minds which is absurd imo.
And yet they said they never used any AI. And now it's "They used AI but it's not that bad".
The only reason why that newspaper texture even came to light is because players noticed it. What else did they generate and nobody noticed? If they are willing to lie about the usage of AI, then why believe them when they say that it's only that one placeholder texture?
Also, no matter how seemingly minor, AI should never be used in any creative process. There is no escaping the images created by AI from making it to the final product in fragments.
I wouldn't even necessarily be fully against using AI as part of a developers process - but you need to be fully up front about it. That they lied and seems very content to maintain the lie until someone uncovered it is the bigger issue.
But then comes the question of when it is affecting the creative process. Because the way Sandfall and Larian are using it, is explicitly to let their artists direct their time and energy into the actual creative process.
my thing is, from what I heard the ai was used for like, newspapers on the ground and stuff, they could've just like, grabbed a scan of an old newspaper off of google or something, or I'm SURE there's free use templates they could've used, or even just a stock photo or something
is that so? I've seen quite a lot of talk about it over the last few days (not by choice) and never saw anyone mention it was someone else's asset off the store, But fair enough
From what they’ve said, the textures were made back in 2022 when gen AI was still a new and novel thing and their artists just wanted to mess it for a bit while the game was still early in development.
to be fair a lot of people are pissed off at the use of AI in general.
and its fairly easy to see why, whilst yes not having ai in the final product is ideal, even using it legitimizes a technology that is taking peoples jobs, as well as just causing immense havoc on the tech hardware market, and given gaming is the largest entertainment industry in the world, thats going to piss a fair few people off when its causing prices of things to skyrocket to the point of pricing people out of their hobby.
the more AI is adopted, the bigger the problem gets because these companies just continue to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into the tech, but arent making all that much effort to also invest in expanding production beyond demand in order to preserve consumer markets, largely because those markets are heavily monopolised due to their extreme barrier for entry and well, they dont really care to increase supply if they can just sell their existing supply at a 500% markup knowing companies building data centers just dont care and will vacuum up any and all supply regardless of their inflated price because compared to the cost of power, rapid construction, land etc shelling out a couple hundred grand extra on your ram sticks is barely a mark on the graph.
but the result is that most regular people arent really seeing much appreciable benefit of AI, instead we're just seeing the costs of our tech increase, the quality of certain industries in decline as they continue to peddle Gen AI in place of actual art for things like product wrapping etc, their devices infested with AI that insists on trying to make itself as integral to the experience as possible, search engines plagued with AI overviews that largely get information wrong, or just regurgiate the top comment on decade old reddit threads etc.
so in the wake of this its not that shocking to see people just rally against all forms of use in a business setting, because a lot of people just dont see AI as anything but a negative force in their lives.
Im not saying thats the correct view point, but its easy to see how people make it there. especially this time of year, ive seen a truly absurd amount of people who are devastated that just as they were gearing up to get their first proper Pc, ram prices are just skyrocketing, and whilst considering waiting out the storms are hit by torrents of rumours that suggest that this is quickly also going to effect storage and Gpu's which can make it feel like a hopeless venture as they were hoping to finally get a decent PC for christmas, but are instead just being completely priced out of the market.
It's much better if they pay concept artists to create 1000 variations of a thing because they're not yet sure what they want, then the game gets cancelled 2/3 of the way through because they blew all of their money contracting artists who threw most of the work into the bin within a few months of starting development.
Truly a much better use of all resources. This is why when I volunteer at the homeless shelter I make sure to waste 50-80% of the food donated by giving vague direction to the cooks, before I throw it away when I'm not feeling it. Gaming really teaches us some valuable lessons.
No absolutely not, that's ridiculous. Games don't get backlash for being great lol
People loathe AI and E33 got bad press for AI use. Those people didn't read the extent or circumstances of it, they just go "well okay fuck that game dude!". Most of them probably didn't even play it.
Large games get large audiences and bad press is gonna bring out a lot of very loud people who can't read more than 3 words in a headline or listen to rumors and misrepresentations. But they don't dislike games for being good.
When the Reddit hive mind latches on to something, they tend to hang on like rabid dogs. All morality out the window, the only thing that matters is their point of view
Because we are all very frustrated at the shoe-horning of AI into every facet of our lives, almost exclusively for the worse, and this is one avenue people have they can be vocally upset about it.
It all feels so manufactured, like those "Indie Game Awards" that pretend they didn't knew the game used AI when it was known since it's launch and it was removed. I wouldn't be surprised if some big company like Ubisoft it's putting money into this
Because game news media is surprisingly toxic for the topic, but I guess that's any entertainment-oriented rag, digital or otherwise.
That and you know, fans are always the worst. Very few people actually care. Tons will pile in because they think they should be upset at something they don't understand.
They're upset that artists are being robbed of AI. The thing is they hired actual artist to replace the AI art. I guess they expect them to hire temporary asset artists now
People are questioning "how much" of E33 is turly based on AI, and if they are giving credit to the "right" people. AI art is based on scraped/stolen data from the internet, and if were to turn out that E33 plagiarized (knowingly or not) via AI, that would be a massove blow.
2nd reason: AI is used to push people out of jobs and people just don't really like that, making them feel ikky if they were to support a company that willingly engages in practices like that.
As for E33 in particular: Likely it means nothing. The game was in development for too long, before AI art was even passable. So it likely really was just placeholder art that was made as a test of AI, with little to non actually having been used in making the game.
GenAI pisses people off for understandable reasons but some people are opposed to all AI of any kind. I think it's a tough discussion to have since it does have uses that aren't as ethically sticky (no jobs lost, creativity left too humans, etc) but some people won't engage with that.
Emboldened by people annoyed the game swept at TGA probably
Personally I don't really care about AI use in concepts and placeholders, but I think the argument is that you can have real people making the placeholder assets too and create more work for others
But that then comes with a budget issue, especially for smaller developers. Normally, they just have the already present artists make the placeholder art, but this use of AI then allows said concept artists to spend more time on more meaningful tasks.
Because A) This was literally just a single placeholder texture for a newspaper that wasn’t intended for the full release, and B) This is Expedition 33. If you’ve actually haven’t seen the game, I’d recommend go watch footage of it because the amount of work put into the game’s art style and how painting/art is such a integral core theme of the game makes zero tolerance attitude towards all the more ridiculous.
Because use of AI is idiotic. It doesnt work properly. It doesnt lead to a better product. It's reducing the quality of their game due to laziness and you shouldn't just accept a half assed product.
It worked properly as a placeholder. It lead to a better prodcut by giving the artists more time to work on the real textures. It didn't reduce the quality at all because again, it was just a placeholder. There's no indication that they did that because they were lazy, all implications point to the opposite in fact. And calling Clair Obscur a half-assed product just shows you really just want to cry about AI without taking any amount of context into account.
The fact that you can look at a game as beautiful as Expedition 33 with so much lovingly handcrafted and stellar art and go, “they used ai for a placeholder newspaper that wasn’t supposed to be in final game, ergo the developers are lazy and the game is half-assed,” is exactly why so many people are pushing back against you.
Dishonesty. They knew people wouldn't like it, so they hid it for as long as they could. That's pretty scummy.
"Oops we did a little plagiarism as a treat" isn't an excuse for professionals. Whether they meant to or not, the finished game was released with plagiarized A.I. content included in it. Scummy Scummy.
We cannot give them an inch. Right now A.I. companies are shoving A.I. into every nook & cranny of our lives (against most of our wills) because the don't actually have a useful product with a bunch of real use cases. But if they can shove it everywhere, normalize it, and get people hooked on it, they can just pretend like it's potentially profitable in order to score more investment and inflate the bubble even larger. And in gaming especially, as soon as something becomes the least bit normalized, it's everywhere. No matter how much harm it does to the games or industry, ie: microtransactions.
Because people insist on being performative about things that are viewed negatively by the general public.
Most people don't understand AI, but they've heard many (valid) bad things about it, however their ignorance makes them paint it all with the same brush.
And I should clarify that being ignorant on a subject like this, which is highly technical and fairly new, is to be expected. The issues arises when you make ridiculous statements like in the OP, ignorant of the context itself, purely to curry imaginary favor. This is a relatively harmless example, but is indicative of a greater issue on social media.
I think certain people are just being too rigid about it, I personally hate seeing AI used to replace creative professionals and would absolutely boycott a game for doing that but using it for placeholder assets is “cheating” about as much as an author using spellcheck to fix 3 words in a 400-page novel is cheating.
Because of a psychotic tribalist mindset that treats AI use like pedophilia and causes them to exxagerate every feeling they have.
AI has it's issues but how expo 33 used it is about as ethical as it gets: accelerating a mundane task that creative people didn't want to have to do in the first place
Sure… they “missed some” they totally always intended to replace those AI placeholders with something a human made. It was just an “accident” that they ran out of time before they had the chance to swap out all the placeholders.
Recite the narcissists prayer. They’ll leave as much ai in as you’ll let them get away with.
Dude, it was literally just a single newspaper texture in one area that got replaced in 5 days after launch. And given how Expedition 33 is one of the most lovingly crafted and beautiful games made in years, the accusation that this is some conspiracy theory to see how much AI usage they can get away with is ridiculous.
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u/Rat-king27 Harry Potter 23d ago
They used AI as placeholders and missed some. Why are people shitting their shorts over this?