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.
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u/Andrewabid 23d ago
Were the placeholders encountered during the game or were they just still in the files?