A touch of AI is all it takes to trigger backlash, as a promising new indie falls afoul of slop skeptics

Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨alyaza@beehaw.org⁩ to ⁨gaming@beehaw.org⁩

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/steam-week-in-review-a-touch-of-ai-is-all-it-takes-to-trigger-backlash-as-a-promising-new-indie-falls-afoul-of-slop-skeptics/

Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania with an evocative, painterly art style reminiscent of Lies of P and the narrative platformers of Playdead. According to Korean studio Alive Inc, the game had 100,000 wishlists just before its early access launch on August 19, mostly on the strength of a demo available since January 2025.

But what should have been a triumphant early access launch went pear shaped very quickly. At launch, few talked about the quite distinctive worldbuilding or the parry-heavy combat. Instead, all focus was trained entirely on something absent from the popular demo: very obvious AI use.

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eleijeep@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Anyone can make slop. That’s the entire point of it. So why would you think that anyone is going to pay money for your slop?

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kehet@sopuli.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
It’s not the AI itself I hate, it’s the laziness and the shoddy quality it churns out. Ten years ago, mistakes like these wouldn’t have stood a chance in a human artist’s work, so why are they suddenly acceptable just because it’s AI? Does nobody bother with quality control anymore?

If your budget is tight and you want to scrimp, fine, that’s understandable but you should at least make an effort to hide how cheap you’re being.

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- mrmaplebar@fedia.io ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Personally I have major ethical objections to the way that the vast majority of generative AI is done today, so I'm pretty much against it regardless of the hypothetical perceived quality of the end result.
  
  The ends really don't justify the means, and I want to support the human beings working hard to make authentic media in the future.
  
  I don't want to play someone's lazy and exploitative AI slop game any more than I want to look at someone's slop art or listen to slop music.
  
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  - naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    There’s a fictional world in which these machine learning techniques are developed ok submissions that are volunteered, rollout is socially and politically responsible, control and means of production are democratised, and development is guided by public interest.
    
    Unfortunately we don’t live in that world and I think given the one we live in it’s actually completely reasonable to find the outputs repulsive.
    
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  - BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Human use in jobs requires keeping a human alive, which is in and of itself terrible for the environment.
    
    Some of them are really bad at it too, have you seen the work my 11 year old puts out? It’s garbage. He can’t even get 100% of his math questions correct, and don’t even get me started on how poor his spelling is. He’s had 11 years to get better and it still sucks. Do you know how many resources he’s consumed in that training period? What if he never gets good at it?
    
    The entire argument AI being bad is based on an assumption that humans are somehow good. Objectively that is wrong. Only subjectively is there any argument for that.
    
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- Rothe@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  You should hate the AI itself as well. Fed on stolen IP, uses more power than a city (and all the carbon emissions that comes with being powered by unregulated gas plants), and being pushed by all tech oligarchs in order to take away owning personal computers so they can profit off of serfs having to subscribe to everything while stealing all of their data in the process.
  
  Then comes all the stupid shit AI does instead of what it was claimed to be able to do. But the underlying premise should be enough to make you hate the LLM AIs themselves.
  
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onlooker@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

He continued: “That was a hasty judgment on my part. Unless AI takes one more leap and reaches a point where no one can tell the difference, what I believed was still closer to an ideal than a reality. I expected some of you would be disappointed by our use of AI. I did not expect it to become this big.”

So… they’re completely fine with hiding AI usage as long as noone can tell the difference? That is super shady, man.

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- sanpo@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yeah, it shows they think the bad output quality is the only valid reason you’d be against slop.
  
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belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
If a game has AI touch it, im out. Pay the fucking artists and developers. AI is always the tool of the c-suite to save money on paying humans. Dont let them live it down, ever.

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- Quexotic@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I got expedition 33 as a gift. Still haven’t played it
  
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Sanctus@anarchist.nexus ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Looking at the rest of the game, take out the GenAI cut scenes and draw them? I dont see how this can’t be saved.

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- Skua@kbin.earth ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  There are two big issues that that doesn't fix:
  
  Showing the trailer in this state very clearly implies that they don't really care about the game. Even if it really was only meant to be a placeholder, would you think highly of a game with obvious placeholder assets in its trailer? If it's not a placeholder, then they're passing off major things like what the protagonist looks like to the hallucination box
  
  There are a lot of people who have ethical issues with AI, and just removing the stuff in the trailer is not going persuade anyone at all that the rest of the game isn't full of AI rubbish
  
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  - Sanctus@anarchist.nexus ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Idk to me it looks like they either couldn’t or just didn’t spend time finding someone to draw those cutscenes. The rest of the game in the trailer appears to have a lot of work put into it.
    
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- Janx@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Apparently, they already did.
  
  There’s a trace of surprise in the inevitable statement made by studio director Young Kim, who promised the AI-generated cutscenes would be replaced “by this weekend” (this has already happened).
  
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  - Sanctus@anarchist.nexus ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I hate the modern day. We’re gonna be in this bullshit forever. Does any of this uproar matter? Has anyone here even played the free demo? Find out next time on Panic Globe Z.
    
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chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

“Saw the very first cutscene, before any gameplay, and how the generative AI they used couldn’t even keep the main character’s model consistent,” reads the “most helpful” Steam review for Vapor World. “From the trailers the gameplay looked pretty fun [but] unfortunately I support people not robots. If the look you want to go for is beyond the scope you can achieve right now then I suggest you change it or wait until you can produce the art and style you want with people doing it.”

That’s pretty representative of the Steam reviews at the moment: Vapor World is currently sitting on 64 “mostly negative” reviews.

Can you leave a steam review and then refund a game? Otherwise how are so many people making the mistake of buying it when other reviews are already saying it has this dealbreaker issue of having used AI?

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- helix@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yes, you can, and it shows how many hours you played.
  
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  - Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    It also shows if you refunded the game or got the game for free.
    
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Mordikan@kbin.earth ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
There is a game that is upcoming that I was interested in that clearly used generative AI in a gameplay trailer. I should say I'm not pro/anti generative AI. I'm right down the middle, I see the issues and the potential, so the presence of AI itself for me isn't a deal killer (Crimson Desert for example).

But, the issue is that this game falsely represented what is going to be in the game. The lighting isn't planned to be that good. The model rigging isn't meant to be that fluid. Etc, etc. The problem is a matter of dishonesty.

If a developer uses generative AI for test assets and placeholders, I don't see that as an issue (especially if they admit to and own that fact). If they use that for material for trailers to showcase their work when that will not be part of the work, then that is a different story as that introduces that dishonesty.

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Janx@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
It looks like they removed all AI (except for narration). I’d prefer if even that was done by a voice actor, but oh well…

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

We use AI-based text-to-speech tools to generate the character voice-over in this game. Everything else that ships in the game is made by our own development team.

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