Diablo IV, for me. I love the Diablo series and just a bit ago, I sank 2 hours down to get my necromancer character up and set in Diablo II Resurrection. I have Diablo III and its expansion too, but they’re online only and I almost can’t be bothered to go through that. I’ve beaten it a long time ago.
And I really do want to get Diablo IV, but they’ve made that online-only as well. Like, I know I’m always online and everything but I do like to have that fallback where if I am without internet or I can’t afford internet for a time, I can play or watch things to bide the time over. I can’t do that with online-only games because it’s like being gated away from something you bought.
So everytime I look at Diablo IV, I just get a little depressed at times. Blizzard should do what D2R did, have an online character and have an offline character.
Clair Obscur for me too, but because of the AI art controversy. I can’t stand AI, even if temporary, even if just store banners, I just can’t trust the company from then on not to sneak it into other areas.
They didn’t sneak anything and they never will. Looked into it deeply. They used AI assets as placeholders during development. But everything in the shipped game is human-made. No further use of generative AI is expected, since the game awards controversy the company’s management published a statement of banning AI use entirely in their company.
The whole controversy around indie game awards was also blown beyond proportions. A company used a new technology at a time when the tech was new and the debate around it’s use was still inmature. Then dismissed it for it was not good enough. They failed at quality assurance and a couple of textures weren’t deleted. They replaced them as soon at they found out. By all intents and purposes, this controversy does not qualify sandfall as an AI using company, and to affirm so is ignorant of the context of all that went down in reality.
You said a whole lot of words, but the fact remains that they did use AI during development, released a game with AI textures, and told the award organization they never used AI at all.
They, and you, can make excuses all you want, but for some of us they simply have lost some of their good reputation. We will see what they do next though, and I’m hopeful.
I understand their reasoning, but still, it soured me on the game. GenAI models being built from non-consensually mass-scraped art was known from the very start, and yet the devs thought it was ok to put it into their game… They could have just used stock textures as placeholders like developers have been doing for decades.
But anyway, we are free to just not agree and draw the line in different places on what we consider ethical conduct 🤷
That’s the point. They didn’t thought it was OK and didn’t.
That is exactly what they did, any texture left in the first version of the game was a mistake that was promptly fixed as soon as they noticed it. We have the advantage of judging four years later with new info something they did back then and have since corrected. Ethical considerations must include intent and context, and here there was definitely no intent to harm.