Sandfall Interactive’s CEO has clarified how they used generative AI in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but don’t expect their future games to use the tool.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one of the best games of the year, but the conversation around generative AI over recent weeks has threatened to derail its positive momentum during awards season.
After picking up a record-breaking nine gongs at The Game Awards, the French role-player was stripped of two awards at The Indie Game Awards because Sandfall Interactive used generative AI during its development.
The team used the tool for placeholder assets, which were later removed via patches after launch, but after experimenting with it, the developer has explained why they’ll never use it again.
The game’s director, Guillaume Broche, discussed the AI topic during a Discord Q&A for select content creators this month.
When asked about how generative AI was used in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and whether they’ll use it in the future (via YouTuber Sushi), Broche replied: ‘Everything in the game is human made. When AI first really came out in 2022, we’d already started on the game. It was just a new tool, we tried it, and we didn’t like it at all. It felt wrong.
‘We had originally used it as a placeholder for textures we missed, but we took it out as soon as we found it. But yeah, the concept art, voice actors, everything is human made.’
He added: ‘It’s pretty hard to predict what the future [of the industry] will look like, but everything will be made by humans from us.’
It’s a reassuring response, at a time when the use of generative AI in games has become increasingly contentious.
Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke recently back-pedalled after a report claimed the studio was ‘pushing hard’ on the tool, explaining that the studio only uses it to explore ideas in the concept phase. Other games like Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7, meanwhile, have rightfully come under fire for using it to produce in-game assets.
While generative AI can help speed up certain processes in game development, like administrative tasks, the bigger concern is when it bleeds into the creative work, such as voiceovers and art assets.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn’t the only game to use generative AI for temporary assets. The Alters similarly used the tool to produce in-game text, which was mistakenly left in after launch.
Whether the practice of using it to produce temporary assets becomes less common due to this blowback remains to be seen, but don’t expect the issue at large to go away anytime soon.
Don’t miss Gaming news! Add us as a Preferred Source
As a loyal GameCentral reader, we want to make sure you never miss our articles when searching for gaming stories. We have all the latest video games news, reviews, previews, and interviews, with a vibrant community of highly engaged readers.
Click here and tick Metro.co.uk to ensure you see stories from us first in Google Search.
Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.
To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.
For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.
MORE: Call Of Duty is coming to Nintendo Switch 2 ‘in a few months’ claims insider
MORE: 007 First Light takes up GTA 6’s old spot after delay
MORE: Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora – From The Ashes review – better than the movie
#Clair #Obscur #Expedition #devs #regret #Gen #felt #wrong
