All the interesting Steam facts for the week ending August 23

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/28095114

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.

  • paris@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    And then after the backlash, the project director came out thinking the only issue was that the AI didn’t look good enough. Yeah bro that was the issue glad you’re in charge here to figure it all out.

    “If someone asked me what I think about using AI, the honest answer is that I would have to think about it for a long time,” the director wrote. “The reason I chose AI was that I believed it could reach a level of expression our existing resources could not, and that it would let us focus more on the game itself, outside of story and cinematics.”

    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.”

    …

    “The truth is, we spent a long time trying to tell this game’s story with cutscenes made entirely by our own hands,” the statement goes on. “The results were devastating every time. We came to believe we could not properly deliver this game’s complex, difficult narrative that way, and that is why we turned to AI. But if that choice hurt your experience, the fault is not in the tool. It is in our own shortcomings.”

    I don’t get it how do artists get captured by the Shortcut Machine like this? Genuinely what worm is entering these people’s brains where suddenly they don’t know or care what art is and just want to ask grok to “make it look cool with dinosaurs and lightning and an erupting volcano.” Brother if you can’t do what you planned to, change the fucking plans. Those constraints are how we get cool and interesting new works and themed and art directions. People love the ps1-era graphics look and it’s not because Square Enix asked chatgpt to generate a Tomb Raider cutscene in the style of Monet or whatever.

    • Soup@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      “It would be better if you couldn’t tell that you were being lied to, and I’m annoyed that we got caught.”

      “We aren’t creative enough to tell this story ourselves.”

      That dude’s dumb as rocks, glad they’re facing a consequence.

    • r1veRRR@feddit.orgEnglish
      01·
      2 months ago

      To try to come up with an explanation that doesn’t pretend these peoples brain fell out of their heads:

      Some people are crafters. For them the process and even the tools around that process are important, maybe even more important than the outcome. It makes sense that they would be wary of AI, to put it mildly.

      Other people are builders. For them, all they want is to solve an issue, build a solution, create an art. The way they get there is an implementation detail they don’t care about. They don’t care whether it’s real oil, or digital oil, as long as the oil painting in there head becomes a real thing somehow. It’s understandable why they might at least try to use AI for art.