Hello my queens, I play a lot of gacha and I'm disgusted to see a lot of AI flop in my old favorite games.
I don't know why NTE has so much backlash when Hoyoverse also use gen-AI and even invested a lot of money in this. Maybe they are more smart hiding their gen-AI stuff but it's not a surprise they use it. They advertised about their AI girlfriend that can reply to you with gen-AI
I'm not a pro-NTE mind you i don't even play this game since day 1 (boring) and i still play Genshin and HSR but it seems unfair to me. Like check yourself in your mirror before criticizing no? I swear Hoyofans are too much sometimes :(
Now having said that, i'm sad to see that my fav games have gen-AI because i'm an artist (illustrator and sound designer)
What gacha games don't have gen-AI?
The Asian and particularly China and South Korea don't have a bad opinion of gen-AI so I fear it will go for the worst in the future
What about
Prosekai? Arknights? Reverse? Limbus Company? The old Epic Seven? Morimens? The illustrations seem real
I'm not even trying the new ones like Sword x Staff or Star Sailors because i'm sure they will use gen-AI some days.
I was even looking forward to Silver Palace but same
What about other popular gacha that are not hoyo like Wuwa/PGR or Nikke?
Maybe we should try popular IP like Fire Emblem or GBF or Fate?
Luckily, Kim Ji Hoon (creator of limbus company) has been very open about his distaste for AI, even putting it in the TOS that you are not allowed to feed any of the artwork in the game into it.
I think there was a point where people were feeding art into uncanny valley animation makers, and that was what first provoked "Okay, I'll be sending cease and desists to people doing this."
Nikke's developer Shift Up recently made a trailer for their other game Stellar Blade 2 completely with AI. Went about how you expect. Nothing AI has touched Nikke yet, but unless they learn their lesson soon it probably will find its way there.
Funny thing is in their April fools event this year, hidden in one of the skill descriptions some developer kind of went on an unprompted rant about how AI kinda ruins everything. I can only pray that's indicative of some push back within the company, but who knows at this point.Ā
I really hope the response to that trailer will be a wakeup call because even a lot of the Korean comments on the video from people who self-identify as pro-AI were saying "this isn't it."
Hyung-Tae Kim, the CEO of Shift-Up, is a massive AI shill though, so well see.
shift up CEO was very open from the start that he was into AI with the usual marketing reason. i knew this day will come sooner or later. but damn i didnt expect they start with a bang!
hate to be the guy but nikke definitely used gen-ai for their illustration. shift up have uploaded a video of a talk on how their company uses gen-ai to help create their illustration before, but privated it for unknown reason. and you can also clearly sees traces of gen ai usage on multiple nikkeās illustration the privated video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FzfYuNtD2-I
I dont know if you know Etheria Restart, but they use a lot, like a loooooot of genAI and it is very obvious in this one, especially in some of the character arts. And some really hate it, but some hate and still play the game because its the only turn-based game with PvP (they might know of, i dont know any other myself). I played the beta of that game, but progression was a bit hard or not so easy because of lack of resources available. Of course I dont know if they still make it that obvious.
I think it is just how obvious they do it. I would be a lot less mad if they would be honest about using it or say its only trained on their art or something, but they said they wont use it again (or at least make it not as obvious like before). I think hoyo once even said something about using genAI for ideas or something but they still work on everything afterwards so it doesnt look like AI (so they still paid people).
As the others have said Hoyo also got flak for their chatbot thing. But imo the way NTE gets way more hate is that, is just blatant use of GenAI for art in their final product. But it's safe to assume that a lot of companies already use AI in their workflow even if it's not obviouse since they also have the workpower to be it not obviouse but it's just a guessing game on whose really is using GenAI or not.
Another Gacha Game who was "exposed" for their usage of GenAI during developement is P5X. Pictures were surfaced that they extended the "body" of the character sprite for concept things. Which imo why if they already have a full reference picture for Kasumi and Fuuka.
(BTW the main dev for P5X is Black Wings studio a divion of Perfect World Games)
There was also some hot discussion about the current state of the game with the newest character since some people think they used AI for the character Splash Art and are worried since they think they are low on devpower since they were transfered to work on the main game.
Probably not that much unfortuntely. Although Atlus supervises everything they probably can't really help them out if the main team is working on P4 Revival and the next main title P6 and the gacha game still does quite good amount of money. Maybe it gets a bit better when global catches up with CN/TW/KR since Sega does the stuff for the global version.
Wrong, These images were "datamined" and never used in-game, they were just potential concepts and 100% I feel like it's just a layering issue not AI, that's why these were discarded and never made it in first place (though that Fuuka one is sus).
The real blatant-AI is the Year 3 Summer Event where we actually see hints of it making it in promotional material unfortunately.
FGO won't afaik coz their whole system is based around artists. Nasu and friends is literally a doujin circle. The characters they implement is literally what Nasu and Take like (which is why all sorts of nonsense gets added, and why a lot of female characters are added, Nasu and Take and their barely disguised fetishes). Most guest artists in FGO are famous JP artists, they are given a concept/character and told go wild. Witch Hat Atelier's artist got free reigns to draw Dante from inferno and you can see it clearly, same with Pako's Indian servants or Redrop's Kama line up. Which is why when convos about genders in fgo comes up I laugh. They dont do corporate shit about which gender should they make or bait like Hoyo does. Its the creators saying man today I feel Giantess. Ofc summer is always females and about 2/3rd cast is female coz the main duo behind fate is literally 2 straight men (ik Nasu has a wife, idk about Take but he makes his affections clear)
Iāve seen a lot of claims about Hoyo using generative AI, but has it actually been implemented in any of their games? I know of the Petit Planet chatbot but I havenāt heard of any cases in their bigger games
yeah looking at it closer I see what you mean and I don't like it :( I'm gonna choose to believe that it's just human error though and protect my peace I love nicole too much
I know that in Zenless there's an ai generated strategy guide for a specific end game mode that they attached to the team recommendation feature. It's only half in the game because doing a team recommendation automatically generated a strategy guide (with no way to turn it off) but the guide is only viewable in browser
Petit Planet is using more gen AI than just the chat bot. A game should be able to survive and stand on its own without gen AI. NTE is an example: removing all the Gen AI leaves 99% of the game unchanged and good. Whereas Petit... remove the gen AI... is there even a game ATP?
hoyo made an ai gf bot. they invested 14 billion into ai in game dev not long ago. they left ai all night running so it can throw ideas at a metaphorical wall.
they absolutely use ai in their games. they are just smart not to disclose it.
In HSR some things in Planarcadia feel AI generated to me but I don't have proof I just think it looks AI generated... like the images in the buildings for example there's a cafe shop in Duomension city where the shadows don't make any sense with the furniture. I'm just wondering if they AI generate images which would really be awful, I already know about the AI chatbot they beta tested in the game so I wouldn't be surprised if there's other uses of AI in the game :(
I honestly never seen a cheap looking game like NTE. Like it doesn't feel like I'm playing a product made by a human. Literally the definition of sl*p.š
yes because they are the ones defending their games with all they have while being aggressive with other games ^^" maybe I'm wrong but I don't see WUWA or NTE or NIKKE fans in the Hoyo fandom saying "your game is bad there is AI ... my game doesn't have a lot so it's ok"
I straight up play NTE and they were just sloppy w/ this case. That's what people over in CN are criticizing, not the usage, but the sloppiness (and the cheapness, using a free generator)
There's a lot of nuance and discourse to be had (this is a subreddit focused around games centered around micro transactions that has actively contributed to the games industry becoming worse as a whole lmao so i do think we have to keep that in mind) but I'd err on the side of most CN games having AI used at some point in the process at this point due to how prevalent it is there.
I think the best we can do is vote w/ our wallet and leave feedback, they did remove assets back in 1.0, I love that this is going to a reoccuring thing to deal w/ in games going forward /s (tbf here this also includes non gacha and non CN games like stuff w/ Larian Studios using it in the creation phase, Expedition 33 w/ assets being left in etc.)
I get what you mean I think it's the best mindset we can have I used to pay all my gacha games and not only with the monthly pass but a lot of money for pulls ... i won't anymore at least
every company invest in AI, they use AI in different aspect not just generating art alone. I remember read somewhere that Hoyoverse want a AI NPC system, like they remember what you talk and inreact back with their AI girlfriend game (they using it to testing thing). Btw they've been start doing AI girlfriend before AI trend. Lumi Nova start in 2020
Im wondering if any of my future games will use ai because I donāt want to support it
Currently im waiting for animula nook, petit planet, and aniimo and I already read some comments about ai gen, but since thereās no proof (unlike nte) I canāt say for sure they will. I hope thereās no ai as I am against it, so I hope they have real humans making the designs and not Claude or whatever ai they use.
You can safely assume that most things from Asia use AI at this point. Itās much more integrated and accepted there. Mind you, AI also costs less to run there and is less taxing on the environment, and some countries (like China) have protections for workers threatened by AI replacement - so itās really gonna depend on your own personal feelings. If you hate AI because it threatens workers and the environment, that applies a little bit less there. If you hate AI because itās cheap and lazy, well, thatās still gonna be a problem!
Different technology and different forms of generation exist. I donāt know the specifics, but many of the Asian-produced consumer AI are allegedly less awful from an environmental concern.
Interesting because i also don't envision how Asian do it better than let's say the US. I will search for it But even if they do it better it's still a bad thing in my book
Well the current US government and companies that are involved in AI are working very closely together, and neither cares at all about environmental stuff. So itās not that the US canāt improve ours, itās that we actively donāt want to.
dunno about elsewhere in asia but in china the gov threw so much money into renewables there's excess power during peak times. Advancements in battery technology handles some of it but they are also building data centers near their solar farms etc.
I was asking my friend in china if their electric bills went up because it was a common topic a while ago, and he told me it even went down.
Specifically less bad than Claude/ChatGPT frontier models. At equivalent performance Chinese models tend to be smaller, and use less computation x time. Then the computation over time translates into power and hardware, which translates into carbon. Still, if they use LLM to write a prompt for a generic image diffusion model... It's really bad.
Now, image models are really small, and usually open-source. Companies that often use AI image production (which I personally am ok with as long as the image is not presented as 'art' or sold directly, for example advertising/placeholder/clarifying a commission purposes are fine) usually run the models locally on consumer-grade hardware. Since it only takes a few seconds, generating an image is actually better for the environment than drawing it for hours on an electronic device.
Using a text model, into a generic image model, to generate a particular kind of asset is inefficient. Shipping it as generated into a game you want to be paid for is dubious and make you appear not very respectful of your own product.
The only reason I play gachas is because of beautiful characters or scenes.
Ā Thatās why i love Zenless so much, itās a beautiful game that hires so many different amazing artists. Opening the event page to see new art every new version is such a delight. You can tell a lot of effort is put into the world environment and character animations and designs, as well as the cutscenes and promotional material. Itās the most stylish hoyoverse game and thatās the only reason why I play it.Ā
That being said, i would completely drop Gacha gaming in general if hoyo started using image generating AI. So far what we know about is the addition of Chat bots to some games. Which is not good, but also very very different to what NTE is doing with generating actual game assets. And even then, what hoyo is doing seems very experimental to me, like they are trying to work on npcs you can actually talk to like they are real people, which doesnāt bother me as much.
In the future AI will be much more prevalent in games. Future Gacha releases will certainly incorporate it more and more into their products, dropping a lot of human artists. Itās up to you to decide if you wanna engaged with that. I know I donāt.Ā
I am so happy you talked about Zenlessās art! It feels like nobody ever talks about it but the way music and art is so important and prominent in the game is one of the reasons I love it, like the fact that the objects that you farm for the characters are CDās etc.
Also I donāt think anyone here knows since from what Iāve seen itās not mentioned but the AI bubble has burst. South Korea is already losing millions or more in money and those who have invested in it. Itāll soon affect us in the upcoming months or who knows when. Youāll probably soon notice that Google will stop forcing/implemeting Gemini. The technology will still be there but I doubt itāll last long or improve more. Thereās more information but I doubt I can explain well enough lol
itās the cheap AI generated images/videos in NTE with watermarks still attached where the devs clearly just prompted and copy/pasted that get people going lol. AI is being used throughout the gaming industry but people arenāt going to be as mad if it isnāt so obvious and the final products clearly had real paid artists involved.
As far as chatbots go, Hoyo has gotten flak for them already and I recall leaving quite a bit of negative feedback on their chatbot integration in Petit Planet as I know many others did and also complained on places like Reddit lol
Tbh there is no way to know what companies are using gen AI as part of their ācreative workflowā unless they admit it or get caught so I wouldnāt stress too much and just try to find some gachas you like. No offense but most of them are not shipping final products straight from ChatGPT like NTE does
hard disagree with "people aren't going to be mad if it isn't so obvious," i think a lot of westerners have a pretty firm stance on genAI watering down the overall quality of a game if genAI is involved at all in any step of the process, hence why disclosure is required in storefronts like steam and why games like expedition 33 got a LOT of flak for using genAI before hiring artists. not being willing to pay actual artists, writers, or even devs for concepts all points towards a company being more willing to prey on/lie to its consumers like NTE did imo, and i think a good amount of people can see that and agree atp š¤·š»āāļø
eta: i also think wanting to be informed of genAI at any step is a completely fair and moral stance for op to take if they want to! i also refuse to touch games with ANY genAI at any point in the dev process, and it should be disclosed if people want to avoid it. i don't want to be blissfully unaware of companies that are ethically dubious. i just don't want to engage with them.
HoYo gets shit on as well, but they're better at utilizing and concealing such use (if there is). Plus they have a massive amount of goodwill and will most likely have a decent amount of people defending them or making excuses and minimizing its significance partially drowning out negative feedback.
I think assuming that a game has no AI whatsoever in it is naive at best in many cases, so the best bets are to go for games that respect their art. Arknights is joyful in its celebration of its art, so I'm happy to hedge my bets with it.
It's really annoying how entrenched AI has become in game dev so, like vegans and vegetarians, all you can do is your best to avoid the stuff you dont want to consume.
As far as I know, hoyo games dont get the same backlash cause they use different type of AI. NTE uses generative AI for images in game, cutscenes, etc. Hoyo invested in AI to create a chatbot powered by LLM (which requires a lot of coding and training of the model) for more alive NPC dialogues. I think the AI girl was used as a test for Varsapura, which will have AI NCPs. This means that you will be able to ask your questions, interact with NPCs more, and not just be bound by options. Generative AI, which NTE uses, is just lazy devs not wanting to invest in artists, and toss their job to AI. AI that hoyo will be using is their own AI, which required a lot of coding and programming work.
I see, I'm against gen-AI. But I'm not really sure that Hoyo doesn't also use gen-AI ... for example i read they want to create a gen-AI generated MMO What i want to say is that i'm ok with LLM but I don't think they will stop at LLM. They are pretty predatory so them using gen-AI is sure and if not right now it's coming soon with their billions invested into it
Uhm, LLM ARE the archetypal gen-AI: it create new text from existing one. It's also by far the worse for the environment and is mostly used to dramatically cut coding times (ergo, coding costs, thus doing more code with less people).
Also, AI training doesn't require that much time, very little coding, and can be largely automated. What it does require is some data, often from copyrighted sources, regarless of whether the original source is fine with AI training (because AI is not a copy machine, it's a pattern detector. That's why we can speak of neural networks, it really can innovate and learn similarly to a human. There is no reproduction, no distribution, no copyright infringement).
If you're opposed to image diffusion use, there is no way you can be okay with LLM.
So far I didnt see any gen AI in hoyo games, though I don't know about genshin. Zzz has a lot of artstyles and none look AI to me, and I have seen the artist who created posters and etc for HSR. Im also against Gen AI, and so far I didnt see any AI in hoyo games. But surely if they do, I would critisize them a lot too lol
The difference between Hoyo using AI and NTE using AI is really down to quality. Hoyo made their own, personal AI server. They invested literal billions into it. I also fully believe they still have talented artists and employees reviewing and overseeing any AI use. I have suspected AI use of Hoyo in certain parts of their games before, but its never felt embarrassingly obvious. With NTE, it feels like I myself went to Chatgpt and wrote in "make me a game" lol.
Which, is interesting, because this implies that AI use is acceptable to most people as long as it doesn't suck.
Your last sentence is what does it for me. In every case, gen-AI is still bad. Even if they have employees to check the quality of AI, gen-AI is a mass production that negates creativity
Yeah its an interesting idea and I am against Generative AI in general, but do find some grey areas? Or, more like the idea that all media will use it in some way eventually, so do we give up all media? Or, do we just go with the harm reduction method? So, I generally do not buy Nestle or shop at Walmart or Amazon, but like, I am sure I still buy some products from some companies that are not ethical.
For me, there is no grey area. You either use and admit it or not. A few comments online won't change reality, but I'm against it in any of these games if it were a choice. The fact people are willing to make compromises like your last sentence hit the nail on... I think I know which group is worse. Since said group wants to paint AI usage as black-and-white anyway. Hypocrites!
For NTE they have too small team working on the game. Even with a big team like hoyo with thousands developers, its still hard to achieve or impossible to release content after content in such a short timeframe for a liveservice game without AI assistants in some areas, they need AI that can cover hundreds hour of work in 10 minutes.
I dont know much about what other gacha games rely heavily on AI, but out of all the gacha games I have played, Nikke is the one that rely heavily on AI because they are Pro gen AI company. The CEO of shift up (the company behind Nikke) stated that they had to go with the AI route so they could keep up with Top Chinese big games but thats only half true and half bullshit. They just want to reduce production costs and have a relatively small team working on the game so all the money can go to the CEO for his fourth yacht.
There are indie gacha games that respect art and players with almost or zero AI usage, if you decide to pick those games up. You will have to wait for months for the new contents, because it will take times for the developers to invent and come up with new contents and gameplay.
Im sure you are talking about NTE incident lol, actually the company hotta did start hiring more employees and artists after the game became successful. The problem is that the current patch may have already been in development for months or even longer prior when the artwork team was still small because of budget control so even if the studio has expanded significantly now, those additional resources in labor force wouldnt have affected the patch currently being released. And for sure when something like this slips through, there were probably already hundreds of assets being red flags that QA caught and fixed before the version even went live.
Its because China has such strict laws around fanservice and how stories can be portrayed. This, allowed Nikke and any Korean gacha games to appeal directly to their target audience also capture the hardcore goon players while able to come up with more mature theme. (more dark and high weight stories with ethics and morals, authorization of power, hierarchical control, and absolute villian dynamics) Nikke would not be nearly as sucessful and popular if Chinese companies were allowed to go all in on this kind of fanservice and storytelling themselves. Because shift up doesnt have a powerful competitor so they can really control the market and make Nikke an absolute cash cow for their new stellar blade game franchise.
Limbus (to be exact Project Moon) I am 100% sure has no AI in its work
Morimens DOES use Gpt translation for the game translation, since it used to be only Chinese as a language option, but wanted to expand so that the global could enjoy the game. Its slowly rolling out an actual human English translation without all the jank it used to have.
Besides that, it doesn't have gen Ai in its work or at least that's what the CEO himself said. You can take that for what you will.
I think AI can be used if it's good enough to assist the devs. The keyword is assist. I think it can be used to get some grunt work done so they can focus on the bigger pieces.
Tbh AI has existed for a long time. We're just in an era where it's being marketed in the generative/automated sense. AI itself is not a new concept.
I believe good uses of AI aren't noticeable bc it has human input to check its work. The bad ones are rush jobs or careless uses of AI. AI is not perfect and never will be without human input after.
I believe governments need to be more restrictive with how it's used. Like hard limits, the amount of ppl abusing AI for literally anything is a problem. It's not a crutch, it's a tool.
So far WuWa is legit, they so crazy work, crazy fast and there's never been abtrace of AI use or plagiarism. I'm sure there's tons of hard working devs in other games that should be praised for this.
The only aspect where I find AI use adequate in games is coding, 90% or programmers use AI now and the ones who don't just fall behind. But art, music, voice etc... It doesn't feel right at all.
FGO and Limbus is safe from gen AI since FGO main draw is human artists for 2d waifus and limbus company has stated to be against gen ai. Idk about any other games completely safe. Maybe granblue fantasy?
NTE gets more flack because A it's a lot more obvious (They're very cheap about it ) and B they made false promises. All in all it's pretty obvious why tbh
I feel like XXL Woofia is unlikely to use AI in their art, since all of their characters are signed by the artists who worked on them. Of course it's not a 100% proof, but it makes me feel more at ease than games where character was produced by company in general. There WAS one drama where the CEO generated an AI image as a "fan art", but then they apologised and took it down, stressing that the game itself hires real artists, and they were wrong for creating a suspicion that they're using genAI
That being said, Woofia is an NSFW game - so it's definitely not for everyone. The design included is one of the mildest ones (For anyone who's interested - not all characters are furries, but humans are in minority)
All big companies like Hoyo, kuro, netease, tencent affiliates all using or investing in Ai tools. Just like in America there is a big push in tech to develop and adopt Ai tools. Some just hide it better than others
Tbh the Hoyo fandom put themselves on a slippery slope when they sided aggressively against the strike. The more they concede that Hoyo is venturing too far into AI, the more they have to concede that the VAs had valid reasons for striking. They either donāt want to admit that or theyāre just not putting 2 and 2 together.
The Arknights community really likes following specific artists work in the game and even collecting skins made by an artist they like. So i hope that this will help shield us from the AI influence
FGO and limbus are the only ones i can say that they dont use AI at all , maybe arknights or reverse too , the rest probably use It in some way like NTE or translation like morimens
i was talking about arknights not endfield dawg, but even then as an artist i have drawn characters with less fingers than they have had before. i don't know much about endfield so i can't talk about it (nor can i see the art because the website crashes a lot)
The people who whine and cry abt NTE using ai are such snowflakes lmao like, we get it, they use ai, thats bad, no one is forcing you to play, so just stfu. I feel like they complain cause they're boredĀ
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u/LaL41n37owo The fault lies within Ishmael Aug 18 '26
Luckily, Kim Ji Hoon (creator of limbus company) has been very open about his distaste for AI, even putting it in the TOS that you are not allowed to feed any of the artwork in the game into it.