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.
“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.”
Man, if this is true – that they agonized over the cutscenes but decided they couldn’t and that AI would be better* – then I feel legitimately bad for them.
I went in assuming it was strictly a lazy “ah, fuck it” kind of thing, but even though this still wouldn’t be acceptable, it seems like this team really is hard-working, cared about the final product, and actually did think AI could deliver a good experience. Deluded, but that seems like part of a larger culture of delusion in SK.*
* Notably, the article remarks on how sentiment around AI in South Korea is vastly more positive than e.g. the US.
That’s basically a statement for the press to try to minimize damage. He even said they had the cut scenes done and later replaced them with AI. Bullshit.
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.
They are mad they got caught and it’s the AIs fault for not being good enough to hide it.
it’s the AIs fault for not being good enough to hide it.
“if that choice hurt your experience, the fault is not in the tool. It is in our own shortcomings.”
The director literally outright says it’s their fault for using the tool.
And what do you mean “got caught”? It’s very obvious. They mistakenly thought most audiences would enjoy it, not that audiences wouldn’t notice. Which makes sense given the overwhelming difference in the perception of AI between SK and the West. He even outright says he expected people to notice: “I expected some of you would be disappointed by our use of AI. I did not expect it to become this big.”
The very first thing you need to become an artist is a sense of taste. Everything builds from that. If in his judgment he thought that art looked good enough then what does that say about him as an artist.
What game with slop have people ever enjoyed? They are not that stupid.
If using a “tool” is wrong, then the fault is the “tool”.
Please open this article, Ctrl+F down to “% who say the increased use of artificial intelligence in daily life makes them feel …”, and tell me which country is at the very bottom, with 16% “more concerned than excited”, 66% “equally concerned and excited”, and 22% “more excited than concerned”.
It’s like you’re refusing to understand the concept of a cultural barrier.
I guess that’s a problem for the Korean game industry then. If you want to sell to the international market, you’re going to need to do some research. Not doing so is wilful blindness. No one in gaming doesn’t know that globally players absolutely hate detectable AI anything. Just including AI in your process makes people uncomfortable. Expecting a major part of your game to be entirely generated content and that just being overlooked takes some pretty delusional confidence.
All that matters is rabid AI bad.
I’d rather see the “bad” things than Ai.
Honestly if the rest of the game is good, I would rather have some napkin sketches, or a computer based paint software.
I’m 100% with you. Bad art with genuine effort put into it has a charm of its own. I understand the team’s mistake, but it’s still a mistake.
No you wouldnt. 4 decades of whining and bitching by gamers have proved that. There is no winning with this lot.
It’s bullshit, they experienced zero agony, they skipped from trying it themselves straight to AI without bothering to just pay real artists because they’re cheap.
Still seems like a cop-out.
If they had intended to do it manually in the first place, I don’t see why they couldn’t just use AI to help generate a number of rough outlines to help conceptualize a solid template that satisfied their needs before investing their time into it.
AI could maybe help stress test the game before the final release. If AI were used like that, the game itself would likely not be considered slopified.
The dirty data centers, the RAM chip grab, the widening divide between the haves and the have nots being exacerbated by the billionaire AI ownership, these problems have to be addressed before I can even consider the other issues. AI as tech is usable, but as a socioeconomic phenomenon it is hugely problematic.
The anti ai crowed is so rabid even that would cause immense backlash.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the anti-AI crowd has every right to be as rabid as they wish. AI proliferation has been an immense boon to a few who work in some hardware and software fields, while causing an immeasurable amount of collateral damage elsewhere. The cost-to-benefit is extremely disproportionate depending on who you are, where you live, what you do, etc.
Regardless, this is a free market. If people don’t want to buy games with AI in them, it does not make them “rabid”.
If you choose to utilize AI to help you construct your product, expect people to have feelings about it and budget for it. That’s it. It’s a small ask against the millions of other people who have been forced to completely reassess how things are done in their respective fields in order to account for rapid AI disruption and interference.
Man, if this is true – that they agonized over the cutscenes but decided they couldn’t and that AI would be better* – then I feel legitimately bad for them.
even then, you use the AI output as inspiration, not as the end product…
I was thinking the same but I have so many questions (that I don’t care enough to research).
How big is their team? Could they not find any competent artists? Could they not afford any competent artists? Could they not afford to upskill any of their current team, like getting them lessons in whatever was relevant?
It seems like they were just shallow and wanted a “classically” pretty product right now. And that doesn’t engender much sympathy.
How big is their team?
If a few paragraphs of reading into the article we’re supposed to be discussing is too much, I’m not sure why you’re here trying to discuss it.
I’m not here to “discuss” anything about the article. As I said, I don’t care enough about a game studio sinking their project with genAI to do research.
When I don’t care about the topic, I skim the comments to see if there is any hidden merit to reading. While doing so, the comment resonated my initial feeling of pity, and I shared my perspective on specifically the quote and comment I just read.
Satisfied? Have I engaged with content in a way you’ll allow now?
How could AI possibly tell a complex story better than a human could? It sounds like bullshit.
look at AI dungeon, before it became whst it is noe
Interesting context, but that statement sounds so fucking stupid.
“Welp, we tried so hard, but just couldn’t portray our art in the best possible way. So naturally, we turned to the soulless machine that fails at generating anything resembling art even if you tell it to do a 1:1 copy of a real art piece.”
LLMs can make stuff resembling art. I’m not interested in it, though, because a human didn’t make it. What makes art art, what makes it interesting, is artists.
This is speciest. Art made by animals is just as good as art made by humans!
The hate on this game is where anti-AI becomes Butlerian Jihadism. I hate that AI is being shoehorned into where it shouldn’t be and shoved down our throats like bloatware to hurry up and justify the trillions of dollars mindlessly invested in it. But to deny indie and solo devs this tool is cruel.
Also, I find this mindless anti-AI hate ironic when there’s a big heading in the side panel here listing Approved Bots. Forums prior to Reddit didn’t allow bots. For a reason. Maybe look into that first?
Look this is simple: There is no legitimate need to use AI to do anything, let alone anything you take seriously and/or you’d want to charge money for.
So if you’re not just being a paid shill then why kill your reputation by attaching your name and company to ANY amount of sloppy shit?
Just don’t do it.
Apart from getting tasks done faster.
Ultimately the litmus being AI or not is stupid. The test is the same test weve always had. Is it good.
If its bad, rate it shit and move on.
You can make good shit with AI if you actually review what its done, understand it and tweak it. Its a force multiplier not a replacement for your own lack of skill.
There’s plenty of reasons to use ai. There’s just no reason at all to only use ai.
That’s the difference. And one that for some fucking reason all but like 2 studios seem to have fucking figured out.
Expedition 33 had ai tool usage. But that’s the entire fucking point. They used it as a tool. Still came out as one of the best fucking jrpgs in years.
Bitching about ai usage as if any amount ruins everything. Is like bitching that using a power tool ruins a whole fucking house and we should all keep using hand tools.
It makes zero fucking sense. Just stop fucking expecting the machine that is explicitly not perfect to be perfect. Treat it like a fucking tool. And actually do your god damn job instead of trying to replace people.
It’s a fucking power tool, not some machine spirit that can shit out a perfect product.
Director Young Kim,
“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.”
“I’m sorry we got caught this time. We’ll try to dupe you again later.”
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.
“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.
AI boosters are controlling the narrative around AI, and what constitutes as extreme positions on it. They made the general population believe, refusing to use AI, refusing to engage with genAI output, especially if paired with mean online comments, is extremism. Meanwhile they claim the “golden middle road” is using it as a tool, such as an already established artist using it to brainstorm ideas, use it for reference material, or use their preexisting capabilities to fix up the AI generated output. Similarly, pro-AI extremism is being downplayed to “slop posting”, especially if it is paired with severe AI psychosis.
Reality:
- There are now some actual anti-AI extremists. The worst of them would not mind sacrificing a portion of the population to put the genie back into the bottle. Less severe people would just put the tech oligarchy and some AI devs in front of a Nuremberg-style trial, ban the use of LLMs altogether, force AI companies to delete any models that made without consent, try to come up with an international agreement on a global AI ban, etc.
- Pro-AI extremists are a lot worse in actuality, than just some third world guy posting AI slop as a side hustle or engagement bait, to get ad revenue money. The DOGE boys’ excuse for the USAID massacre and the deregulation is that any problem, including 600 000 (!) people dying from USAID funds getting pulled, is that AI deregulation will lead to artificial superintelligence, which will lead to a quadtillion human being living in the solar system in a few centuries. TESCREAL is a fucking cult, that would be too extreme for Shin Megami Tensei, let alone the real world.
- “Moderate usage” or “rational adaptation” is often a slippery slope. I’ve seen way too many devs trying to use it as a “tool”, only to implement things on AI hallucinated specs and similar shenanigans, with many falling down the rabbit hole of loop engineering and vibe coding, all while claiming the decreased code quality worth the “productivity gains”. Said “productivity gains” don’t last for too long though.
- The “I want more ethical AI” crowd are usually hypocrites IMHO. At best, they secretly run their own model. At worst, they’re the same as your average AI bro with mild AI psychosis, except usually more leftist and more secretive about their AI usage. I heard that some devs who previously had issues with attributing open source code are those most likely to be in this group, though I cannot confirm due to lack of a solid evidence.
- Your average “can you please not post AI slop?” people are the real centrists.
- You’re right if you refuse to use AI, you’re right to not want to engage with AI slop, even if your aunt disagrees.
You can just say that you believe that no one should use AI. You don’t got to write so much man.
You’re also falling victim to The logical extreme fallacy. You’re functionally stripping out every bit of nuance there is from this discussion. Enforcing people into one of two extremism camps.
There’s nothing in the world that is like that. That’s not how people work.
You can just say that you believe that no one should use AI.
At least for LLMs, yes. It is the most pragmatic resistance against AI as of now, especially considering how “useful” they are.
Sometimes one extreme is the correct one. Moderation can be a fallacy too.
To be fair, the issue is basically that it didn’t look good enough. Just look at the backlash expedition 33. Games still beloved and came in as one of the best jrpgs ever made made that AI usage. The only problem was that people noticed the AI usage.
As long as it’s just a tool and it’s transparent like any other tool and people have no f****** issue with it.
That’s just literally a fact.
As long as it’s not being used to slop out s***** products then it doesn’t really matter. Getting matter over AI usage is like getting mad over people using Photoshop. It’s just a tool. It doesn’t matter what tool people use. As long as they’re actually putting effort into making sure the final product is good and not lying about it, then it’s fine.
I don’t get it how do artists get captured by the Shortcut Machine like this?
True, maybe we need to police artists more to ensure moral purity and alignment with political correct ideology. Make them delete their “work” line by line, file by file /s
PS: Reminds me of this: https://lemmy.world/post/51139260 . The age of pluralism is definitely coming to a middle.
Soulslop, if you will.
Good. Make another example of them. Slop will not be tolerated and will torpedo your ‘studio’ instantly.
painterly
Lovely word, cant believe ive never seen it before
I see it used mostly for manually painted 3D scenes - where the artist has textured the objects with brush strokes, or a procedural shader setup that makes it look like they’ve been painted.
Random example from the internet:
You’re one of today’s lucky 10,000
Bummer. Looks like a cool idea art-wise judging by the gameplay trailer.
Too bad these fuckers are too lazy and untalented to do the work themselves.
Can you really call a studio that relies on AI independent?
Yes. With AI-using indie devs it’s really just like with YouTube woodworkers who use a Festool Domino for their joinery. As long as they aren’t actually sponsored by Festool in any way, they can still be independent.
Pear shaped?
Basically means “not good”, but the etymology expands on it more.
If people can detect it as AI it shouldn’t have passed the quality check. People will happily buy games from the most awful and immoral companies if they like the game.
Those indies don’t get canceled for using AI - they get canceled for a lack of quality control.Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania
Daring today, aren’t we? Is it also a deck builder somehow? No wonder they had to slop the slop, creative juices run out on the fourth word of the title
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Quality control, for one.
Artifacts like this would be unnaceptable if they were from CGI or whatever, but somehow generative models get a pass? That makes no sense to me, yet it happens all the time; heavily distorted output somehow meets the bar for publishing.
Honestly it has nothing to do with “AI.” It would be worth calling out however it was made. But for some reason generative diffusion models always seem to lower the standards of output for user.
If it was indistinguishable from CGI and fit the rest of the hand-painted style, the argument would be very different, IMO.
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Well it is actually complicated. It appears the tiny studio ran out of time/budget trying to get usable CGI, so they did some diffusion real-quick as an act of desperation, and got slop as a result.
Not everyone is exactly up to speed on diffusion, either. I bet they Googled and used the first video diffusion service they found, and hence got bad results, but its also fair to criticize them for publishing them. They either didnt bother to proof the output, or they did and knowingly published anyway.
Im not sure anyone is the villain here. But I dont like people leaning into outrage culture, and trying to paint it as black-and-white.
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I mean, the customers are the ones with the purchasing power here, and most of the shame was put on the studio.
It lowers the standard because the tool itself is so much easier to use. The barrier to entry has been lowered to the point where people with no personal standards can use it.
So it’s not an inherent problem of the tool itself. But the people who use the tool.
For me, anytime creative thinking is outsourced.
Could you make a straw man argument of “well by not manually touching every pixel the special effects is outsourcing creativity” and to that i say “nyyyaaaaah”
People deserve slop. They don’t want a nice game with some AI art, they prefer shitty corporate slop with manually drawn textures. Such stupidity is punishable by even more corporate slop! Congratulations!
There is a third way, and that’s where my money’s going. Solidarity with all game devs, including artists
You put this incredibly abrasively, but there is a grain of truth there. Gamers, in aggregate, repeatedly preorder or buy hyped garbage, so perhaps we dont have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to boycotts.
I did. What else can I do except for spitting “in the general direction” of gamers who are enemies to themselves? They are the majority and most of them are dumb as a brick and think in slogans. “Abrasiveness” is all I still have…
I dont think any spitting is necessary, nor is it productive.
It is. Not in the way you might think or wish, though. It just calms down my nerves. That’s nice and useful. For me.
