Steller Blade: Blood Rain‘s large reveal at Summer season Sport Fest has been all however overshadowed by the ongoing fallout over a genAI music video for the protagonist Evie that Shift Up put out again in July. And each time a studio govt opens his mouth in regards to the controversy, issues simply appear to worsen.
Chief expertise officer DongKi Lee was requested in regards to the fan backlash in a latest interview with The Gamer (through IGN). He tried to sound level-headed about the entire thing, each distancing the upcoming sport from the AI video and acknowledging the fears of gamers about slop infiltrating their favourite tasks, whereas additionally defending generative AI as an necessary software that can be utilized responsibly to make higher video games.
First he stated this:
The rationale we revealed that music video was to indicate extra of the fantastic thing about Stellar Blade Blood Rain. We needed to indicate the world view and the character Evie. We simply needed to indicate a bit extra of every, and we did that as a part of the content material.
However then, we do take significantly and importantly what the followers have been saying, and the considerations they’ve been expressing in regards to the music video, and any further we undoubtedly need to make a transparent separation between the 2, like game-related content material and what we’d name experimental content material, like what we’re experimenting with.
Then he adopted that up with:
AI has lots of affect and affect on sport improvement. However once we are utilizing sure applied sciences or instruments, what’s necessary is the route and function they serve. It must be utilized in a means that helps the builders’ creativity, know-how, and expertise. It needs to be used as a software. That’s the route, and its function can be to make an incredible, high-quality sport.
Lee’s remarks had been actually extra measured than CEO and director Kim Hyung Tae’s more defensive response earlier this summer. “The AI shouldn’t be creating her from scratch. It’s rendering and presenting the character primarily based on the info, designs, and craftsmanship our crew created,” he argued on the time. “We would really respect it for those who might view the work with that understanding in thoughts.”
However even the CTO’s extra nuanced place on the subject doesn’t appear to have smoothed issues over a lot. “Subsequent time somebody tries to kill me for a tweet I make I’ll simply inform them it was ‘experimental content material,’” one individual joked on X. “ you might simply do this by making a correct trailer, like actually each sport corporations have achieved, proper?” identified another.
Given the heightened AI panic round something in trendy video games that even resembles generative slop, some followers received’t be happy with something lower than an specific ban on any genAI content material making it into Steller Blade: Blood Rain. They means issues are presently going, nonetheless, Shift Up exhibits no indicators of hopping off the AI prepare.