Monday, January 12th 2026
Many Game Devs Reject AI in Gaming
It appears as though the divide between game developers jumping head-first into generative AI and those who oppose it is growing yet again. While brands like EA, Ubisoft, and Xbox are leaning further into the tech, several smaller and indie studios have recently gone on the record to state their displeasure with generative AI and its use in games. In a recent turn Larian Studios, of Baldur's Gate fame, has announced that it will no longer be relying on generative AI for concept art or in-game assets for its upcoming Divinity game. The studio's CEO, however, clarified in a Reddit AMA that he still sees some potential use for AI in optimizing workflows and trying to "improve the speed with which we can try things out."
The development team that worked on Bandai Namco's Code Vein 2 also confirmed in an interview with PCGamesN that there would be no generative AI in Code Vein 2, citing cohesiveness as part of the justification for avoiding the tech. The game's producer, Keita Iizuka, also commented that the team is "creating a very original world" and because they "value art style" and the aesthetic of the game. This extends to publishers, too. In a recent interview with Kotaku, Tim Bender, CEO of Hooded Horse, the publisher behind games like Manor Lords and Endless Legend 2, has officially banned AI from the company as a policy. The CEO said "It is now written into our contracts if we're publishing the game, 'no f**king AI assets.'" Bender also touched on using generative AI in early development or to generate placeholder art, expressing concern that developers could easily fall into the same trap as Sandbox Interactive did with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which ultimately resulted in the game being stripped of its Indie Game Awards Game of the Year award.
Sources:
Kotaku, PCGamesN, FRVR
The development team that worked on Bandai Namco's Code Vein 2 also confirmed in an interview with PCGamesN that there would be no generative AI in Code Vein 2, citing cohesiveness as part of the justification for avoiding the tech. The game's producer, Keita Iizuka, also commented that the team is "creating a very original world" and because they "value art style" and the aesthetic of the game. This extends to publishers, too. In a recent interview with Kotaku, Tim Bender, CEO of Hooded Horse, the publisher behind games like Manor Lords and Endless Legend 2, has officially banned AI from the company as a policy. The CEO said "It is now written into our contracts if we're publishing the game, 'no f**king AI assets.'" Bender also touched on using generative AI in early development or to generate placeholder art, expressing concern that developers could easily fall into the same trap as Sandbox Interactive did with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which ultimately resulted in the game being stripped of its Indie Game Awards Game of the Year award.
55 Comments on Many Game Devs Reject AI in Gaming
Generative ai for landscape and general world building just makes sense during the development of the game.
I would love to be able to walk trough a lore size Tamriel, that’s never going to happen without the help of a lot of AI
NVIDIA’s CEO Says You Shouldn’t Talk Bad About AI, Saying That Those Fueling the “Doomer Narrative” Are Deeply Conflicted People!
Stop drinking the Kool-AId. Leather jacket boy needs to be exiled to a submarine.
Nice to see some folks putting up a fight.
You are falling for the words of known liar todd Howard.
He tells you a game will have 1000 planets to visit... as a gamer, you don't want that
It's no different to having a book with 5 million Pages.
Tamriel is suppose to be a currated carefully purposely crafted world, not some AI generated meaningless nothingJensen should from now on only be allowed to watch AI generated movies and listen to AI generated music and talk to AI "people".
See how quickly he will start talking bad about it...not that we would hear, he can only talk to AI
The time saved can be used to make actual curated story Driven content, that takes place in the expansive thanks to ai world
It is not about if you CAN do it, but if you SHOULD do it.
There are some rare exceptions where AI might be able to do a better job :D
We should also ban alarm clocks so the knock er upper can return.
It’s a tool that will make the lives of graphical artists more interesting as they will be able to work on details in the world and not have to waste time implanting thousands of the same tree in a stretch of Forrest a player might not walk trough
Ai can be a tool to make things nice faster, it can also be used to make slop.
It’s on the consumer not to accept the slop or the rest of the crap that is wrong with the current batch of games, movies and tv shows
Just imagine morrowind being the size of Australia ~8million km
Cyrodil the size of Africa
And tv and movies decimated theaters just as radio and recordings crushed many minstrels making a steady living.That’s why you should get the Nvidia synaptic neuron enhancer, it will accelerate perceived ingame time by 200 times.
story, gameplay, music should all be from human
The article itself says those same devs are open to other forms of AI.
Seriously, can we cut the ambiguous buzzwords and start using descriptive labels? (I am complaining about this entire fad here, not the article).Elder Scrolls Online.
And it’s not that great…
The argument for automation of coding has some sense to it. But art is inherently an artisan thing, not a tool or canned food to be churned out with assembly lines. The craft itself is what matters. We already have example for what formulaic and industrialised creativity process produces in all those damned asset flips, shovelwares, and cashcow, annual AAA franchises.
That said, my mini-rant about the ambiguity of “AI” also applies here. I’m guessing that most anti-AI people are against the text-to-image like those diffusion models. But few would explicitly object to, say, Photoshop having an ML-based content-aware fill tool (how it’s marketed and made notwithstanding).
I do get the arguments from studios. And there are ongoing questions that are coming up and keep coming up about what the models were trained on, how these are trained, ownership of generated assets and the whole cost model on both income and expenses side. And honestly, I am pretty sure this side is very much part of the argument aside from art aspect - Would using AI assets expose you to some unexpected cost of some sort in the future? Or even litigation?
The other side of course is that generative AI tools are are huge multipliers when used correctly. It is not that big of a surprise that AAA publishers/studios are adopting these despite of backlash - their scopes are bigger, so are the costs and benefits from reducing effort and thus the costs are more noticeable.
AI is the future of truly reactive, emergent, and open worlds, there's no question about it. Games like The Witcher, Cyberpunk or R*'s stuff are nothing of the sort. They're all static and scripted. Bethesda's games are much more close to that ideal but even they can only do it on small scale (like limited number of NPCs who are living persistent lives or having emergent world events).
I've been waiting for that ultimate game where you can walk into every building, have meaningful conversation with every NPC and have a truly living world around you since I was a kid. AI will be hopefully an answer to that old conundrum.
AI in art, on the other hand, should be banned. Ok, not banned, but really that's not where we should be going. Still, some studios will go along with that. Especially indies. It'll be bad, but will it be really much worse than so much of store asset slop and lazy cookie cutter mobile-level "art" you see in so many games?
And no ESO is nothing like proper TES games, mmorpg are grind fests with pseudo social obligations that keep you grinding in those story less wastelands
There is no creativity in modeling a Beretta M9 by hand or drawing individual lints on a fabric texture. But designing a Gears or Halo gun or coming up with flag for some alien race, that's a different thing.