People spend more time hunting traces of GenAI than actually playing a game—Earthion is innocent

At the tail end of last week, we told you about Earthion, a new old-school style shmup from the mind of Yuzo Koshiro, royalty when it comes to Sega Mega Drive/Genesis classics.

Do catch up if you missed it, but since then, Earthion has already been claimed as a new masterpiece of the classic genre. It looks, sounds, and handles like the best shoot ’em-ups on the system from the ’90s. It’s very, very good.

Step forward the new subsection of gaming antagonists who accuse developer after developer of trying to sneak in “AI Slop” into games, from artwork, sprites, ideas, and characters, woe betide anybody if the text wasn’t written by Dickens and the art knocked out quickly by Picasso.

The thing is, they have a point – most of the time. The mess the industry is in already does not need the help of boardroom execs who believe you can cull some staff and get Grok to do it all for you for a couple of hundred a month, instead of giving a salary to a trained professional.

It’s trying times for the people who have spent years putting our entertainment together. Will it end well? I doubt it. GenAI is here to stay in one form or another, and whether we accept it or not, more and more games will be assisted with the technology as it gets even easier to wrangle.

Having said that, there now seems to be a trait among some folk to spend all their time scouring everything so they can be first to shout out “AI CHEAT!” from the rafters of social media. This happened with The Alters and is happening again with Earthion.

Both of these games are fantastic. Just sit down and play them and stop poring over every asset.

Koshiro-san has since come out and flat-out said there is no Generative AI in Earthion after some old posts on X were regurgitated when he said that they had some AI audio placeholders in very early versions of the game.

The damage here may have already been done, though. Not everybody who sees the tweets may see the follow-up explanation.

Thank you for your concern.

Just to clarify: while we did use Synthesizer V in the prototype stage for placeholder voices, all of those lines were replaced by real human voice actors in the final release of Earthion.

Synthesizer V uses AI vocal synthesis, but it’s not generative AI like ChatGPT or Midjourney. It creates voice from written input using licensed voice models, with full consent from the voice providers.

So to be absolutely clear: no generative AI was used in Earthion’s final version, and we fully respect the work of human artists and voice talent.”

To be clear, I don’t want my games packed full of ‘AI slop’. I don’t think anybody who plays games does. But I also don’t want them to be packed full of human slop, and I can get you a list in about three seconds of terrible games that people should be complaining about from Steam that the robots have been nowhere near.

I want good games that are enjoyable and worth my time. AI may help smaller studios like this one and the millions of one-dev bands to get a game over the line, certainly in the early days. It’s kind of sad that the fear of being lambasted on somewhere like Reddit may stop somebody talented from trying to create something.

Earthion is a cheap game and worth every penny of the asking price, even if there was an artificial voice in there.

GenAI is going to be misused hugely by the big boys in all probability, but when Henry Ford thought up the production line for his car manufacturing, little thought would have been given to those who would find themselves out of work soon after.

Of course, if there is any viable way to create great things with humans, it goes without saying that would be the better option, exactly like hand-crafting anything is worth more than something fired out of a production line in a factory, be it a tasty artisan pie at a Farmer’s market or an original sketch by a decent artist, as opposed to a print.

I do fear, though, that it won’t be long before companies decide, much like the pie, that 100% human-created games are worth charging more for. That might be when we know the battle is truly lost.