After 25% positive Steam reviews, Soulslike dev realizes people hate AI slop and admits "if it looks like the effort is not there, that is a fair reading of what is on screen"
Vapor World: Over the Mind is a newly released Soulslike platformer promising a twisted world and Sekiro-like combat, but all anyone can talk about it is its hideous AI-generated cutscenes, and that includes its own director.
With over 100,000 Steam wishlists behind it, Vapor World had some real buildup, with Soulslike fans essentially hoping for a 2D Lies of P. It launched on Steam in Early Access on Tuesday, August 18 and has since received user reviewers averaging 25% positive. Many reviews mention the generative AI called out in the game's Steam page disclosure, with developer ALIVE Inc saying it used AI for voices and cutscenes but not "live" generation during gameplay.
"All AI-assisted content is produced and reviewed by our team during development and ships in a fixed, pre-rendered form," the game's AI disclosure adds.
This human review process demonstrably missed some spots. One Steam reviewer writes: "The AI is so obvious in this game that it really ruins the experience. AI voices, AI cutscenes, it's not even subtle."
In a new Steam post, director Young Kim owns up to heavy AI reliance and says he underestimated blowback to ALIVE using the tech.
"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," Kim writes. "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.
The idea that gen AI use is unavoidable if small teams want to hit certain scope, complexity, or fidelity bars is an argument some game devs have shot down before. Games have, after all, been fine without it up until now. More pertinently, dozens of indie devs told GamesRadar+ that they avoid generative AI for multiple reasons.
"That was a hasty judgment on my part," Kim continues. "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 don't know if more convincing AI-generated content would necessarily solve the problem, but that isn't the plan for Vapor World anyway. "From this point on, we will not use AI-generated cutscenes. Not in any cutscene," Kim promises. "Second, we will remove all AI cutscenes and fully replace them with our own original content."
Kim says Vapor World originally used "cutscenes made entirely by our own hands," but "the results were devastating every time." Convinced they couldn't do it themselves, they "turned to AI."
"If that choice hurt your experience, the fault is not in the tool," Kim says. "It is in our own shortcomings."
In a fairly stunning admission, Kim says "every cutscene in this game was originally built as a full in-game cutscene," and the team "only recently began replacing them with AI-generated cutscenes."
"What you are seeing right now is the middle of that transition," Kim adds. "So if it looks like the effort is not there, that is a fair reading of what is on screen. Looking back, that replacement was the wrong call. But it is also the reason we can fix this quickly: the in-game versions already exist."
You don't often hear game devs who choose AI say all of this out loud: we turned to AI because we couldn't immediately do better ourselves (and chose not to learn new skills), we didn't think so many players would care, and if it looks like slop, well, that's because it is.
Kim concludes: "We will begin the replacement right away, and we will have it done by this weekend. The in-game versions already exist, so this will not take long."
Vapor World did look pretty interesting in early trailers; I'd love to see that game, not some AI's interpretation of it, shake off these launch woes and recover in Early Access. That said, early reviews indicate that while there is real potential here, some other areas could use improvement as well.
There's certainly no shortage of great Soulslikes. Our Mortal Shell 2 review calls it one of the best entries to the genre since Elden Ring.