20-03-2025
New ‘ARK: Survival Evolved' AI Trailer Incites Fan Fury
ARK: Aquatica
It is no secret that game publishers and developers are experimenting with AI in all sorts of ways, some of them more normal, streamlining internal processes and such, others more controversial, like the recent AI-infused Aloy conversation demo from Sucker Punch. But this? This is next level.
ARK: Survival Evolved has debuted what appears to be a 98% AI-generated trailer for its new Aquatica expansion. That includes voicework, possibly a script, and certainly the video footage shown:
Almost everything after the first-person intro has the trademark smoothness of AI video and something just feels…off about almost every scene. There are the trademark AI screw-ups, like a man swimming where his feet evolve into weird fin-like appendages as he moves. Also, AI video is mostly only able to be effectively rendered in very, very short clips right now that are just a few seconds long, which is how long each of the clips are that are shown here..
Fans hate this, as does the general public, and as you can see, it's become a news story. The trailer has an underwater (no pun intended) ratio of 500/21,000 likes to dislikes, with comments with thousands of votes saying something along the lines of 'you should be ashamed of yourself' or 'how do I delete someone else's video?' The video was supposedly delisted, but it's still visible and on the Snail page right now.
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Again, AI is certainly being pushed into gamedev to some extent, much to the chagrin of many devs, especially artists and writers, but rarely to this blatant of an extent. The idea here, of course, is not really proudly displaying AI tech, but being able to save money by not paying artists or needing to take the time and energy to make an actual cinematic trailer. Why do that when you can spend a few hours messing around with AI video prompts and throw them all together with an AI narrator on top?
There seems to be a split here between publisher Snail Games, who put the trailer out, and ARK developer Wildcard, with a tweet reiterating Aquatica is being developed by Snail, while Wildcard is focused on Survival Ascended and ARK 2, not decrying the trailer outright, perhaps, but putting some distance between them, and this was posted the day the trailer went live:
I would think the reception of this trailer would be a cautionary tale to other studios attempting to do something similar. We've also seen this in other media like the ill-received AI-generated intro to Marvel's Secret Invasion, which is still brought up to this day. We will see more and more AI inserted into games whether we want it or not (or whether we know it or not) but this? This is ridiculous.
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