Crimson Desert is getting roasted on Reddit for using blatantly bad AI art in-game and hiding it from Steam. Is it a placeholder or pure dev laziness? Let's dive in.
The game isn't even fully out yet, and the drama is already cooking. If you've been riding the hype train for Crimson Desert, you might want to hit the brakes. The highly anticipated AAA title just got dragged on Reddit for using AI art—and we're not talking about cool next-gen generation, we're talking absolute jank.
So, some eagle-eyed redditors spotted a few pieces of in-game art that look absolutely atrocious. The horses depicted in the paintings look like mutated, melting Eldritch horrors straight out of a Bloodborne fever dream.
People are genuinely wondering if the devs dusted off a 3-year-old AI model to generate this garbage because the results are painfully bad. I'm calling it right now: I give it exactly two days before the studio drops the classic PR template: "Oh, that was just placeholder art left in the build by accident, a hotfix is on the way!" Yeah, we've heard that one before.
Scrolling through the thread, the community's reaction is basically split into three camps:
Look, speaking dev to dev, I get it. Deadlines are tight, the crunch is real, and using AI to generate some obscure background assets seems like a quick win. But shipping a build with blatantly broken, nightmare-inducing assets is a massive failure on the QA team's part.
The lesson here? Tech is meant to help your workflow, not replace basic quality control. Trying to sneak past Valve's AI disclosure tags is just asking for a Steam review bombing campaign. Just be transparent with your player base, or prepare to get flamed. GG.
Sauce: Reddit
