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butchering a well loved title is what you get there. CA/Sega is also doesn't have equal amount of good will from players to make people backing them like CDPR.
Had me until you mentioned Embark. The complete incompetency of how Arc has been run since around February is enough cause for me to not trust them as far as I can throw them. The Chinese version is lightyears ahead of the global version and even now still has some QoL changes that people have been asking for in the global version since release.
Game breaking exploits left unaddressed for months. Taking nearly a YEAR to disable family sharing which was the root cause of most of the cheating problem was also an insane choice. Wardogs did this within a week of release.
I love the core gamplay loop of Arc but I can't even begin to sit here and defend Embark for how the game has been run.
I played the OG game on the Nintendo switch lol (still salty that I paid for it) and came back recently after they got rid of the 2 and went back to just Overwatch. Of course there are much more heroes (didn't take me that long to adjust though), metas are different, people in general are quite a bit more skilled than before, but ultimately I think it's still mostly the same game though and if you enjoyed the original you are pretty likely to enjoy the current game as well.
They’re also taking down the original version of the game because it was cheaper, had better functionality because of the mods that were already made and couldn’t be marketed as a new product
With AI slop flooding marketplaces nowadays I think even indie devs shouldn't be immune. BUT I do personally think you should never plunder an indie game that you don't plan to buy if you end up liking it.
Sadly this is just the tip of the iceberg... the remaster also introduces a bunch of new bugs, like a control group bug where if you make a single unit control group all other control groups you make afterwards (in that battle) wont respond to your orders... it's a shockingly bad remaster, even by CA's low standards... :(
I wonder if CA was even involves in this or if SEGA wholly outsourced the remaster to MATABOO. Wouldn’t be the first time they’d done something like that that. glances at Endless Space 2: Awakening. Good on Amplitude for getting free of SEGA in the end though.
They could have just told the AI the context of the image and it would have managed the face fine.
Here it is with the prompt:
"This is a picture of a Samurai sitting on a horse - upscale it with subtle extra detail, but keep the original art style and colours in tact. The Samurai is wearing a helmet and has a moustache, he is NOT wearing a face mask."
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u/zuus 5800X3D / 7900XTX / 150TB / Arch (btw)21h ago
The AI slop one is closer to a Stormtrooper than a samurai
Nah it's 100% Generative AI upscaled, just really bad AI.
Non-GenAI image upscaling algorithm I am aware of would do THAT to the face. That's bad prompt (or worse zero prompt batch upscaling) AI hallucination.
Case in point: The Fal ai one is closest in wiping out the details, but even that didn't turn the face into a star wars helmet.
Edit: And yes technically Waifu2x is "AI", but it's machine learning AI, not generative AI. It's deterministic.
Edit 2: Actually Now that I look I'd wager my 3rd image (Fal ai) and OPs AI image (from Creative Asses remaster) use a similar model (the jacket looks almost exactly the same) just deep fried it with excess smoothing.
LLMs are also machine learning and they are also fundamentally deterministic. The LLMs currently available for use are specifically tuned to add randomness, so that they don't always answer the same way, but they are absolutely capable of that.
In theory it could be[1], in practice no, as you said they add noise for a reason, so that the same prompt can generate infinite variations. They're probabilistic.
In fact that's literally the core process of them, a forward and reverse diffusion processes. Add noise, then take it away to get new stuff.
Point is, Waifu2X is ye olde machine learning, GenAi is new shiny (or evil depending on your take) model AI.
[Edit]: If you used a fixed noise process - like using a fixed seed in a game.
Not really no, that's kind of the point (it's very basic by modern standards). It reduces the aliasing slightly, crisps up some of the lines and reduced some of the compression artefacts slightly.
If you zoom in you can see some minor improvements.
No, there's traditional upscaling, where it stretches the image to be bigger, and does some additional things to make it look crisp, and then there's AI upscaling.
Example of a trad upscale - Pacific Rim 4K Bluray. Looks amazing, sounds amazing, a must have.
Example of an AI upscale - True Lies 4K bluray. The old 1080i D-Theater D-VHS looks better than this monstrosity. At one point the AI got confused when a bald extra in the background bends over so the AI drew a face on the top of his head.
Also if you want an example of why a Native 4K scan will always beat an AI upscale, BFI and Shout Factory both released Nosferatu on 4K Bluray. Both companies were given the same 4K digital master. BFI choose to downscale to 2K (Theatrical 2K - 2040x1080) to do all of their restoration work, then AI upscale it to 4K. Shout Factory did all of their restoration work in 4K, and used no AI what so ever. Here's a video comparing the two. (Brighter one without film grain is BFI's AI, darker one with film grain is shout factory)
i did not know, that they AI movies now :( they know, it tends to guess things, why would you use it on an old movie for "enhancement".
heck, letsgo, scan all black and white movies, color them and delete the awful monochrom things (or at least restrict access, so people wont know that it was stolen from old art)...
It's very uncommon for movies to use AI upscaling. So far just James Cameron (Terminator 1 4K, True Lies 4K, Aliens 4K, Abyss 4K. Titanic 4K), and BFI's Nosferatu.
There is "AI" in the broad sense of machine learning systems, which can be trained on limited specialized datasets, and there is "AI" in the narrow sense of the huge natural language based models trained on enormous amounts of mass collected data.
There are both types of upscalers out there, highly specialized machine learning models trained on a limited data set specifically to upscale and nothing else (no text prompting), and ones that utilize the same "generative AI" natural language models that image generators use.
It's easy to tell the difference as something like ESRGAN (one of the top open upscaling model) is 60 megs big while your typical natural language model might be 6 gigs or more.
Not all upscaling. Take a gander at the wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scaling and only that last category, "Deep convolutional neural networks", is what we'd call AI these days.
They're both AI, but one is an imagine generated by AI, the other is an image i guess you could call edited by AI? It's up to you if you put them in the same category of "bad". I honestly don't know if it being upscaled or generated by AI makes much of a difference to me, it feels lazy either way.
Well, in terms of "laziness", if you're talking about computing power required, Cable_Hoarder's AI Generated image here definitely took orders of magnitude more compute to generated than the simple upscaled image OP showed us.
obviously not what i meant with laziness, really? laziness of the team of people behind it. plenty of examples of remasters/remakes out there to illustrate my point
There are tons of proofs they used AI. Just look at the totalwar sub. There is literally an image of a guy pointig something with a thumb, or another one having 6 fingers. Based on all these artifacts, it's pretty clear they used just some very old local generative model. I remember this kind of things from when I was messing around with first Stable Diffusion back in 2022.
I don't mind AI upscaling. There's a FF7 original fan project that did upscaling of all the backgrounds and it looks pretty decent. For really old games, it can be a real improvement because things were just so low res otherwise.
I think a lot of these projects started during the early days of gen AI and clearly show the limitations of that era.
Sins of a Solar Empire II heavily used AI for their splash art and UI icons and they had similarly awful and obvious artifacts.
Nowadays those same artifacts are really, really easy to avoid. They're a non-issue. But I'm guessing those pipelines won't come out for another year or so.
lmao his right hand is paralyzed. you could be the best "prompter" in the world. it will still suck ass. just hire an artist to do the job SEGA. oh wait, corporate hates spending money. nevermind!
His right arm in the original looks just as mangled to be honest. I'm not defending AI in general here, but I absolutely could, 100% prompt that out to look better.
I mean you don't have to like it...
For the record: I certainly don't but it is an unfortunate necessary evil for my continued employment in my career now (EEng), and I can't lie, AI tools make me vastly more productive, until they replace me entirely anyway.
...but there's pretty much nothing you can't revise these days. I could go further, fix his posture, do whatever but I don't want to burn credits for no reason.
Do u think developers don't know?? Definetetely they do, thing is definetetely management wanted the product out in a short time and developers just dumped 1000s of assets into AI with a generic upscale prompt
nothing theoretically stopping them from adding a vision model as an inbetween step to "customize" parts of the generic upscale prompt with important elements of each.
probably still not worth the extra compute or small amount of time for such a simple step that will do wonders in probably avoiding an overwhelmingly negative response to the morons in manglement though!
They should definitely develop in house tools for game upscaling, or find a provider of good tools, I feel like they just go through all the UI assets and run a generic upscaler over them. I think you should have a UI that gets all assets and allows you select different models, select different parts to chance (in your instance here instead of getting the AI do a full parse of the whole image select an area and then describe the changes you want in the image) I believe photoshop already has some of these features.
Like how Claude has MD files you could even potentially store design rules in global contexts.
AI is reasonably not bad at upscaling if you prompt it right. I wouldn't be offended if someone used AI to upscale original works for games honestly. It still respects the creative direction as long as it goes through a review process.
This was done by a third party, not by CA most likely.
Mataboo did the visual enhancements for the rework which is kinda hilarious as didn't this happen to RuneScape as well? Outsourced visuals (trailer in RS case) who then used AI and they "apparently" never caught on?
I love how AI was supposed to be the cheap option but somehow they still find a way to fuck it up by being even cheaper. Like what are we doing dawg 😭😭😭
anyone who can even half decently curate an image can avoid this issue with enough renders lol. i'd expect significantly more from a commercial project with actual artists who can just edit the picture... using AI as a part of a human made workflow would be one thing, this is certainly sloppy.
Well TW:WH3 doesn't even have any modern AA, no dlss/fsr(can be modded in thankfully) just TAA and pretty trash one at that, so bad upscaling checks out.
Well, AI is just a tool and whoever was in charge of assets upscaling did their job lazily and terribly. It's so bad, a lot modders were using AI upscalers before 2025 much better and for free.
I hate to break this to you, yes. This is what cheapo AI upscaling does when you don't use the right model. This is not AI generated.
Square did the same thing with the Kingdom Hearts games where some intern took all of the textures and upscaled them with some random crappy upscaler and it mushed everything together instead of guessing what detail should be there.
Download a low resolution image and try upscaling it. One model may be okay, especially when you get closer to 720p and higher, but another will make the image appear mushy like this.
In many cases simple upscaling would not look good (usually tend to look "bland") because it tends to be very conservative in terms of introducing new details, especially when the original is very low res. So in a way yes, it'd follow the image quite closely, but style transfer, or contextual details.
The thing is the original actually have a good amount of details, but the image is very low res, if you are upscaling it, the result shown is very very expected.
I hate genai slop especially those that generated from scratch from prompting, but style transfer with decent QA typically is quite strong suit and I'd rather see that than whatever this is
Ah, I was wondering what everyone was focusing on. I thought the arrow was pointing at the left side of the helmet specifically which looked pretty close to me
It’s always a good sign when the publisher delists the original game to force people to buy the remaster. It shows they definitely have a tremendous amount of confidence in it. (hard /s in case it wasn’t obvious).
I never knew why total war fan base has so many creative assembly bootlickers/defenders. CA has done the most egregious DLCs milking like selling graphical blood setting under guise of PG rating. Sega/CA is lucky there are so many loyal TW fans and there is no other real worthy competitor in the genre or they'd be out of business so quick.
They gave out all dlc (minus blood) for free right before the complete edition release, which should still be available to claim right now, so if anyone wants to check out the dlc and owns the base game there’s no need to spend money
This is what corpo gonna do in the next 100 years, ran a old game thru ai for 10 minutes, sell it as new , literally make bazillion with zero cost and effort , all while using you ,the end user as the sacrifice by making you unable to buy your ram and gpu or any pc part , welcome to cyberpunk kids , the corpo has ruled the world and fucked you up.
I'm gonna be honest, and maybe this is my autism, but when I was a kid, low-fidelity art/3D models/Sprites always failed to message to my eyes what the artist intended. I don't blame AI for not understanding the lack of detail inherent with low-fidelity artwork.
Like, for example, the Halo CE assault rifle, I always saw the charging handle as the Chief's thumb nonsensically stuffed through the width of the rifle.
When you have no idea what something is, your mind tends to fill in the blanks with a best approximation. The AI simply had no idea what it was looking at and, had SEGA been more passionate about their jobs, they would have caught this before shipping.
Exactly. The slop 99% comes from studios/Devs/managers that want something quick and cheap and don't actually look at the results in detail which would absolutely happen with a normal artist. To get code or an image that is accurate you cannot just post a simple prompt and expect it to be 100% accurate, giving it context is exactly how you make it accurate.
I am warning you now, relying on AI to code is going to cause a brain drain; in an already existing brain drain of technical ability and talent; and create a future where nobody will know how to code. If you can't code without AI then you're not a coder, you're nothing. AI can't understand context, so it won't be able to understand and take support tickets and fix it's own code when there's a problem, and neither will you because you never learned how. Mark my words.
Mark my words, Mo Bitar is an ex Quant Dev, Senior Software Engineer, who for almost three years has mirrored your claim. A month ago, with the release of Opus 5.5, he did a 180. He created a site, all in code, using Opus 5.5 in 7 hours that would have taken two senior software engineers and a designer three months in the past. He claims the architecture and layout of the code was far beyond what a human can do. He's one of my fave YT creators, as he is an extremely talented engineer who never jumped on the AI bus, and said exactly the same stuff as you for years. However, he always tested the latest models before laughing at them. With Opus 5.5 he stopped laughing, and simply said, AI has won. No software engineer can create code as quickly or as beautifully as the models that came out 3 weeks ago. 3 months ago he wouldn't let it do anything but the most menial tasks.
Except that now he no longer checks OR shows us the results that the AI achieves. I also follow the guy and watch his videos on the regular. He could be building a shit product for all we care. He just trusts the AI without verifying, and his audience just trusts him without verifying, as you seem to be demonstrating.
Here’s how you prove me wrong: try it yourself and give me a first hand account.
Monitor what you feel while you use it. Judge the results once it’s done, and how much you feel like you own it.
Here’s my own report after doing that (multiple times) as a senior dev with 8 years of industry: I’ve never felt so much anxiety, burnout and lack of confidence in expanding a product, all while feeling like I owned 0% of the code.
'The announcement left some Epic developers stunned on a video call last week, according to the people. Some made jokes about how they should handle errors produced by the AI-generated work, asking if they should ask Claude to fix its own mistakes. Some said they hoped that it was not a serious request or that the company would reverse course, arguing that the initiative wouldn’t be as successful as Epic hoped.'
Opus 5.5 changed the game. If you've been testing each new model, you'll have seen that substantial improvements from 3 years ago took 6 months. Then it was 4 months. Then it was 3. Then it was one. Now we're seeing huge upgrades in ability every 2 weeks. There are a stack of Senior Software Engineers on YouTube who have doubted AI could ever replace them... and most of them all said Opus 5.5 totally crushes them, as of 3 weeks ago. Astra 6.1 was the first serious competition to human coders; Opus 5.5 released a week later and destroyed it.
Unfortunately if all these senior engineers are saying it, then I don't doubt them. If they're true, the days of hand coding are dead within the next year or two, that's how massively it's improved in the last year.
I think the real challenge will be whether AI can train off AI, or companies reach some sort of brick wall when it comes to quality sources for training in future. I noticed some of the Photoshop clones on windows and linux are using opus 5.5 for reverse engineering, and although they are far from perfect, it's early days.
AI cannot train from AI. To grow, you need new content, and training on old content not only does not refine it, but even lead to degeneracy. It will replay the flaws (no matter how small are they) of the previous generations and amplify them tenfold. Future training will always require high quality data to stay up to date, while at the same time push for more and more devs to forgo coding themselves and rely exclusively on AI code hurt the production of original and high quality data to keep the machine running forever
That face example is attrocious. IDC about use of AI in principle, but it requires substantially more oversight than a competent human, and that's obviously absent here.
I went to the TW subs and this might honestly be one of the better ones. There are some bits of art that look like AI from like 6 years ago when they only sorta make sense if you almost close your eyes.
They did this to GTA San Andreas, they called it the Enhanced version. Everything looked artificially plastic and the original was lost because they forced the update instead of just allowing the owner of the content to decide.
I bought empire, WH3 and napoleon last night cuz they're on sale and after seeing this I'm refunding my purchase lol this company does not deserve my money.
Was originally looking forward to this however their use of AI, its terrible performance still, regardless if its now 64bit
I think they just vibe coded this whole version and just pushed it out.
I dont support AI and I dont already dont buy saber, EA and ubisoft games. I really like total war but at this rate I might have to add CA to that list and before medevil III released 🥲
That's the issue with slop vs actually good results is simply how you use it. It's frustrating seeing so many people say that AI slop yet the cause in reality it is just the development wanted to save money and couldn't be bothered to test it properly.
Oh good lord, I finally got it - why people were complaining about AI and this image.
I thought it was a robot or something (no, I did not pay attention to the name of the game, lol) and didn't give the face a second glance. I was looking at the things on the side of the helmet and wondering what people were complaining about because they looked pretty much identical to me.
It's so obvious now looking at the 'face with moustache' on the left and metallic robot face on the right.
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u/PCMRBot Bot 6h ago
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