Everybody makes mistakes. Admittedly, the GDC trailer for ARK: Aquatica, a new undersea DLC for decade-old survival behemoth ARK: Survival Evolved, is a pretty big one. The one-minute reel depicts a series of generically damp, clearly AI-generated backdrops, replete with disorienting quick cuts and the sort of telltale glowy lighting that often illuminates AI’s uncanny valley. There’s also a squid that produces an explosive splashing effect while rising out of solid ground and a swimming man whose feet morph into fins. It’s a mess. ARK fans, predictably, hate it. Who thought this was a good idea? Unclear!
The trailer has been viewed nearly 500,000 times on YouTube, but only 1,600 viewers upvoted it. The trailer’s top comment, which has 21,000 upvotes, reads, “This is disgusting and you should be ashamed of yourselves.”
Around the same time Aquatica – which is being developed by Snail Games – was announced last week, original ARK: Survival Evolved creator Studio Wildcard distanced itself from the project. "ARK: Aquatica is being developed by [Snail Games] Colorado, please follow them for more updates," reads a post from the official ARK: Survival Ascended Twitter account. "Studio Wildcard remains entirely dedicated to the production of ARK: Survival Ascended & ARK 2, and we're excited to bring ARK: Lost Colony to you later this year!"
ARK: Survival Ascended is an already-released remaster of the original game. It functions as the new home base for upcoming expansions like the aforementioned Lost Colony, whereas Aquatica is meant to celebrate ten years of the original game, specifically, and seems to be planned to launch only as part of it. Confusion around this release strategy is not helping defuse tensions within the community.
Last week at GDC, Aftermath took a meeting with Snail Games to ask about the AI trailer.
“That [trailer] was done by our marketing department,” lead game designer Matt Kohl told Aftermath. “They took our assets and then ran them through an AI to animate them. That was marketing. Development team did not do that, and there has been no AI use in development of Aquatica.”
Asked why Snail Games’ marketing arm decided that an AI-fueled fever dream was right for Aquatica, Kohl replied that he didn’t “have any knowledge on that” and reiterated that marketing called the shots when it came to that trailer in particular, leaving devs in the dark. He went on to note that Snail released a brief gameplay trailer for Aquatica as well and that more will be revealed closer to launch.
The ball is now in the court of Snail’s marketing department to explain – or not explain – its rationale, if indeed it was solely responsible for the trailer, as Kohl suggests. Aftermath reached out to Snail with questions specifically for the marketing team on Aquatica but did not receive a response as of this publishing. Aftermath also reached out to Wildcard to ask whether the studio plans to keep a close eye on future marketing efforts from Snail – which is not just Aquatica’s developer, but the ARK series’ publisher – going forward, seeing as all it takes is one screw up like this to send a game’s reputation swirling down the toilet. Wildcard did not reply.
And that’s really the issue at the heart of this whole debacle: AI leaves creatives more vulnerable than ever to fallout from decisions they had no say in. Trained on their art, AI trailers bear some version of their stamp, but the end result is plainly inhuman, bereft of care or craft. Understandably, this rubs players the wrong way; whether intended or not, the impression ARK: Aquatica’s trailer gives off is that this is a throwaway project undeserving of real effort.
But what are developers supposed to do? Spend time they already don’t have keeping tabs on the publisher or other parts of the company? Check every day to make sure that execs with their heads in the clouds and their hands about as far removed from the creative process as possible keep away from the reputationally ruinous plagiarism machine? Or even to ensure that fellow developers aren’t quietly leaning on AI to the detriment of the project as a whole? It’s impractical and, frankly, dystopian.
This is far from the first time that a company has misrepresented a game that developers poured months or years of their lives into, but with AI it’s an almost entirely mindless, automated process, increasing the likelihood of it happening and forcing everybody else on a project to scramble in its wake. This was not effective marketing. The only thing ARK Aquatica’s trailer did effectively was demonstrate how much people don’t like AI.
