[This Is Where My Anno 117 Impressions Were Going To Go]

A few weeks back I got a copy of Anno 117, and was really looking forward to playing it. I've been on a city-building and management streak lately, and was excited at the prospect of spending some time with a Roman one that also featured the Anno series' quaint obsession with city-building narrative campaigns.

So I started it up, dabbled in the sandbox mode for a bit, found out I was probably better off playing the campaign instead (it’s got a gentler, longer tutorial) and settled in for what I thought was going to be a month or two of good times. The game looked great on my new PC, and in terms of city-building it seemed like one of the better ones I've played recently. Its production queues require some tricky planning to get right, and the 4X/RTS stuff layered over the top--like controlling army units, exploring uncharted islands and having diplomatic relations with neighbouring islands--was all pretty interesting.

Over the weekend, I hit a loading screen (pictured above) I hadn't noticed before and something immediately felt off. The game's other loading screens had also been weird, but I'd assumed that was because they appeared simply unfinished, raw sketches of an idea for an eventual, more-polished loading screen, in much the way many of Civ VII's were at launch. But this one in particular wasn't that; it was clearly AI-generated. People's arms were gone, hands were strange, outfits warped in unnatural ways, the entire composition was wacky. I'm not the only one to have picked up on this, either; after jumping online to see if anyone else had noticed, I found that so many had noticed and posted about it that Ubisoft had issued a public statement defending it:

This image was a placeholder asset that unintentionally slipped through our review process...With Anno 117: Pax Romana being our most ambitious Anno yet, we’ve assembled the largest team of artists ever for the franchise and to help meet the project's unique scope, they use AI tools for iterations, prototyping, and exploration. Every element players will experience in the final game reflects the team’s craft, artistry, and creative vision.

After reading this I immediately stopped playing, and won't be back. This is 2D art, for a series dating back to the 90s and which has made it through seven previous games using 100% human-made art just fine, and you're telling us that somehow AI is needed now? Are we honestly supposed to take Ubisoft at its word that this dogshit image was the only one? And that it just magically slipped through multiple layers of supervision before appearing in a shipped product?

In addition to the above statement Ubisoft have shown an updated version of the art, which will be added to Anno 117's next update, but the public-facing damage has already been done. As I've said with The Alters previously, once players can see one instance of AI being used, how do we know it hasn't been used throughout?

I’m Getting Real Tired Of Not Being Able To Trust That A Video Game Doesn’t Have AI Crap In It - Aftermath

It sucks that players are having to scour every asset and line of dialogue

AftermathLuke Plunkett

And just like I said with The Alters, I'll say again here: the presence of this stuff inside a game (and in such an obvious case) sends a very clear message to your fans and customers that you do not give a shit. You don't care that this technology is threatening art jobs (and beyond), that it's dehumanising the medium, that it's creating slop that makes your own product look like garbage to the degree that it's causing people playing what had seemed an otherwise good video game to jump online and re-enact the Jose Mourinho headphones meme.

All of that for a piece of loading screen art! Something that older games in the series, like 2019's Anno 1800, were especially noted for. Gah!