E33 had one (1) of these early generated assets, in the earliest area of the game, essentially on the side and easy to miss as you try and make sure the game gets out the door. All fits together in context. I fully believe they were acting in good faith, and it wasn’t “sorry we got caught 🥺”
Again with long gamedev timelines I fully believe the next year or two we’ll see more or less the same scenario playing out across more big budgets. Stuff that was slapped in at an early stage as a placeholder, thinking the flaws of early generation would make it obvious, and being patched out.
DALL-E was a fun curiosity at one point because the end results were kind of fucked up and weird and obviously blending into one another. It was uncanny, but worked well enough that you might be tempted to make an asset with it in early days as a placeholder. Likely what Sandfall did with E33.
Recent Discourse about Expedition 33 about having one (1) AI placeholder is infuriatingly bad faith stuff. Sorry but gamedev takes a long time and there was a period in the early days that a lot of people were fucking around with DALL-E or whatever. It’s gonna happen a few more times.
Audiences are overtly hostile to genAI (good). But this overt hostility is going to also affect titles it has no business doing so, where someone explored a novelty in good faith, decided against it going forward, and missed a spot in cleaning up the crap.
I just reckon it is such bad faith to suggest that E33 "popularized this excuse" or similar that Lucifer himself can be seen sneering with pride in the faint outline of the post. There has to be room for understanding, and focus on more current issues like genAI being used in production processes.
one of the best features of the PS Trophy system by far is the ability to patch in trophies as their own separate category, so you still have the base game with the relevant platinum but you can also have a "Photo Mode Update" category! Really wish other platforms would adopt it.
the credits bit certainly seems to imply something to that effect :3