Author: Game Infliction

Battlefield 6 Fans Accuse EA of Selling AI-Generated Image After Spotting What Looks Like an M4A1 With Two Barrels

Battlefield 6 fans have accused EA of selling an AI-generated image after spotting a sticker of what looks like an M4A1 with two barrels in the in-game store.

Following a similar generative AI controversy for rival shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, Battlefield 6 has come under fire for selling what some fans have called “low quality AI generated garbage.”

The sticker in question comes as part of the Windchill cosmetic pack for Battlefield 6, which costs 900 Battlefield Coins. It includes six items, one of which is a player card sticker called Winter Warning. The red flag here are two barrels on the M4A1, but the hand position of the soldier as well as the scope do not look properly aligned.

“Remove this AI s**t from the store,” said redditor Willcario in a thread upvoted 4,600 times. “Two barrels on the M4A1, sure. I would literally prefer to have no sticker than some low quality AI generated garbage. You can look at BO7 and see how many favors AI generated rewards won with them.”

Remove this AI shit from the store
byu/Willcario inBattlefield

The use of generative AI is one of the hottest topics in the video game industry, with the pressure on publishers to cut costs and speed up development in order to boost profits despite the risk of backlash from some fans. Indeed, according to a report by The Financial Times, EA’s new prospective owners (the ones who just spent $55 billion to take the company private) are betting on the use of generative AI to do just that. And EA itself, even before it was bought out, had signalled that it was all-in on generative AI, with CEO Andrew Wilson insisting AI is at “the very core of its business.”

While EA has yet to issue a statement on the Battlefield 6 allegations, fans are digging up past comments from Rebecka Coutaz, general manager of original series developer DICE in Sweden, and Criterion, the UK studio now also a part of what’s collectively called Battlefield Studios, who in October said players wouldn’t see anything made by generative AI in Battlefield 6.

Coutaz said that while generative AI “is very seducing,” currently there is no way to work it into the developers’ daily work. However, Coutaz clarified that generative AI is used in preparatory stages “to allow more time and more space to be creative.”

While this is Battlefield 6’s first significant generative AI controversy, Call of Duty has suffered a number of gen AI controversies in recent years, including the now-infamous six-fingered zombie Santa bundle. Earlier this year, Activision was forced to add an ‘AI generated content disclosure’ to the Steam page for Black Ops 6 after Valve changed its storefront rules. Currently, Battlefield 6 has no such AI content disclosure on Steam.

And last month, Activision issued a statement in response to a player outcry regarding the seeming use of generative AI art assets in a number of areas of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Players took to social media to complain about images they believed to be AI-generated across the game, primarily focusing on calling card images that they claimed used Studio Ghibli styling, following a trend of AI-Ghibli images from earlier this year. The Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Steam page also includes the following disclaimer: “Our team uses generative AI tools to help develop some in game assets.”

This week, IGN reported on video game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which was stripped of its Game of the Year award by The Indie Game Awards over its use of generative AI. Meanwhile, Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian plans to address concern over its use of gen AI in upcoming game Divinity following a backlash online.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Feature: Games Of The Year 2025 – Nintendo Life Staff Picks

Our personal picks for the best Switch (2) games of the year.

Every year in December, Team Nintendo Life puts our heads together and we combine our personal Top 5s into an uber, unranked GOTY list encompassing all the Switch games that got us hottest under the collar throughout the year.

2025 brought us Switch 2, of course, but it’s been a very strong year across the board, with exceptional games of all sizes on all platforms – and an absolute ton of them. Perhaps the knock-on effects of layoffs taking out huge swathes of the industry haven’t quite hit the pipeline, but this year we’ve once again had more brilliant games than time to play them all.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Behind the scenes of Lumines Arise with Enhance

Hello everyone! I’m Takashi Ishihara, the Game Director and Art Director for Lumines Arise at Enhance. It’s been a little over a month since we released Lumines Arise, a reimagining of the Lumines puzzle game series originally introduced in 2004, on PlayStation 5 with optional PS VR2 support. Hopefully, you’ve been enjoying playing through the Journey mode, exploring the Mission mode and its Training missions and Challenges, battling other players around the world in Burst Battle, or taking part in Weekend Loomii Live events.

I’d like to give you more insight into the development of Lumines Arise and how the team at Enhance brought this project to life.

Defining next-generation Lumines

We already knew that after Tetris Effect: Connected, we wanted to revisit Lumines. The big question in our heads at that time was, “What defines the next Lumines?” An image began brewing in my head, and I spent time thinking about key words and colors that would represent the new game. It was all very abstract at first, but slowly the main idea took shape. This is when I sat down with Executive Producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi to align on the core concept and where we’d like this iteration to go. Once that was agreed upon, I went full tilt in designing individual stages, picking out moments or feelings I wanted to see visualized, including the UI/UX, getting an idea of the musical styles that might pair with each.

As it came together, I made a pre-visualization video. That’s when a real team was starting to take shape so I shared it with them. We started talking about how to make the concept even better and improve on the foundation. After this initial shaping and polishing process, that’s when we really started building out the game.

Developing Stages over time

A common question that we get is how long does it take you to create a full stage from start to finish. Well, that’s a bit of a difficult one to answer, since during development we continually polish, improve, and tweak little things throughout. It’s become a bit of our house style at Enhance! At no point do we say, “OK, we’re done with that stage time to move to the next!”

The initial design for a single stage is quite broad—its visuals, music, and sound, and the feeling that we want it to evoke. Then, as we work, each person on the team, be it a visual designer or a member of the sound team, contributes tweaks and changes. This back-and-forth process doesn’t stop, but if you laid it all out on a timeline, it might show that it took three or four months per stage from start to finish! At times we would shift focus to certain stages and leave others to “breathe” and come back to them later. Every component of a stage—visuals, sound effects, music—needs to work together in harmony. The design informs the music, the music informs the design, and we change things throughout the process until the very end. When we reach the point where it’s in harmony and feeling good to play, that’s when we know the stage is working and everything is in its most polished, perfected state.

Speaking a little more about matching the music to a stage’s visuals, at the beginning it’s very broad. From what I just described, you could say our development style is very flowy. But at the start, we do a lot of music-related planning, analyzing sound waves, looking at the MIDI, timing and BPM data. However, it’s very similar to making something out of a mountain of clay. You have a plan, but as you’re creating it you take things away, add textures, or maybe you have to add elements back to it. Maybe a shape or curve you added doesn’t work anymore. You’re always perfecting and correcting, and our development style gives some room for that flexibility.

On the cutting room floor

Now, were there any stages we cut from the game? There were a few that we’d started working on very early in development that just didn’t fit thematically. One had an ocean theme, and another was a forest theme—in the end, these didn’t feel cohesive to the Lumines experience we were building. I’d set a high bar for what I wanted out of this new Lumines game. After working on these types of games over the last 20 years, focused on the core synesthesia experience, I had to dig deeper and it turned out that the more darker, cooler feeling tones worked better than the brighter and sometimes softer epic-scale vibes that fit more naturally in a game like Tetris Effect: Connected.

That VR feeling

This is the first time a Lumines game has been playable in VR, too—have you tried it in PS VR2? We wanted playing Lumines in VR to feel like being in the front row at a concert. The lights, the energy, the stage in front of you. It took quite a bit of tuning to get the camera positioning perfect to elicit these feelings, too. If you’ve played on PS VR2 you may have noticed there are lights and particles and things happening that are not visible when playing on a TV. Those little details, along with the headset vibration, help immerse you in the experience even further.

An Immense Task

The games in the Lumines series up to now were all built in 2D. With Lumines Arise, we’re bringing all this into 3D, which means we’re working with a ton of assets, lots of sound components, and music. Every stage’s visuals, music, sound effects are different across all 36 stages. It was so ambitious in scope that we increased our production schedule by six months to get it all done. The finished project hopefully appears effortless, but the scale and volume of making this happen were immense. It was an absolutely huge effort by our team over three and a half years. In that time, our team grew, we learned a lot of new technology that we hadn’t used before, tuned each stage to painstaking detail, and we shipped a game that plays on your TV, PlayStation Portal, and in VR via PS VR2.

I am so proud that we were able to overcome all the challenges that this game presented to us. Lumines Arise is available right now on PlayStation 5 with optional PS VR2 compatibility. If you’re a PS Plus Premium subscriber, there’s even a game trial available so you can try out the game for yourself.

Displate Denies Warhammer 40,000 AI Art Accusations, Says ‘Red Flags’ in Official Fulgrim Poster Are the Result of ‘Human Error’

Displate has denied that one of its pieces of official Warhammer 40,000 artwork was the product of generative AI, insisting “red flags” spotted by fans were the result of human error.

The online marketplace for collectible metal posters, which features a range of licensed art from major brands such as Marvel and Star Wars, came under fire last week after fans spotted what looked like signs of generative AI use in a $149 3D-printed Fulgrim Limited Edition artwork.

Fulgrim is one of the most prominent characters in the Warhammer 40,000 setting. As one of the Emperor’s 20 genetically-engineered ‘Primarchs,’ Fulgrim played a key role in The Horus Heresy (the civil war that acts as the foundation of the current setting), and recently returned to the Warhammer 40,000 narrative with a new model and lore as the Daemon Primarch of Chaos god Slaanesh.

The issue was raised after popular Warhammer 40,000 YouTuber Luetin pulled a promotional post for Displate’s limited run Fulgrim art over concerns that part of the image “looked AI generated.” A circled part of the artwork appeared to contain misaligned geometry.

“I have no way of confirming this, so I must underline this remains entirely speculative,” Luetin continued. “But based on just the potential for this, I have removed that post – and until I can get a clear answer one way or the other – I do not currently intend to work with them again in the future.

“Its very disappointing, as their production of official 40K artwork that I own, and still look excellent on my office wall I would absolutely recommend.

“If anyone did purchase that image yesterday, I would recommend you to personally evaluate its detail for yourself – and if you felt it necessary cancel or refund.”

That post ended up doing the rounds within Warhammer 40,000 online communities, where the artwork was analyzed for signs of gen AI use. Now, Displate itself has addressed the concerns, insisting “no AI was used in the creation of this piece.”

In a post on the Displate subreddit, company representative WallOverthePlace said the artwork was digitally painted by “one of our top in-house artists as part of our licensed Warhammer project.” The part of the image that had become the focus of the gen AI debate is “a human error that slipped through during the final stages of production.”

Displate continued: “the piece went through multiple revisions – including repaints, composition changes, and moving elements around – and a small cut-off edge from an earlier adjustment wasn’t fully repainted before final delivery. That’s on us. Designing a Limited Edition is a long and complex process, but this mistake should have been caught during QC.

“We understand why this raised red flags, especially given how strongly fan communities feel about AI, and we take that seriously. Limited Editions are our highest-tier releases and we treat them accordingly. To be completely clear: none of our licensed artworks have been or will be AI-generated. Every Limited Edition we release is created entirely by real artists, either by our internal art team or trusted external collaborators, and held to the highest standards we apply as a company.”

As a result, Displate called on customers who already have their order of the artwork to get in touch to get a replacement. “You will receive a separate product with the same Limited Edition print run number and the same certificate,” Displate said. ”If you choose to keep the original piece, we completely understand and respect that choice of appreciating this unique variant.”

Those who have an order yet to ship will get a corrected version, but it will be sent after the New Year.

“We appreciate the community holding creators to high standards – that same standard is exactly what we expect of ourselves, and we’re sorry for the confusion this caused,” Displate said.

The Warhammer 40,000 setting is in many ways built upon the evocative and enduring art drawn by the likes of John Blanche, who shaped its “grimdark” aesthetic alongside other key Games Workshop staff. This official, human-made Warhammer 40,000 artwork is beloved by fans, most of whom take a dim view of the mere whiff of generative AI “art” sold or released in any official capacity by either Games Workshop itself, or its partners.

Indeed, Games Workshop sells expensive Warhammer 40,000 ‘codex’ rulebooks that are packed with stunning official art as well as lore. Any suggestion that this art was created either in part or entirely by generative AI tools would likely cause a community uproar.

The issue of generative AI and its use in entertainment is one of the hottest topics across all industries. This week, IGN reported on video game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which was stripped of its Game of the Year award by The Indie Game Awards over its use of generative AI. Meanwhile, Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian plans to address concern over its use of gen AI in upcoming game Divinity following a backlash online.

Image credit: Games Workshop.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

No roguelite reeks quite like the wonderful Morsels

Here is a list of waste items I can see from my desk, at the time of writing: one piece of mud tracked in from a nearby forest, with a curl of oak leaf poking out of it; two condensed, possibly sentient balls of spiderweb; two fingernails (I know, it’s a terrible habit, I promise I’m not this gross in proper office environments); three screws that really should be part of my bed; one discarded bottle of antivac; ten unidentified somethings.

What do all these objects have in common? Obviously, they would make amazing roguelite protagonists. I know this because I have been playing… Morsels!

Read more

UK Charts: Nintendo Performs Admirably In Its Last Christmas Push

Mario Kart once again appears twice in the top ten.

The latest UK Charts data is in, and there’s honestly very little change in the top ten this week, with EA SPORTS FC 26 once again claiming the top spot.

In fact, the top eight games have all played a bit of a switcheroo, while the latter two spots in the top ten are taken up by Battlefield 6 and Just Dance 2026 Edition. Meanwhile, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond continues its descent down the charts to land at number 17, though with sales skewed heavily in favour of the Switch 2, this perhaps suggests that the hardcore crowd are still picking it up in droves.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Indie Game Awards Strips Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 of Game of the Year Over Gen AI, Dev Says ‘Placeholder’ Textures Were Patched Out After Slipping Through QA Process

Fresh from receiving the Game of the Year award at The Game Awards 2025, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been stripped of two awards from the Indie Game Awards after its use of generative AI hit the headlines.

Sandfall Interactive’s record-breaking role-playing game launched with some placeholder textures built with generative AI. The developer patched them out five days after release, insisting they made the cut by mistake. This went under the radar until recently, when comments from Sandfall co-founder and producer François Meurisse reemerged.

Speaking to El País for an article published in July, Meurisse said: “We use some AI, but not much. The key is that we were very clear about what we wanted to do and what to invest in. And, of course, technology has allowed us to do things that were unthinkable a short time ago. Unreal Engine 5’s tools and assets have been very important in improving the graphics, gameplay, and cinematics.”

Meurisse’s comment resurfaced amid a backlash to comments from Larian boss Swen Vincke in the wake of the developer’s high-profile announcement of Divinity at The Game Awards. The original news came from a Bloomberg interview in which Vincke said that Larian was “pushing hard” [Bloomberg’s phrasing] on generative AI, even though it hasn’t led to big gains in efficiency. Specifically, the studio was said to be using the technology to “explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text.” [again, Bloomberg’s phrasing].

Vincke later addressed the backlash, and has promised an AMA to answer questions from fans. All the while, a light has been shone on Clair Obscur, which leads us to the Indie Game Awards.

Clair Obscur had won Game of the Year and Debut Game from the Indie Game Awards, but both awards are now retracted. Explaining the decision, the Indie Game Awards said:

The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself. When it was submitted for consideration, a representative of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In light of Sandfall Interactive confirming the use of gen AI art in production on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination. While the assets in question were patched out and it is a wonderful game, it does go against the regulations we have in place. As a result, the IGAs nomination committee has agreed to officially retract both the Debut Game and Game of the Year awards.

Each award went to the next highest-ranked game in its respective category; Sorry We’re Closed now has Debut Game, and Blue Prince now has Game of the Year.

Meanwhile, El País has updated its original article to include a statement from Sandfall clarifying its use of generative AI in the making of Clair Obscur:

The studio states that it was in contact with El País on April 25 — three months prior to this publication. During these exchanges, Sandfall Interactive indicated that it had used a limited number of pre-existing assets, notably 3D assets sourced from the Unreal Engine Marketplace. None of these assets were created using artificial intelligence.

Sandfall Interactive further clarifies that there are no generative Al-created assets in the game. When the first Al tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, instances of a placeholder texture were removed within five days to be replaced with the correct textures that had always been intended for release, but were missed during the Quality Assurance process.

And here’s Vincke’s latest statement in full:

It’s been a week since we announced Divinity, our next RPG, and a lot has become lost in translation.

Larian’s DNA is agency. Everything we work towards is to the benefit of our teams, games, and players. A better work day, and a better game. Our successes come from empowering people to work in their own way and bring the best out of their skill & craft, so that we can make the best RPGs we can possibly make.

In that context, it would be irresponsible for us not to evaluate new technologies. However, our processes are always evolving, and where they are not efficient or fail to align with who we are, we will make changes.

To give you more insight, we’ll do an AMA featuring our different departments after the holiday break, in which you’ll get the opportunity to ask us any questions you have about Divinity and our dev process directly.

We’ll announce the date in the new year. In the meantime, I wish you all happy holidays!

The use of generative AI in video game development is one of the hottest topics in the industry. Last month, we reported that Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft was forced to remove an image found within Anno 117: Pax Romana that contained AI-generated elements after fans complained, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 players took to social media to complain about AI-generated images they had found across the game, following a trend of AI-Ghibli images from earlier this year.

The Alters developer, 11 Bit Studios, and Jurassic World Evolution 3 developer, Frontier Developments, meanwhile, similarly faced fan backlash when they were caught using undisclosed AI images. EA CEO Andrew Wilson has said AI is “the very core of our business,” and Square Enix recently implemented mass layoffs and reorganized, saying it needed to be “aggressive in applying AI.” Dead Space creator Glen Schofield also recently detailed his plans to “fix” the industry in part via the use of generative AI in game development, and former God of War dev Meghan Morgan Juinio has said: “… if we don’t embrace [AI], I think we’re selling ourselves short.”

As the debate around the use of generative AI to build video games rages on, Tim Sweeney, boss of Fortnite developer Epic Games, has waded in to call on Valve to ditch its AI Generated Content Disclosure for Steam games.

Valve’s rules mean developers must disclose their use of AI-generated content on a game’s Steam store page. For example, the Steam page for Embark Studios’ Arc Raiders includes a note from the developer on how the game uses AI-generated content: “during the development process, we may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation. In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team.”

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Reminder: Two More Mega Evolution Are Now Available In Pokémon Unite

Mega Gyarados and Charizard Y join the fray.

A major game update for the free-to-play Switch and mobile title Pokémon Unite was released earlier this month.

Now, before we get to the end of the year, the development team has added Mega Charizard Y. This follows Mega Gyarados, which joined the fray earlier this month. Before this, trainers got Mega Charizard X and Mega Lucario.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Square Enix’s HD-2D Series ‘Octopath Traveler’ Hits Another Sales Milestone

It’s now sold over six million copies.

Square Enix released the HD-2D RPG Octopath Traveler 0 on the Switch and Switch 2 earlier this month.

Now, following this, it has provided an update about the lifetime sales of the series – revealing it has now sold over six million copies worldwide. This follows a sales update in December last year, when it hit the five million mark.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com