Crimson Desert’s launch last week was soured by the discovery and later confirmation of AI-generated art assets in the open-world RPG. The developer and publisher behind Crimson Desert have since explained that the AI art was intended to be placeholder content during the development process that would be replaced before launch. Not everyone buys this theory, and some devs have been sharing their own ugly and silly placeholder art to show what actual temp assets should look like when making a game.
On March 22, after people began sharing Crimson Desert screenshots showing in-game paintings featuring horses with extra legs and other odd quirks that pointed to the images being AI-generated, developer and publisher Pearl Abyss confirmed that, yup, Crimson Desert contained AI slop. The studio says these assets were included during development to help devs “rapidly explore tone and atmosphere in the earlier phases of production,” and the plan was always to replace these AI-generated images before launch. According to Pearl Abyss, some just slipped through the cracks, apparently. Whoops! This explanation has been given before by other studios caught using AI-generated art. Still, not everyone believed Pearl Abyss’ story. Other game devs in particular seemed suspicious because they know that temp art and placeholder assets should be ugly, obvious, and silly, so you don’t accidentally ship them. And you don’t need AI to make these assets, as many devs shared their own examples of temp art on social media.
Perhaps my favorite example came from Obsidian Entertainment studio design director Josh Sawyer, who helped lead games like Fallout: New Vegas. He shared some temp art that was used in 2022’s Pentiment. One image featured Bambi hanging upside down. Another was just an MS Paint-style drawing of the words “Guy Sux.”
Sawyer was far from the only game developer to share silly and obnoxious placeholder art online in the wake of Crimson Desert’s AI controversy. Many, many other developers began sharing what actual, human-created temp assets look like, and it’s a smorgasbord of MS Paint-created nonsense, meme images, bright pink pictures, and other images and models designed to be so obvious and ugly that devs will see them and (hopefully) replace them before shipping their game.
