So hey, remember when Snail Games USA shared more details about its Aquatica map DLC arriving for survival sandbox ARK: Survival Evolved? And how pretty much everyone was focusing on how the trailer for the map looked like it was an AI-generated morass? Well it turns out that assumption proved to be correct, but supposedly the dev team didn’t know that marketing was up to such clownery.
According to statements shared by Pocket Tactics from lead developer Matt Kohl, the use of AI in the trailer was all the idea of the marketing team and not the developers. “The marketing department used still images of some of our assets to create an AI-animated trailer. That was not part of the development team; we did not know that they were doing it,” he’s quoted as saying. Kohl also made sure to point out that AI tools are not being used by Snail to develop Aquatica and that the trailer doesn’t reflect the final product.
Readers will remember that this all started when Studio Wildcard (the original dev studio, now working on ARK Survival Ascended) distanced itself from the DLC’s creation well ahead of the trailer’s release, which led many to suspect that it wanted to sever any immediate ties to AI tool use. Now it would appear that the buck is being passed yet again; normally you need to watch a rugby match to see so many laterals being thrown.
