Happy New Year, everybody! 2026! We made it! I was going to write a cute column about video game New Year’s resolutions but then I decided I’d ruin my week off and instead put together something that will get me angry emails from people who agree with me on 95 percent of other issues. And that’s because I’m afraid 2026 is going to be the year that AI in gaming gets super annoying. We’re just going to hear about it endlessly and it’s going to just be so irritating.
Okay, I’ll be honest: it’s already annoying. As you probably know, Larian’s CEO said in an interview that the team had experimented with generative AI at the beginning stages of planning their new game Divinity. A lot of fans didn’t like this, especially because some folks at Larian had previously proclaimed their distaste for AI and the company’s games are known and loved for their human touch. Other fans thought it was stupid for Larian to avoid testing a new tool that could (although “could” here is doing heavy lifting) help finish games faster and eliminate crunch. The internet fought, as the internet does.
How AI Hit The Headlines In Gaming As 2025 Ended
Larian’s CEO has since clarified that no concept artists are being fired and the tools were meant to help out the workers rather than replace them. Then everyone pointed at Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 using generative AI in its early stages (to the extent of accidentally leaving in placeholder art) and how it wasn’t condemned like Divinity. Then Expedition 33 was condemned and it had its Indie Game Award revoked, although that seems to be because a company representative had said no gen AI was used at all when submitting the game.
And then the Expedition 33 team said that they only used AI a little and disliked it from the get-go and kind of regret it. Also, the director of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 jumped in and said everyone was an idiot for not facing the reality of everything. Passions are high! Patience is low!
TheGamer Game Of The Year – 2025
It has been 12 months of unexpected hits, leading to a fairly expected conclusion. Roll on 2026!
And we’re just getting started on the annoyance. Now, I’ll lay my cards on the table. I’m not a big generative AI fan. And I’m specifically saying ‘generative AI’ because folks who hate AI tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater while folks who love AI tend to say that the bathwater is also a baby and must be protected at all costs.
When it comes to AI in the arts (I’m not talking about monitoring crops or protein folding here) there seems to be two solid conversations: those who are for it are soulless, talentless hacks, and those who are against it are fools sticking with horses while cars leave them in the dust.
Gaming Needs To Figure Out What It Means To Use AI
So, no, I don’t like generative AI for the many loud reasons you either already agree with or already disagree with. We don’t need to litigate my own personal feelings about the human element of art and I’m not going to change your mind about what constitutes creating.
I dislike that AI is trained on copyrighted material. I dislike that data centers are going to raise my electric bill and probably pollute my water supply. I dislike that many users already treat generative AI as a bias-free knowledge God that can answer any question correctly, even when it comes to issues of opinion or serious mental health. Most of all, I dislike that the em dash – the spackle of writing – has now been associated with AI.
But what’s going to get even more annoying is the foundational disagreement on what generative AI is being used for in game development. What do we mean by a placeholder? What even is concept art? Are we generating a first draft of art that the concept artists are working off of? Are we using AI to iterate and refine on already-created concept art? Are these vague brainstorms or very specific prompts?
The same goes for writing. What is placeholder text in a roleplaying game? Are we talking about a basic plot that’s been generated and will get gussied up by the pros? Or do we mean generic dialogue trees that allow the game to be tested. Oh, and testing. Apparently AI is going to test games. Will that cost jobs? How will the AI test the game? What’s the underlying technology? How many questions can I ask in a paragraph?
Your Favourite Game Dev Is Probably Using AI; CD Projekt Red Joins Larian In Claiming There Are “Meaningful” Benefits To The Tech
CDPR is already implementing AI technology into “productivity areas”.
The less fans understand how the technology is being used and the less developers are open about whether or not they’re using it at all is only going to make this more irritating. And, no, I’m not saying fans should ‘educate themselves’ on how AI works. They understand the basics. Stop saying that if they only learned the mathematical equations behind machine learning, everyone would be on board.
That’s not the problem. The problem is that fans aren’t getting told how or even that it’s being used until it becomes a PR crisis. There’s a big difference between ‘we experimented with AI to test some stuff out and hated it’ and ‘we used AI to create the foundation of the game’ and all of that is going to be conflated together by the loudest voices possible, both pro and con, professional and amateur.
Battle Lines Have Already Been Drawn For AI
And just like how you might not change your opinion because I yelled at you on Threads, forcing AI down people’s throats isn’t going to make them more excited either. I’ve seen the argument that it’s literally impossible to not use an AI product at this point because the technology has been writing code that’s used in many if not most of the popular apps and operating systems. ‘It’s already in your computer, so why are you fighting it?’
Then you have proponents who conflate anything that’s automated on a computer such as procedural generation being the same as generative AI, so, if you think about it, you’ve really been using the tool for decades. And, of course, in the middle are normies who are simply enjoying not writing emails for work and creating quirky pictures of their kids playing in the Super Bowl to share online.
On the flip side, arguing that everything is now AI and that the technology is inevitable and companies are secretly using it doesn’t really help your game with the anti-AI folks. All you’re doing is creating a paranoid subset of your audience that feels like it needs to be on the constant lookout for a product they don’t want. You’re not making them feel better about AI or showing how it’s improving the game itself or your employees lives, you’re simply telling them that they’ve got no choice and they can just go buy old games at a Steam sale if they don’t like it.
Gaming’s Recent Gen AI Controversies Haven’t Impacted The Current Steam Top Sellers
All four of the platform’s paid bestsellers are connected to the ongoing debate in very direct ways.
Even if you think this is all stupid, which I get that you might, the longer this argument goes on, the more folks will be suspicious of things like weird ambient music or an awkward line of dialogue or a hand drawn background that’s a little distorted. Everything is going to become a battleground over what’s real and what’s fake, what’s useful and what’s heartless.
I do respect that it’s a strange situation for pro-AI people. They understandably believe this is a groundbreaking technology that could change civilization even more than the internet did. So it must feel weird as hell that a ton of nerds like me are crowing about not loving it. I’m sure it feels like humanity was given a magic wand and some dummies would still prefer to go back to just having a rotting wooden stick. But when fans are upset about AI in games, treating them like they’re naive idiots won’t build that trust back. It’ll just raise the volume and create a feedback loop of pressure.
When developers circle the wagons or dismiss worries out of hand as stupidity, it just makes dorks like me dig in. And when dorks like me dig in, the pro-AI people get frustrated that there isn’t more give or take in the conversation and they dig in, too. The catch 22 is that transparency both causes and prevents blowback. Which, again, is only going to make this all annoying.
So we’re in a situation in which we’re being told that AI is inevitable in game development but there’s vast confusion as to what it’s actually being used for, which only annoys fans of every stripe. If the Expedition 33 team is telling the truth that they tried out AI in 2022 but didn’t love it, I’m willing to believe them. If Larian is saying that, despite its AI use, it’s actually expanding their creative staff, I’m willing to believe it. I really want to believe that the vast majority of people, even in disagreement, are coming at this in some form of good faith. But the more companies obfuscate and hide the ball on AI, the more AI is going to become a battlefield for fans.
I know, I know. It’ll pass. We’ll get used to it, even those of us who don’t like it. A sprinkle here. A dash there. What’s the harm? But until that point, this whole thing is going to be so outrageously bothersome that I can’t even stand it. It’s also possible I’m a huge part of the problem.
