The French publisher simply refuses to pay artists to celebrate the Assassin’s Creed franchise with new, unique artwork.

The day before yesterday was Halloween, and Ubisoft celebrated on Twitter. The image below isn’t the prettiest, and let’s just say it’s blatantly obvious that artificial intelligence was used by the company led by Yves Guillemot. It is soulless and boring. However, if you look closely, you quickly realise that the image is not man-made…

The Assassin logo is not perfect. The fingers look unnatural. The pumpkins aren’t the best either, and if AI can make a mistake on something so simple, the quality is far from what Assassin’s Creed deserves, and the fact that it was officially used by the French publisher through Ubisoft’s Dutch subsidiary is a sad story.

It is true that Ubisoft is currently pursuing a cost-cutting strategy, but this is a typical case of reaching for pocket change. It wouldn’t have cost anyone much, and a fan would probably have made a unique Halloween picture for a bargain. Several games have been cancelled, many people have been made redundant, some offices have been closed, and Skull & Bones is still not out (because we won’t miss the opportunity to say that we’re still waiting for it).

Also on Twitter, we can see that Ubisoft’s Latin American subsidiary has also used artificial intelligence, but at least in this case the quality of the human fingers is not questionable. The tweet has since been deleted, but the Internet never forgets. Reid Southen, a concept artist, suggested putting pressure on the Dutch Ubisoft account to delete the image.

Artificial intelligence imaging is not the best solution, but it is cheaper than human labour. Unfortunately, many people take this into account and ignore the quality. And this is becoming more and more common, we have to be prepared for it. But Ubisoft has many artists who could have done the same thing with better quality in no time…

Source: PCGamer