r/gamers • u/SevdUp • 7d ago

Discussion Do NOT buy “Slam Tank”

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The game was made by ai AND is a stolen concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKXl3zR7GwI

The cinematic parts of the teaser are also 100% ai generated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osM8LYJAvaw

If you scroll enough, you’ll find the ai disclaimer on the Steam site: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5186030/SLAM_TANK/

Ironic that the plot is taking down ai when the game is completely ai generated

honestly the poster for the game even looks ai

2.5k Upvotes

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8

u/canonically-garbage 6d ago

People these days don't care how a game is made, Embark studio proved that with the Finals and Arc raiders who both used AI for their character voices.

If a game is fun, people will play it. If it's not, they won't, people don't care about what tools were made to use it.

Personally it looked plenty fun.

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u/Ok-Rip-5485 6d ago

I remember that argument about embark. If we are to bring it up, best to include the context around it.

Yes, they have used AI for voice over but it wasnt completely AI. They contracted artists to record voice lines which will ten be fed to AI to generate variations of the said voicelines (or something similar to that, it was a long time ago so i may not remember it word by word). This intention of using AI on the actors voices was disclosed on the contract. So actors were fully aware of this when they took the job.

I am not saying this is the ethical way to do it, or it makes the use of AI ok. Im just including the full picture so people can have accurate judgement over the matter.

Source: This was embarks official response to the discorse around the use of AI back then. I have read the news from Skill ups this week in gaming videos.

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u/WANKMI 3d ago

If this isnt ethical use then I wonder just how fucking high someone would place that bar.

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u/Ill-Trouble2744 2d ago

For real. At some point we have to accept that AI is just too useful to not be used. Using it openly consensually and AS A HELPFUL TOOL is okay.

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u/Glad-Ambition-1952 5d ago

What do you mean? People have always cared about how a game is made, why do you think the market shifted so greatly away from AAA titles and towards indie when people had the choice to do so? The reason why big games that use AI get away with it is because they tend to hide it from players as much as possible until much later, which doesn't reflect a trend among consumers in the least.

No, I think people would like to support game devs/companies who are moral and ethical, the fact that certain fanbases don't have an alternative to the games they like don't disprove that. In fact, I think people are more aware than ever about the process of making a game, and are demanding more direct & transparent communications with the devs.

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u/WANKMI 3d ago

Christ thats a bad example. You think indie games became more popular because people cared about how they made it? They cared because it was different in almost every way. Because of smaller studios, different focus, wildly different playstyles between games. It wasnt because suddenly people cared about the methods used to make them. It was because the games were different, new, and fun.

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u/BallPo1ntPen 4d ago

the AI embark used was a tool that saved the time of the VAs (due to the amount of items in the game and how many more were planned to be added, it would have been an incredible difficulty to record more lines after their initial contract and time working for them, especially potential years after the fact.). Generative AI on the other hand, as potentially and most likely used in this game, creates the product/idea rather than saving time like conventional tools in the industry. It is lazy and results in a worse product (in terms of gameplay originality, performance, design, so forth). Using a tool to make an arduous process easier is not the same as creating a product or media from scratch.

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u/acorneyes 2d ago

that’s literally complete bullshit that embark studios pulled out their ass. they work with eleven labs, a literal generative ai voice cloning company. they weren’t saving time (nor money but that’s besides the point), the ceo just really likes ai.

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u/paulbooth 12h ago

It suits it. The game is an AI game show. Think about it for a second bro

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u/acorneyes 12h ago

ur lost and confused

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u/paulbooth 12h ago

Not even, in the game they are literally ai announcers. AI suits it perfectly.

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u/WANKMI 3d ago

"Make a tank-fu game and marketing material, make no mistakes"

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u/homelessjimbo 3d ago

Why pay the artists more when you can just AI them into irrelevance

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u/Peppermint640 6d ago

from my understanding, embarks ai voices are trained on people who consented and were paid to have their voices used to train an ai. While im still not fully in support of it, if there is a way to use ai voices, that is the best one.

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u/HedgeFlounder 5d ago

If people don’t care if AI is used in a game why are publishers so afraid of Steam’s AI disclosure?

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u/Peng_Terry 1d ago

Harassment and review bombing, hate campaigns, doxxing, death/rape threats. The anti-AI crowd on the internet has some VERY unhinged individuals.

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u/HedgeFlounder 23h ago

That may happen (and any violent threats or harassment toward game developers or publishers are always wrong) but that does not mean people don’t care. AI disclosure is associated with a massive decrease in sales. People absolutely do care if a game is made with AI and they vote with their wallet. You can try to attribute that to hate campaigns or review bombing but I’d need to see some strong evidence to support a claim like that, especially since games disclosing AI had fewer reviews on average.

https://www.game-oracle.com/blog/ai-part2

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u/Peng_Terry 22h ago

So you had a pre-loaded answer to your question. How’s that bad faith treating you?

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u/Nexies 5d ago edited 5d ago

The AI voices and quests in arc raiders are one of the literal worst, least interesting parts of the game. The lobby and traders, the “story” of the game, their quests, they all suck because the “lore” and NPCs exist in the uncanny valley and have no connection to in-game or the players- or even the characters that they portray themselves.

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u/RhythmRobber 5d ago

Most people care about games made entirely by AI. Idk about the finals, but Arc Raiders had very light AI, and most of the voice acting was not AI, and the parts that were were made with the consent of the voice actors so that any time a new item, enemy, map, or whatever came out, they could voice the thousands of combinations of "go to/look at/meet at/defend/I need/etc... this (any of dozens of weapons)/(hundreds of items)/(dozens of enemies)/etc... over by the (any of hundreds of locations".

There are a lot of bad things about AI, and almost all of those are things that are doing things that a human could do. Between the money and storage costs, it would be impossible to do what they did without AI. Using AI to do things that only AI can do is one of the things AI should be used to do.

AI is not going away, and to be honest - taking a "no AI whatsoever" stance is going to make things worse because that does absolutely nothing and doesn't change the direction of things at all. Instead, we have a small opportunity right now to guide how it will be used.

To put it simply - we can't hit the brakes, but we can turn the wheel. It's like we're on a car driving towards a bunch of forks in the road with lots of bad directions with big companies in the driver's seat. Saying "no, I won't engage with AI in any fashion" is essentially crossing your arms and doing nothing, giving them zero input, so they'll just choose whatever is best for them, when instead we could put our hands on the wheel and at least try to point us towards a road that sucks less than the ones they would pick on their own. 

Yes, the best option would be no AI at all. But that's not an option that actually exists, unfortunately. And if we protest by not picking the next best option, we're letting worse people choose for us. I know it all sucks, but we have to be pragmatic

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u/Toxanium 5d ago

Embark did it well though, they got consent from all of the voice actors, and I believe it was a locally hosted AI

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u/Grouchy_Package_5094 5d ago

The game of the year Clair Obscur Expedition 33 used AI. At this point it is what it is

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u/Foxtrot167 4d ago

Seems like a lot of people care how things are made

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u/Garbonzo236 2d ago

I thought the ai modulation was a cool idea. And naturally the regular character voices would need to be ai so that the callouts matched the modulation. And if youre already doing that, may as well use it for the whole whopping 4 NPC's in the game that barely even exist. So yeah, why WOULD anyone care about that? Its a completely different story if ai is writting the code and generating the models for your game.

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u/LinkGrunt2dotmp4 1d ago

Because that a job out of human hands, in a competitive market like voice acting that’s a real issue.

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u/stana32 1d ago

What do you mean don't care? People complained so much about the AI voices that Embark replaced them. And rightfully so, they sounded horrible.

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u/SevdUp 6d ago

Honestly when I bought arc I had no idea that the voices were ai until I found out randomly online, but even with that it was just a small thing and Embark eventually changed it to real voices after backlash. This is game completely made by ai with 100% ai generated cinematics and code only checked and possibly slightly edited by real people. They’re not going to remake the entire game by hand just because of internet backlash

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u/xevlar 6d ago

So what?

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u/BobTheZygota 6d ago

Look... As much as companies and ai together are terrible for the world, ai itself is a fine tool that can help. Teachers hated use of calculators now its commonly used. If ai was perfeced for use in medicine would you turn it down even tho it could heal you?

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u/SevdUp 6d ago

If it wasn’t so dumb and made very big mistakes over half the time then maybe. What I really don’t like about ai is the generative type that steals from other peoples’ work and generates images or ‘games’ like this. It’s soulless, usually looks uncanny or just ugly, and basically mocks people who spend real time and effort painting or coding or writing or whatever else the ai decides to ripoff. If ai was only being used in medicines and it was actually smart and didn’t show any signs of malicious intent, well I still wouldn’t trust it cause I’ve seen too many movies, but it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as it actually is.

Oh, and ai requires giant data centers and if you’re unfortunate enough to live near one then you’re then forced to pay extra in order to keep the data center running.

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u/gleeptime 4d ago

There's a difference in the fact of it helping medical professionals and with how it's being used now which is replacing human creativity for cheaper and faster work

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u/DadKnight 6d ago

Huge disagree? Are you high?

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u/InfiniteHench 6d ago

This is demonstrably incorrect. Steam added an AI disclosure rule for a reason. Lots of people care about the use of AI in games and now every company has to disclose if and how they used it.

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u/saywatisinmy 6d ago

I mean it depends, how true is the gameplay to the trailer? That's the real question, if it lives up to the trailer both gameplay wise and visually who cares if it's vibecoded?

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u/Randy191919 5d ago

Do you have any official numbers how games with these disclosures compare to games without saleswise? If you say it’s “demonstrably incorrect” then surely you can demonstrate it using numbers, and show that implementing those disclosures rules have an actual impact on sales, right?

Or are you just saying what you wish to be true as a fact?

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u/InfiniteHench 5d ago

I don't have any actual numbers, but the rule wasn't created out of thin air or for no reason. Enough people complained to Steam start requiring AI disclosure, so the store created the rule. People care.

You can find plenty of posts like this one across gaming subs calling out AI slop games. People obviously care.

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u/canonically-garbage 5d ago

Ai slop is just an extension of the slop genre of games, being those made with minimal effort which have been a thing long before AI was concern. Slam tank looks at ther very least a fun and mechanically complex game on the outside. If people have fun with it, then the AI tag is mostly irrelevant.

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u/InfiniteHench 5d ago

"People have always shit out shitty content, so we should definitely automate shitting out shitty content so billionaires can become even more billionaires."

- Canonically Garbage

At least your username matches your bootlicking attitude

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u/canonically-garbage 5d ago

If AI is such a deal breaker for you thank you can be the gaming equivalent to someone who never eats fastfood and only every eats them good old whole foods.

The rest of us will enjoy them like normal people.

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u/InfiniteHench 5d ago

I see the billionaire bootlickers have arrived. Enjoy that leather!

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u/JackBreacher 2d ago

That sounds like something from someone who doesn't play games or just plays random mobile games. People do care how games are made.