Ubisoft has told Anno 117: Pax Romana fans that it will be replacing an AI-generated loading screen image, insisting it had “slipped through” and had only meant to be used as a placeholder.
The Steam page for Anno 117: Pax Romana carries an “AI Generated Content Disclosure” – the first for an Ubisoft game – but that hasn’t stopped fans complaining about the image, or insist ing that they expect better from a premium game from a developer like Ubisoft.
The image, which can be viewed in full here, shows a number of tell-tale signs that it’s been generated rather than drawn, including disfigured or out-of-scale facial features, missing limbs, and strange set-dressing. A touched-up version is considerably less jarring, but some fans still take issue with the fact that it was based on a prompt rather than an original piece of art.
“If they are going to go with cheap tools in their game, I will wait till the game is cheap,” said one unhappy fan.
Another, leaving a negative review on Steam, wrote: “I don’t want to live in a future where every big studio that very well could afford paying artists instead chooses to steal from artists by using AI generated images. AI tools are bad for the environment, bad for the job market, on top of that the images look awful, genuinely an eyesore in a[n] otherwise beautiful game.”
The AI background art is pretty low quality unfortunately
byu/MedicaeVal inanno
Responding to Kotaku, Ubisoft said: “This image was a placeholder asset that unintentionally slipped through our review process. The final image is attached here and will replace the current version of this artwork with the upcoming 1.3 patch. With Anno 117: Pax Romana being our most ambitious Anno yet, we’ve assembled the largest team of artists ever for the franchise and to help meet the project’s unique scope, they use AI tools for iterations, prototyping, and exploration. Every element players will experience in the final game reflects the team’s craft, artistry, and creative vision.”
And it’s not just images that seem to have been generated by AI, either. According to some players, the game’s text localisation is also allegedly “still AI-generated”, too.
u/Taubenangriff posted a number of examples they believe were translated by machine, writing “nobody who has ever played an Anno before was let near translation work, and it is still AI generated slop to a large part. They got six million euros cultural (!) sponsorship from the German state, but the result is outright disrespectful to the German language”.
German text localization is still AI generated in the release version
byu/taubenangriff inanno
These issues persist despite the same user highlighting issues with the German localisation two months ago.
Ubisoft unveiled Anno 117: Pax Romana back in June 2024. A new entry in Ubisoft Blue Byte’s long-running economic city builder series, it whisks PC and console players back to ancient Rome and the Roman Empire.