The gaming world appeared ablaze after the Indie Game Awards announced that it was rescinding the top honors awarded to RPG darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 due to the use of generative AI during development. Sandfall Interactive recently sat down with a group of influencers for a private interview session, where the French studio was probed about recent AI controversies. Game director Guillaume Broche clarified some of the misinformation surrounding the studio and reiterated what other Sandfall developers have said about generative AI usage during interviews held earlier in the year.
Transcription of the Q&A comes courtesy of gaming content creator Sushi, who was one of the handful of influencers who were present at the session. Twitch streamer crizco prefaced his question by recounting the storm surrounding Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios’ admission about using generative AI during game development.



Dude, naming the textures placeholder_<name> doesn’t take any more time and ensures you won’t ship a game with a placeholder. This is, or at least should be, common practice even without using LLMs, and only takes a couple of seconds, not enough to cause any inconvenience.
Every process can be theoretically simple but they never have zero impact. So you come up with this process and some other guy comes up with another, there’s an infinity of things that are simple and quick. Imagine the uber-crunch a small team needs to go through to produce an AA title. It’s just cruel to just come up after the fact and be like “oh yeah you could have done this and that on top of your actual work, it would have added zero quality to the finished product but it’s oh so important to a few people”.
Like… When will gamers ever respect workers giving it their all? They’re just human ffs.