Recently, a new trailer surfaced for ARK: Aquatica, a bizarre and unexpected expansion for ARK: Survival Evolved – not ARK: Survival Ascended. The underwater adventure potential was instantly spoiled by the trailer itself, which was made entirely via generative AI. Even the most uneducated viewer could tell that something was up with the one-minute-long trailer.
It caused intense blowback on social media and led to Snail Games unlisting the video on YouTube. At GDC, a lead designer at Snail Games was doorstepped and grilled for comments on the trailer.
‘We Did Not Know’
In a chat with Pocket Tactics at GDC, lead designer Matt Kohl insisted that the development team working on Aquatica had no idea what the marketing team was doing with the trailer:
The marketing department used still images of some of our assets to create an AI-animated trailer. That was not part of the development team; we did not know that they were doing it.
It was then mentioned that no AI tools have been used in the creation of Aquatica, which remains a fairly bizarre expansion for a game that is in a weird position. It has been a year and a half since ARK: Survival Ascended, the ‘upgraded version’ of ARK: Survival Evolved, was released.
Despite it having been on the market for that amount of time, players are still reluctant to make that upgrade and prefer to keep playing Survival Evolved. At the time of writing, Survival Evolved had 24,236 players on Steam, while Survival Ascended boasted 18,000 active users.
Do you think there’s anything wrong with Snail Games’ team using generative AI to make a trailer? Let me know in the comments what you think or pop up on the GPlayr forum.
For more GPlayr coverage, check out this former GTA 6 dev’s insights about open-world fatigue