When 11 bit studios first revealed The Alters in 2022, it was a revelation for the developer. The studio made their name on This War of Mine and Frostpunk, both critically acclaimed survival games with deep gameplay systems and smaller scale graphics and presentation. The Alters is a big concept game with AAA production values, but now it seems this game may ironically be set to ruin their reputation.
The Alters is basically Mickey 17 as a video game. Your character Jan Dolski, working by himself on a space expedition, creates clones of himself called Alters, who can help him collect resources and manage tasks. Each Alter is based on a specific time in Dolski’s life, and so they exhibit different personalities. Dolski has to manage his Alters themselves on top of their tasks to survive the game, a grace Rob Pattinson’s Mickey doesn’t get in Bong Joon-Hoo’s recent film.
But then, as reported by Eurogamer yesterday, fans suddenly noticed evidence that The Alters used generative AI, particularly for texts and translations. In particular, Brazilian Portuguese and Korean subtitles indicated signs that generative AI was used. Generative AI has been used in games for some time now, and many if not all gamers frown upon its use. In this case, 11 bit studios did not disclose their use of generative AI, which would be breaking the rules Valve set for games published on Steam.
Today, 11 bit studios owed up to their generative AI use. We’ll share the full text of their statement below but they claim it was used only twice:
- A snippet of generative AI was added in a background texture but was only meant to be a placeholder.
- Some last minute translations were made under time constraints and they chose to use generative AI to make it to launch, with their official translation partners to be brought in afterwards.
While we certainly won’t be making excuses for 11 bit studios’ sin of omission, we will point out this controversy comes at an inopportune time for the studio. They were part of the wave of layoffs last December 2024, and those layoffs seem to have been a factor in the game getting delayed. We don’t even know if The Alters turned a profit when it released two weeks ago, but the potential refunds coming on the way won’t help the studio. 11 bit studios are hardly as equipped to use generative AI at a large scale, compared to, say, EA Sports, but we can already see the public won’t be making that distinction given the stigma surrounding generative AI.
You can read the full text of 11 bit studios’ statement below.
We’ve seen a wide range of accusations regarding the use of AI-generated content in The Alters, and we feel it’s important to clarify our approach and give you more context. AI-generated assets were used strictly as temporary WIPs during the development process and in a very limited manner. Our team has always prioritized meaningful, handcrafter storytelling as one of the foundations of our game.
During production, an AI-generated text for a graphic asset, which was meant as a piece of background texture, was used by one of our graphical designers as a placeholder. This was never intended to be part of the final release. Unfortunately, due to an internal oversight, this single placeholder text was mistakenly left in the game. We have since conducted a thorough review and confirmed that this was an isolated case, and the asset in question is being updated. For transparency, we’ve included a screenshot to show how and where it appears in the game. While we do not want to downplay the situation, we also want to clearly show its limited impact on your gaming experience.
In addition to that, a few licensed movies that the alters can watch in the social area of the base were added at the final stage of development. While those were externally produced, our team was not involved in the creative process, and these required additional last-minute translations. Due to extreme time constraints, we chose not to involve our translation partners and had these videos localized using AI to have them ready on launch. It was always our intention to involve our trusted translation agencies after release as part of our localization hotfix, to ensure those texts would be handled with the same care and quality as the rest of the game. That process is now underway, and updated translations are being implemented.
To give you a better understanding of what a small part of the overall scope of the game’s narrative layer they are, those few external movies are approx. 10k words out of 3.4 million across all languages in the game, or just 0.3 % of the overall text. The alternative was to release those specific dialogues in English only, which we believed would be a worse experience for non-English-speakers. In hindsight, we acknowledge this was the wrong call. Even more so, no matter what we decided, we should have simply let you know.
As AI tools evolve, they present new challenges and opportunities in game development. We’re actively adapting our internal process to meet this reality. But above all, we remain committed to transparency in how we make our games. We appreciate your understanding and continued support as we work towards that goal.
