Do you remember the days when we didn’t need to talk about generative AI? Whatever side of the pro or anti fence you sit on, or even indeed if your buttocks are firmly planted on those white picket panels, you may be tired of hearing about which games do or don’t feature AI-created artworks. Even the US supreme court seems done with the whole business, as they recently refused to take a case about copyrighting AI art.

I wish, instead, developers would avoid the whole kerfuffle and do what Slay The Spire 2’s developers Mega Crit Games have done: just bodge it in Paint.

Yesterday saw Slay the Spire 2 launch into Early Access and, as such, the roguelike deckbuilder is incomplete. While there are multiple character classes and hundreds of cards to play with, over the course of development Mega Crit are clear there will be both new content added and everything currently available is liable to be tweaked and balanced.

There are also parts of the game that are clearly unfinished, such as the Timeline. This new feature tells the story of the eponymous Spire and how it came to both exist and become filled with monsters in need of a good slaying. As you battle your way up the tower, beating bosses and earning experience with each of the game’s heroes, you unlock new scenes on the timeline. Each of these is presented as a bit of text and a piece of art – much of which is currently placeholder.

And, to put it as positively as I can, a lot of it is charmingly naff.

Instead of taking the past of prompting ChatGPT – or any of the other AI tools on offer – to spit out a mock up of the scenes, I really enjoy that the team embraced the unfinished nature of Slay The Spire 2.

(I realise that it’s not actually Paint, as there are some quite nice brush effects on show, but it’s got a slapdash air that suggests they’ve not lost sleep over getting it to a shippable quality.)

Plus, this approach avoids them getting into hot water. When developers have been found to be using AI-generated art in their games there’s often been a backlash. The common refrain when developers are caught is to say the art was a placeholder and they always planned to replace the thing. Honest, guv’. Like what happened when the Anno 117’s developers were found to be using AI art in their loading screens, or when 11 Bit Studios were called out for using an AI-generated texture in The Alters. But Megacrit are showing there’s another path to take. Embrace the placeholder (and also make it so obvious it’s placeholder that it can’t slip by your final checks).

After all, the loss of faith from players can be costly. Just look at Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian. The criticism they faced after announcing plans to use generative AI to produce concept art for Divinity was so strong they they backed off within weeks. However, the damage may have been done. The studio were once a darling, riding high on the reputation hard won over years with the Divinity games and Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s never going to be so pristine again.

So, perhaps developers shouldn’t reach for the super computer-powered art generator, and just slap something together in Paint instead.