ShiftUP CEO Kim Hyung Tae hasn’t precisely been lowkey together with his pro-AI stance over time, however he and his firm have now made it clearer than ever with one of the god-awful movies I’ve ever had the displeasure of witnessing from an organization with sufficient cash to do higher.
Essential Hit
Welcome to Essential Hit, the place I (or another person on the PC Gamer group) have a good time and lament all issues videogame music, audio design, and the methods our favorite video games make our ears tingle.
Stellar Blade: Blood Rain—the sequel to 2024’s Stellar Blade, which I believed was simply positive—is because of come out later this yr. And what higher method to promote it than with a horrible AI-generated music video the place Evie’s skin-tight go well with has a stomach button and fingernails, and components of her outfit part out and in of existence all whereas she smiles on the digital camera in a deeply unsettling method.
As if that wasn’t dangerous sufficient, it is all to accompany a track that can also be AI-generated. Shrill computerised bleeps masquerade as Evie “singing” excessive notes in the course of the refrain—which finally soften into an ear-splitting cacophony of robotic phrases—and a musical composition that hardly understands the basics of what makes music good within the first place.
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It’s a track so completely devoid of soul, and likewise of something that feels even remotely associated to Stellar Blade: Blood Rain and its universe. It actively undermines the sport, its theme, and any visible id it is making an attempt to current in favour of one thing that appears shit, sounds shit, and fully discredits any goodwill ShiftUp could have had.
And it makes me fear about the best way a passion I’ve spent so a few years loving goes. For the entire videogame soundtracks which have made me cry, or pumped up, or irrevocably blissful. As a result of they have been crafted by a human who understood precisely what they needed to do to make me really feel these issues. People who additionally really feel the issues they have been attempting to make me really feel by way of their music.
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Videogames are a type of artwork, and artwork wants a human contact. Parading round a track that feels so completely lifeless, that does not inform me what Stellar Blade: Blood Rain is definitely about? It is irritating, however particularly coming from ShiftUp—an organization that’s definitely not wanting cash because of the income it makes from gacha recreation Nikke: Goddess of Victory. One which constantly finds itself estimated within the high 10 to twenty gacha earners alongside giants like Hoyoverse.
It might probably do higher. It does do higher! Nikke is house to a few of my all-time favorite videogame bangers. It actually has a long-time rhythm recreation composer on its group who’s accountable for a great chunk of Nikke’s discography. I can’t perceive why anybody would suppose that among the worst AI-generated music I’ve heard in a sizzling sec is the higher choice.
I am not completely positive what impact ShiftUp hoped to have with this video, however it has fully turned me off attempting Blood Rain completely. I used to be truly relatively trying ahead to seeing how the group might develop upon the Stellar Blade universe—I believed the primary recreation’s narrative was surprisingly underbaked contemplating the corporate’s chops for storytelling in Nikke, and I hoped to see extra great things in Blood Rain.
And massive corporations normalising this behaviour solely paves the best way for extra to comply with go well with. It threatens to open the floodgates, to now not relegate this sort of rubbish to these AI YouTube playlists made with some horrible 80s-themed thumbnail whereas every little thing appears to be like and sounds diabolically crusty and deep-fried. It has the very actual chance to proceed displaying up in our video games in a giant means, whereas nonetheless demanding the identical sort of cash we have been paying to have a human concerned in its creation.
That kind of domino impact is how we now have the very actual chance of ending up with reams of samey, soulless video games that really feel just like the very antithesis of why this passion exists within the first place. And that is why it is so necessary to name this rubbish out for what it’s the second we lay eyes on it, to let corporations like ShiftUp know that this ain’t it, and we do not need it.
