The Relic: First Guardian, the upcoming Soulslike from developer Project Cloud Games and publisher Perp Games that’s set to release on July 31, immediately drew criticism from several content creators for its suspected use of AI-generated assets during the previews that went out towards the end of last month. The director has now responded to those critiques, stating that AI was only used early on and that, while minor AI elements may be in the demo build folks have played, none will be in the final game.
If you’ve not heard of The Relic: First Guardian, that’s certainly not due to the publisher’s lack of advertising. Trailers for the game have been published on the YouTube accounts of both PlayStation and IGN, and Perp Games has been giving demo build keys to basically any content creator even vaguely associated with the Soulslike genre. It seems to have worked too, as the publishers recently announced that The Relic: First Guardian has been wishlisted over 250,000 times across both Steam and PlayStation 5.
Indeed, I was only reminded of this game’s existence after watching Iron Pineapple’s recent video featuring it and—look, I know they say “all press is good press,” but Iron Pineapple was one of many content creators, alongside the likes of FightinCowboy, who suggested that The Relic: First Guardian’s preview build looked a little off. Artwork, item icons, text, dialogue—all of it came off as suspicious.
The game’s director, In-Hyeok Park, was recently asked about the presence of AI-generated content in The Relic: First Guardian during an interview with Thumb Wars, and he confirmed that “one or two elements” of AI-gen’d content “may” have made it into the preview build. However, he seems pretty certain that none of the aforementioned slop is going to make its way into the final game.
“There is no AI used in the final game; however, in the early design stages, AI was used in a very few areas to help in the concept stage of development. This involved a few pieces of concept art for loading screens and a handful of icon images for the consumables,” stated Park.
“Although there may be one or two elements of this AI still in the preview build, the final product will not have any of this AI work in the game,” he continued. “AI was also used in the early stage to help localize text, although all text was then manually reviewed and edited by Project Cloud Staff and no AI was used in the game’s voiceovers.”
It’s possible any generative AI work was removed from the final version of the game, or content creators were seeing signs of slop that was never there to begin with. The game’s Steam page has no AI disclosure.
At least one early review dinged the game for its use of AI voice overs for quest givers, though it didn’t take issue with any of the rest of the game appearing to hinge on the work of generative AI tools. “Truly, no voice at all would’ve been better than the robotic garbage I experienced,” RPGFan wrote.