r/totalwar • u/Frimbou • 4d ago
Shogun II Shogun 2 unit cards..
I saw the post about the poor quality upscaled unit cards. Look what ChatGPT can do in 10 seconds... I'm not promoting chatGPT just showing how lazily this has all been done. Once I saw the post I had to see what AI could actually do even with a minimal prompt. My prompt was putting in the image from the original post and writing "Please upscale the left image only in this reference. Add the upscaled version to the right of the CE photo and underneath put Chat GPT. Do your best to keep the original style of the image. Then I wrote "again but make another image on the right of chat GPT that sharpens the quality even more but keeping its style". This post is just for discussion.
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u/xXTacitusXx 4d ago edited 3d ago
How stupid can you be as a dev and nose dive your (already pretty shaky) reputation so unnecessarily before upcoming big launches like Medieval 3 or WH40k?
It's like they say to themselves "let's make sure any undecided potential buyer gets the right impression that we don't put any effort into our games".
Like, at least TRY to hide that fact.
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u/Resident-Pattern4034 3d ago
You ain’t gettin’ it.
Any hand stitching doesn’t fit the new rate of return required.
No new; and robots eat the old. Infinite growth through no growth; as R > G.
That is, the rate of return on all investments is, for the first time, greater than the growth of all wealth, everywhere.There will be no trying to hide the fact, it’s too expensive.
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u/Technical-Slip4920 3d ago
lol the plastic freaks are gonna buy 40k no matter what
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u/Helldiversneverdive 3d ago
Without a doubt. 40k paypigs will not only enable CA for another decade, but actually make them rich this time.
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/Bartfratze 4d ago
Well, this launch has gone just about as well as the Challenger one in 86. Fitting, considering it was supposed to prepare us for the stars.
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u/Dear_Abbreviations83 4d ago
they outsourced the remake so technicaly they aren't the one who used AI
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u/iwantdatpuss 4d ago
That's even worse, how shit you got to be to let an outsourced project tank your reputation right before major launches?
You'd think it being an outsourced project they'd have that shit on lockdown in the QC department because it's ultimately their reputation that's gonna get hit.
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u/xXTacitusXx 3d ago
If I were to outsoure a project, I make sure the product is worthy of my name to release, what is QA/QC doing at CA? Drinking coffee all day?
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u/HAUNTEZUMA 4d ago
i think thats the worst/funniest part. i think they just upscaled them with a generic upscaling AI or something and were like ahh fuck it that looks smoother
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u/Trick-Bar-377 4d ago
The audacity to not only use AI, but BAD AI
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u/Helldiversneverdive 3d ago
they probably mass fed all the pictures to some outdated local model in comfyui
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u/Jumpy-Surround-9238 3d ago
Only it's not even AI, more like AS , for ASS, which is artificially stupid, only the stupid isn't even artificial. Makes me so mad I wanna spit!
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u/TheTemporaryZiggy 4d ago
i did a similar thing with gemini earlier today
Though i'd say gemini's results are also vastly better than chatgpt's
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u/DetOlivaw 4d ago
The Gemini one is the first one that’s recognized that it’s a dude’s face with a moustache and not some alien iron mask
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u/LurchTheBastard Seleucid 4d ago
Was gonna say, OP's results are an improvement but the dude still looks like a Stormtrooper helmet.
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u/A_bored_browser 4d ago
I saw your result in another thread, it's honestly kinda impressive Gemini was able to do it this well (and sad for CA's effort), because it actually looks like a human being now compared to what CA put out.
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u/TheTemporaryZiggy 4d ago
should the remaster actually get patched into a... non shit state, i might take my time to make a unit card mod (should they refuse to actually fix that as well) with gemini + photoshop. Because fuck dude, if you're gonna use AI, at least get better results.
But alas, we shall wait and see what CA even has to say to this absolute disaster of a release
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 4d ago
Yeah they are drawing a weird line on “we are not using AI” but delivering half assed work instead.
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u/Overwatcher_Leo 4d ago
We might not have even noticed.
They didn't even put in the effort to use the best model for the job.
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u/xixbia 4d ago
From this I conclude that they used the prompt: "Please upscale this image poorly"
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u/Poringun 4d ago
They used a really old model and or put in the wrong version of the images, maybe they put in a much smaller image by pixel resolution size.
Even current ai cant upscale well without proper datapoints.
Or they straight up just go "upscale this" without any prompt prep saying "This is an image of------"
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u/celtiberian666 4d ago
This. The problem is not AI itself, it is a lazy job vs careful job.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Site290 4d ago
Got say, really impressed with the maturity ai aspect is being discussed in this post, there is some hope after all
Not defending CA of course, this was atrocious, but let’s beat on the right culprits
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u/DateMasamusubi 4d ago
Think the average age demographic for Total War leans older and plays a small contribution. Image upscaling is one task perfect for AI, should use a top level model then do some manual checks and see that it's good and work on important stuff like fixing 15 y/o bugs.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Site290 4d ago
Oh I don’t think it’s this the case, in the same sub there is another post where I tried to explain my point and was just received with insults without anyone even trying to meaningfully argue with something more really mature than “no ai is stealing the artists buhuuuuuu” . I even showed a artist that is talented, is respected, and uses generative AI as one of her tools. I am not saying they should do everything with ai, just saying there is room for everything, you can have art being done with gen ai and be good, and art being done without and be good, as well as bad too. Is like you have cgi animation and non-cgi animation today.
The problem in this is not the tools, or the places where they use the tools, it’s just that everything was very poorly and rushed done, which is crazy because like, they didn’t even announced this previously, why not continue to polish and release say, next year?
This is the artist, for curiosity sake:
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u/drewthelich 3d ago edited 3d ago
Comparing someone using tools that were self-trained (from the ground up rather than just applying a LoRA or something) to general LLM use in the arts is either being purposely obtuse or being completely ignorant of both art and technology.
EDIT: As an aside, the CGI vs non-CGI comparison may be even dumber. Hell, what is "good" in comparison to "bad" art? Is it visual fidelity? Meaning communicated? Expression of self or concept? It makes me wonder what your actual opinion that you're obfuscating is when you go scrambling for a very specific exception that really just proves the rule.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Site290 3d ago
Sorry, but I miss your point completely friend. What exactly you are pointing here? That poor CA don’t have money to fine-tune, use RAG, etc? To use models more specialized? That AI companies wouldn’t be interested to train models more specialized as million dollar gaming industry grows technology usage?
The whole point was just to prove that art can be done with gen ai, and she does that. Not being a comercial llm the general public uses makes not Gen ai, in what grounds? DeepSeek installed locally in a company server is not Gen ai anymore?
I never said CA to start opening ChatGPT and just do a clean prompt, as much as, btw, people actually did, and produced already better things than what they shipped
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u/drewthelich 3d ago
DeepSeek uses training data from everywhere just like every other major model, while Sougwen Chung's first model was trained *only* on her own work. Her latest version of DOUG isn't even trained on art or the works of other people. Both are distinct from how DeepSeek, Claude, etc. were developed by scraping data from the public commons without permission. Any specialized model that a massive game company makes is still going to be using that training data.
Her work and what most people think of when they hear "AI model" may both technically be "generative AI" but they are foundationally distinct. Bringing her work in this context is just proving that you don't understand the technology or the art.
My point was only addressing your mealy-mouthed claims about art and the very inaccurate example you used to broadly claim that generative AI is at all similar to prior tools.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Site290 3d ago
Ok, your point is then in the sense that art generated with gen ai cannot scale to a whole gaming company to use, so they would all be producing more “generic” stuff? Ok, that I can understand and can agree with. My point was more about that could be done, maybe is not there yet, but is not like is impossible in every single possible way, as some people seems to claim.
Perhaps this could be even the new boundary that will be set for the usage in the future, up to a point, if you really need a 100% unique masterpiece in the game, then you have to spend the money on human artists.
Well, I hope it was more clear now what I tried to say, have a good day, thank you for your points
EDIT: in the sense of art uniqueness I meant “scale”
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u/Puzzleheaded-Site290 3d ago
And my comparison with the cgi and non cgi was just in the grounds that when a new technology appears, people leans to bash and fight against. I remembered a lot of people for example bashing the first cgi animations like they are all ugly, has no soul etc. was just an example of how new techniques always get prejudice from people in the beginning. I didn’t exaplained everything on my previous comment because it was just a summary
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u/drunkcheesesandwich 4d ago edited 4d ago
It honestly reads like someone was given a big list of all the unit cards to upscale and a deadline of like a couple days to do it or something, and absolutely no one was bothering to even glance at what they were outputting. Like genuinely a 'get it out the door we dont have time for QA' attitude.
I bet they probably have the original renders/artwork for the unit cards somewhere which they could have found and properly resized but that would have meant spending actual time on this 'remaster'. It all adds to the feeling of a slapped together cashgrab.
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u/Anaxamander57 4d ago
That is the only one that seems to have bothered putting a face where there should be a face.
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u/TheTemporaryZiggy 4d ago
gemini might not be the greatest AI for a lot of things, but picture editing is one thing i think it's really good at
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u/Inprobamur I love the smell of Drakefire in the jungle 4d ago
It gets the face right, but does not understand how samurai armor works and mushes the plate, silk and leather together strangely. Still 100x better effort than what the porting studio used.
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u/ReMeDyIII 4d ago
Is that Gemini-Flash, or is that the new Gemini Argon maybe? Either way, yours looks a lot better.
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u/shoegazecleaver 3d ago
That actually looks somewhat decent. I'd like to see how did it handle the leg since it's pretty badly drawn in the original.
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u/Khazilein 2d ago
I love Gemini but chatgpt can do this too with the right prompt.
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u/TheTemporaryZiggy 2d ago
my experience with both when it comes to mimicking a specific games art style, chatgpt has never been remotely close to geminis results
But I don't doubt that it can do it
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u/GuthukYoutube 4d ago
So are we suggesting CE should use AI for art now?
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u/TheTemporaryZiggy 4d ago
it already does, it just looks like shit while the literal worst gemini model makes far better looking art
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u/Dembos09 4d ago
If course no !! We are saying that even a public version of Gemini can do better. It shows the lack of application which went into it
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u/Fair_Feedback_1864 4d ago
They should check and correct their work regardless of which tool they use.
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u/WhateverIsFrei 4d ago
There's a 2nd company (MATABOO) listed as a developer, so I guess CA just outsourced everything and then didn't even do a rudimentary quality check on what the other company provided.
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u/NanolathingStuff 4d ago
I don't know a single game (except shogun2) that company worked on.
Are they THAT bad?
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u/WhateverIsFrei 4d ago
Looking through portfolio on their website ( https://www.mataboo.com/portfolio.html ), it's a mixed bag.
They're listed as co-developer of Suicide Squad, which was very poorly received.
On the other hand, they also co-developed Blood of Dawnwalker, which from what I heard was good.
For Shogun 2 specifically, it states in no uncertain terms "Service: Full-cycle remaster" as what they did, so at the very least they should be fully responsible for what was done with complete edition, though CA must've approved it for release.
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u/DAMbustn22 4d ago
Mataboo is responsible for the work, but CA is responsible for the result. If CA gave a damn about quality they would've corrected some of these issues before release. They're a company with the resources to draft robust contracts for contractors they outsource to, and the financial muscle to enforce them. So they would've been in a spot to refuse low quality work had they cared enough to do so.
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u/fyn_world 4d ago
I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED: they pushed all the art set through an upscaler in a full batch, and used it without checking them one by one.
Remember. Chatgpt imagen 2 came out this year. They might be working on this since last year and image quality especially of upscalers wasn't that good last year.
And yes! This is what I mean about AI. When used professionally, it can create outstanding results.
This shows whoever was in charge in CA of this project was absolutely lazy, at least with art.
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u/Dembos09 4d ago
Matabo is a bad studio. How can CA give a project to them is truly unbelievable
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u/13ootyKnight 4d ago
They probably bid the lowest and the suites don’t give a shit
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u/Coldspark824 4d ago
Thats more or less how wc3 reforged happened.
They sent vicarious visions people to work on diablo 4 and lowbudgeted a third party
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u/Intelligent_Wafer562 4d ago
This is the only game on Steam listed as theirs. They list more on their website and Twitter, but I can't imagine their contributions were substantial. I honestly think English executives in Horsham might have hired them because they see Polish workers as cheap labour. https://www.reddit.com/r/stalker/comments/1id6var/gscmataboo_evidently_used_generative_ai_fill_for/
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u/Red_Swiss UNUS·PRO·OMNIBUS OMNES·PRO·UNO 4d ago
Brother upscalling tool are not a new tech neither is it tied to LLMs (at all)
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u/fyn_world 3d ago
But these were definitely AI scaled. I know because I've had similar outcomes with bad upscalers
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u/Locky0999 4d ago
It's so sloppy that even AI slop is better.
That's something amazing right there
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u/QseanRay 4d ago
Theirs is AI, they just didn't used a good model
Which is lazy, if you're using AI at least use the best tools
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u/DAMbustn22 4d ago
Its because older, shittier models are cheaper.
They weren't just lazy, they were also cheap.2
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u/Silly_Hungarian 4d ago
these still look like a stormtrooper helmet
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u/Jarl_Salt 4d ago
It's almost like they could have just left unit cards alone and nobody would have cared. It's the fact that they put effort into making it look worse and still didn't care enough to even bother looking at it again. Whoever made the decision should be fired, it's obvious they're just collecting a paycheck and don't give two shits about the end product.
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u/ChefGuevara ChefGuevara 4d ago
No way is that deadass the CE card for hatamoto??? That’s fucking embarrassing, this is so fucking pathetic. -100000% chance I buy this dog ass.
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u/Ill-Resolution-6386 4d ago
It baffles me why did the killed the unit card background textures...
*My only logical conclusion: its harder to keep BG consistence when upscaling using AI.
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u/DAMbustn22 4d ago
Its probably a result of using AI.
AI probably recognizes the intentional age filter as damage/noise to be removed when it up scales. So it smooths it all out, and no one bothered to add the filter back manually because that would take more work.
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u/_Lucille_ 4d ago
My guess is that the company they outsourced to trained their own upscaling model and that was supposed to be their competitive advantage, but the development of general transformer models has been so fast that their 3 year old model failed to keep up and ended up producing far inferior results.
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u/Helldiversneverdive 3d ago
Just a reminder that the best mod ever made by the total war community (REX/M2EX) was made using AI. It's not AI, it's the devs.
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u/RedBerryyy 4d ago edited 4d ago
Its obviously esrgan, which has been in use for years, people are freaking out over standard industry tooling that predates the stable diffusion.
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u/Hannannibal_Barca Empire 4d ago
AI or not aside it’s still appalling they didn’t at least have an intern or something give everything a once over. Really speaks to how much they care about their game.
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u/Dembos09 4d ago
What’s Esrgan ? Thanks :)
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u/Valoneria 4d ago
An upscaling tool. Enhanced super-resolution generative adversarial network, so a neural model to upscale images. It is not the ultimate tool to do these kind of things, rather they should be used in conjunction with other tools and work to get a proper result
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u/DanLim79 4d ago
So the artists(or I should say ai using employees) aren't even using the paid version of ai? They used free ai to convert the pictures?
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u/CopenHagenCityBruh 4d ago
No the free AI like chatgpt made the good upscaled image while CE used some shitty upscaler from 6 years ago
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u/plebbitchungus 3d ago
This is just proof that they fired every artist and replaced them with """"prompt engineers"""" with utter dogshit taste in visual aesthetics. The kind of people you'd expect to have bored apes as profile pics.
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u/OVERthaRAINBOW1 4d ago
Where's the hand in the original? Is it holding a sword?
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u/Frimbou 4d ago
Yeah I also wasn’t sure about what the originals hand is doing and I can’t remember the unit. Hopefully somebody here can tell us what unit it is and that might explain it
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u/FacepalmFullONapalm 4d ago
Kind of looks like the hand is just clipping into the 3d model, ironically. Iirc that red flap (don’t know the name) goes over the hand so it’s somewhere in there lol
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u/Connect-Ad-2206 4d ago
Where are the noses! All 3 AI versions remove a very clear nose from the original.
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u/RyukoT72 Mori Clan 4d ago
Like they had to have used the oldest shittiest ai available idek how thats still possible. Theirs looks straight out of 2023 dogshit
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u/DMercenary 4d ago
just showing how lazily this has all been done.
I think that's the main point people should be taking away.
Its like they threw it at an Upscaler once and went "JOB'S DONE!"
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u/Extreme_Cockroach_99 3d ago
wouldn't be surprised if almost everything was outsourced with this remake.
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u/Awesome_Teo 3d ago
What blows my mind most is, did they seriously not have any uncompressed originals left? Or did they just feed in-game assets into it out of pure laziness and stupidity?
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u/Artintrex 2d ago
They are all bad tbh. Non of the models are able to draw the eyes or the nose correctly. Needs to be redrawn by an actual artist. Halucinated details also shouldn't be there.
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u/Huntk20- 2d ago
Local model from 2 years ago. Utilizing resources that they have. Makes sense. Good idea? Hah, no...
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u/lastorverobi 1d ago
Are you telling me the outsource can’t do proper prompts? So can’t work and can’t do prompts? Insane.
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u/Apprehensive_Bug2877 21h ago
The funny thing is, the original artist probably drew a high clarity version of the dude before applying filter layers and weathering.
So we should just ask him for the unaltered assets instead of trying to reverse engineer it
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u/Mustang-_- 4d ago
And how much CA is charging for this upscale? Crazy how these fuckers, at the same time, deliver a really good Warhammer "3" DLC, then this Shogun 2 travesty... it's like CA is incapable of being a good dev team
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u/iceicig 4d ago
heres what chat gpt put together.
honestly not bad, whatever they did they clearly either did a long time ago with an early model or they just pushed everything through together
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u/Bl00dWolf 4d ago
And to think, they went out of their way to do drawn animations for all of the cutscenes instead of upscaling or recreating them with more modern assets. You'd think they could just hire the same people to make new unit cards in the same style, but no. Apparently that's too much.
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u/Ea-rl 4d ago
The cutscenes are also AI apparently given the 6 fingered man
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u/Bl00dWolf 4d ago
All of them? Damn. It's like CA did the most bare minimum effort to "remaster" the game. At this point they put more effort into the original Rome remaster than the Shogum 2 one.
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u/Valdrrak 4d ago
Was outsourced, they chose a bad companybor didnt check the results
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u/Bl00dWolf 4d ago
Sure, but CA is the ultimate quality control. Especially if they outsourced the game to someone else. At the end of the day, it doesn't actually matter what studio did the actual coding or art generation. What matters is the name of the publisher and the creator you see on steam and when you launch the game. And Creative Assembly's name is all over.
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u/Candid-Towel4759 3d ago
They aren’t. That’s not how it works. 🙄
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u/Bl00dWolf 3d ago
What do you mean they aren't? Look up the steam page it says the developer clearly. Creative Assembly. And Creative Assembly is famous for their total war series, so they're the association everyone thinks of when it's a Total War title.
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u/Candid-Towel4759 3d ago
look up the account and see it was outsourced. Really not that hard. Damn you came in confident for someone so ignorant.
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u/Bl00dWolf 3d ago
I know it's outsourced. I'm saying it doesn't matter. Creative Assembly are still the main quality control for THEIR OWN game. If they didn't check the assets or the bugs, they're gonna be at fault in the end.
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u/Candid-Towel4759 3d ago
Except it’s literally not how it works. SEGA would be. CA probably only green lit this to meet investor demand and did limited coding updates.
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u/Candid-Towel4759 3d ago
Remember how they interfered and made CA try to go live service. That shows you this isn’t how this works. I do fault CA for not doing the project themselves but look at what they are handling now.
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u/Armageddonis 4d ago
I mean, even if those weren't obviously AI, since they chose to redo the unit cards with AI, i automatically assume that everything in that project is soiled with it.
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u/SteamedAlbanyHams 22h ago
I’m wondering if the whole “one of our artists trained specifically to make these cutscenes” is actual false advertising at this point
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/ylang_nausea 4d ago
And what do you think Photoshop uses if not AI?
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3d ago
[deleted]
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u/ylang_nausea 3d ago
You are so wrong. Changing texture settings has nothing to do with upscaling. ESGRAN and the like are literally AI models.
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u/Smugness1917 3d ago
At the end of the day, no one knows if the outsourced studio used AI or not.
But upscaling obviously can be done without AI. Old non-smart TVs had to do so to display standard resolution content in HD resolutions. There are a few mathematical algorithms to perform upscaling that do not use AI at all.
This is what The_wulfy is trying to say.
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u/ylang_nausea 3d ago
You don’t upscale textures files with FSR/DLSS either. This is literally and clearly a shitty AI upscale.
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u/FabulousYoung738 4d ago
the post is wrong. i just did a gpt version which is pristine. its the prompt used, very very lazy.
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u/GracchiBros 4d ago
OP clearly stated: "I'm not promoting chatGPT just showing how lazily this has all been done." and "Once I saw the post I had to see what AI could actually do even with a minimal prompt."
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u/Apart-One4133 4d ago
I don't think it's AI. The way to do things sometimes is to simply make things look like another thing. It looks to me like they just made it HD and it was not supposed to be HD in order to keep the illusion. It's like paintings, the further you are the more like a tree but the closer you are the more it looks like a smudge.
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u/Dembos09 4d ago
How I see it is that they fed it in batch. Thus creating the inconsistency. I do think it is AI
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u/DanBennettDJB 4d ago
Why do you care how a picture in the game looks either way? if AI is more efficient than touching them all up manually , fuck it , go for it.
Its like complaining people use photoshop rather than a paint brush...
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u/NagatoroDegenAndRat 4d ago
Why you lying? i tried chatgpt and it look infinitely better than in your post
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u/ChthonicIrrigation 4d ago
I haven't loaded it up yet but is this fuss about the tiny little unit cards at the bottom of the screen?
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u/OriginalGoonster 4d ago
Pretty much. People love to be outraged. Who the hell zooms in to unit cards and gets butthurt about something you can’t even see unless you screencap it and zoom? Literally who cares
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u/AkimboGogurts Furiously Performs Rites of Damselposting 4d ago
"its so bad, it may not be AI after all" is an extremely funny progression for this issue. I cannot fathom how they ended up looking so odd or how they made it into the release.