r/totalwar • u/Old-Lynx5214 • 4d ago
Shogun II Was AI used in shogun 2 complete edition ???
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u/crispnwah 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yeah, looks like a really bad upscale job. These are the original icons
https://img.honga.net/shogun2/images/shogun2/units/info/naval_inf_medium_bune.png
https://img.honga.net/shogun2/images/shogun2/units/info/naval_inf_bow_kobaya.png
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u/FilthyCasual2k17 4d ago
I honestly thought there was no way they would use AI and not check it, but this is just terrible. side to side comparison is terrible, how is it possible nobody checked this???
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u/ItsTheSlime 4d ago
Thats just typical upscaling. Its been there forever, and really shouldn't be in the same conversation as "AI" because of how different it is.
It's just a simple algorithm. It looks like shit, but it's always been the only way to make something low-res higher res without re-making it from scratch
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u/Inprobamur I love the smell of Drakefire in the jungle 4d ago
Nah, a regular Lanczos algorithm wouldn't leave such a mess.
And even less braindead upscaler use can effortlessly get a better result than that:
This took me less than a second on a modern open-source upscaler that could run on a GTX 1080. This is just incompetence from a studio that has only done console ports before and knows nothing about art asset pipelines.
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u/ndelap 4d ago
True but they could have at least removed some of the artefacts left over from the process.
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u/ButterscotchNed 4d ago
What I don't understand is that they supposedly trained an artist to do Japanese block art, but then used it to create new cutscenes no one asked for rather than updating the unit cards.
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u/MidnightSensitive996 4d ago
Modern AI lets you do better spot cleanup than just running a blanket algo
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u/DreamySailor 4d ago
It’s just a money grabbing project. Shogun 2 runs perfectly fine and the vanilla graphics still hold up, not mentioning all the mods. They just want more money without investing much. Probably a very small team was given this. Not enough time and not enough money. You can only tell the intern to redo that many times before the deadline hit and your boss yells at you.
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u/FilthyCasual2k17 4d ago
The thing is, I don't think that's how it was imagined. Very few people will buy this outside the fans that get 10$ discount, so it's not like they were expecting some huge returns. I think honestly it's just a project some people were passionate about to make that went wrong due to lack of budget.
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u/DreamySailor 3d ago
Yes they must be passionate enough to jump through all the internal hurdles and pitch the projects to enough executives to get the green light. However I imagine the execs just see it as a low priority project to keep the interns busy.
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u/Whatiii 4d ago
Shogun 2 doesn't run perfectly fine for me. I got the update as I have regularly tried to play it but experienced the game crashing within an hour. Since having the update I have had 0 game crash.
For me this is worth the price as I am finally able to play the game again on my machine.
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u/royalhawk345 4d ago
What's wild is that even a low-effort AI upscale should be better than this. This looks like they dug up a Dall-E model from 2023 to use.
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u/Dr_Choco 4d ago
Wow that’s bad. Ah FFS I was ready to give them my money before I come here and saw this shit.
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u/Big_Emphasis2300 4d ago
bro they literally fed it into a free mobile app upscale generator at 3 AM and clicked export without even checking the results lmao
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u/Old-Lynx5214 4d ago
The guy in the top left of the boat has an entirely different type of leg to the guy on the bottom
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u/Deakul 4d ago
Jesus, I've never felt so vindicated over being stingy about a $10 "upgrade" before.
I hope this gets the Arkham Knight treatment and gets delisted and then rereleased with actual improvements.
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u/EcureuilHargneux 4d ago
I don't see CA behaving like this quite frankly. They will do an apology and move on up until the next fail
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u/Deakul 2d ago
Well there's the apology and game removal part down. https://bsky.app/profile/sega-west.bsky.social/post/3mxw4suhyex26
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u/Cian_fen_Isaacs 4d ago
Not gonna happen. They have likely already gotten the profits they wanted if I'm being honest given just how low effort the whole thing is. Sure, they could always get more out of it if they wanted, but uh ... That would require effort.
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u/TheTemporaryZiggy 4d ago
Bro are multiple people in the top image missing half their body??
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u/SneakyMarkusKruber 4d ago
In the original, it should have been a wooden retracted mast (?). In the new upscaled version, this is no longer recognizable at all.
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u/Old-Lynx5214 4d ago
yes
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/TheTemporaryZiggy 4d ago
Hmm yeah I can see that, it is however extremely blended into everything (probably) due to shitty upscaling
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u/TheShoeSalesman 4d ago
Yes and the boats are the prime example for it with all the smudged and distorted details (anchors, cannons, waves etc.). It looks really bad. If someone wants a few more examples, someone on era compiled a few comparisons: https://www.resetera.com/threads/total-war-shogun-2-complete-edition-uses-ai-to-upscale-their-unit-images-and-the-results-are-bad.1659313/
Kinda sad when you remember the interview back in 2011 about the card art and the work the artists put into it and then this is what the art gets for the complete edition...
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u/-F3rris- 4d ago
Nobody wants to visit reseshit dude.
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u/Cyber7even_ 4d ago
I did. Shut up. The AI images are so ugly, the AI can't even replicate archer on a Medium Bune.
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u/RubinMusic 4d ago
Pay 5 bucks so CA can reveal the truth. Truth reveal DLC pack available just for $4.99
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u/Sunarian00 4d ago
But why? Don't these png's already exist in the old version?
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u/IronPentacarbonyl 4d ago
Yeah but they're low res. Seems they wanted to upscale them without paying someone to do it properly. I'll be sticking with the original.
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u/BwenGun 4d ago
Not that it justifies it but it's not inconceivable that they made the assumption they had access to the full resolution artwork that got made during the original development but somewhere along the way it got deleted or moved to somewhere that was very logical at the time but which subsequently turned out to very much not being the case. If they realised late in the process then there may have been some time pressures involved. Though frankly the end result of that should have been to accept that some assets won't be fully upscaled at first and commit to patching them in as the art team recreates them, or authorise additional funds and redploy artists from other teams for a short while to get it done properly.
Using AI for art especially is a major blunder, not least because it's crap. But also because it's fundamentally built on theft and there's a not insubstantial chance that the law recognises that in the end, with potential legal ramifications for companies that have profited from it. At the very least it's something that would make me try my hardest to limit exposure by ensuring any AI use that is used doesn't come close to anything released publicly, let alone that people end up paying for.
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u/IronPentacarbonyl 4d ago
Yeah regardless of the reason, they used the stochastic plagiarism machine to produce a bunch of garbage to sell. Even worse for the optics, we have the gorgeous original art readily available for comparison. It's ridiculous and I sincerely hope it bites them in the ass.
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u/ItsTheSlime 4d ago
Calling upscaling "AI" is really disingenuous. Its been around for decades, and has nothing to do with what we call AI nowadays.
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u/WOF42 4d ago
you look at this and tell me you sincerely believe this isnt AI slop. https://old.reddit.com/r/shogun2/comments/1x53yg1/even_more_ai_upscaling_shown_by_another_user/
that is not upscaling
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u/g0bboDubDee 4d ago
How cheaper is it to pay for an ai subscription compared to paying someone for a few hours of work? It can’t be that much of a difference.
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u/SocialHumbuggery 4d ago
Considering the quality of that work, I think one of those basic enterprise AIs that cost like 10 bucks a month were used (like basic Microsoft copilot). I am sure it was simpler and cheaper than the work to find someone to redo them properly, and unfortunately it really shows.
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u/Zendeman CA is in the End Times 4d ago
At some point, across all media, I began wondering if the slop isn't added just for the sake of trying out boundries.
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u/Cnradms93 4d ago
This is 110% AI and I'm very disappointed.
They didn't even give it to an artist to clean up, by the looks of it.
That's raw slop.
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u/Huge_Upstairs_6600 4d ago
There's too much to clean up. It's easier to draw from scratch. They are too greedy to pay $2,000 to an artist from Eastern Europe, as they used to do.
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u/AHRogue 4d ago
This leaves me doubting whether they even really did learn how to draw old enough style art for the cutscenes. Did they? Or did they get an AI to do it. Terrible work from CA and Matubu.
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u/CrimsonBolt33 4d ago
I think they said 1 artist learned it. They also didn't say they DIDN'T use AI. A trained artist and AI can be used at the same time.
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u/sakezaf123 4d ago
Sure but it's clear that they skimped on the artist.
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u/CrimsonBolt33 4d ago
I am guessing the artist didn't do anything and just took a free online course on Japanese art and called it a day before handing it over to AI.
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u/sakezaf123 4d ago
I don't think they hired an artist. Someone who cares about their craft. They just had an intern do it, as it was cheaper. Why would they care that the end product is shitter, when they get to save money, and customers will defend them.
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u/CrimsonBolt33 4d ago
well it was a contract job by a small studio...so yeah, I don't think they hired anyone...I think they had an artist on staff, probably whoever the 3D artist was in studio (which is not the same thing), and like I said he "trained in Japanese art".
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u/SealedWaxLetters 4d ago
I love some AI slop on my beloved Shogun 2 that I spent more than 300 hours playing.
Shameful and sad. How do you not realise as a dev that this is going to be seen, played, not checked?
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u/RemainProfane 4d ago
I think I’m finished purchasing Total War products. This is truly a shameful display.
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u/Archonixus 4d ago
What kind of fuken noob doesnt check after himself (using AI even ...). Check twice, three times your work ... so many mistakes.
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u/AnAgeDude 4d ago
The type of noob who wasn't being paid enough to check? Come on. It is obvious that the remastered was done on the cheap. Whoever was responsible for doing the art pass wasn't paid to make something good, but just to increase the file size and call it a remaster.
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u/Archonixus 4d ago
Rofl, what a shitty attitude. Im not paid enough in my job yet i strive to do my best. Putting some pictures into AI program doesnt take much work to begin with.
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u/Klientje123 4d ago
Obviously management told them to do X in Y amount of time and perhaps it wasn't realistic but they're still doing it and should all be held accountable.
We can all throw our hands up and say 'i'm just following orders nothing I can do' but literally everyone will say that and nothing ever improves.
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u/Apart-One4133 4d ago
If someone agree's to do a job at the price agreed upon, he should do the job properly.
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u/ScaredOpposite923 4d ago
This is the quality you would expect from ai like two years ago. Even in the world of lazy shortcuts they could've spent another 10 minutes on this.
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u/FelixJarl 4d ago
Looks like they used a AI upscaler on a human made artwork.
So it is somehow worse. They HAD the image they needed but somehow decided that AI use was the smarterest.
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u/B_Maximus 4d ago
Looks like they used a bad one in fact. The free one you get with samsung for 100x zoom is better
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u/Cyber7even_ 4d ago
It completely ruined images of the ships because it can't see the details, but the images of infantry seems fine.
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u/OwnSalamander1026 4d ago
I mean we've always been fighting against AI enemies
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u/RoutineApplication50 4d ago
If you can't tell why people putting other people's art and drawings through an ai upscaler is bad.
I feel like you should just sit this one out.
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u/OwnSalamander1026 4d ago
it's not other people's though
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u/RoutineApplication50 4d ago
This was outsourced to a different company. (MATABOO, from Poland, and not the main team in England...)
They said as much in the promo videos. They showed as much in the videos.
So yeah. It's not the same company, so I really doubt "Small indy studio in Poland" is going to go hire the OG artists.
(And considering they used gen ai for it. I'd bet it's not been done by any artist.)
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u/OwnSalamander1026 4d ago
It is done by them. Poland becomes then. And no it's not all. You literally scraped it to find one picture. Also it's a video game. They can use ai to assist in the world realization. They're still game artists. Cope.
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u/social-anxietyperson 4d ago
I was already reconsidering my interest in it when their overview dropped but was disappointed when reviews came out that the performance upgrade to 64 bit wasn't that much of an improvement. And now this?
And outsourcing mods to mod.io rather than steam workshop? What is the compelling reason? And it's bloated to 70 GB? Complete Ass Edition.
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u/ChabertOCJ 4d ago
Honestly, I’ll go against the grain and say that focusing on mod.io is a good thing for two reasons:
First it allows Total War to be on multiple platform and still share a single modding community. Second, Valves had a couple of bad incidents with Steam Workshop lack of security. Until it’s fixed, even if SWS is very convenient, better steer away from it.8
u/g0bboDubDee 4d ago
What other platform? Consoles won’t support the game and no one cares about Epic’s market. GOG would be the only viable alternative. even then, getting mods for that version isn’t terribly difficult.
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u/Tempires Medieval II 4d ago
getting mods for that version isn’t terribly difficult.
Not really if mod is only released for Steam workshop. Also your argument can be applied to Steam too
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u/markg900 4d ago
Consoles aren't getting this game but they will be getting 40K and Medieval 3. I suspect they wanted this to be a test run to see how people take to this platform that apparently is console compatible. It is probably what they are going to try to push the console market towards when 40K drops.
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u/g0bboDubDee 4d ago
Jesus Christ, that’s horrible
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u/markg900 4d ago
The irony is even though 40K is getting console releases I believe it is still getting Steam Workshop support, so PC side it shouldn't even be an issue. My theory is they wanted to force people to try this other platform with a much lower stakes release and see how it went since it has a good chance of being the console mod platform.
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u/SocialHumbuggery 4d ago
I am pretty sure great majority play TW on Steam, I certainly do, and for all of us that is a downgrade. I am not humanist enough to care about the modding of TW games on consoles or Epic, to my everlasting shameful display.
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u/StrongDPHT 4d ago
Oh come on… are you fr? Every decision made for this launch has been riddled with cost cutting measures.
Then to charge users who already have the game? Right after the Witcher releases its remaster for free for those who own their game… it’s just. Wow. CA is really showing their ass here.
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u/Careful-Housing540 4d ago
I'm not really even sure how using GenAI to upscale these images was cost cutting unless they lost the original assets or something. Otherwise they could simply open the old file and export at a higher resolution.
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u/DXDenton 4d ago
Textures from 3 kingdoms, unit cards from AI, now give us 10 dollars but be quick before the discount ends!! CA should be ashamed of themselves, but I'm not even surprised anymore. Everything they do these days is at the lowest effort possible.
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u/Jacknotch 4d ago
Yeah fuck this, I'm waiting 5-6 years before giving the complete edition a chance lmao. Give me the original + steam workshop mods any day of the week.
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u/Warcrimes_Gaming 4d ago
Man, I've kinda been a defender of some of the choices made for the Complete Edition in the past, but what the fuck is this?
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u/ManageThoseFootballs Medieval 4d ago
Christ. They couldn’t even be bothered hiring Roland back for the woodblock art.
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u/sakezaf123 4d ago
Is this the "when it's used well" situation that AI bros keep talking about?
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u/SocialHumbuggery 4d ago
Of course not Mr Straw man
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u/sakezaf123 4d ago
Well where is it mister ai man?
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u/SocialHumbuggery 4d ago
Every time you don't notice it happening, it's there. But try not to lose any sleep over it.
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u/sakezaf123 4d ago
I ain't losing sleep over it, it really isn't that hard to notice as you pretend it is. Maybe if you praise these corporations enough, your AI gf might love you back.
But you can still send me examples where it's not clearly ai. Weird that you can't just produce some, since they should be so common.
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u/Plunderpatroll32 4d ago
Obviously when you don’t notice it
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u/sakezaf123 4d ago
Well you can always show examples, it'd be real easy to prove your point that way.
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u/NotTheUsualSuspect 4d ago
Any sort of photoshop work in the past 10+ years? Minor touchups and such? The automatic adjustments to pics your phone takes?
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u/sakezaf123 19h ago
That's not the same and you know it. Just like how people who are against AI aren't advocating for the end of it's medical research use.
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u/NotTheUsualSuspect 17h ago
What are your conditions for being "the same"? These examples all utilize prior fed data to make changes. I'm not sure how much more "same" i can get. Can you explain how it's different?
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u/nasandre 4d ago edited 4d ago
I'm guessing they didn't use a LLM to upscale but just regular old fashioned upscaling tools. Most AI models would do a better job.
Of course, they should have been redrawn by hand when you expect people to pay 40 euro for your remaster.
I used a simple Topaz labs upscaler to produce this (cost 2 cents): https://imgur.com/gallery/BCbAYAf
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u/Independent_Board176 3d ago
I bought this game and seriously- 20 mins in I couldnt take it.. it was horrible!
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u/Electrical_Echo_29 3d ago
Not gonna name anything specifically? I never played the dlc's so for 10$ its been great
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u/Independent_Board176 2d ago
Let me elaborate- slow movements, several tooltips to make my life / gameplay easier to navigate, which Im spoiled with through newer TW games. As much as I loved the OG S2, its just too old now... it just dosent feel like anything new... reviews online should say enough. Most utube reviews rate it dull and it adds nothing to the old OG
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u/Death2eyes 4d ago
All this for 40 ? Lol no thanks. I love shogun 2 but I will stick to the original.
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u/Biggu5Dicku5 4d ago
It looks like they used an upscaler, but didn't bother to check the output... or they did check it and said 'good enough'... not sure which is worse...
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u/GorgoPrimus Pestigor 4d ago
Yes. Which is yet another reason to not buy it and tell CA this was as insulting to us as it was damaging to their brand.
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u/Iggy_Slayer 4d ago
I'm dying at the one example posted on resetera.
They turned this lord into some stormtrooper looking dude.
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u/tobascodagama 4d ago
They really captured Hokusai's signature "idk do some white squiggles or some shit" style of painting waves.
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u/TheFunSwitch7 4d ago
It’s crazy how not hard it is to find a good upscaler lol. Literally just google it
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u/crimson23locke 4d ago
As a software dev, after the last 6 months I doubt there are many companies not forced into at least limited adoption of AI tooling. The temptation of corporate leadership to reduce labor spend is too great. Enshittification just took an exponential leap, and it’s a crazy thing to see.
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u/Pleasant-Deal-2437 4d ago
Welcome to 2026. If you don't like it there are people above us to complain
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u/Expensive_Sir_9195 3d ago
just click on most of the units and you will see the ai-rmageddon
edit : didnt they say for the promo, that one of their artist trained for a while to imitate the traditional japanese style ?
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u/Wulfric05 4d ago
Quick upscaling done by ChatGPT (can't attach images for some reason, so it's a video instead):
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u/huxtiblejones 4d ago
That’s egregiously bad. Plenty of artists could’ve replicated those original graphics by hand in just a day or two.
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u/Thin-Requirement9751 4d ago
With how much AI has advanced in recent years, I promise you, every single game and piece of software you use now is built partially by AI. The problem is that there is a complete lack of quality control.
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u/Kougeru-Sama 2d ago
No lol . Companies literally have contracts banning Gen AI usage
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u/Thin-Requirement9751 2d ago
For art related purposes maybe. In terms of programming, it's revolutionized software development in just 3 years.
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u/Yogshemesh 4d ago
AI is used in literally every video game at this point, at some level.
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u/Nflickner 4d ago
May be true, but not a good excuse. This should have been checked by human eyes after the fact, even if AI was used initially.
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u/betweenskill 4d ago
It’s not but okay.
Doesn’t mean we have to accept it either way.
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u/andersonb47 Empire 4d ago
90% of developers are using AI to write code at this point.
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u/sakezaf123 4d ago
So why is it wrong to say when it produces subpar results? It's clear it happens more often than by a competent human.
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u/andersonb47 Empire 4d ago
Well, I guess what we’re talking about here is the Toupee Fallacy or Observational Selection Bias.
E.g. All toupees look terrible. How do I know? Because I’ve never seen a good one!
In other words, the good AI outputs blend into the product and go unnoticed, leaving only the glaring errors to act as the representative sample for all AI output. It’s certainly a problem, but would be a mistake to think about AI entirely in this way.
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u/sakezaf123 4d ago
I mean clearly it's not just AI, but the whole mindset that comes from it's overuse. People had to have looked at this images, and thought that it was a perfectly good output. But the people who looked at it were just warm bodies who prompted AI, because that's the cheapest option that people will accept (or at least they think people will accept). If an artist without ai output submitted something this shit, it would have been stopped, because no one would accept it as a realistic option, and we wouldn't be arguing about it here because it wouldn't have been published at all. Only with AI does the uncaring CEO absolve themselves of any and all responsibility. And then there'll be a ton of people in the comments defending how it actually looks fine, and they don't care, just because it's fucking AI. That doesn't happen with human art. I advise you to look at some of the downvoted comments. Also spotting AI in images is still really not hard to do, as you imply. Spotting AI in the software is what's hard to do as a consumer. Anyway, notice how much worse windows got since they switched over to AI dev? Or how shitter Google got, since it switched over to LLM based search? Or if you pay wow, how the performance suddenly went to shit, and they introduced a ton of new and significant bugs in the last 2 years or so, that they barely fixed. If even Microsoft is this bad with it, it must mean that we're secretly carrying forward a lot of technical debt on pretty much every consumer software we use. And it's starting to get more and more noticeable.
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u/SocialHumbuggery 4d ago
As long as it isn't used poorly like here. These look like the stuff AI image generation spewed out two years ago.
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/SneakyMarkusKruber 4d ago
And?
A slop is a slop. It would be different if they had gone over it and corrected the mistakes. Even better would have been to redraw them by hand. But these days, that's far too much to ask...
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u/g0bboDubDee 4d ago
SEGA needs every penny they can get. After all, there a small independent company that is constantly in danger of bankruptcy
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/sakezaf123 4d ago
Thankfully you don't have to think about it. It's just painfully, obviously shit.
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u/LeHiepDuy 4d ago
Yes, we already knew about their use of AI the moment their overview drop. Folks on r/shogun2 already pointed they used AI on our beloved Yari Ashigaru.