Transport Fever 3 developer reworks handcrafted art after players mistake it for AI-generated

This Steam game is changing its art as fans keep calling it AI (it's not)

The internet savvy among us would like to think we're discerning enough to know when something isn't real. We'll point out the telltale signs of generative artificial intelligence, like visual irregularities and impossible perfection. Realistically, though, generative AI has turned internet scrolling into a perpetual, awful game of spot the differences. And as one upcoming Steam game proves, we're not nearly as good enough at this game as we believe. Transfort Fever 3 is a tycoon sim game where players build critical infrastructure for cities. Players are tasked with creating transportation routes for both people and industry, but optimization is not the only consideration. As your transport empire grows, so does the complexity of your services. "The whole world, including buildings, people, and cars, follow designs and trends through time," the game description reads. "Rewrite transportation history and run steam trains and jets side by side as you progress through the 20th century and beyond." Much of the game is from a top-down perspective that makes vehicles and roads easy to parse, but Transport Fever 3 also has actual characters in it. These fully-voiced characters give players tasks and add a much-needed touch of humanity to a game that is otherwise obsessively concerned with things. You can also watch humans go about their day inside the cities, where they make ample use of all the vehicles that you make possible. Right now, Transport Fever 3 is still in beta and doesn't have a specific release date beyond 2026. Developer Urban Games recently held an event where press and influencers got a first-hand look at the game's campaign, and the reaction to what people saw was extremely off-putting. One PC Gamer reporter says that he looked at the glossy, uncanny characters in the game with "revulsion." Urban Games maintains that their game only features handcrafted art, but the studio has still taken player feedback to heart. "In the last beta test, where we have shown the campaign for the very first time, we have been made aware by some players that the character models we are currently using for the conversations in the campaign itself, that they look a bit AI," Urban Games publishing manager Nico Heini told PC Gamer. And so, Urban Games is promising that it will rework the art in the game to avoid any potential negative association, even though the studio says it doesn't use the controversial tech. "This is something that is very important to us that this gets addressed, because we don't want any results of AI in our game at all," Heini said. AI has become a hot-button topic in the world of video games, especially as publishers express an interest in leveraging the technology for their products. But as "AI slop" takes over the internet -- and new video game releases -- player sentiment around titles which feature the technology has curdled. For some, it's a matter of quality and maintaining the spirit of creativity. For others, AI usage and its impact on the environment is more of a moral conundrum. And seemingly no one is happy about the fact widespread AI usage is driving up the prices of nearly everything. POLY Report: Subscribe and never miss what matters Enter your email to get the best of Polygon sent straight to your inbox, packed with news, reviews, and insights from the gaming world. Subscribe By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime. Some game studios have already explored generative AI tech only to find it lacking. In other cases, the backlash to AI-generated content has been so overt, some gaming studios have scrapped or rethought projects that revolved around the technology. In at least one instance, a game developer dropped AI art only after his girlfriend convinced him it was a bad idea. In the case of Transport Fever 3, which is still currently in development, changes to the final product were probably going to happen no matter what. Early footage shows that the management sim has some stiff animations or appears to lack polish characteristic of shipped games. But it's wild to know that the stigma and concern around AI has become so pronounced, we are now at the point where games have to change the way they look... just in case.

Understandable AI paranoia has inspired a developer to change the handcrafted character art in its upcoming sim: 'They look a bit AI'

Transport Fever 3's characters look pretty uncanny, and that's a bigger problem than it used to be. Generative AI sucks for so many reasons, from its impact on the environment to the skyrocketing cost of RAM, but in my day-to-day life the most frustrating side effect is that whenever I look at an image online, a piece of art, or even a video, I have to wonder if someone's trying to pull the wool over my eyes. We've had to become extra vigilant, paranoid even, to keep out AI slop. There's even a subreddit dedicated to people asking, "Is this AI?" And this is why Transport Fever 3 developer Urban Games is making some changes to its sim's character art. Transport Fever 3's eight-mission campaign is full of chatty characters who dole out tasks, appearing as static pieces of character art with full voice acting. The instant I saw the mayor of New Orleans in the game's first mission, I experienced that feeling of revulsion that I often feel whenever I see some AI-generated art. He was shiny, uncanny and weirdly smooth. There were none of the imperfections usually associated with AI art -- no inconsistencies, no blurry patterns on his clothes, no freakishly malformed hands or teeth. But he, and all the other characters, still had an aesthetic that so many pieces of AI-generated character art end up with -- and it was offputting. Urban Games' publishing manager Nico Heini is adamant that generative AI was not used for any part of Transport Fever 3. "We are a 100% handmade studio," he told me. "So we do not have any AI in any part of the game. Something that is very, very important to us is that everything is handcrafted by our artists." But I was not the only person to be put off by the character art. "In the last beta test, where we have shown the campaign for the very first time, we have been made aware by some players that the character models we are currently using for the conversations in the campaign itself, that they look a bit AI." Urban Games is now making changes to rectify this, he said. "This is something that is very important to us that this gets addressed, because we don't want any results of AI in our game at all." The character portraits are "currently being reworked", and Urban Games will be replacing them with "something better that does not leave any doubt in terms of if they are AI or not". While some studios and publishers have gone all-in on AI, like Krafton, which boasts that it is now an "AI-first company", it's reassuring to see other developers go the extra mile, not just taking a stand against AI, but making sure that there are no doubts that its games are handmade.