From the Saber Interactive CEO:
“Stella who? I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her. We have already said we are using AI for certain parts of the game and will update the Steam page once we have finalized the feature set.
“Let me clarify that the entire story script, were it to win an award, would go to someone who can walk up on stage and receive it. It was always our intention to reveal this until Stella violated her confidentiality clause and revealed this before we were ready.
“We look at our use of AI in this particular game, which will be a lower priced title, as a plus for consumers,” he said.
“As far as Stella is concerned, she was replaced by someone more talented and terminated for a variety of reasons a few months later. From what I can gather she enjoys controversy even more than I do. I would frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI. At least we would be dealing with someone programmed to be honest.”
This deters me not only from buying this game, but also from buying anything from this company.
Yeah, even just going purely by just that response quote in this post is enough for me to detest that guy and want the company that chose him to lead to fail.
Though I do kinda wish that leaker had waited because it’s easy to say “we were going to reveal it later” even if they had no intention of revealing anything. If this had come out at release, then that excuse wouldn’t have been available (assuming my hunch that they weren’t going to say shit was right).
Turns out I have 3 of their games on my wishlist.
Roadcraft, recent reviews mixed, looks like that was from before this controversy as only one that I looked at mentioned it. Others mention things like the characters and story seeming like they were produced by AI. “The story is so generic and blandly written, I wonder if humans were involved or not.” Others complain about the game being janky and lacking polish. Someone preordered the ultimate edition and was upset they paid $100 for it and it didn’t include DLC (there’s 5 paid DLCs, game was released in May '25).
Tempest Rising, though for this one they are only listed as a publisher. Reviews are mostly positive (though there’s a negative one that mentions this).
Space Marines 2, this one is currently showing up as “Very Positive” but it looks like this might bring it down into the mixed area because there’s a lot of negative reviews mentioning this, though. Oh it uses kernel anti-cheat so I guess I wasn’t getting it anyways.