Assassin's Creed Shadows players protest Nvidia's controversial DLSS 5 "AI slop" filter: "It's only gonna tank the franchise's reputation even further"

Assassin's Creed Shadows is set to be one of the games – alongside Resident Evil Requiem, Starfield, and others – Nvidia will use to exemplify its upcoming, and already unpopular, AI rendering model DLSS 5, and Ubisoft fans can't take it anymore.

"We need to tell this company and their nepo baby CEO that we don't want this," one Assassin's Creed player commands in a Reddit thread with nearly 700 upvotes as of writing. They're referring to new Assassin's Creed studio Vantage's co-CEO Charlie Guillemot, who's very literally the offspring of parent company Ubisoft as its co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot's son.

The older Guillemot recently argued that the younger Guillemot's presiding over Assassin's Creed isn't nepotism, because Ubisoft is "a family company." He can believe that all he likes, because removing alleged nepotism from the situation doesn't make Assassin's Creed's current predicament any better. Fans believe AI-driven tech like DLSS 5 will tarnish the already rusting action game series.

"It's only gonna tank the franchise's reputation even further," continues the player in the Reddit thread on the subject. It doesn't help that Charlie Guillemot's most recent experience prior to his role at Vantage was as the co-founder of AI-powered, web3 gaming project Unagi. It feels like an omen.

"Immersion is about making the world feel real," Guillemot counters in Nvidia's announcement about DLSS 5 coming to Assassin's Creed Shadows this fall. He thinks "the way it renders lighting, materials, and characters changes what we can promise to players."

But players maintain that DLSS 5 is "AI slop," as that Reddit thread and other posts make clear.

Ubisoft makes a big bet on "generative AI-driven gameplay" leading to "more interactive and engaging games," CEO says "this work reflects the direction we want to take."