Arc Raiders and The Alters would have been my GOTY picks, until I discovered the depressing thing they have in common

Arc Raiders and The Alters should be two of my favourite games of the year, for reasons that most who've played them can probably understand. They're fun to play, and in the case of The Alters, the story was fascinating, to say nothing of the musical number at the end of act one. I should be praising these games! But several months later, as we look back at the year and pick out our favored games, I can't do it, and you probably know why.

How a piece of art is made is, in many ways, just as important as the end result. Beautiful music can't really elevate and soothe the soul after you find out the percussion was made by bashing orphans with hammers. And both Arc Raiders and The Alters have poisoned themselves in my eyes by involving AI in their creation. As much as I initially liked both games, I just can't get past that black mark. And the more I think about it, the less I feel I should have to.

What could possibly go wrong?

To start with, I'll lay my cards on the table: I despise AI, mainly when involved in anything artistic or creative. Just to pluck a few reasons out of the air, it disrespects and devalues human creativity while simultaneously ransacking it for parts, it's an environmental strain on a planet that really doesn't need another strain put upon it, and it frequently puts talented people out of work as a cost-saving measure for large businesses.

Moreover, the lack of adequate regulation around AI means we can all expect it to be used for the most ghastly purposes possible, rather than pushing humanity towards the easy-going, Sunday morning utopia that Silicon Valley's marketing departments have been promising.

Now, full disclosure in the interests of transparency: my employer, Future PLC, has an ongoing agreement to share its content with OpenAI – which will presumably include this very article! So with that in mind it should be obvious that this op-ed is only my personal opinion. I'm aware that Future and I do not see eye-to-eye on the societal value of the aspiring Skynets, but I suppose that's on me for skipping the important meetings.

Regardless, the fact that gen AI largely produces (at least for the moment) rubbery, fifteen-fingered uncanny valley mutants and obvious tech titan propaganda is probably all for the best – we wouldn't have to worry so much about these programs if they were never going to be effective. Sadly, certain people are diligently working on making this technology everybody's problem, ensuring that it will permeate every corner of our lives whether we want it to or not.

"We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity"

All this leaves me deeply troubled that what should have been two of my favourite games in 2025 both involved artificial intelligence in no small degree. Arc Raiders has been upfront about its character's voices being AI-generated, but when it came to The Alters, it was the fanbase who uncovered that certain assets and textures within the game were not manmade, including some of the localization options. For me the news was like discovering that my favourite authors had been using pureed puppies for typewriter ink, and before I knew it, my entire opinion of both games had been thrown into question.

These examples are hardly the only ones. Just recently Black Ops 7's player cards looked suspiciously rubbish, prompting predictable revelations, and even current RPG darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 got rumbled for generated asset usage like The Alters. Still, both The Alters' and E33's creators have since assured us that these assets were simply overlooked placeholders that were never supposed to make it to the final build, and have since swapped them with real artwork in later updates, so no harm, no foul, right?

Well, I'm not sure it's as simple as that. For one thing, being caught after the fact is never a great look, no matter what your intention, but the fact that AI involvement wasn't disclosed suggests that there's an understanding that it's not something the public likes to see in the culture they consume. Whatever you personally think about AI as technology, there's a general feeling that the content it generates is cheap. It's algorithmic, it's processed, it's disposable – all of which are antithetical to artistic values like "artisanal", "inspired," or "labor of love".

But it wouldn't have been fine even if they had disclosed it, like Arc Raiders did. "AI art" is itself a contradiction in terms, because all art is ultimately a statement about the world, and something that isn't sentient has no statement to make – it doesn't understand why it's doing the thing that it's doing. There's no conversation, no intention, no higher ideals to litigate, making it inherently shallow and (to me at least) vastly less interesting for it. Tech bros might argue that artificial intelligence is just a tool to streamline human creativity, but that stinks of a sales pitch to me.

At some point relegating so much of the creative act to a machine just makes the human contribution negligible, like claiming to be a whiz at mental arithmetic when all you're doing is using a calculator. There's clearly a distinction between an art stylus, which digitizes the craft of drawing in real time, versus slinging demands at a laptop until it eventually churns out something that vaguely meets your brief. If you can't see this distinction, spend time learning any artistic skill and see if you feel the same way afterwards.

Pulped fiction

So two games that I initially loved for their apparent artistry stumbled at the final hurdle by giving out a strong signal that artistry was seemingly never actually that important to them. I have a lot of empathy for Eurogamer's review of Arc Raiders, which reprimanded its use of AI and scored it harshly as a result, especially with how tone-deaf that choice is when paired with the "robots taking the world from humanity" lore and setting.

And yes, both games use AI in a comparatively minor capacity (at least as far as we know), but it still feels disrespectful to both the craft and the audience to include it at all. Normally a few NPC voices being poorly-acted wouldn't necessitate such a tough appraisal, but the bitter aftertaste that comes with knowing why they're poorly acted… Yeah, it does poison the experience for me.

And it feels doubly jarring by how unnecessary it was. There's no shortage of amateur voice actors out there who would've been happy to get their industry break as the NPC vendors in ARC Raiders – or heck, if money's tight, just round up some programmers from the office to provide the voices! Then the VO work would at least be authentically, even enjoyably, terrible; rather than a soulless modulation patched together from the corpses of old .wav files.

As a team, GamesRadar+ did not include The Alters or ARC Raiders on our GOTY list, and while different team members had different reasons for vetoing that idea, I always knew what mine were. Maybe this will be seen as a ridiculous stance in a few years when the world is ruled by the Borg and humanity is treated as some sort of inefficient fungus, but here and now, I really can't bring myself to encourage these kinds of practices. It really doesn't feel complicated: Those who reject critical thought should not expect critical acclaim.

See what's set to come our way in the future in our roundup of new games for 2026 and beyond.