The prologue demo for 1666: Amsterdam shipped with generative AI assets. The accusations turned out to be true, Panache apologised, and the studio promised to strip AI out before the game was playable. It is now in Early Access with the assets gone — and Patrice Désilets, the Assassin’s Creed creator behind it, says the removal is permanent.
What Désilets said at a preview event:
- The AI was used “mostly at the beginning, in conception and pre-production”
- “It’s been totally removed, and we won’t be using any AI anymore”
- He was “a bit [thrown]” by reports that took his earlier comments out of context
The GamesRadar+ column takes the correction at face value and still isn’t satisfied:
- The commitment to remove AI came after the accusations, not before the demo shipped
- Players who revoked wishlists were reacting to the workflow itself, not to any asset they could point at
- The column’s verdict: the game “will always have the stain of AI on it like cigarette smoke in the ceiling”
The question the r/gamedev thread pulled out of it is sharper than the studio’s statement: if generative AI is used only internally during early ideation, and none of it reaches the final game, do players still have a reason to care how those early concepts were made?
Taken literally, the file is closed — AI went in, AI came out, the shipped build is clean. The reception says the timeline matters more than the state of the build. A tool used quietly in pre-production and then removed is invisible in the product, so the objection is not really to the assets. It’s to the judgment that put them there first.
That is the part no patch fixes. Removal is a repair cost, and it gets paid in a currency the studio can’t audit out of existence: what people think it chose to do before anyone objected.