The Bannerlord Art... Is a step up

[Colonel.EXE]

I actually really like the generated art. I think it looks 1000x better than the old, repetitive art. Sure, the original art had "charm" but that was.... 9 card pictures worth of charm... for a whole game. Thinking on it, I believe the thing that always held me back the most with Age of Rivals WAS the poor graphics. It felt like I was playing a game on Newgrounds, not a professionally designed game. Even simple graphics card games like ascension have amazing and unique card art. I think that there will definitely be manufactured outrage, but I also think that there will be far more people interested in playing this game.

[Ninja Sloth]

I mean, there's no accounting for taste, but AI art is generic at best and souless slop at worst. There'll be a hundreds of games with identical 'art', it wont stand out. Not to mention the dubious ethics around art theft when training AI models. I don't personally care all that much about artists crying about their stolen art (even if they have a point) - I just think AI art looks ♥♥♥♥.

[NerdExtrodinare]

Originally posted by Ninja Sloth:

I mean, there's no accounting for taste, but AI art is generic at best and souless slop at worst. There'll be a hundreds of games with identical 'art', it wont stand out. Not to mention the dubious ethics around art theft when training AI models. I don't personally care all that much about artists crying about their stolen art (even if they have a point) - I just think AI art looks ♥♥♥♥.

You're not wrong, but also it lets some random single dude make a game that has art that we can at least look at and go "yes, this is x."

[Ninja Sloth]

Originally posted by NerdExtrodinare:

art that we can at least look at and go "yes, this is x."

Maybe don't look at the catapult cards then, they are.... well, they're certainly something. I'm not sure anyone would recognise them as a catapult
I get it, a solo dev trying to make a game on their own, it's got to be tough.
Looking at the discussions I think the dev's fears that the AI art could dominate any discourse about the actual game play is going to be true. It's going to be seen as 'indie AI generated card game' over anything else.

Hopefully there'll be an option to switch back to the old Age of Rivals art, or just a default icon or something. I think that'd satisfy some people. Don't think I'd enjoy playing it at all in it's current state, as silly as it sounds, looking at AI art just makes me mad and sad. I'd rather have a simple informative icon than a guy with lob-sided glasses clipping through his face and 12 fingers.

[Dark Inertia Studios]

I'm glad that the debate on the art so far has been measured and reasonable, and for the most part I don't disagree with the concerns. For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, I wrote most of my thoughts down in my post here: https://darkinertia.com/2025/05/10/the-art-of-bannerlands/. But just to highlight a few points:

- Thank you to Colonel.EXE for the words of support. I agree 100% that the old art, while charming in its own way, turned off many potential players. And as NerdExtrodinare pointed out, AI art allows this game to exist. I don't think I could have made it otherwise.

- Tastes will vary, and that's fine, but I hope we can agree I did what I could on the ethics front. I used Adobe Firefly, and they have what seems to be a strong ethics policy: https://www.adobe.com/ai/overview/ethics.html. I did not grab some free generator that was built using images off the internet. I am paying Adobe and they in turn are supposedly paying royalties to artists. I do not know how the artists feel about it (maybe the way some musicians feel about Spotify, but I assume it's still better than the free mp3 sharing of the 90s). I think when it comes to ethical AI, some options are better than others (if still not perfect), although it will be hard to communicate that nuance to potential players.

- Along those same lines, AI art can vary a lot when it comes to quality. I'm not going after any art awards here (I'm sadly not that kind of indie dev), but I hope I'm putting in enough time and effort to make it look nice. Not for anyone who hates the overall style (which would be hard to change at this point). But beyond that, I am willing to swap out or edit individual pieces. I have already done that extensively, but I agree that there are still some bad ones I need to address. The catapults are a good example. They were surprisingly hard to get right, and so I let them be for now so I could move on with the rest (there are hundreds of cards already). But I'll try again before launching the full game. Maybe we can keep a running list of the worst card art and I can keep working on them. I promise that if someone points out an egregious mistake (like 12 fingers or bad clipping), I can and will fix it (sometimes I don't notice because I just get used to staring at this art).

- Yes, I can consider adding an option to switch back to the old card art if people really want that. It might look strange though mixed in with other new (non-card) art that has no equivalent in the old style.

Finally, I'm going to reiterate my commitment to maintaining the original Age of Rivals for as long as I can. So this isn't a replacement - you can keep playing the original if you like it better. Thanks!

[slugcat]

I played AoR when it came out and have come back to it many times over the years including this month for a long plane flight. The gameplay is just so good. I like the old art but I understand it didn't pull people in. So I think sprucing up the visuals is a great idea and I appreciate that you're using Firefly for it - definitely the right way to go. As long as the gameplay doesn't lose a step this is going to be phenomenal

[james_mcbride]

I REALLY like AoR and I sincerely wish that you could do more artwork of that style for this new game, just LOTS MORE of it.

[Meanwhile]

An indie game that was never going to be able to employ an artist anyway is a reasonable way to use generative AI. I don't even care if it looks better or worse than what the developer could have done on his own. I'm sure it saved him a lot of time, and that's the most important thing (after using ethical software, of course).

[superobot]

I really liked AoR, but the AI art is a turn off for me personally.
That being said I completely understand why the dev went for it and I totally respect their decision. I hope the game will do well regardless!!!

[Cian]

Originally posted by superobot:

I really liked AoR, but the AI art is a turn off for me personally.
That being said I completely understand why the dev went for it and I totally respect their decision. I hope the game will do well regardless!!!

Think I'm in the same position as yourself.

I appreciate the transparency of the Dev explaining their thought process but the art itself feels like it undermines the argument. I (and seemingly everyone else in this thread) is here as fans of AoR but if I was coming to this cold all I'd see is the 'glow' from the generated character portraits and I'd move on.

[ZeL]

I, for one, really like the new art style. Definitely a step up to the old-school and limited images of AoR. If the developer is successful, perhaps in the future hiring an artist could be justifiable, but for now, this is a pretty great result (also, time spent learning how to prompt and achieve a good and coherent design is not trivial nor cheap).

[JamJam]

Just throwing my two cents in here,
It’s good to see a dev show hesitancy towards AI because It would be a real shame for solo devs to fall into copping out of creative solutions for visual appeal by using it.
I have a feeling the conclusion for how much it would cost to match an intricately expressive realistic style painting for all of the assets will mean that the dev will lean towards sticking with AI instead of finding an alternative style more within the scope of a solo dev.
Even with the option to just paint over the AI to “make it look less obviously AI-generated” kind of sets the focus on having it look passable than trying to build up a unique spirit of its own to the game.

Just kind of a shame, I miss when games were made fun first and pretty later, but now the pretty is too easy that you lose a lot of genuinely interesting creative choices or accidents trying to figure stuff out.

[JamJam]

cont: (more on AoR)

I know the push for this new style was due pivoting away from AoR but I don’t think it’s as simple as AoR being a case that it couldn’t work. Imo AoR’s style could have absolutely worked with one more round of polishing to really bring out the charming parts of its style and especially if the dev wanted to purchase art going forward It would definitely fill the roster/repeating image issue

[Dark Inertia Studios]

Actually, I've got an update on this. I've decided to try once again to find a way to redo the art with actual artists. I'm in the early days of exploration on this, but I'm hopeful. I'll post more when I know more. Thanks!