Silent Hill: Ascension was the return to Silent Hill that we all feared, but none of us wanted. With an absolutely terrible user experience and microtransactions that border on the reprehensible, the game is not being the Silent Hill experience that literally no one was looking for. So much so that the people who have decided to dive into it have begun to doubt that it was even made by human beings.
This doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Much of the community thinks Silent Hill: Ascension is actually written through AI, given how absolutely terrible many scenes are. Characters appearing out of nowhere, saying incongruous things and disappearing. People who react in ways that can’t be called human. And in general, a whole sense of strangeness that, far from seeming intentional, seems to be the result of either a glaring ineptitude or that it is not, in fact, written by a human being.
It hasn’t helped matters that the CEO of Genvid, developers of Silent Hill: Ascension, has stated that they have been experimenting with AIs for their next projects. Including Ascension. Although, in fairness, developers at the studio have claimed that they rejected the use of AI because the results were less than ideal. And the CEO himself, Jacob Nakov, has had to come out swinging.
Nakov has stated that “every single word of Ascension has been written by real people, many of whom have bulging careers in writing, including on titles from Telltale, Pixal, God of War Ragnarok, Resident Evil Village, and more.” Stating that “there are zero words written through AI.”
This has caused the community to have mixed feelings about the whole situation. Many do not believe it and many others believe it and think it is worse to do such a bad job being a human being. In any case, we have no reason to disbelieve Nakov. It is possible that everything in Silent Hill: Ascension was written by a human being. But that doesn’t mean it was written well. Or that it makes any sense at all.
