Crimson Desert Players Are Calling Out Suspected AI-Generated Art Hidden Across Pywel

Barely a day in, and Crimson Desert already has a full-blown controversy on its hands.

The game landed on store shelves on March 19, and sold over 2 million units within 24 hours. Impressive numbers for a title that's been in development for what feels like forever. But while those sales figures are genuinely strong, they're sharing headlines with something Pearl Abyss probably wasn't expecting to trend: paintings on manor walls.

Players on Reddit, Bluesky, and other social media platforms have been sharing images of what they suspect to be generative AI-created art. In each case, it's environmental art - ornate portraits and medieval woodcut-style paintings - that's drawing the most scrutiny.

The most shared example is a battle scene hanging in Oakenshield Manor, first spotted by Reddit user Rex_Spy. It's supposed to depict some kind of historical battle, but look at it for a second longer than you intended and you'll start noticing a mosh pit of centaurs and strange half-man half-horse figures holding spears. The people on the ground appear to morph into rocks. It is, by most accounts, deeply odd.

Reddit user Ok-Error-403 laid out their case plainly, pointing out "three fingers on the hand holding the bag and four on the left hand" as the biggest telltale sign, alongside inconsistent linocut stroke patterns and wonky clothing folds that they say are typical of AI generation.

That painting alone might've been dismissed as a one-off weirdness. Except it's not just one.

TheGamer writer Harry Alston, who had logged over 150 hours in the game prior to launch, went back and looked harder after the community posts surfaced. His conclusion: in almost every manor house investigated, from Oakenshield Manor in Hernand to Marni's House in Deleysia, the paintings share what he describes as the unmistakable quality of poor AI generation.

Beyond the horse painting, a separate Reddit comment flagged jesters on boards within the game as AI-generated too. That one's less obvious, but commenters noted the style bears a strong resemblance to ChatGPT's image generation output.

The Steam Disclosure Problem

Here's where it gets a bit more serious than just dodgy wall art.

Valve updated its policy back in 2024, requiring developers to disclose whether generative AI tools or assets were used in their game. The onus sits entirely on developers to be upfront about it. Crimson Desert's Steam page currently carries no such disclosure.

It's unlikely Pearl Abyss faces any serious consequences from Valve given the game just moved 2 million copies, but they may be pushed to add a disclosure or patch out the offending assets entirely.

This isn't the first time a high-profile release has walked into this situation either. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 went through something similar last year. Developer Sandfall Interactive later explained the AI assets were placeholder textures that the team forgot to remove before the game shipped through QA. That explanation went down about as well as you'd expect, though some players accepted it.

There's a similar theory floating around the Crimson Desert community now - that these were placeholder assets no one got around to replacing before the game went gold. Whether that's the actual explanation or not, Pearl Abyss hasn't weighed in.

"Nightmare Sauce" and a Split Community

Crimson Desert's marketing director Will Powers earned genuine goodwill last month by publicly confirming that every NPC in the game was voiced by a real actor. That statement is sitting in an awkward spot right now given everything currently getting screenshotted and posted.

The community is split. Some Reddit users have called for a boycott and refunds, describing the AI imagery as "nightmare sauce" in a full-priced game. Others argue these are tiny, inconsequential background details that have zero effect on whether the game is actually fun to play.

Both positions are understandable, honestly. The paintings aren't going to ruin an open-world RPG. But the principle matters to a lot of people, and the absence of any Steam disclosure is the part that keeps the argument alive.

As TheGamer put it, it's easy to call these paintings an inconsequential part of the game. That's largely true. But it's about the principle, especially when there's no disclosure anywhere on the game's store listings.

Pearl Abyss has not responded to press requests for comment as of writing. Multiple outlets including GameSpot and TheGamer have reached out directly. Whether the studio addresses it publicly or quietly patches things before the weekend is the question everyone's sitting on now.