Aquatica Trailer Hit With Serious Backlash

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home March 20, 2025 28 Views 6 Min Read
Aquatica Trailer Hit With Serious Backlash



Summary

  • Fans are upset over the Ark: Aquatica DLC trailer, believing that is uses AI-generated footage.
  • Snail Games is receiving backlash for the trailer.
  • Concerns are growing over the direction of the Ark franchise and Snail Games’ silence on the recent trailer controversy.

Fans believe the trailer for the upcoming Ark: Survival Evolved DLC, Aquatica, is AI-generated, leading to a wave of backlash. Snail Games has unlisted and deleted some of its posts regarding the new Ark: Survival Evolved DLC and seemingly attempted to move on. However, fans have even begun to comment about their frustrations on new posts for Snail Games’ unrelated projects, like Bellwright, to ensure that their voices are heard.

On March 18, the Ark social media account announced that Ark: Survival Evolved‘s Aquatica DLC would be fully developed by Snail Games. This news came across to fans as a peculiar change since Studio Wildcard typically handles most of the mainline Ark games. Although this news was disappointing to many fans, it came with a tease of Ark: Lost Colony info along with reassurance that Ark: Survival Ascended will be handled by Wildcard along with Ark 2. Following these updates, the Ark: Aquatica DLC trailer dropped, and gamers were not happy with what they saw.

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The trailer for Ark: Aquatica has been slammed with backlash after fans noticed that it appeared to feature AI-generated footage. This outrage echoes the disappointment shown over AI in other games recently. The Aquatica DLC teases exciting new creatures and mechanics to explore, but the hype surrounding this release appears to have been dampened after seeing the creative vision on display. Ark: Aquatica‘s GDC 2025 reveal trailer begins with approximately seven seconds of gameplay footage as the player character spawns and looks around, gathering their bearings, before what looks like entirely AI-generated content covers the rest. Although many believe this video is AI, there has been no definitive confirmation from Snail Games yet.

Ark: Aquatica Trailer Spawns Backlash

The trailer describes an entirely new world waiting for players after 10 years of journeying in the world of Ark. This narration is shown alongside AI footage of a man in trunks without other gear, deep diving. The video pans across footage of reefs and underwater flora. A dinosaur is shown swimming past fish and deep-sea architecture, and the diver fires a crossbow and grabs a crystal in between other quick shots. In a particularly notable cut, an octopus pops up out of a body of water, seeming to float for a moment.

Fans are upset by this trailer for several reasons, but they seem especially agitated because they believe that Snail Games has used high-fidelity Generative AI visuals to begin marketing this DLC in place of any meaningful gameplay footage. Commenters noted that the proportion of these visuals compared to actual in-game footage is overwhelming. Others stated that the video is tone-deaf and out of touch, since so many gamers have begun to argue against AI, and some fans are begging Snail Games to sell the rights to the Ark franchise to other developers. Since this backlash has surfaced, Snail Games has unlisted the video, but its lack of commentary on the matter has left fans concerned.

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