Valve’s new disclosure rules revealed just how deeply Let It Die: Inferno leans on generative AI for voices, music, and graphics. Here’s how that’s reshaping expectations around production values, marketing, and reception, and how it compares to Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Arc Raiders.
Let It Die: Inferno was already an odd proposition: a belated follow‑up to a cult PS4 roguelike, now positioned as a PvEvP survival action game for PS5 and PC. But it was Valve’s new AI disclosure rules on Steam that turned it from a curiosity into a lightning rod.
The game’s Steam page openly states that a “considerable amount” of generative AI was used, then edited by the team, across voices, music, and graphics. That single paragraph has defined the conversation around Inferno more decisively than any trailer or dev diary.
How Valve’s disclosure rules exposed the scope of AI in Inferno
Valve’s updated policy requires developers to spell out if and where generative AI is used. For Let It Die: Inferno, that surfaced details that likely would have stayed buried in marketing talking points or post‑launch interviews.
According to the store page disclosures and follow‑up reporting, Supertrick Games used AI tools for several key pillars of production:
In‑game voices are at least partially AI generated, then cleaned up and edited by the team. That could mean anything from enemy barks and incidental chatter to minor NPC dialogue processed through voice models. For a roguelike where repetition is built into the loop, vocal variety matters, and AI offers a way to generate a lot of lines quickly. At the same time, knowing those voices are machine‑assisted changes how players read every line.
Music also leans on generative systems, again with human editing and arrangement. On paper, it is a good fit for a game that lives on procedural chaos and repeatable runs. Players expect a strong soundtrack in a Let It Die follow‑up, though, and the franchise’s identity has been closely tied to style and attitude. The second AI shows up in the credits, expectations shift from “new Suda‑adjacent weirdness” to “template‑driven, tool‑assisted score,” whether that is fair or not.
Graphics are where Inferno’s AI usage covers the most ground. Background signboard textures, record‑style illustrations, infocast videos and other environmental assets are called out as being generated and then touched up. These are exactly the kinds of elements that give a mid‑budget game its texture: fake brands, posters, UI flourishes, diegetic video feeds. In a traditional pipeline, that work is time‑consuming but also where a game’s worldbuilding shines. Replacing a large chunk of that with AI prompts is a dramatic shift in how that texture is created.
Because Valve forces these details into the open, players see the sheer breadth of AI usage before they ever touch the game. Instead of a quiet tools discussion inside a studio, Inferno’s pipeline is now part of its public identity.
A mid‑budget PS5 roguelike under a microscope
Inferno is not a premium $70 blockbuster, but it is also not a tiny indie experiment. It sits in that mid‑budget space where players still expect a clear stylistic voice, especially on PS5. The original Let It Die carved out a niche with a grimy, punk‑horror personality, and much of its charm came from how hand‑crafted it felt, from character performances to the lo‑fi weirdness of its menus.
By comparison, Inferno’s heavy use of generative AI puts its production values under a microscope. When players know AI touched voices, they listen more closely for robotic cadence and inconsistent tone. When they know AI helped fill out signs and posters, they start zooming in on textures to catch telltale artifacts or nonsense text. Even if the end result is serviceable, the perception battle is already lost for some of the audience.
The short marketing ramp exacerbates this. Inferno was revealed during a recent State of Play and is turning around to launch only a few months later. That compressed window, combined with extensive AI use, creates an impression of a project sprinted to the finish. For a roguelike that wants players to sink dozens of hours into repeated runs, any sense that corners were cut clashes with the long‑tail commitment the game is asking for.
At the same time, AI is clearly being used here as a budget multiplier. Supertrick Games is building a networked PvEvP title with shifting layouts, meta systems and service‑style hooks. Offloading some of the more repetitive or decorative content to generative tools means more resources to spend on level scripting, balance, and backend. On paper, this is exactly the tier of game where AI can stretch limited funding. The backlash shows how hard it is to sell that story to players.
Production values versus production methods
What makes Let It Die: Inferno such a flashpoint is the gap between what players see and how the game was made. Trailers can showcase flashy combat and surreal enemies, but once the AI disclosure is out there, the conversation pivots to methods over results.
On the production side, AI allows Inferno to ship with:
A broad spread of voiced content without having to record every incidental line in a booth. That potentially gives more variety to enemy callouts, radio chatter and system messages, even if major story beats are still recorded traditionally.
Large volumes of environmental art, signage and pseudo‑brand imagery that keep the world feeling dense. Instead of reusing the same three posters, AI‑assisted workflows can produce dozens of variations that are then cleaned up by artists.
Additional infocast‑style in‑game videos and diegetic UI elements that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive for a mid‑sized team.
On the reception side, those same choices land as shortcuts. Because the disclosure text explicitly spells out that AI was used for voices, music and graphics, players naturally ask what, if anything, remains untouched. That erodes the sense that they are buying into a strong authorial vision, which is often the selling point for something that is not aiming purely at AAA spectacle.
In other words, Inferno is testing how much players are willing to separate production values from production methods. If the game looks and sounds solid, does it matter that a chunk of it went through a model first, as long as it hits the expected quality bar on PS5 and PC?
How Inferno’s AI strategy compares to Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
Let It Die: Inferno is not alone in leaning into generative tools, but it is one of the only titles where the extent of that usage is laid out on a store page. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has also embraced AI, though in a very different way.
For Black Ops 7, public messaging has focused less on direct AI authored content and more on AI assisted systems. Activision has talked about AI driven testing, analytics, and anti‑cheat, and is experimenting with AI powered moderation and support tools. There are also reports of AI being used to prototype lines or iterate on barks internally before human writers and actors lock in the final script.
The key difference is that Call of Duty’s brand is built on high end, visibly lavish production values backed by enormous budgets and massive teams. When AI shows up in that context, it is framed as invisible infrastructure rather than a headlining feature. The trailers and previews still emphasize photoreal environments, big set pieces and recognizable human performances. As long as the yearly standard of polish is met, most players will not interrogate which tools got the studio there.
Inferno, by contrast, has its AI footprint front and center via Valve’s disclosure rules. Black Ops 7’s use stays mostly in the background. Players are not seeing “part of this was generated” on the product page. The result is that Inferno gets scrutinized for its methods while Call of Duty mostly gets evaluated on outcomes.
This reveals a double standard in how generative AI is received across tiers. Big franchises can absorb AI quietly into their pipelines. Mid‑budget projects forced to disclose the same practices up front risk being defined by them, even if the actual volume of AI content is not drastically different.
Arc Raiders and the live‑service survival angle
Arc Raiders, another multiplayer‑focused sci‑fi action game, has been part of similar conversations around how AI and modern tools shape service projects. While it has not had the same kind of explicit, all‑caps disclosure about AI authored content as Inferno, it exists in the same space of ambitious online shooters that need a steady drip of new missions, cosmetics and world events to stay relevant.
In that context, generative AI is less about headline features and more about sustaining content pipelines. Systems that help mass‑produce banner art, mission briefings and flavor text, or prototype environment dressing, are attractive to any studio trying to keep a live game fresh without ballooning costs.
Inferno’s catalog‑style signboards, infocast reels and background art are exactly the type of elements that a live‑service project like Arc Raiders would be tempted to offload to AI in the long term. Where Arc Raiders can simply roll those tools into future updates with minimal fanfare, Inferno is entering the market with that approach already stapled to its identity through Valve’s disclosures.
The comparison here is less about who is using more AI and more about visibility. In a genre where players expect evolving content, any whiff that those updates are largely machine‑generated could dull excitement around seasonal drops. Inferno is the test case where that visibility is unavoidable from day one.
Marketing in the age of mandatory AI labels
For Let It Die: Inferno, Valve’s rules have effectively hijacked the marketing narrative. Instead of talking about its shift to PvEvP, extraction style runs and grotesque new enemy designs, much of the community discussion revolves around that single disclosure line about “a considerable amount” of AI.
Trailers and blog posts try to push the usual beats: new systems, PS5 enhancements, meta progression and cross‑platform play. Yet every new clip is now filtered through the question of which parts are AI assisted. Flashy infocast transitions, busy cityscapes full of signage, and layered audio stings all risk being interpreted as proof of tools at work rather than as creative flourishes.
That dynamic matters for word of mouth. A smaller title like Inferno depends heavily on early impressions, streamers and niche communities to carry it. If those communities frame the game as the “AI roguelike” instead of “the wild new Let It Die spinoff,” that shapes everything from review expectations to how long players are willing to stick with early balance issues.
By comparison, Black Ops 7 and Arc Raiders can talk about AI as one bullet point in a broader technology stack. Inferno has no such luxury. The label is not buried in a tech blog or GDC talk. It sits right next to the purchase button.
Where this leaves player trust for mid‑budget projects
The biggest fallout from Let It Die: Inferno’s situation is not the existence of AI in its pipeline, but the timing and visibility of that revelation. Valve’s rules ensure that mid‑budget and indie projects cannot quietly adopt the same tools that big publishers already use without preparing a communication strategy around it.
For players, the risk is that AI usage becomes shorthand for “corners were cut,” especially when applied to voices and music. That raises the bar for studios like Supertrick Games. They now have to prove, through raw moment to moment play, that Inferno delivers the same sense of personality and craft that fans associate with the Let It Die name, even if the sausage was made differently.
For the industry, Inferno is an early example of what transparent AI pipelines look like in practice. It shows that mandatory disclosures can materially change how a game is perceived, particularly in the crowded mid‑tier. It also hints at a future where savvy players start comparing AI labels the same way they compare frame rate modes or monetization schemes.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Arc Raiders represent the other side of that future, where AI is treated as a behind the scenes efficiency tool rather than a marketing landmine. As more platforms adopt rules similar to Valve’s, the gap between those two approaches will shrink.
Right now, though, Let It Die: Inferno is the clearest case study of how generative AI can affect not just how a game is built, but how it is sold and received. Whether it ultimately lands as a clever way to stretch a mid‑budget PS5 roguelike or as a cautionary tale will depend less on the tools used and more on whether players feel the results on their screens justify the disclosure that greeted them on the store page.