Today marks exactly eight years since Bethesda revealed the Elder Scrolls 6 teaser from 2018, and all this time later we've seen virtually nothing else from the project. Bethesda and Xbox's silence on the long, long, long-awaited follow-up to Skyrim is remarkable, but Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty has broken his silence with the tiniest of updates on one of the biggest games on the release date calendar.

BGS executive producer and game director Todd Howard has gone on the record to say Elder Scrolls 6 was announced too early, which seems like a bit of an understatement as we approach 10 years from that infamously vague teaser, but Booty tells Variety that the decision to reveal such a massively anticipated project is one of the trickier parts of his job.

"I would say one of the more challenging balancing acts of someone in a job like mine is balancing that you want to go show the world all the cool stuff you're working on, and you want to get them excited early, but we also know that we want to wait till the right moment," says Booty. "And when you decide to show it, you want it to be the best you've got. And also that when you show the game, you're also giving them a promise of, hey, it's coming soon."

Booty seems to be directly acknowledging the aforementioned premature reveal of The Elder Scrolls 6 here. With every day that passes without a significant update on the game, the big green elephant in the room at Xbox gradually swells, as does frustration from the RPG community who's been waiting almost a decade. That said, Booty assures that what he's seen from gameplay footage will be worth the wait.

"I can tell you, having visited Bethesda and sat with Todd and seen 'Elder Scrolls' playing, it looks amazing, and it's coming along well," he says. "And we'll make sure to announce it and really reveal it at the right time."

"The majority of this building is working on The Elder Scrolls 6": Todd Howard says Bethesda's full focus is on the RPG it announced in 2018, and "it's so different than Starfield, so different than Fallout"

One of the games that got us excited during the Summer Game Fest deluge this past weekend was 1666: Amsterdam, a long-in-development project headed up by Assassin's Creed creator Patrice Desilets. The narrative teaser, about witches, cats, and supernatural spookiness, lacked any kind of look at gameplay, but it sure set a powerful mood.

And yes, as we predicted last week, it is now time to say, "Ugh, that game with the cool trailer used AI."

To help get the hype machine properly cranked up, developer Panache Digital Games also released a playable prologue on Steam: A short "narrative experience" introducing the game world, characters, and mystery. It didn't take long for players to notice some telltale oddities in the game's visuals, and Panache eventually confirmed that, yup, that's AI.

"A number of people have raised questions or concerns to us about whether assets in our marketing and game use generative AI," the studio wrote on Reddit. "We have a dedicated team of over a dozen talented and experienced artists. With them, we looked into the assets in question and found that there were indeed some early versions of assets that made their way into the the prologue. This includes some in-game portraits and external marketing assets.

"We are actively reviewing the assets in question. Human made versions will be released in an update dropping soon. We own up to this oversight and apologize for any upset caused. Please be assured that the Early Access and full game will not include any assets generated by AI."

It's a lot of words to say "Yes, we used AI to make this game," and the fact that 1666: Amsterdam won't have AI-generated assets when it releases (unless it does, I suppose) is almost irrelevant: If you use AI to help make the game, and then replace it with human-generated copies, well, AI was used in the making of your game.

What I find more galling, though, is the quiet implication that the studio was shocked—shocked!—to find AI-generated assets in its game demo, and now they're all trying to find the guy who did this. And of course, the apology: "for any upset caused," not what caused the upset in the first place.

As we said last week, this sort of thing—AI whoopsies like this one, and also AI disclosures for new games on Steam—is inevitably going to become more common, particularly during big extravaganzas like Summer Game Fest when new games are rolled out by the truckload. Gamers rage against it, developers apologize, and then they keep doing it anyway, leaving us to play AI detective with every new trailer, and in many cases to decide just how much of it we're prepared to live with. 1666: Amsterdam really does look cool—is the use of generative AI in its development disqualifying?

For myself, I don't think so. But as a matter of principle, I take issue with the use of generative AI in place of what is supposed to be an artistic undertaking—and as cool as 1666: Amsterdam looks, this admission has really diminished my enthusiasm for it.