Lies of P Sequel's Art Could Run Through Midjourney

One of the best things about Lies of P was that it looked like nothing else. The Belle Époque architecture, the grotesque puppet designs, the way Krat's factories loomed over cobblestone streets like something out of a fever-dream Victorian postcard. Every frame of that game felt like someone at Round8 Studio had hand-picked the colour palette. Now, the studio behind the sequel is looking to run parts of that process through Midjourney.

A job listing on Neowiz's career page is recruiting an "AI Creator" for Round8's Game Art and Creative team. The responsibilities are explicit: "creation of character/background concept drafts and expansion of variations using Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc." alongside AI-based texturing, image-to-3D asset creation, and the training of bespoke AI models tailored to the project's art style. The listing also tasks the hire with integrating AI tools into the studio's existing art workflows to cut production time and build what it calls "an efficient AI art pipeline." There's no ambiguity here. This isn't AI being used to sort bug reports or optimise server loads. It's generative image models being woven directly into how the game's art gets made.

The timing lines up with NEOWIZ's Q1 2026 earnings presentation, which confirmed the Lies of P sequel has moved past prototype into the vertical slice phase. NEOWIZ describes the project as having "completed validation of its core fun elements and moved into a phase to enhance the actual play experience and overall polish." The company also revealed a six-game pipeline, with the sequel sitting at the top alongside Project Rubicon (a narrative RPG) and Project Windi (another soulslike, still in prototype). Revenue for the quarter hit KRW 101.4 billion, roughly $74 million, up 13.9% year-on-year, though operating profit dropped 32%.

Why This One Stings

I'm not going to pretend every use of AI in game development is automatically a disaster. Studios use procedural generation, automated QA tools, and machine learning for all kinds of backend work that never touches the player-facing product. But Round8's listing isn't describing backend work. It's describing concept art, character design, texturing, and 3D asset creation. These are the disciplines that gave Lies of P its identity. When you ask Midjourney to generate "character concept drafts" and then "upscale AI products to a level applicable to actual games," you are describing a pipeline where generative AI output becomes the foundation of the final art, not a reference tool sitting on a mood board.

Round8 isn't the first studio to walk into this particular minefield. Larian caught serious backlash last year after CEO Swen Vincke mentioned using AI tools for concept art on Divinity, and reversed course after the outcry. Embark shipped Arc Raiders with AI-generated voice lines and eventually swapped them for human performances after players pushed back. The pattern is consistent: studios announce or ship AI-generated content, the response is overwhelmingly negative, and the studio either walks it back or weathers the storm. Round8 is making this move with full knowledge of that pattern, which tells you how committed the decision is.

What makes this particular case harder to shrug off is that Lies of P's art was the single strongest argument for the game's existence outside of the Bloodborne comparison. The soulslike genre is crowded. Combat systems can be iterated on. Level design philosophies can be borrowed. But Krat's visual identity, its specific blend of steampunk grandeur and puppet-body horror, was Round8's clearest creative signature. Feeding that into a generative model trained on scraped datasets doesn't preserve that identity. It dilutes it into an average of everything the model has ingested. I don't think you get the sequel's equivalent of Krat's eerie circus districts by prompting Stable Diffusion.

NEOWIZ's earnings presentation also emphasised narrative as a core competency, stating that "in an environment where global development costs are rising, it is difficult to achieve favorable market evaluations relying solely on technical and quantitative inputs." The irony of that statement sitting alongside a job listing designed to replace qualitative artistic labour with generative shortcuts is hard to ignore. Rising costs are real, and I understand the pressure Korean studios face competing globally. But if the solution to rising costs is stripping out the handcrafted art that made your breakout hit special, you're saving money on the thing your audience valued most.

The Lies of P sequel has no announced release date or platforms. NEOWIZ lists it as a PC/Console project currently in vertical slice development.