Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity Original Sin developer Larian Studios generated a ton of hype (and no shortage of revulsion) when it revealed its next big role-playing game, Divinity, at The Game Awards last week. But new comments from Larian co-founder and game designer Swen Vincke have tempered that hype a bit, as the studio is said to be employing generative AI in the creation of Divinity.
Vincke told Bloomberg that Larian is using generative AI for certain tasks — to “flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text” — but that what will ultimately appear in Divinity will be created by actual humans. “We’re writing everything ourselves,” Vincke said.
Even with those caveats, reaction to Larian’s admission of implementing AI technology, and Bloomberg’s characterization that the studio “has been pushing hard on generative AI,” has angered some of its fans. After Bloomberg’s report and the ensuing blowback, Polygon reached out to Larian for clarification on Vincke’s statements about generative AI usage. Vincke provided the following statement:
We’ve been continuously increasing our pool of concept artists, writers and story-tellers, are actively putting together writer rooms, casting and recording performances from actors and hiring translators.
Since concept art is being called out explicitly — we have 23 concept artists and have job openings for more. These artists are creating concept art day in day out for ideation and production use.
Everything we do is incremental and aimed at having people spend more time creating.
Any ML tool used well is additive to a creative team or individual’s workflow, not a replacement for their skill or craft.
We are researching and understanding the cutting edge of ML as a toolset for creatives to use and see how it can make their day-to-day lives easier, which will let us make better games.
We are neither releasing a game with any AI components, nor are we looking at trimming down teams to replace them with AI.
While I understand it’s a subject that invokes a lot of emotion, it’s something we are constantly discussing internally through the lens of making everyone’s working day better, not worse.
On X, Vincke clarified certain aspects of Larian’s approach further, prefacing his statement with “Holy fuck guys we’re not ‘pushing hard’ for or replacing concept artists with AI.”
“We use AI tools to explore references, just like we use Google and art books,” Vincke wrote. “At the very early ideation stages we use it as a rough outline for composition which we replace with original concept art. There is no comparison.” He added, “We’ve hired creatives for their talent, not for their ability to do what a machine suggests, but they can experiment with these tools to make their lives easier.”
Vincke and Larian’s position isn’t exactly new. Earlier this year, Vincke laid out Larian’s approach to generative AI and machine learning in an interview with GameSpot.
“Essentially, there’s three things that we use it for,” Vincke explained. “First is automation of tasks that nobody wants to do. It’s the obvious things like motion capture cleaning or voice editing or — something very Larian-specific — retargeting. That is basically if you play with different species, you want to be able to reuse an animation on a different species, but they’re different sizes, and then they’re doing certain interactions with others…”
“Then there’s what’s called white boxing,” Vincke continued. “That’s an important one for us because it allows us to iterate more rapidly. White boxing is essentially the stage before you actually do the real implementation. That’s going to [be] where you try something out […] that you say, ‘OK well let’s try these things out.’ Typically, that takes some time before you can actually play it. You can accelerate that with machine learning. So it’s good for that.
“And then the most exciting thing is where you can use it for new gameplay. Truth be told, we’re not there yet. I don’t think we’re close to doing that. But you experiment with it, because, for an RPG developer, what you really want is something that helps with reactivity to agency — permutations that you did not foresee reactions to things that the players have done in the world.”
Vincke went on to emphasize that the areas of creation that raise red flags around generative AI — visuals, writing, music — are not where Larian is divesting in favor of machine creation. He says that Larian is hiring up in those areas, and that machine learning and AI techniques are targeting complexity and automation.
“There are things that we call narrative validation,” he says. “It’s basically trying to figure out, I did 300 choices here that led to this particular permutation, did I write something that’s not correct anymore? Then we try to automate the discovery of these things, which, it’s not working super well yet, but it is something that you want to do because it takes a lot of time to go through these things, and not they’re not very creative. So you try to organize your processes, your pipeline to put as much automation as you can to accelerate your iteration.”
Whether Vincke’s full answer to questions about AI and machine learning will satisfy Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity Original Sin fans, or persuade players who object to generative AI to eventually play Divinity, remains to be seen. But it does sound like the only “slop” present in the shipping version of Divinity will be bile-flavored and gobbled up by in-game hogs. Man, that shot in the trailer was so gross.
