Following up on Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios’ next game has been confirmed to be Divinity. This RPG is said to be the team’s biggest, and its first trailer shows a lot of potential.
Unfortunately, conversations around the title quickly devolved into discussions regarding generative AI when Larian Studios boss Swen Vincke confirmed the team was experimenting with the technology. Since then, however, Larian Studios has also backtracked on its stance. The team no longer intends to use generative AI for this purpose.
When asked to share his thoughts on generative AI, Swen Vincke confirmed that Divinity would not launch with any AI-generated art.
To ensure this is the case, the team has now decided against using this technology altogether, at least for the purpose of coming up with concept art. Vincke noted that AI should still come in handy when attempting to streamline development processes.
He also assured audiences that any AI model used to generate in-game assets would be trained on the team’s own data.
“To ensure there is no room for doubt, we’ve decided to refrain from using gen AI tools during concept development.” -Swen Vincke
Elsewhere, the team confirmed that the same principle would apply to the writing process. As per Divinity’s Writing Director, dialogue, journal entries, and other writing in the game are set to remain free of any generative AI.
Adam notes that generated placeholder text does not benefit development over simple stub text since the number of iterations needed to achieve satisfactory quality in such cases is enormous.
‘We don’t have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries, or other writing in Divinity.” – Adam Smith
The good news is that Larian Studios is being a lot more transparent about its AI usage than most developers. Whether the team will stay as transparent in the future remains anybody’s guess for now, but the current communication with audiences is certainly encouraging to see.
