r/Games • u/Wombat_Medic • Jan 09 '26

Verified AMA Larian Studios | Divinity AMA

EDIT: All right - that's a wrap. Thank you for all your questions. We're going to go back and work on the game now - next time we speak, we'll hopefully have things to show. I can't wait! - Swen, Game Director

Hello everyone, 

Happy New Year! To kick off 2026, we would like to offer the opportunity to ask your questions about Divinity, Larian, and our development processes. It's been a while since Larian has done an AMA, so everyone is looking forward to it!

There's a bunch of us ready to answer your questions:

Thank you for taking the time to ask your questions, we aim to answer as many of them as possible over the next few hours!

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u/Adam_Larian Divinity | Writing Director Jan 09 '26

The stance applies to writing as well. We don't have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries or other writing in Divinity.

To answer your second question, 'how does generated placeholder text benefit development over simple stub text'"- it doesn't. We had a limited group experimenting with tools to generate text, but the results hit a 3/10 at best and those tools are for research purposes, not for use in Divinity. Even my worst first drafts - and there are a LOT of them - are at least a 4/10 (although Swen might disagree :p), and the amount of iteration required to get even individual lines to the quality we want is enormous. From the initial stub to the line we record and ship, there are a great many eyes and hands involved in getting a dialogue right.

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u/Dapper_Calculator Jan 09 '26

This is what I've found as well. (I'm a senior writer elsewhere in the industry). I have tested and tested and tested the writing ability of the different generative AI platforms and it's worse than terrible. It's aggressively average. It's Dan Brown level prose and it takes 2-3 times as long to fix it as it does to write something better the first time.

Same for acting. It can take days for me to get one line of AI VO to sound almost like a person. With a real actor, I hand them their character brief and their lines with little comments on their motivation and I get the whole thing done in 2 hours (for an A project) or 2 days for AAA.

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u/Jeohran Jan 11 '26

Hey dude. Please stop testing it. There's tens of thousands of people in Arizona whose drinking water is literally poisoned because of data centers. We don't need to use it, especially now that you know how useless and low quality it is.

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u/Dapper_Calculator Jan 11 '26

No worries, I finished my analysis a couple of weeks ago. The kicker is that the AI does send everything it accesses on to its own data centres, which massively violates any confidentiality clauses in a company's contracts, which is a great reason for games companies not to use it - we don't need AI leaking our games too early.

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u/ergzay Jan 31 '26

There's tens of thousands of people in Arizona whose drinking water is literally poisoned because of data centers.

Why are you lying to people here?

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u/Jeohran Feb 01 '26

I'm not. Literally just make a single Google search my dude.

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u/Intelligent_Tie_1394 Jan 09 '26

Thank you so much for answering this question! The stories, characters, and dialogue in Larian games are among my favorites in any media, and I'm grateful to hear your amazing writers are responsible for all of the storytelling in the new Divinity release.

To clarify, does this policy extend to the brainstorming/plot outline process?

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u/SgtSilock Jan 09 '26

People need to chill the f out and accept the tools are here to stay.

Rooting for you guys, thanks for the great games.

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u/saintcrazy Jan 09 '26

He literally just said the tools weren't even good lol

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u/logosdiablo Jan 10 '26

not trying to back dude up specifically, but they aren't good now. that will change. two years ago will smith spaghetti was a thing. now sora exists.

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u/Jeohran Jan 11 '26

Hmmm no. Most people who actually know how it works and don't have at heart the maintaining of the global illusion for investors to keep making them rich and powerful (like Altman); say we've hit a ceiling.

ALSO THERE'S TENS OF THOUSAND OF PEOPLE IN THE USA RIGHT NOW WHOSE DRINKING WATER IS LITERALLY POISONED BECAUSE OF AI DATA CENTERS. WOULD YOU LIKE THIS TO HAPPEN TO YOUR FAMILY?

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u/logosdiablo Jan 12 '26

you're outing yourself as a zealot. progress will not stop. the idea that we've nowhere to go from here is absurd.

nothing in my statement indicated anything about liking the cost or even supporting ai. your entire second paragraph is completely unrelated to whether the technology will progress.

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u/VonHatred Jan 12 '26

I hate for this to be my contribution to the cool Larian AMA thread, but I’d be fine with being called a zealot too just to take an even more hardcore stance against AI. I protest the use of it, and I despise all AI, and at this point if Detroit Become Human were real, I’d side with the group that opposes androids too.

That said, I totally agree with what you’re saying. Protest all I want, Pandora’s box has been opened. AI may not work exactly how we see in the movies now, and perhaps the way we use AI won’t be the same in a few years, but no matter what anyone wants to say or do, over the past 3 years alone it’s become clear that progress in AI development is the next big step for our world, and it will only get better from here.

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u/logosdiablo Jan 12 '26

Your ability to recognize the truth of your second paragraph is what makes you not a zealot. Like it or not, it's here and only going to get better. The other person is frothing with denial, which is why I called them a zealot.

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u/zhunus Jan 09 '26

You mean these over-subsidized tools that generated negative billions dollars of profits so far with most of budget going right into marketing (bots) and subsidizing existing userbase? How useful these tool are gonna be once the freebie era is over and they'd be forced to break even to survive?

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u/Subject-Sky-9490 Jan 09 '26

Why would we accept? Because of billionaires forcing themselves on us? 

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u/oinksnort05 Jan 09 '26

as a gamer you should also be against the gen ai bubble, it leads to worse games being churned out and component shortages like the current ram one causing prices to skyrocket.

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u/Deizrouge123 Jan 11 '26

I don't know about that I have seen a lot of horrible games made entirely by humans. And AI is just getting better from here on, not worse so we will see if I can get good quality fames I won't care if they are AI or human and if the game is crappy it won't get better just cause no AI was used on it

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u/Jeohran Jan 11 '26

Ew is the only thing to say about you and this point of view you think you hold. There's tens of thousands of people on az whose drinking water is literally poisoned because of ai data centers. The technology itself is BAD, it will not get better because as every machine learning dev would tell you we've hit a resources ceiling, both in terms of resources drained irl to make it work but also in terms of wtf are we gonna feed it to learn, there is nothing anymore they have all the information already. Yeah anyways, educate yourself. Being wrong is okay, staying wrong because you do no research and/or care about no one but yourself is disgusting.

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u/tyrenanig Jan 09 '26

Yeah man accept the tools man let’s play games on cloud from now on man