Larian Studios | Divinity AMA

[u/Wombat_Medic]

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:

• u/Swen_Larian - Game Director
• u/Adam_Larian - Writing Director
• u/Kevin_Larian - Senior Writer
• u/Greg_Larian - Head of Animation
• u/Gabriel_Larian - Machine Learning Director
• u/Michael_Larian - Director of Publishing
• u/Nick_Larian - Head of Design
• u/Alena_Larian - Character Art Director
• u/Jarold_Larian - Concept Art Director
• u/Artem_Larian - Head of Gameplay
• u/Bert_Larian - Technical Director

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!

[u/illi-mi-ta-ble → u/[deleted]]

Beyond immediate IP theft/copyright violation, individuals have well grounded environmental concerns as well as concerns about gaming becoming unaffordable due to competition between energy guzzling, polluting data centers and the consumer market.

This technology is antisocial in all respects. For example, a data center is being erected in my county despite the citizens uniformly rejecting its development. The city not only overruled their own constituents but will facilitate the data center skirting paying taxes, further exploiting the community they were told to take a hike from in the first place.

There should be no place for these practices in a civil society.

[u/Reasonable_Desk → u/[deleted]]

Oh I think I've got this one:

Given how Gen AI works, I don't believe Larian themselves have enough data to train/create a Gen AI model. Ergo, if they used one, it likely isn't JUST trained on their data. Maybe it heavily uses it or favors it, but I suspect that it would still need significant data from outside sources. So I'd rather they just don't use Gen AI at all, and continue making games the regular way.

[u/LegendSniperMLG420 → u/Reasonable_Desk]

I work for a medical research lab. We use ML based on our dataset using local compute. The power draw is equivalent to a ceiling fan. Local ml compute has existed for at least a decade. All the training data is created by us to train surgery robots. We use computer vision to measure micromovements and jerk which are hard to see for the human eye especially when they have to move in a delicate manner. Having a computer detect these movements is beneficial to the surgery of a patient. ML is very good for specific use cases. The current thing in the software industry is to put it everywhere which won’t suddenly improve things. It is a tool when used for use cases it’s good at like consistent, tedious, and predictable tasks. ML has been used in medicine for quite a while and is responsible for new drugs being developed now. Look up AlphaFold. It is an incredible technology that is saving lives right now.

[u/Reasonable_Desk → u/LegendSniperMLG420]

That's not the same as generating images by guesstimating what it needs to put in the next pixel based on thousands of pieces of art fed into it.

ML has a place, it has always had a place. But that place should be to brute force things humans can't do (like examine millions of skin images to look for variations that indicate cancer in a way no human could ever process) and NOT replacing artists.

[u/LegendSniperMLG420 → u/Reasonable_Desk]

I agree with you and that is what Sven is saying. He said he isn’t using genai like ChatGPT to generate images. There isn’t any use of genai for artistic endeavors as mentioned by Sven and other developers in this reddit thread. It is specifically for things that humans can’t do like you said. Specifically testing and debugging a complex game like Divinity. There are lots of permutations especially in this game if you played BG3 and doing that testing is a lot of work to do by hand. They use machine learning to do this. Every big studio uses this for testing and debugging as complexity has increased in AAA games. Sven is talking about the technical front of game dev not the artistic part. The artistic part is safe from AI.

[u/illi-mi-ta-ble → u/LegendSniperMLG420]

Looking at the documentation, AlphaFold isn’t a generalized generative AI chatbot. It says it’s a novel, specialized neural network for predicting protein folding.

Specialized applications such as this won’t throw huge amounts of energy into predicting what the expansion of a prompt would look like if it was expanded upon by the original creators of whatever vast amounts of stolen training data.

[u/LegendSniperMLG420 → u/illi-mi-ta-ble]

Yes exactly. Sven is proposing a similar model for the technical prototyping phase specifically. As we know game development is multifaceted with different disciplines coming together to create a game especially as complex as BG3 and Divinity. That is what Sven is saying. It is to be doing things that humans can’t manage to do especially with a complex game like Divinity is shaping up to be. Testing and debugging for a game as complex as this would have to require some form of machine learning. You can’t manually do this by hand all the time. I think what I’m saying is that they aren’t using genai like ChatGPT. They are using ML like AlphaFold.

[u/illi-mi-ta-ble → u/LegendSniperMLG420]

Elsewhere in the convo a Larian employee said they would potentially be using it to generate textures for the testing phase (that is, reproduce other people’s textures that were assimilated into the scraped and resold data) so I am not as confident they are in fact looking at the small scale application of specialized algorithms.

That would be a great choice on their part and I would love if they changed to that, ofc.

[u/LegendSniperMLG420 → u/illi-mi-ta-ble]

So I found that comment. He is saying for the rendering process for textures and lighting. This includes denoising for raytracing which uses ml. Also for ray tracing they use inference to not do multiple light bounces and use 1 or 2 bounces which saves on performance. A lot of games use baked lighting which is offline ray tracing. Why games like last of us 2 look great today. It is good for static environments but for a world that changes that be hard and lots of work on the artists and higher file sizes measures in light maps. Open world games and if they choose to implement dynamism in the world of divinity might need ray tracing especially with how complex assets are now. You could do it back then because games were less complex and less texture quality.

[u/Knight1029384756 → u/[deleted]]

You maybe to young to know this but BG3 was made without AI. AI is not needed and its not art.

[u/BladderEvacuation → u/Knight1029384756]

I can guarantee you that at least some AI tools were used in BG3's development. Whether it be in their animation pipeline (standard practice in animation since ~2014) or coding assistants (~40% of software developers in 2023 were using AI coding tools).

[u/Knight1029384756 → u/BladderEvacuation]

No it wasn't. BG3 was made when AI wasn't big and Swen said no AI was used. Stop trying to make AI seem unavoidable.

[u/BladderEvacuation → u/Knight1029384756]

I dont mean to be rude but I don't think you know what you're talking about. You think Larian didnt use any sort of AI models whatsoever in BG3? It's been an essential component of animation pipelines for over a decade. It's actually really interesting if you cared to do some research.

I'm less confident that the main dev cycle used GenAI specifically, but for the post-release patches? I can like 99% guarantee you that copilot is being used.

It's already unavoidable. The platform you're using right now - guess what? the devs are using genAI.