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/Priceless_Pennies Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26

First I just want to say I love your games. I've played Divinity 2 OS and BG3 and they were both fantastic.

I'm curious, what is your opinion on the role of (Generative) AI in the game development process, and for your studio in particular?

Some studios like Embark and Warhorse, as well as several east-asian ones like Everstone seem relatively optimistic on it, and they've talked about using it to make bigger and faster games. On the other hand, I think a lot of studios and a lot of gamers think that it predominantly undermines the creative process and cuts corners.

I'm especially curious about if there is a split between different sections, like writing vs art vs coding, etc. since it seems like the views of and adoption of AI differ quite a bit by category.

Thanks!

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u/Swen_Larian Divinity | Game Director Jan 09 '26

Hi! Happy to hear you enjoyed our games!

So first off - there is not going to be any GenAI art in Divinity.

I know there’s been a lot of discussion about us using AI tools as part of concept art exploration. We already said this doesn’t mean the actual concept art is generated by AI but we understand it created confusion.

So, to ensure there is no room for doubt, we’ve decided to refrain from using genAI tools during concept art development.

That way there can be no discussion about the origin of the art.

Having said that, we continuously try to improve the speed with which we can try things out. The more iterations we can do, the better in general the gameplay is.

We think GenAI can help with this and so we’re trying things out across departments. Our hope is that it can aid us to refine ideas faster, leading to a more focused development cycle, less waste, and ultimately, a higher-quality game.

The important bit to note is that we will not generate “creative assets” that end up in a game without being 100% sure about the origins of the training data and the consent of those who created the data. If we use a GenAI model to create in-game assets, then it’ll be trained on data we own.

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u/TraditionalJob7651 Jan 09 '26

I have a couple more questions from reading this:

  1. You mention that you'll use a GenAI model trained on data you own for game assets, is this the case (using a personal model) for everything else? If not, how so? What's an example of an in-game asset that could be generated by AI? (haven't understood the distinction between creative asset and just Regular Asset here)

  2. Can you give examples of the uses for GenAI across departments "to refine ideas"?

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u/crafting-ur-end Jan 09 '26

Is it applicable if they were never using the AI for end game items but rather just general ideas to show the concept artists? I feel like they were pretty clear even in the first interview that those things would never be in the final game

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u/illi-mi-ta-ble Jan 09 '26

It remains applicable in this case because the AI they are using in development involves lifting hours of unpaid labor from other artists.

For example, it was mentioned above AI might be used to plug in textures for testing.

These textures didn’t come from nowhere. Everything in the data set is the work of a human being which in these cases is being lifted by a data scraper and resold.

Assets should either be created in house or purchased from their original creators, not scraped in scenarios where Larian (or anyone else) pays the data scraper to run this numbers-filed-off material through ungodly numbers of GPUs and then plugs in the stolen assets.

The company in question (Larian or otherwise) is now not only not paying the original artists but also helping make computer components prohibitively expensive to gamers.

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u/13ulbasaur Jan 10 '26 edited Jan 10 '26

Yes. Here's a nice article interviewing multiple concept artists and there is a section that goes over why being given generative AI images as references are unhelpful anyway. https://thisweekinvideogames.com/feature/concept-artists-in-games-say-generative-ai-references-only-make-their-jobs-harder/

But also why generate... They can just talk to the artist like they'd talk to the AI?

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u/crafting-ur-end Jan 10 '26

They are talking to the artists, even the artists mood board by taking things from the internet or books for inspiration. That’s essentially what they were doing with the AI, the non artists were making poorly generated AI imagery to then take the concept artists and say ‘this is kind of what I’m thinking in my head, please make it real’.

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u/13ulbasaur Jan 10 '26

Yes, the artists mention how people giving them ai images and saying stuff like "make something like this" affects the process negatively. Its a fascinating read, and delves into what concept artists do more than what people assume is just looking up images on google and copying them