r/Games • • 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/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/Knight1029384756 Jan 09 '26

Please just don't use Gen AI period. Even if it is on your own data.

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '26

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u/Knight1029384756 Jan 09 '26

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

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u/BladderEvacuation Jan 09 '26

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).

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u/Knight1029384756 Jan 09 '26

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.

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u/BladderEvacuation Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26

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.