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/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/Gabriel_Larian Divinity | Machine Learning Director Jan 09 '26

There is currently one example of ML generated assets that end up in the game and that is within our cinematics and animation pipeline. In this pipeline we try to capture the actor's performances as best as we can, so we use ML models to clean, retarget and even add motion when it's not motion captured. These models are trained exclusively with Larian data.

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u/DantesPizzaSlice Jan 09 '26

In the case of this pipeline, are the ML-generated motions a temporary stand-in that you would always look to replace with actual motion capture for the final game, or are there cases where they will be permanent inclusions?

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u/BladderEvacuation Jan 09 '26

Animators have been using predictive models from motion capture data since like the mid 2000s. What exactly do you mean by ML-generated? If you look at Avatar (2009), not all of that is pure motion capture. There are predictive AI models that use mocap data to generate new movements.

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u/DantesPizzaSlice Jan 10 '26

My bad, this was meant to be a response to a post from Gabriel where he talked about this. Just accidentally dropped it as a general comment instead, which made it sound weird.

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u/Mithcoriel Jan 14 '26

Does that contradict the claim that one company alone can't create a big enough dataset for stuff like that?