Larian says "there is not going to be any gen-AI art in Divinity," and it's even booted it out of the concept art stage after backlash

Larian Studios has emphasized that the upcoming Divinity will not use any art created by generative-AI tools, and that it will be refraining from using them in the concept art stage “to ensure there is no room for doubt.” The next RPG from the creators of the world-beating Baldur’s Gate 3 made its gruesome first splash at The Game Awards, but comments from game director Swen Vincke that the developer had been exploring the use of gen-AI led to intense community blowback. Naturally, the topic came up frequently throughout a new Divinity AMA, and the team seems eager to put the controversy to bed, although it notes that it believes such tools can be useful in the development process.

Responding to a question on the use of generative AI on the r/games subreddit, Vincke starts with a fairly definitive statement: “First off – there is not going to be any gen-AI 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 gen-AI tools during concept art development. That way there can be no discussion about the origin of the art.”

Writing director Adam Smith adds, “This stance applies to writing as well. We don’t have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries, or other writing in Divinity.” He says Larian “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).”

Vincke, however, notes that the team believes generative AI can be useful in some elements of development and testing. “We continuously try to improve the speed with which we can try things out,” he explains. “The more iterations we can do, the better in general the gameplay is. We think gen-AI 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.”

“When we talk about game design – the rules of the game, character progression, loot, combat encounters, level layouts, and so on – there is no gen-AI used,” head of design Nick Pechenin adds. “Frankly we always have more ideas than we can cram into the game.” Vincke also stresses that Larian “will not generate ‘creative assets’ that end up in a game without being 100% sure of the origins of the training data and the consent of those who created the data. If we use a gen-AI model to create in-game assets, then it’ll be trained on data we own.”

Larian’s machine learning director Gabriel Bosque gives more details on this process. “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.”

Bosque also touches on the way this affects actors, saying that the new Divinity is currently scheduled to include “over 100,000 voice lines.” Larian has “explicitly committed in our actor agreements to not using recordings to train or build AI voice modelers, because we are aware of how sensitive it can be to artificially generate an actor’s voice.” He says that even if an actor was happy to agree to this with compensation, “we don’t currently feel comfortable with including an AI-generated voice in our games.”

“Our team is incredibly creative and we use any visual means we can to communicate ideas across different departments and teams,” concept art director Jarold Sng explains. “They are not final products, they are mood boards, doodles, combinations of text and image. Gen-AI-based imagery was part of that but by far not the only thing.” Some tools were used in rendering elements for the likes of lighting and texture fills.

However, following on from Vincke’s statement, Sng clarifies, “We don’t want there to be any doubts about the origins of the artwork, nor do we want to disrespect other people’s authorship, so we’ve decided to refrain from using these tools during the concepting phase.” Bosque also notes that the prototyping tools feature “strict guardrails to ensure nothing that would be used during prototyping can ship. All assets involved would be clearly marked as stub and get purged afterwards.”

Outside of the AI discussion, there’s plenty more to dig through in the full AMA. If you’re a Divinity: Original Sin 2 veteran, for example, you might wonder whether its magic armor system will be returning – unfortunately that one’s a hard no from Pechenin. “There will be fun ways to protect your characters from harm, but you will not have to wait before you can use your fun skills on enemies. We are still cooking a system that makes sure that you have to work harder to stunlock solo bosses with level-one skill, but it won’t be tied to damage.”

Pechenin adds that “feedback from BG3 players trying DOS2 for the first time has been especially interesting to us, seeing the two worlds colliding.” As one example of a system being carried over from Baldur’s Gate, he says that Larian’s approach to handcrafting every magic item worked well. “Something we realized when working on randomized loot for DOS1 and DOS2 is that fully random loot is frequently confusing, so we added more and more rules and pre-made patterns to make it feel more intentional. In the end randomization did not save us much time.”

Vincke says that “Divinity takes everything we learned from BG3 and DOS2 and improves from there.” He says the team has grown from 411 people at the end of BG3’s development to “around 500,” and says that the main things he’s looking forward to are offering more agency and working with a rule system designed for games. “We had all the freedom we needed for BG3 but the game was based on [D&D] 5e, which is a system that was made for tabletop, not for videogames. Most of the limitations came from that.” Senior writer Kevin VanOrd, meanwhile, touched on why Wyll felt like the most underloved companion.

“There’s never been a ‘Divinity’ and now that we can finally make the game we always wanted, we thought it was time to do so,” Vincke concludes. Asked what he’s excited for players to experience in the new game, he responds, “There’s a lot but we prefer to show and not tell. That said – Lizard romance seems like it’s going to be popular.” If you felt your party members were too cold to one another in BG3, Smith also teases, “The goal is to have more interactions between party members, and it won’t always be talking.” Start writing your fanfictions now.