Larian's new role-playing game Divinity should spend much less time in development than the previous one. Baldur's Gate 3 – or at least that's the dream. CEO Sven Vincke wants the process to take “three to four years” in total, which apparently includes an early access period.
For context: the first time we heard that Larian were I'm officially working on a new game (actually two) back in April 2024. Let me run these numbers through Rock Paper Shotgun's own mirror of fate. God. Assuming I performed the rituals correctly, this means Divinity will be out of Early Access in 2027 or 2028. In less positive news, Larian is reportedly limiting its internal use of generative AI for tasks such as concept art development and internal presentations.
Announced in 2019, Baldur's Gate 3 It took around six years to fully develop, but this is partly due to delays due to the Covid lockdown. However, after saving a couple of years, still striving to achieve the result “greater breadth and depth than ever before” this is no small task, even considering the effects of the Covid pandemic.
“I think three or four years is much more beneficial than six years,” Vincke said. BloombergJason Schreier in a new interview conducted shortly before Divinity's announcement at Geoff Fest last week. One way to speed up the process is to develop quests and storylines in parallel. To do this, they are attracting many more writers and screenwriters – Larian currently employs 530 people in seven locations, including a recently founded studio in Warsaw.
However, Vincke believes that “the creative process itself can't really be rushed”, telling Schreier that BG3 was a much better game because it gave the developers time to explore concepts and sort things out. “People underestimate how many times we implement something and realize halfway through that it just won’t work,” he says.
The less useful side of all this is that Larian is apparently “a big pusher for generative AI,” as Schreier puts it, using generative AI tools “to explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art, and write filler text.”
According to Vincke, developers do not use generative artificial intelligence to create things that appear in the finished game. “Everyone is a human actor; We write everything ourselves.” Some Larian developers appear to be resistant to adopting AI tools, but Vincke says, “I think everyone at the company is more or less comfortable with how we're using them at this point.”
Although Vincke doesn't make this connection in the Bloomberg article, I believe that the automation of some tasks is related to the desire to release Divinity faster. However, Schreier also paraphrases Vincke by arguing that there have not been “great efficiency gains” as a result of AI adoption. The utility of generative AI in the workplace overall remains high contestedand this technology continues to be associated with sudden electricity consumption And mass production of clones and disinformation in the name of oligarchic profits.
Art created by artificial intelligence is often called “garbage.” There's certainly a lot of literal slop in the Divinity promotional trailer below – it's full of dirt, blood and disease, but we can apparently be sure that it was all hand-vomited by humans rather than projectile-vomited by generative AI. Someone please resurrect the screaming ghost of Jean-Paul Sartre to explain to me how sick I feel. No, you are not allowed to create a Sartre clone using ChatGPT.
Elsewhere in the chat, Vincke expresses concern about Larian's current scale (even more of this hot and delicious context: unlike many large public gaming companies, Larian hasn't carried out any mass layoffs in the last couple of years).
“I think a lot of founders have the same problem,” he says. “I have to be big, otherwise I won’t be able to create my own video game. With growth suddenly comes a whole new set of responsibilities that you never thought you'd ever have, but you have them and you make the best of them. Size exposes you to new challenges you never knew existed.”
This week I spoke with Vincke myself, paying more attention to direction of the new Divinity RPGwhile also finding time for scathing reporting on Larian's apparent pig-phobia. Among other things, he confirmed that it is a turn-based CRPG, the successor Divinity: Original Sin 2with a world that looks darker than Baldur's Gate 3.
Update: Vincke responded to online outrage over Larian's use of generative AI. Read all about it Here.
Disclosure: Former RPS Deputy Editor Adam Smith (RPS Worldwide) now works at Larian and is the lead writer on Baldur's Gate 3. Former contributor Emily Gera is also working on it.
