Larian want to complete Divinity in "three to four years", and they're making limited use of generative AI

"Everything is human actors; we're writing everything ourselves."

Larian's new Divinity RPG should spend a lot less time in development than their previous Baldur's Gate 3 - or at least, that's the dream. CEO Swen Vincke wants the process to take "three to four years" in total, which seemingly includes an early access period.

For context, we first heard that Larian were officially working on a new game (two, actually) back in April 2024. Here, let me run those numbers through Rock Paper Shotgun's in-house Mirror of Fate. Gosh. Assuming I have performed the rituals correctly, that means Divinity will launch out of early access in 2027 or 2028. In less positive news, Larian are reportedly making limited internal use of generative AI for tasks such as concept art development and internal presentations.

Announced in 2019, Baldur's Gate 3 took about six years to develop in entirety, but some of that is owing to delays from Covid lockdowns. Still, shaving off a couple of years while still aiming to deliver "greater breadth and depth than ever before" is no small endeavour, even when you allow for the effects of the Covid pandemic.

"I think three to four years is much healthier than six years," Vincke told Bloomberg's Jason Schreier in a new interview, conducted just before Divinity's announcement at Geoff Fest last week. One way they're hoping to speed things up is to develop quests and storylines in parallel. For this, they're enlisting a lot more writers and scripters - Larian currently employ 530 people across seven locations, including their recently founded Warsaw studio.

That said, Vincke feels that "the creative process itself actually is something you cannot accelerate", telling Schreier that BG3 was a much better game for giving the developers time to explore concepts and bin things off. "People underestimate how many times we're implementing something and realize in the middle that it's just not going to work," he says.

The less salubrious side of all this is that Larian have apparently been "pushing hard on generative AI", in Schreier's phrase, using generative AI tools "to explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text".

According to Vincke, the developers aren't using generative AI to make things that appear in the finished game. "Everything is human actors; we're writing everything ourselves." Apparently, some Larian devs have resisted the introduction of AI tools, but Vincke says that "I think at this point everyone at the company is more or less OK with the way we're using it."

While Vincke doesn't make this connection in the Bloomberg piece, I imagine the automating of certain tasks is related to the desire to get Divinity out faster. Still, Schreier also paraphrases Vincke as saying that there have been no "big gains in efficiency" as a result of the AI push. The utility of generative AI in the workplace at large remain heavily disputed, and the technology continues to be associated with spiking electricity consumption and the mass-production of clone art and misinformation in the name of oligarchal profits.

AI-generated art tends to get referred to as "slop". There's certainly a lot of literal slop in the Divinity announcement trailer, below - it's full of mud, blood and sick, but we can seemingly rest assured that all of that was hand-puked by humans rather than projectile-vomited by a generative AI. Somebody please resurrect the screaming ghost of Jean-Paul Sartre to explain to me what kind of nausea I'm feeling. No, you are not allowed to generate a clone of Sartre using ChatGPT.

Elsewhere in the chat, Vincke expresses anxiety about Larian's current scale (yet more of that hot, delicious context: unlike many larger publicly owned game companies, Larian have not carried out any mass layoffs in the past couple of years).

"I think a lot of founders have the same problem," he says. "I have to be large, otherwise I can't make my video game. With growth suddenly comes a whole bunch of responsibilities that you didn't necessarily think you were ever gonna have, but you have them and then you make the best of them. Size exposes you to new problems that you couldn't imagine existed."

I spoke to Vincke myself this week, focussing more on the direction of the new Divinity RPG, while finding time for some hard-hitting reporting about Larian's blatant swinophobia. Amongst other things, he confirmed that it's a turn-based CRPG successor to Divinity: Original Sin 2, with a world that skews darker than you'll find in Baldur's Gate 3.

Update: Vincke has responded to online ire over Larian's use of generative AI. Read all about it here.

Disclosure: Former RPS deputy editor Adam Smith (RPS in peace) now works at Larian and is the lead writer for Baldur's Gate 3. Former contributor Emily Gera also works on it.