What’s the matter? I thought they were super confident this was going to do really well. Are they getting cold feet and deciding to make changes for fear of bad reception when they don’t quite have enough time, leading to forced overtime?
EDIT: Wait. All of this was for a DEMO? How bad was the game that they needed to work 60 hours a week mandatory overtime just to finish a demo of the game??
Demo in this context isn’t a consumer-playable ‘demo’ in the sense that most people understand; it means a playable internal build with specific targets for what must be included. Internal demo milestones are often linked to project funding and approval to move forwards, so there is a tangible risk if they fail to deliver.
Presumably the current state of the game is behind where it needed to be to deliver that demo, so they’re now crunching to finish it on time.
IMO, any time a game repeatedly fails to meet deadlines, especially so early on in its development, that usually indicates the game isn’t likely to launch in a healthy state. Either the scope is way too big, or the narrative is receiving major changes and reworks, or the people working on the game just wish they weren’t working on that project and taking longer as a result. This kind of situation is rarely good, and even more rarely ends up with a good launched product.
Cyberpunk 2077, Anthem, Mass Effect Andromeda, Halo Infinite, Duke Nukem Forever, John Romero’s Daikatana (although I personally am a bit charmed by this one despite it being undoubtedly bad), and other games are examples of this. Repeated failure to meet production deadlines, lots of crunch forced on the developers, and all for what? The launch product for all of these games was horrendously bad. Some for technical reasons, some for narrative reasons, and some for both.
When I first saw the trailer for Intergalactic, I had mixed feelings. I liked the intended graphics/art style and retro styled tech, the Porsche was a little weird product placement but fine I guess, but the characters and dialogue I personally found both unappealing. The obvious Snake Plissken rip-off woman the main character talked to (blonde with an eyepatch, I can only assume she is some sort of merc job handler) seemed maybe interesting but then she spoke and the writing lost my interest. Upon learning the game is likely to follow some sort of religious theming, I lost all interest in the game. Its not what I want from a video game. So this was pretty disappointing to learn. But now seeing the game is in such a state doesn’t give me great confidence that the final product will be even decent when it launches.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad take, but it’s worth pointing out that lots of games miss internal deadlines and waste time ‘spinning their wheels’ but still turn out good or even great. The difference is that you don’t usually hear about it, whereas here some of the team are obviously pissed enough about the crunch that they went to the press.
Crunch is always bad and is an indication of poor project management and/or unrealistic expectations, but issues with scope or major reworks aren’t always a death knell either. I’ve seen plenty of games go through that and come out the other side better than before.
Of course there are always exceptions, but I don’t count on news like this to mean that this project will be the exception.
Metroid Prime and Halo 2 both had excessive crunch and both turned out great, obviously. In Metroid Prime’s case, a management change seemed to fix it in the long term. In Halo’s case, Bungie just embraced the suck I guess, since they still wanted to make Halo 3.
Regardless, these were exceptions to the rule, and I would never expect a project to be an exception, personally.
I wonder why companies do this? does it actually make it get done faster? Last I knew most workers were only efficient at their job for like the first 5 or 6 hours if that, spending an extra 8 ontop of it sounds like a waste of salary.
Ex Activision QA employee here - It does not get anything done faster, and it burns out the devs and QA alike so more mistakes are made. It’s always about hitting dates on time for shareholder profits, the C-suite people in charge do not give a shit about releasing a quality game.
Fuck Neil Druckman, Naughty Dog, and Sony, in that order. Amy Hennig carried the whole PlayStation brand identity and got couped over some good ol industry sexism so that N.D. could opine about how hard it is to be a white man
I really wouldn’t call it leaning into AI, they are using it for doing basic boring work and the CEO has even said he’s not even sure it actually helps that much with productivity. It’s really weird seeing the actual statements from Swen Vincke and then comparing it to articles saying he’s “heavily pushing AI” into employees, that just isn’t what’s happening.
I dislike AI as much as the next guy, but when even Clair Obscur launches with a few AI generated textures we have to just admit that AI is going to be used to some degree in a larger studio. So long as it doesn’t end up in the final product I don’t really care that much, it’s just kind of annoying.
Well clearly we do when even Clair Obscur gets caught with AI generated assets in a fully released project and gets away with absolutely no hit to their reputation simply because they refuse to comment on it. I would rather more devs come out and talk about their AI use like Swen Vincke has done here instead of keeping it under wraps for fear of the mob dragging their reputation through the mud for daring to even look at the thing. Maybe then more devs would get real information on how useless AI is as a proper creative tool.
Among the devs responding is a former Larian staffer, environment artist Selena Tobin. “consider my feedback: i loved working at @larianstudios.com until AI,” Tobin writes. “reconsider and change your direction, like, yesterday. show your employees some respect. they are world-class & do not need AI assistance to come up with amazing ideas.”
Honestly I’m prepared for LLM style sloppy writing. You don’t generate “placeholder concept art”. You just replaced a concept artists job and put the first ingredient for an AI slop game in your pipeline.
Jason Schreier released the full transcript of the interview and Swen Vincke never said they had “placeholder concept art” actually, he said that the artists had used AI to generate images that they then used as reference while drawing concept art. In the full interview he doesn’t even seem particularly impressed with AI, says that it doesn’t improve productivity much and implies that it is disappointing. I honestly respect Larian for actually coming out and sharing their experiences with using AI, even if I agree they should probably stop using it entirely, rather than doing what most other studios do and simply hide it under a rug and refuse to talk about it.
I really don’t think we should be using AI, I just think that it’s entirely unfair to describe Swen Vincke as “pushing AI” and I respect that he was willing to talk openly about it. However judging by the rabid hatred from everyone online I doubt he will ever talk about it again. Most developers that are using AI are almost definitely just keeping it quiet to avoid controversy right now. The Clair Obscur devs avoided the controversy of literally launching a game with AI generated content by quickly patching the game and refusing to give a statement to any journalist who tried to contact them about it and I suspect this will be the way going forward.
With the money they made from BG3 they have the means to make Divinity the best it can possibly be and I couldn’t be happier for them. The first two Divinity games were great, don’t get me wrong, but they were basically low budget when compared to the money they got from Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast to make BG3. I imagine they basically have “fuck you” money now and can do whatever the hell they want. They definitely deserve it and I can’t wait.
Edit: Turns out Larian is going to use gen AI for concept art. I guess fuck all those concept artists trying to get entry level jobs. Very disappointed.
Their concept artists are allowed to use some generative AI tools to explore ideas and speed up their workflow. They’re currently hiring a bunch more concept artists (both juniors and a senior character artist) so if you’re trying to get a job: https://larian.com/careers/4fd694b3-ece7-4307-9949-15cac512a815
Great place to go if you’re looking for a concept artist job.
Edit: Turns out Larian is going to use gen AI for concept art. I guess fuck all those concept artists trying to get entry level jobs. Very disappointed.
It’s misinformation. They have almost 30 concept artists employed. They use GenAI for quick ideation, not for concept art.
Also, corpos are alllowed and in some cases are required to lie, even the “good ones” like Larian. And now, when they have more money then ever, they become less trustworthy than ever. This slope is very slippery. Nothing stops them from overextending their ideas, and when a lot of money involved, I can forsee “well, we need to finish quickly, and we’re already use llm anyway, let it help with the script, and since it’s already in the script no reason not to let it generate some art, and well, since it’s already everywhere, why don’t we generate the code with it”
My point is pretty simple: they said they only use LLM “for good”, but the more they get, the more insensitive they get to lie, so your “but they said [bla bla]” argument can’t hold. If they started using it for something, the only thing stopping them from using it for everything is their reputation and the desire to make a good game, and the more money is on the line, the less value that desire holds in the face of immediate profits.
I love everything Larian did before, I’m a huge fan of the Divinity series, BG3 is still my top 5 favourite games of all time, but this doesn’t mean all that can’t go to shit, wouldn’t be the first.
I don’t agree on a fundamental level, though. Anything and everything could go to shit at any time. You could get killed on a bus stop, your favourite grocery brand might be outed to be using slave labour, Larian could start using AI instead of human work for everything…
With that approach, might as well hide in the woods, disconnect from civilisation and wait for the world to end.
I personally reject that attitude. I think we should support what’s good while it’s good and stop supporting it when it goes bad. And, to me, the way Larian uses AI is not “it went bad already”. Like it or not, the tools exist. They’re everywhere. A single (small-ish) company rejecting its use out of principle is not going to make a dent on that, it won’t even be registered within the margin of error among the billions, if not trillions, of monthly impressions AI companies get from teenagers talking to chat-bots.
And even if it did, it doesn’t matter - AI companies are not making profit anyway. Actually, fewer users is better for them, because they’re actively losing money every time someone uses their product. The whole AI bubble is propped up on the largest circlejerk in history and users are the least important, if not flat out insignificant, aspect of it.
And don’t get me wrong, the fact that it’s originally trained on stolen data is important, but… Kind of irrelevant in this case - and that’s for two reasons:
Companies like Corridor Crew mostly use AI that they self-train, which means that no stealing happens. We don’t know what Larian does.
Even if Larian uses publicly available models that are trained on stolen data… fuck me, we should be going after the people who stole the data, not the end users!
Would I prefer if they didn’t use AI at all? Sure! But am I going to start shitting on the entire company just because they do? Hell no! Their products are still made with care and love and humanity at their core. Just listen to interviews from Jennifer English or Neil Newbon - they praise both the VO company and Larian for their amazing approach.
And finally - the “war on Larian” would make much more sense if we also learned that they’re firing concept artists - but they’re doing the opposite - they have open positions for concept artists, character artists, environment artists, etc., etc. They’re currently hiring these people!
So, yeah, it’s just a lot of noise over practically nothing, in my opinion.
That‘s nice but I‘ll wait until reviews flock in to confirm this. There is a point when a studio is too big to pre-order. I‘ve seen this pattern before and know better than to ride the hype wave from one super success all the way to the next „more ambitious than ever“ title.
For smaller (indie) studios it can make sense. If the game costs more money to developed than the developer has, preordering is indistinguishable from crowdsourcing like kickstarter. It removes the need for the developer to take a loan and investors, possibly giving up creative freedom.
Anything backed by a (big-ish) publisher should never be preordered!
You know. I have never once heard a single company admit that they are just gonna release some mediocre pos product. They all say the next thing will be the best thing since sliced bread. Not saying I doubt them. But a company will never be like “we gonna phone it in and release an at best 36% complete product.”
They do say it sometimes, like Microsoft admitting defeat on this year’s Call of Duty. It’s not, “We’re going to release a mediocre product,” but when they say, “We hear you, and we’re making changes” or “we’ve made the difficult decision to…” or “we’re trying to stay agile”, that’s usually what it means. Beyond just hyping up their next product, there’s substantive information in here, like engine upgrades, expansion of the studio, reduction in production timelines, the damn genre of the video game (because that wasn’t a foregone conclusion given this series), etc.
Larian is very ambitious in their aims. Divinity: OS, DOS2, and Baldur’s Gate 3 were all huge games with incredible interactions and stories, and the games hold together even if you intentionally make an effort to break them by being a murder hobo or just not playing “correctly.” Their games are pretty awesome, because there is no “correct” way to play them, they’re very wide open and flexible.
I don’t always like everything they do (in fact, I kinda hate BG3), but I respect their efforts. They don’t half-ass anything.
It’s like Apple every year who proudly boasts on stage that they just made the best iPhone ever. Yeah no shit, that’s what they are supposed to do each year.
They are employing almost 30 concept artists, their art style is extremely unique. Just look at the Elves in DOS2.
They use the tools available to them. If quick iteration of the “foundations” of ideas is improved by the use of GenAI, why not use it? It’s already integrated into the products they’re paying for (like Photoshop).
It’s like saying “they shouldn’t be using Google Images or artbooks when developing concept art”, it’s just silly.
The concepting stage is a really crucial and foundational stage in terms of design, but it can also influence writing, gameplay, etc. as an artist explores the thing they’re concepting.
I don’t like genAI, and think that using it at such an important stage will invariably mean it ends up influencing the game. I want to play games or experience media made with intention by people, not bland products shat out by a chatbot.
You: “The exercise at the gym stage is really crucial to building muscles. I don’t like cars and think that using it at such an important stage will inevitably mean it ends up influencing the training”.
I mean, if you just want to invent and imagine things and then get angry at them, go ahead.
I’m just trying to tell you that Larian isn’t replacing anything or anyone with AI, they’re using it to help with the foundational stage of some processes, which is how it’s supposed to be used. Throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, then work off of that.
Like… It’s hilarious to complain about their use of AI like that in the context of the fact that they currently employ 27 concept artists and are hiring more.
I think maybe you’re having a different argument than me? I didn’t say they were replacing anyone or anything with AI.
What I have expressed an issue with is exactly what you described:
they’re using it to help with the foundational stage of some processes, which is how it’s supposed to be used. Throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, then work off of that.
And you dismissively and incorrectly compared that to driving to the gym.
I think maybe try a different LLM to come up with your arguments, maybe Claude? Because the one you’ve got thinking for you right now doesn’t seem to be working lad.
I think what they’ve said is that they’ll be using it in the ideation stage, which is part of the process of creating concept art. They’ve also said they often use it to “develop concept art”, which could well just be a slip of the tongue by management rather than a clear statement by somebody involved in the process.
But they’re using GenAI in the ideation stage of concepting, which is something I have a problem with, and you don’t (which is fine, by the way). I feel like we’ve come back to the beginning of this argument, lol
I feel like replacing low-quality, quick-and-dirty doodles (often by non-artist members of the team) with medium-quality AI is fine and doesn’t pose a threat to the job security of concept artists (as exemplified by Larian currently hiring more concept artists).
If you’re just against any use of GenAI, then I get it - it is controversial due to the way it’s trained, and I’d prefer if they weren’t using it, but at least in terms of “AI replacing humans” it’s a non-issue in this case.
I don’t think it was a slog, but I do find DND 5e an unsatisfying system. You spend a long time waiting to get to the cool parts of your character, and unlimited resting breaks dnd’s already dubious balance.
I tried a Pathfinder mod, but it wasn’t quite doing it for me. I’m not sure what would do it for me exactly. I’m being a stereotypical customer where I don’t know what I want, but I can tell you what I don’t like, heh.
There’s a single mod that purports to convert the game to pathfinder 2e. I’m not sure if the balance isn’t to my taste or if I was doing something wrong, but my characters all had very low hit chances on their first attack. Missing isn’t fun for me
The story was excellent, the combat was a slog. Still finished it and overall enjoyed it, but it felt like they were being limited by the DnD system a lot, ultimately worsening the experience.
At first, Larian had planned to continue working with Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast division on Dungeons & Dragons, but Vincke said he and his team spent a few months working on a new project before realizing they weren’t feeling the excitement they once did. “Conceptually, all of the ingredients for a really cool game were there except the hearts of the developers,” he said. They abandoned that game last year and pivoted to Divinity, a franchise that Larian also happens to own.
It’s crazy they have the finances to be working on a D&D franchise game and decide “…Nah. Let’s do something else.”
They recently switched to a new engine…
Uh oh.
I know folks like to hate on Unity, and Borderlands 3. Rightfully so. But let me list out some “in house engine” releases:
Cyberpunk 2077, which Nvidia backing
Mass Effect Andromeda, after previously being Unreal
Starfield
Paradox Grand Strategy, like Stellaris
A “smaller studio” example, Distant Worlds 2
All these drug their developers through hell, and we’re still technical messes at release. And after.
Now let’s look at some others:
KCD2: CryEngine
Expedition 33: Unreal
Black Myth Wukong: Unreal
Stray: Unreal
As a “smaller studio” example, Satisfactory: Unreal
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are just too many things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
So what I hope this means is Larian moving to CryEngine or something like that, and not making something from scratch. But if they’re talking about early access so soon, I bet they licensed another engine.
They said very little about what that new engine entails, but much like Starfield, I suspect it’s largely reusing their old engine and only remaking select parts of it. Larian is doing something in the RPG space that, to me, makes nearly all of their competitors feel outdated, and it makes sense to me to make their own engine to do that as efficiently as possible. To make one of their games in an off the shelf engine like Unreal, with all of the bespoke physics objects and the ways every entity interacts with spells, elements, and other effects, could easily result in huge performance costs above and beyond what we saw in Act 3 of BG3.
I’m utterly terrified of them pulling an Andromeda/2077 and getting stuck in dev hell trying to debug the new engine bits instead of actually building the game. This is the advantage of prebuilt engines: someone else has already one all the hardware support/optimization and contemporary architecture stuff for you.
I’m less afraid of them pulling a Starfield, I suppose. The “divinity engine” in BG3 already runs okay. It’s not sleek like CryEngine KCD2, but it doesn’t feel janky or dated either, and even the mildest refresh over BG3 would be fine.
Much less is determined by engine than the average person thinks. Andromeda wasn’t a new engine; it was an engine that was made to make Battlefield games that then had to be used to make action RPGs and racing games after the fact. Capcom made an engine for the games they had in mind 10 years ago, and it’s fantastic at Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and even serving as an emulation wrapper, but it’s showing cracks under the support for open world games that they added more recently. Larian’s engine is made to support the systems driven RPGs they conceptualized in the early 2010s, and there’s little chance some other engine will do it just as well or better without plenty of custom code anyway. Ask Digital Foundry about all of the “optimization” Unreal 5 has done for developers already.
If they can shoehorn in something akin to KCD2’s or Satisfactory’s Global Illumination, but keep their dev workflows and existing systems in place, that’d be perfect.
From the other Larian article in this community, it seems their engine improvements are largely things that they claim will allow them to iterate on ideas faster, like going right from mocap to a usable animation more quickly.
I truly love that Larian leadership frames everything they talk about around devs and their needs/wants. Another D&D game? “Oh, that’s great and all, but our devs hearts weren’t in it so we dropped it like a rock.” New engine? They ramble about improvements to dev workflows. It is so obviously a top priority.
Keep in mind that also comes with Vincke championing AI, and though he says no genAI assets will make it to the final product, there’s still some dissent. Here’s hoping though.
Well that can be reasonable. Obviously don’t vibe code an engine, but LLMs are great for basic code autocomplete, or quick utility scripts, things like that.
Really specialized AI (not LLMs/GenAI) can be great at, say, turning raw mocap into character animations. Or turning artist sketches into 3D models. Cogs in their pipeline, so to speak, which has nothing to do with GenAI slop making it into a final product.
The line is very fine though, and most in the business world skew to the side of pushing slop.
I think very little about AI compared to most people, for or against, but it largely seems to me like a solution in search of a problem, and it’s very cult-like how many CEOs get on board with it so quickly despite its very public lack of actually good results. On paper, the way Vincke describes their use of it sounds fine to me, but hopefully he’s not doing something so idiotic as to mandate its usage, as is happening at workplaces for friends of mine right now.
“Mandate its usage” could mean the motion cap/animation people have to learn some kind of automation tool, that’s now part of the engine.
That’s fine.
And that’s very different from the “you MUST make X hits to Microsoft Copilot” type garbage that’s so common now.
I’m harping on this because I’m afraid Larian will try something reasonable, yet get immense, unwarranted backlash (both internally and publically) because of other workers’ experiences with enshittified ML. And how politicized “AI” is becoming.
Machine learning is not bad. Tech Bro evangelism and the virus they spread among executives, is. And I don’t want the garbage they sell to poison tools studios like Larian could use to get ahead of AAA publishers.
Hasbro could have done nothing and made a bunch of money, but they chose temporary short term gains. Baldur’s Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.
WTF. That’s awful, and also totally baffling. “This single game is responsible for a huge chunk of revenue and introducting countless people to D&D; let’s lay off its staff and leadership.”
Baldur’s Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.
What do you mean by this? An outsourced spinoff is already in the works? I don’t see that in the linked article.
Nothing has been announced as far as Baldur’s Gate 4 goes yet. It looks like Hasbro is being a little bit smart and are going to try and make (“make”) a handful of other smaller games, like the recent Warlock game announcement.
But at some point Baldur’s Gate 4 will be announced, but Hasbro isn’t going to be willing to invest properly into it in order to make a good game.
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are just too many things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
Larian’s track record is good. They used an in-house engine for Divinity: Original Sin, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and Baldur’s Gate 3. They also made their own game engine for their older Divinity titles (Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity). And Vincke attributes at least part of their success to using in-house tools instead of “off the shelf” engines.
Thats depressing, i really liked larian’s whole thing and their attitude toward games development. Seeing them kick artists while they’re down means I’ll be skipping this :/
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