The first Divinity was called Divine Divinity, and it was closer to Diablo than Baldur’s Gate. As per this interview, this game is going to be the same style as BG3 and the Original Sin games.
Learned about this for the first time earlier today watching Mortismal’s Divinity recap videos lol
I did know about Divine Divinity (which, fun fact, canonically features Lucian the Divine as your player character) but Dragon Commander completely missed my radar.
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.
For me, this specific issue is more of a personal level, it’s not about me waging a war against slopgenerators, it’s about trust. Trust is gradually built item by item. My trust in a company consists of their actions over time. They make a good game - trust goes up. They commit to provide good working conditions to the workers and actually do that - trust goes up again. Them starting using slopgen reduces that trust. It reduces it enough so I don’t trust what they are saying anymore. It’s not that I’m starting war on them or whatever, but they lost enough of my trust so when they just say something, I don’t believe it outright, the way I do with any other company, because for a company the line going up is way more important that anything else, and honouring words demonstrably doesn’t put the line up. Before this shit, my trust in Larian was high enough so I might believe them publicly declaring something, but as it stands right now, I don’t anymore, and that’s kind of the extend of my approach to it.
All the previous games of theirs I preordered, early accessed, bought the second the buying option was available. This one I wouldn’t.
it’s about trust. Trust is gradually built item by item
But all it takes is one out-of-context quote to drop this accrued trust back to zero?
Them starting using slopgen reduces that trust. It reduces it enough so I don’t trust what they are saying anymore.
Honestly? This part is confusing me super hard. “They say the truth, my trust goes up. They say the truth again, my trust goes down and I no longer trust what they were saying before” - help me understand that.
I would get it if it was the other way around - “they say they don’t use slopgen, but that’s outed to be a lie, my trust goes down”, right?
because for a company the line going up is way more important that anything else, and honouring words demonstrably doesn’t put the line up
But isn’t it exactly the opposite? They admit to utilising AI tools (which don’t equal “slopgen”), which means they care more about trust and honesty, than the line going up, no?
And this is all extremely confusing to me specifically in the context of what Larian said - yes, they use AI tools, but they don’t use them for the games themselves (like, I don’t know, writing lines, or generating textures), they use them to speed up the menial tasks and give their artists more time to spend on making art. What’s wrong with that?
Shovel Knight was responsible for kicking off the second renaissance wave of indie games, as Cave Story was the first wave. It's quite a bit saddening that they've put themselves in this corner.
Shovel Knight is one of the most successful indie games ever released. We’re not talking of a “moderately” successful game that sold a few hundred thousand copies, like Hyper Lighr Drifter or CrossCode: SK sold over 2.5m copies back in 2019, and I’d wager at least as much since then. How do you go from there to almost bankruptcy?
They did a lot of extra work on it without charging for it, and it’s been a long time since they put out a hit. California salaries and real estate are expensive.
Paying a bunch of salaries when your revenue streams are Shovel Knight (good but old game that kept getting free DLC and made a lot of its money before release) and… Shovel Knight Dig. They had to go back to Kickstarter for Mina, after all.
If it was one guy or a tiny team, SK’s success would be enough for them to be “set for life”, but a business is more expensive to run than a team is. They probably don’t expect Mina to be a phenomenal income stream either, since (like SK) it’s already mostly done making them money.
As far as I understand it, the vast majority of ‘successful’ indie studios are in the same boat. You need to continual decent hits to keep afloat in an ever turbulent and flooding market. Even if the next title is successful, they already mentioned the other looming problem, burnout. You might be able to push yourself through one game, two is a struggle, and very few make it to three.
To me, and maybe I’m being a bit cynical, but this feels like a very foreboding article.
That’s what. I’ve been trying to get into game dev myself multiple times the last few years and it’s difficult. I can’t imagine getting one game out, let alone a second one. Getting that far I imagine has to drain a person
It most definitely takes a toll. Most devs don’t even talk about the weird sadness you get after finally getting something out the door either.
I don’t mean to make it all sound bad though, there is some genuine joy in making something and seeing it come together. Anyways good luck on your game dev projects.
Great article, but a very painful one to read. Mina the Hollower was one of my most anticipated games this year, and it sucked that it got delayed the same month it was supposed to release in.
What was once considered a less ambitious side project is now the company’s largest game ever. “We basically had to redo everything,” D’Angelo says. If they’d all stuck together from the beginning, Gordon says, “we would’ve finished it two to three years ago.”
So it sounds like the game got delayed because they were split into two teams. One was working on a 3D Shovel Knight sequel, and one was working on Mina the Hollower. The person directing the latter was struggling and slowed down the project, so they fired a bunch of people, focused on Mina, and basically restarted its development.
The good news is that if things go to plan, they said they’ll revisit the 3D Shovel Knight game. I’m really looking forward to that.
I would ordinarily put my top-level thoughts in the “Body” part of the link submission, but I’ve found that a lot of people here only read that box without reading the article, so I’ll put them in a comment here.
“Your company is only as strong as your last game,” says Celia Schilling, marketing director at Yacht Club.
This is true when you’re a single project studio.
By 2024, Yacht Club finally acknowledged that the two-team structure wasn’t working. It laid off some employees to cut expenses and paused development on the Shovel Knight sequel so everyone could work on Mina the Hollower, with Velasco taking over as director. What was once considered a less ambitious side project is now the company’s largest game ever.
My read on this is that the the two-team structure wasn’t the problem, but scope creep was, not to mention the bad fit for initial project direction that they acknowledged elsewhere in the article. I’m quite sure Mina the Hollower will hit their sales target of 200k copies. Hopefully they scale back up responsibly after that.
I liked it a lot. It’s engrossing enough to make you just want to keep going to the next episode, and it’s beautifully animated. Other than the story stuff, the gameplay loop is just This is the Police, and I think this improves both the Telltale design and the design of This is the Police by way of pacing. It did still leave me wanting more as a video game, but as a story and a comedy, I loved it.
Just finished Chapter 3 of 8. It has some very classic Telltale foibles. Sometimes the script seems to assume you made a decisions that you didn’t make and it makes the dialogue feel awkward. Other times, the sarcastic tone in a written dialogue choice isn’t clear when you select the option and the resulting scene isn’t at all what you thought you were suggesting. I suspect by the time I am done, I’ll have the general sense of “oh, my decisions didn’t ACTUALLY matter,” as is Telltale tradition, but I’m not far enough to judge in that space yet
Despite these fairly common for Telltale problems, it’s an incredibly witty and entertaining piece of entertainment, and perhaps one of better “no, seriously, there’s a game in here” Telltale products. The “dispatch” mechanic is, imo, a fun management game, and they tie it into the narrative in ways that feel clever. Everyone is at each others throats because of a story beat? People are actively sabotaging each other on the job and it’s making your job as their dispatcher harder. As a comedy and near-film, the writing is laugh-out-loud funny, the voice acting and character animation is top notch, and there’s an interesting story and world holding it all together. I’m sure people will argue that it’s a better movie than it is a game, and, as much as I enjoy the corporate dispatcher half of the game, I am sure many will agree, as the dialogue writing is truly the stand-out element of the game.
It’s very good. Not perfect, but very good, and compared to the older Telltale games, a real home-run.
Interesting that you felt the game assumed you made choices you didn’t, I hadn’t ran into that despite very frequently picking the less popular options. I won’t ask for specifics for obvious reasons, but that does make me curious whether there was a bug or a gap in logic. Definitely not a flawless game as gamepad is a very flawed input option when things get hectic, but damn the writing and action sequences had me hooked immediately.
Still can’t believe my first time through was only 7.5 hours. Can’t wait to go through with different choices.
I think they mean how the suggested responses were summarised, sometimes when you choose that dialogue option it doesn’t always say the thing it suggested in exactly the way you were expecting,. Personally I found it on point and did fit within the parameters of the summarisation. My 17yo son played it and loved it so much he made me sit and play it with him, and I noticed that he didn’t pick up on what some of the dialog summaries meant. Whereas old and ancient me, whose been around the block a fair bit, understood the nuances behind them all.
I’m going to spoiler it and talk about it, because I am genuinely interested in other people’s opinion/experiences on this.
Spoilers for late chapter 1, early chapter 2This is mostly centered around the kiss. Save the “proposition” innuendo, it became pretty clear that Blonde Blazer’s whole schtick was to recruit Robert. Even in the moment when she moved close to him, she kind of sizes him up like someone looking at a horses teeth as opposed to someone losing themselves in the eyes of a prospective lover, so I didn’t kiss her, and save making a joke on the “proposition” comment, didn’t say anything overly romantic of flirty. This made the whole conversation the next day feel weird and out of place. It was toned like Robert DID kiss her, as Blazer just constantly apologized, and the responses I had options for (“I don’t think it was a mistake” met with “it was, for reasons I’ll explain later”) kept that same awkward connotation. Blonde Blazer acted like she did something incredibly inappropriate in… being slightly drunk when she offered Robert a job? But as a result of my options, there really was nothing to act like this about. But the conversation HAD to be toned this way, otherwise Invisigirl overhearing and responding with “what, you two fuck?” wouldn’t make any sense. The game didn’t “assume I made choices I didn’t” as much as they clearly wrote it with an expectation in mind, but my choices didn’t meet those expectations, leaving the whole section flowing weird.
Oh okay I see what you’re saying, but I took it as more than just that.
spoiler for the same eventShe was being flirty with him while not just on the job but also in a relationship, and for some that’s enough for them to feel guilty. Yes, at this point Robert didn’t know about the relationship at this point, but from his POV he’d still read that guilt for what he saw might have been a signal he missed.
I’m sure you probably have more than just that one example, but in this instance I didn’t see it as being off from my decisions I guess. Overall, I felt the writing was pretty well done across the board.
Gameplay - quick time events weren’t super annoying (I wasn’t a fan of telltale batman quick time events), I personally liked the hacking minigame (though not everyone did), and the actual “dispatch” segments were tons of fun.
The story was excellent - I kept expecting a “twist” like we’ve seen in a lot of superhero media recently, and there weren’t any big twists. I think this was a good thing, it’s nice to see more of a “reconstruction” of good guy vs bad guy.
Spoilers - ::: spoiler spoiler If there is a twist, it’s that Shroud’s actually kinda stupid with common sense things - no grand plot, he’s just good at math and let it get to his head. Letting Robert live since he was “unimportant” really was just Shroud missing an opportunity. Not having Toxic kill him in the first scene really was just shitty planning, and probably the need to be a drama queen in the warehouse and the need to defeat Mecha Man, not some “I am your father” type moment like some theories were suggesting.
I enjoyed this a lot, even though it meant a lot of theories around the game didn’t pan out.:::
As with most games I’m just not going to get it day one and wait for the reviews. It’s not like they’re going to run out of stock so there’s no harm in delaying things.
I want to see what they do with the RP side of things, as there are rumours of a proper RP mode, which would make online play actually bearable. But since it’s just rumours with no evidence, I’m going to wait.
I had a ton of fun with the GTA V single player campaign, years ago.
I’ll wait for the reviews, and probably for the price to drop, but if it’s not all multiplayer micro transaction hell I’ll absolutely play the biggest game of the decade.
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