…Yeah. That’s a bit extreme.

You can sit back and let this stuff collapse under its own weight, you know.

TBH a violent reaction feels like is just going to help politicize this LLM mania (and therefore present an excuse to cement the enshittification). Let people see how awful and annoying it is all by itself.

You should break Meta glasses though. That’s totally warranted.

Yep.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Radar/LiveActionTV

All the Star Trek entries are hilarious:

Back in The '60s, U.S. TV networks, particularly NBC, wouldn’t allow women to show their belly buttons, most famously affecting Jeannie on I Dream of Jeannie. In the original Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror”, Uhura’s mirror outfit included a bare midriff and her navel is visible in several shots. The producers achieved this simply by having someone take the Standards guy out to lunch and lowering the bottom half of her costume while he was gone. The shots with her bare navel were edited into the episodes and evidently no one caught it.

because anyone who knows even a scrap of how LLM/GANs work knows that the data needs to train a model would be far beyond the reach of a company of Larian’s scale

If it’s like an image/video model, they could start with existing open weights, and fine tune it. There are tons to pick from, and libraries to easily plug them into.

If it’s not, and something really niche, and doesn’t already exist to their satisfaction, it probably doesn’t need to be that big a model. A lot of weird stuff like sketch -> 3D models are trained on university student project time + money budgets (though plenty of those already exist).

We don’t need defenders coming in here trying to pretend that the CEO hasn’t just clarified that they are using AI for preproduction, we know this and it’s not up for debate now.

No. We don’t know.

And frankly, why do I need to play their game when I could just AI generate my own slop and save the 70 bucks

I dunno what you’re on about, that has nothing to do with tools used in preproduction. How do you know they’ll even use text models? Much less that a single would ever be shipped in the final game? And how are you equating LLM slop to a Larian RPG?

hit, it seems like they’ve forgotten about the community that got them to where they are today in favor of some AAA gaming nonsense.

Except literally every word that comes out of interviews is care for their developers, and their community, which they continue to support.

Frankly, there are plenty of games that people judge from the outset. There’s a reason why we have the saying “First impressions matter”. They’ve left a bad taste in anyone who dares question the ethics of AI use, but thankfully there might be an audience of people out there who like slop more than I dislike it so they could be ok. No skin off my nose.

Read that again; pretend it’s not about AI.

It sounds like language gamergate followers use as excuses to hate something they’ve never even played, when they’ve read some headline they don’t like.

…Look, if Divinity comes out and it has any slop in it, it can burn in hell. If it comes out that they partnered with OpenAI or whomever extensively, it deserves to get shunned and raked over coals.

But I do not like this zealous, uncompromising hate for something that hasn’t even come out, that we know little about, from a studio we have every reason to give the benefit of the doubt. It reminds me of the most toxic “gamer” parts of Reddit and other cesspools of the internet, and I don’t want it to spread here.

That’s an awfully early point to judge a game, with basically zero knowledge of what they’re actually doing/using.

What if they’re referencing a small, home grown model to assist with mocap? Or a sketch->3D drafting tool? Would that be enough to write it off?

That’s extreme, and put abrasively.

…But the sentiment isn’t wong.

Except it’s not a small minority anymore, which is understandable given how pervasive chatbot enshittification is becoming. Maybe the ‘made with AI’ label isn’t enough to deter everyone, but it’s enough to kill social media momentum, which is largely how games sell these days.

Why not both?

like the recent Warlock game announcement.

That’s a very… abstract trailer.

Yeah, I’m suspicious too.

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.

At a certain level, it is going to be a chore to determine who is or is not slopping up with AI media. Not every asset comes out with six fingers and a half-melted face.

Image/video diffusion is a tiny subset of genAI. I’d bet nothing purely autogenerated makes it into a game.

I can see legitimate frustration with an industry that seems reliant on increasingly generic and interchangeable assets. AI just becomes the next iteration of this problem. You’ve expanded the warehouse of prefab images, but you’re still stuck with end products that are uncannily similar to everything else on the market.

See above. And in many spaces, there are a sea of models to choose from, and an easy ability to tune them to whatever style you want.

And that’s before you get to the IP implications of farming all your content out to a third party that doesn’t seem to care where its base library is populated from.

Thier tools can be totally in house, disconnected from the outside web, if they wish. They might just be a part of the pipeline on their graphics workstations.

Keep a distinction between “some machine learning in tedious parts of our workflows” and “a partnership with Big Tech APIs.” Those are totally different things.

It sounds like Larian is talking about the former, and I’m not worried about any loss of creativity from that.

Yeah, the outrage is overblown.

This doesn’t mean they’re enforcing a CoPilot quota or vibe coding the game or shipping slop; it could be simple autocompletion, or (say) a component that makes the mocap pipeline easier.

Don’t let Tech Bros poison dumb tools that could help out devs like Larian.

…Now, if they ship slop into the final game or announce an “OpenAI partnership,” that’s a different story.

Well again, it depends.

“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.

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.

Unfortunately, not everyone has the cash to spend up front. Paying more over time is easier.

Or they just get lured in by a cheap sticker price.

And again, price is still relevant. If this is well over $1K, it starts to negate the Steam storefront cost savings.

That sounds excellent.

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.

This is a fair point. When I made the original comment, I didn’t realize their in house engine went so far back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinity_Engine

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.

Depends how much they “redo”.

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.

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.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GreenSkinnedSpaceBabe

It’s well documented, see:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LipstickLesbian

And all the links/categories.

Price!

We can argue about it all we want, but basically everything hinges on its street price.

If it’s cheap, all those critiques are irrelevant.

Expensive? “It’s cute, I like Steam, I like how it mostly works OOTB,” gets real niche, real quick.