Larian is dropping “genAI tools during concept art

After a striking debut at 2025’s Game Awards, the next Divinity game from Larian Studios faced severe backlash over Swen Vincke’s quotes regarding the use of generative AI for concept art exploration. Now, a Reddit AMA has helped clear things out, though the answers given might not be enough for some players.

Following what we can only describe as a huge pre-Christmas shitstorm of biblical proportions, Larian announced a Reddit AMA session that would happen in early 2026. Beyond the genAI talk, the developers would also illuminate their vision for the upcoming turn-based RPG, which aims to expand on everything that made Baldur’s Gate 3 a modern classic.

“To ensure there is no room for doubt, we’ve decided to refrain from using genAI tools during concept art development,” Larian CEO and Divinity director Swen Vincke confirmed during the AMA on January 9. Back in December, he’d already stated no AI-generated assets would ship in the final game, yet many players, developers, and artists rightfully rejected the idea of playing with it during the early concept phases, at it only hurts the trust put on the studio.

“I know there’s been a lot of discussion about us using AI tools as part of concept art exploration. We already said this doesn’t mean the actual concept art is generated by AI but we understand it created confusion,” he said of the conversation sparked by his comments during an interview with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. Following his words about the studio having embraced the technology despite pushback early on, the veteran creative even had to step away from the social channels, casting doubt over his role at the company moving forward.

Now, it seems nothing’s really changing beyond moving away from genAI during “concept art exploration.” Regardless, we won’t be surprised if the conversation around the game has been terribly poisoned for the foreseeable, as we’re being asked to take Vincke at his word after a frankly shocking display of not getting what made the creative process that allowed games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and past Divinity entries to be so special.

Even now, he isn’t outright rejecting the use of the tech at some point of development. The second part of his post will no doubt continue to raise eyebrows: “We think GenAI can help with this and so we’re trying things out across departments. Our hope is that it can aid us to refine ideas faster, leading to a more focused development cycle, less waste, and ultimately, a higher-quality game… The important bit to note is that we will not generate “creative assets” that end up in a game without being 100% sure about the origins of the training data and the consent of those who created the data. If we use a GenAI model to create in-game assets, then it’ll be trained on data we own.” As the games industry either goes big on AI or starts rejecting its use in most creative endeavors, we’ll have to deal with this conversation many more times.

In other news extracted from this AMA (which is well worth a look), we now know something about several of Divinity’s key features:

The loot system will be similar BG3’s (more handcrafted and less randomized). No engine change. It’ll use an iteration of the Divinity Engine. No keyboard movement controls out of the box (as introduced by a beloved WASD mod) on PC. Co-op at launch, with “no hard limit to the amount of coop players.” “More grounded,” but still tonally flexible like the studio’s past games. The magic armor system from Original Sin 2 won’t return. Similar camera modes to BG3’s.

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