Baldur's Gate 3, Divinity Developer Confirms They Are Using Generative

Fresh off their grand reveal of Divinity at The Game Awards, Larian Studios wants to make sure that their follow-up to the critically acclaimed Baldur's Gate 3 meets the hype.

Of course, they also want to make sure fans don't have to wait forever to play that game, as has been the case with Elder Scrolls 6 since its 2018 announcement.

Baldur's Gate 3, for example, took six years to develop, but Covid-19 played a role in that time frame. According to Larian CEO Sven Vincke, who recently spoke with Bloomberg, "three to four years is [a much] healthier [development time]."

Now, you can't just snap your fingers and magically make a game faster than before, especially when you're looking to make things bigger and better than before. There is, however, one area that can help, even if it's the current boogeyman of the video game industry: generative AI.

Vincke has been reportedly "pushing hard on generative AI" even though the technology has not led to an increase in development efficiency. Despite the team's use of AI, Vincke also confirms that Divinity won't see any AI-generated content. "Everything is human actors; we're writing everything ourselves. So what, then, is the AI being used for? Think about the tedious tasks that take away from a developer's creativity.

If this sounds similar to what Blizzard has been doing, you'd be right. The apparent goal is to let the creative teams be creative and have AI assist with the more boring, time-consuming work.

Sven Vincke One One Of The Biggest Challenges During Divinity's Development

Bloomberg's report continues to say that some developers at Larian have pushed back against it, though Vincke believes that "everyone at the company is more or less okay with the way we're using it."

That use is something that Vincke feels can help speed up the development process to ensure games are being made in that desired three to four year range. "The creative process itself is actually something you cannot accelerate," he says. "People underestimate how many times we're implementing something and realize in the middle that it's just not going to work."

He's 100% right, too. No matter what you implement to speed the development process up, you cannot speed up the creative process, especially since there's so much tinkering taking place. The ideas that are presented and, at times, implemented early on in the development process often never make it to the final game. One thing that can help speed up development? Building a video game that is, at its heart, meant for the video game medium. As popular as Baldur's Gate 3 is, at its core, it follows tabletop rules and fundamentals stemming from Dungeons & Dragons. With Divinity, however, that's not the case.

We're making a system that's made for a video game. It's much easier to understand.

Divinity is planned for an early access release at some point, but that's most likely 2027 at the earliest.