Divnity, meet Divine Retribution.

   Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Hannukah, Happy Holidays to any and all who celebrate anything during the jolly and festive month of December. This will be my last blog post of 2025, and of course, it’s about Generative AI. So, without further ado…

Larian, what the fuck were you thinking?

After hyping up their next big game with a mysterious statue in California and finally revealing it at Geoff Keighley’s video game Superbowl, Swen Vincke, head of Larian Studios, decided the smartest move was to open his mouth and admit that the game’s concept art was influenced, to some vague degree, by Generative AI (and that they're letting AI throw together PowerPoints, which is even more frivolous and indefensible in my opinion as a Professional Complainer).

His excuse? That their actual artists, who are clearly talented, sometimes “need help visualizing their ideas,” and that AI was used like an art book. (Siri, did Zdzisław Beksiński need to use Generative AI, or was he just that good?)

Before this, Larian was known for completely rejecting AI. Their stance drew a loyal fanbase that cares about real art and the people behind it. Now, after this complete 180, we’re seeing reports that even their own artists pushed back, and the public is furious. Fans are questioning the studio’s values, its integrity, and its respect for actual art.

The truth is there is no excuse for generative AI in the arts. It pulls from existing work created by real people and spits out something new based on a prompt. Suggesting that humans couldn’t have made it is disrespectful to artists and the craft.

I think the bigger problem here is how the normalization of generative AI, even in small doses, can snowball into something much worse down the line. Take Game of the Year winner Claire Obscure: Expedition 33. They claimed AI was only used for concept art, but the game launched with AI-generated assets that had to be patched out later. If that hadn’t happened, they probably never would have admitted it. That suggests they were almost certainly using AI wherever they could get away with it.

ARC Raiders, Multiplayer Game of the Year, pushed it even further, with AI-generated voice acting that was blatant and terrible. And now Larian.

This isn’t about “how much” AI was used or “where” it was used. It’s about whether it was used at all. The excessive, needless use of AI only makes things worse. Data centers that power generative AI do massive, almost unimaginable damage to the environment, and almost always in low-income neighborhoods. These communities are often Black, and the impact is real, tangible, and ignored.

Swen seems to think a “little bit of AI” doesn’t hurt the artistic integrity of the game, without considering the very real consequences that careless, unnecessary AI usage has on actual people and communities.

The backlash has led to an incredibly tone-deaf response from Swen, who claimed people were overreacting and didn’t understand why AI was “necessary.” The fact is, it isn’t necessary. Baldur’s Gate 3 was made without generative AI. Divinity can be too.

This has also brought out the worst kind of people, disgusting chuds crawling out of the woodwork to defend it, suddenly aligning Larian with groups of gamers it had previously, intentionally or not, disavowed. And all of this comes at the expense of its relationship with its more diehard fans.

I’ll ask again: Larian, what. the fuck. were you thinking?

It’s a shame, then, that this is the reality. Divinity will sell a mind-numbing number of units and silence its critics. The wheel will keep turning and companies will be further incentivized to use AI wherever they can. A technological gateway drug, if you will.

The titular “Divine Retribution” is not about Larian losing sales. They won’t. It’s that the studio will now be remembered by many of its most loyal fans as one of the major players that welcomed the destruction of the medium. Not to be dramatic, but you either have zero tolerance or you let this shit run wild. Larian has chosen the latter.

In a few years, maybe decades, when the industry is flooded with AI-generated garbage marketed by trillion-dollar corporations until any studio still making games the old-fashioned way is drowned out, hand-made games will become a novelty. Boutique. Maybe even a luxury. Call it fearmongering if you want, I call it history repeating itself.

The worst part is that if Larian sanctions this, everyone else will follow. Other studios, major publishers. Microsoft is already pushing for fully AI-generated games. The bough is broken and eight out of ten people are too comfortable, too complacent, too disaffected to even notice, let alone rebuild.

To be honest, even if Larian walks back the admission and changes its practices, there is not much that can be done. Generative AI will continue to spread through the industry via other studios. It’s just defeating that a previous Game of the Year winner, an industry titan, and a studio that condemned any use of AI as recently as early 2025, would give in so quickly.

Merry Christmas. I sure hope your tree isn’t fucking AI generated. Then again, considering the damage that data centers do, you're only like 100 years away from actually needing an AI Generated tree since no one will remember what one looks like.

...let it die, let it die, let it shrivel up and die 🎵