There's nothing worse than a stuttering frame rate. Whether you can't afford a modern graphics card because AI tech bros are hoarding them in data centers, that big new release isn't quite optimized, or you're just trying to play Crysis in the year of our lord 2026, poor performance is infuriating. However, it's something you may have to suffer through while playing FPS Quest, a meta game which uses your frame rate as your health bar. If you want to survive, you'll have to break the game itself and stutter to victory.
If you were among those hoping for the tidal shift of the games industry to move in favor of workers, this news is not exactly something that will fill you with confidence in that hope. Ubisoft Halifax, the studio that developed titles like Assassin’s Creed Rebellion and Rainbow Six Mobile, officially formed a union in […]
Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity developer Larian Studios held its Reddit AMA (ask me anything) today, after backlash from the studio reportedly using generative AI in the development of its new game. During the lengthy AMA the studio seemingly drew a line in the sand, committing to not using generative AI as part of the concept art process, as well as any of the writing processes for the game.
Larian CEO and co-founder Swen Vincke noted that no current concept art had been created using AI, but that he saw how his comments had been misconstrued. The controversy first started when Vincke did an interview with Bloomberg, where he talked about the studio’s experimentation with AI — seemingly implying it was part of the concept art process.
In the Reddit AMA, Vincke said that it was removing generative AI from the entire concept art process to ensure that players knew all art is original.
“There is not going to be any generative AI art in Divinity,” Vincke writes in the AMA.
“So, to ensure there is no room for doubt, we’ve decided to refrain from using genAI tools during concept art development. That way there can be no discussion about the origin of the art.”
Later in the AMA, Larian writing director Adam Smith says the studio doesn’t “have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries, or other writing in Divinity.” Smith does say the team experimented with genAI, but the results were “3/10 at best” and paled even in comparison to his worst human drafts.
However, all this doesn’t mean that Larian has written off genAI entirely.
“Having said that, we continuously try to improve the speed with which we can try things out. The more iterations we can do, the better in general the gameplay is,” Vincke says, “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.”
The AMA is ongoing, so check the full thread for more details.
Divinity is currently in development, and does not have a release date. The studio also recently announced that Baldur’s Gate 3 has sold over 20 million copies to date.
Welcome back to another quick roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news! The UK Games Industry Shadow Council: No, this isn’t a secret society that’s extremely bad about being secret; it’s a self-formed group within the UK games industry sector that has been formed to elevate “voices who would like to identify good and poor […]
The war of attrition that is seeing c-suite and games industry leaders continue to pour AI into games and tech in spite of repeated pushback by developers and gamers continues. Today we’ve got a trio of stories from three different companies that are in different stages of AI brainworm infection because this stuff needs to […]
David Baszucki, the CEO of Roblox, has been known to say some pretty outlandish things, but his recent interview with the New York Times might have ended up being a carpet bombing of poorly considered answers, as he tried to spin problems into “opportunities” and speak positively about tech additions that are anything but positive. […]
If you happened to be holding any stock in Ubisoft, this past week might have frayed some of your nerves, as the gaming company announced that its fiscal report for the first half of the year was being delayed and that share trading would be temporarily halted. As one might expect, this ended up causing […]
Back in 2021 we first reported on the fate of an in-development Halo MMO project as told by former developer Sandy Petersen, who recounted how the title and its developer Ensemble Studios were effectively taken apart by corporate politicking by Microsoft and then-Xbox head Don Mattrick. Well now, Petersen is back to talk about this […]
PUBG and Subnautica publisher Krafton has said the two things that investor boards apparently love to hear in their earnings reports: profits are up, up, up, and it’s going to go all-in on AI. That’s essentially what’s being touted by the company in its third quarter earnings report for 2025, which has brought in record-breaking […]
It’s been a five year-long kaiju fight between Epic Games, Apple, and Google, as Epic took both corporations to court back in 2020 over what were considered monopolist policies related to third-party payment processing. And while most of the focus was zeroed in on the Epic vs. Apple fight, there was also a ruling in […]
Why let skilled quality assurance workers make sure game code is functional when an investment in AI can botch the work? That would appear to be the push by Square Enix, as it has told investors in a “medium-term business plan” presentation that it’s aiming to have QA work done by AI in the future, […]
