Baldur's Gate 3's director thinks AI is "a tool that we use to help us do things faster" but doesn't think "it'll ever replace a creative side" of development

The director of Baldur's Gate 3 has shared his stance on AI and said although it has its place, he doesn't think it'll ever replace the creative side of development.  

In an interview with IGN, Swen Vincke revealed what he'd do differently if the team at Larian Studios were to develop Baldur's Gate 3 again. This is where the topic of automation came up, and so the developer shared his stance on the use of AI in game development. "AI is a very large subject," Vincke said. "The thing that's under criticism is generative AI, but there are a whole bunch of other things where you really want AI to be busy in your process.

"So my stance on AI is really straightforward. It is a tool that we use to help us do things faster. We have so much work that we're happy to take assistance from anything. I don't think it'll ever replace a creative side of things and I can put money where my mouth is," he continues. What Vincke means by this, as revealed in the interview, is that instead of relying on AI tools like Midjourney (which can conjure up images using prompts in seconds) Larian has hired 15 more concept artists to keep this part of the process more streamlined. 

"The pipeline bottleneck in the past was we don't have the concept art coming fast enough, so the creatures are not made fast enough, so the technical animators can't rig it fast enough, so the animators can't do the monster fast enough so they run out of work, which is really the worst thing we want in a development environment," the developer continues. "So that's how we solve that."

It's not just concept artists being hired either: "We're hiring writers, so we're not having ChatGPT write their dialogues," Vincke says, before adding that he does, however, "see a usage of generative AI." Further elaborating on this, the director says: "I think you can have reactive games and that's where it can have a place. So you can complement what's there already. So that's the thing that we should be exploring because [it's] how we'll make better RPGs."

Summarising his thoughts, Vincke says he thinks AI's role in development should be to "augment" something that's already been crafted by artists, and he doesn't "buy" into the idea of an NPC being fully generated by AI. "I buy more that there's going to be something that's crafted, and then you'll have AI that plugs into it to augment it. And it should be done in such a way that it's invisible, so you don't know that it's shifting around. So I think that's the thing of the future."

In other news, Larian is done with Baldur's Gate 3 and D&D, and won't make Baldur's Gate 4.