Baldur's Gate III News

[Skatan]

The contrarian in me wants to push back against this idea that they're only trying to eliminate the laborious tedium, and only so they can expedite the release schedule.

If they say the aim is to cut development time in half (from 6 years down to 3 years) then that must mean the final game is going to cost 50% less right? Right?

Lol

I mean we know how its going to go down. They'll shitcan like half the staff, expect whoever remains to finish on the same timeline. The savings from payroll will go directly to the shareholders or the chief executives or whoever. Would a potential BG4 by some mystery studio only cost us 35 dollars instead of 70 in this new future where nobody is doing the literal grunt work anymore?

I prefer my grunts and claps and chunk out thud sounds to be fully like acted out by professional professionals. Human beings, with some gusto behind it. I want my CA and background environments and character designs doodles to be doodled and noodled by actual people. It makes a difference. The coffee table I just bought at walmart lasts what like 3-6 years tops? When we might still have some handcrafted thing built by shakers that gets passed down through the generations cause it's quality is just all boss like that. They just convinced me that games could be artworks, like by artisans, but now its headlong on to the mechanical LOOM?

I think it would be nice to at least just hear that they're as pissed about these changes as everyone else. You know like a good response might have been 'well we know it sucks, but we're being forced into this stuff by the billionaires, so taste it! I guess.' Like least that would seem more honest lol. Pretending its for the rank and file staff, so they can like take Xmas eve off and get a turkey for tiny tim or whatever, I mean I just don't believe it. What if Machine Learning learned nothing from Marley's Chain party control and so we're stuck with that forever? We're gonna get goosed. They'll probably just scrooge it if we don't grumble every single time it comes up

I don't get your point? If you are buying a cheap table from Walmart, with inferior quality you expect to last 3 years etc, you are part of the problem you seem to dislike since your purchase incentivize companies to produce the things you claim to dislike. It can perhaps be the same with "AI" assisted game production, at least I'm guessing it will be. There will be tons of people shitting on the concept but then the sales will show that people buy those same games anyways thus companies realize it's empty online boasting. Now, I'm not saying you personally will be one of those people, I'm speaking more generally, but this is my prediction.

And why would all in the industry be angry at AI/LLMs (emphasis on all)? It's like engineers being angry at the calculator when that became trendy. It's an assistant tool for the vast majority of users, yet it seems most who rant against LLMs get so hung up on the image creations and similar they forget that in the gaming industry it will be code that will be done firstly and mostly.

 

[Skatan]

I am not with Dan Vavra on this. The technology itself is unethical and inherently so at that, since it is trained on works of hundreds of thousands, artists, be it visual artists, musicians, voice actors etc. without consent, compensation, acknowledement etc. It doesn't matter how you use it, it doesn't change how this technology came to be.

It also is not my problem that nowadays videogames' budgets are overblown. It is not my problem that Dan Vavra doesn't give a single crap about authenticity. It is not my problem that Dan Vavra doesn't understand that autistic number of voiceovers and insignificant details isn't necesssary for the videogame to be good - people don't play videogames to count pores on NPCs skin or experience hundreds of dialogue options, with each single one of them being pointless. It is not my problem that Dan Vavra doesn't understand that having an idea is nothing unique. He also doesn't understand that an initial idea is usually a bad one, and thus creative ideas require development. Shitting out every idea you have via generative AI will just result in slop. For creative people, this is common knowledge. For Dan Vavra, not so much.

"Making a videogame will be as easy as writing a book". Sure, maybe. But writing a good book is a lot harder than someone out of touch might think.

Yes, there is a lot of bad art, music and so on. What Dan Vavra doesn't understand is that those "bad" works are necessary in order to eventually being able to make "good" work. Bad art is a stepping stone towards good art. Even great artists produced tons of bad art at some point. With art, the bad we have is there for a reason, at least part of it. With generative slop, it is only bad. It won't make people better at it. If anything, it will only make it harder to find authentic human creations. Hell, it already does that.

We won't even start talking about how outsourcing your cognition to AI does to your cognitive funcitons. We won't talk about AI psyhosis. About envoirmental factors. About it effects on marketplaces. AI might be the future, but it will be a worthless future. Not to mention, if this technology was so amazing, there wouldn't be need to showe it into everything regardless of customer feedback.

So, fuck you Dan Vavra, with everything I have, including a cacti.

Now, with that is over, there is a lot to say about videogames, their budgets, crunches and so on. Customers are not responsible for balooning budgets, budgets mismanagaments, demands from marketing department or anything shareholders say. If anything, businesses should remember and go back to the basic: you are serving customers first and foremost. That's it.

Such bitterness? Vavra is allowed to have his opinion same as everyone else and saying fuck you directed at him is very immature.

Customers are very much to blame and thinking otherwise is just puerile. Customers rant and rave online, louder and more obnoxious every year. Companies' forums can become toxic as hell, requirements and expectations rise year after year and if a game release not perfect, then we all know what happens in every social media channel available. "Customers", sometimes it's not even actual customers, just people who love to hate or that pirate games yet behave as disgruntled customers anyway, have been an active part in making the industry and its communities into what it and they are today. The pressure on "AAA" companies to deliver on the extremely high expectations is real and that means it cost a lot of money to produce, money that needs to be invested without any payoff for many years until sales begin. There are very few (if any) philantrophists funding and/or producing games. They invest and fund to get a profit, it's the fundamental part of capitalism. So if you hate what happens, then don't buy those games made by those companies or funded by those you don't like. That is your choice, that is your responsibility. And this very post of yours, this toxicity, is part of the problem I mention above. All IMHO of course.

 

[O_Bruce]

Ok, I cannot say fuck you, because that is toxic. Meanwhile companies can commit the biggest copyright infrigement in human history, gaslight people who don't know any better that what they're doign is right, lie, artifically support a technological bubble regardless of mostly negative consequences of doings so, and never suffer any consequences of it. Brilliant.

 

[OrlonKronsteen]

And why would all in the industry be angry at AI/LLMs (emphasis on all)? It's like engineers being angry at the calculator when that became trendy. It's an assistant tool for the vast majority of users, yet it seems most who rant against LLMs get so hung up on the image creations and similar they forget that in the gaming industry it will be code that will be done firstly and mostly.

Ah, but AI isn’t analogous to a calculator - calculators do their job correctly. And plenty of people are pointing out the problems with AI coding, namely that it does a terrible job. You may have already noticed software you use getting glitchy, and there’s a very good chance with each issue that it’s due to AI writing updates. And that’s with already existing platforms. Things are going to get very interesting when humans try to grapple with faulty code that they have had no part in creating.

But even as an ‘assistant,’ as you say - AI isn’t doing that in a vacuum. The base of its knowledge is obtained by scraping.

And then we get to the biggest problem of all with AI - the environmental costs. Even the most trivial AI actions, e.g. ChatGTP searches, use obscene amounts of energy, which ultimately results in pollution and water waste on a mass scale. Even if AI worked perfectly and didn’t rip off IP, it would still be an indefensible technology. There is literally no defense for it. In a better world it would have been banned before it got off the ground.

 

[BelgarathMTH]

@O_Bruce , I was starting to wonder why this issue seems to be making you so angry, until I remembered that you've mentioned elsewhere that you have tried to make a living as an artist, or in an art-related field. Have you personally lost a job or lost money because some company or employer used generative AI instead of hiring a human artist? If that's the case, I can understand the anger.

Wasn't the use of generative AI also a core issue in the most recent Hollywood writers' strike? I think it's starting to also affect musicians as well as visual artists and writers, not to mention actors.

I don't personally have a dog in the race anymore since I'm now retired, but maybe it would be helpful if people who approve of the use of AI in gaming and other fields to increase profits and maybe help there to be more games made would try to be considerate of people who may be losing their livelihoods to the trend of using AI instead of human employees to do various tasks in business, especially creative businesses like gaming, arts, entertainment, and music?

There's also the ethical component of the issue where these generative AI models have been trained on the work of countless human artists who receive no credit or compensation for their lifetimes of training and work.

From reading this discussion and other discussions elsewhere, I'm starting to understand why there appears to be a growing group of consumers who refuse on principle to buy any product that has in any way used AI in its production in place of human labor or has been trained on products created by human labor.

 

[Black Elk]

@Skatan I think you got my point, but then latched onto my facetious joke about Walmart furniture as being somehow super earnest lol. I didn't actually buy any tables, but was speaking as if for emphasis. You know to stress the general decline in quality that happens, since it's more familiar than games. Also to point out that any labor savings probably won't translate into a benefit to the consumer either, for whatever potential price point we get on the final product when that hits the shelves. A lot of what's happening with AI just amounts to outsourcing anyway, so the producers aren't really making out either, on the line I mean. The kneejerk response that I'm seeing floated around goes something like "well, gamers are just being hysterical again" like we're looking for a reason to be angry about something." But I think that is downplaying the legit concerns that Gen AI couldn't even exist without a bunch of scraped data or gifted work. The concept artists got burned first, none of them got payed or received any restitution for that first wave grab, but the fire appears to be spreading, such that's now effecting all the creatives.

Also, one of the issues I aniticipate is a bit of a generational divide here, because younger people are pretty price concious and seem to care less about how the tech is being rolled out and tend to just use it if it's fun. I remember doing the much the same when I was younger, with like napster and limewire for the music industry. I think maybe for some peeps who are just starting out now, they might be head scratching at some of this angst, like "who are these dinosaurs trying to spoil our fun?" Meme culture is sorta built on this idea right? Everyone expects everything for free, or at least anything that doesn't have a time signature. That they'll pay a few cents for, but like text or still images, even paywalls for journalism, where the majority will balk, but then it's like alright, I guess nobody gets paid except for the people who own the learning machines hehe. I just think there is a lot of salt left to go around, so it's not terribly surprising this sort of story is still making headlines.

ps. I think for peeps who worked in the visual arts, or had aspirations to make that a career, the burn was particularly rough. It's sort of like first you hear that your house got robbed, then you got fired from your job while filing the report on that. Then you discover all that stuff that got robbed from your house is now going up for auction by your former employer, like for penny's on the dollar. Credited to the robot magicians that just conjured it out of thin air!? And on top of that they're like "hey what's the big deal? Don't you want your games faster and cheaper? You should be thanking us!" Like of course that's going to leave the artists hella sour. I'm one of those people who has become more categorically opposed to it as time goes on. I think it will become a bit like how people become somewhat more discerning or opt to spend more on products that they feel are more ethically sourced. So maybe the difference between say fast fashion, or fast furniture vs some sort of craftsmans markup. In addition to the age thing, it might become a bit of a class thing as well, where consumers who can afford to do so will vote with their wallets on that, but then not everyone will have that option. So we try to make some noise at least, even if we end up just taking what we're given in the end, since nothing else is available anymore. Not to get too caught up on the generational thing, I'm speaking more about the people who are coming up right now, who are using chatgpt or the built in adobe widgets or whatever, and wouldn't even know how things were done before. Even just a couple years ago. Used to be that the person commisioning the work would have that line about "great exposier" and artists had to just know when the smoke was being blown up their asses. Now it's more like, the smoke is already all up in there, and peeps find out only lately and after the fact that they got used, when their whole portfolio is now owned by Skynet and they never even signed off in the first place lol.

pps. what's the worst thing going right now? Those SORA videos intended to be humorous flooding places like FB? Like if someone sends me that stuff I just immediately begin to ignore them generally, but at least that's an option there. Where it starts to grate even more is like every ad on TV, where the latest pharmaceutical whatever is just entirely generated. A bunch of Pixareqsue animated ducks selling drugs hehe. The commercial work that used to support working people is just gone already and it's not even 2026 yet lol. I think it's good to drag the execs who are trying to wring their hands and pass it off like 'but everyone else is doing it! what gives?' We gotta signal our displeasure somewhere, even if it's just here at the tavern.

 

[OrlonKronsteen]

I don't personally have a dog in the race anymore since I'm now retired...

I really don't want to derail this conversation, but I'd feel amiss if I didn't congratulate you on your retirement. I seem to remember you saying how badly you hoped you could do that in the shitty jobs thread. So, congratulations! I'm really happy for you.

 

[O_Bruce]

If that's the case, I'd like to give my congratulations for @BelgarathMTH as well. It must be a relief!

I'd like to suggest to move AI-related discussion to other topic. It was not my intention for it to go like that, and I apologize for the mess I made.

 

[Antimatter]

Don't worry about that. It was related to Larian and BG3 at the beginning, anyway. Now though, we learned what Kojima thinks about it, that Owlcat Games also uses it, CDPR uses it, GotY 2025 Expedition 33 developers also used it. So feel free to start a new topic about it.

 

[Skatan]

I'd like to suggest to move AI-related discussion to other topic. It was not my intention for it to go like that, and I apologize for the mess I made.

You didn't make a mess, mate. It's perfectly fine to have different opinions and to state them without that automatically meaning we're fighting. My reply was rather blunt, but never intended to go beyond the topic at hand and be directed to the person behind it.

I see many great new replies, but alas, I'm too tired to reply tonight (too much christmas prepping, too little sleep). I'll reply later since I think it became a pretty great discussion from it.

Merry christmas.

 

[Chronicler]

Generative AI is fundamentally a tool to turn information into less reliable information. It doesn't know anything but what you feed it and then it chops and screws that and removes any link back to the sources it's actually pulling from.

A statement from the Mayo Clinic saying in clear terms how condoms work for example, becomes an unattributed statement saying approximately how condoms might work.

Same with any of the generative algorithms specializing in art or music or what have you.

I think when people compare it to tools like the calculator, or the steam engine or what have you, they miss the glaringly obvious point that those tools are useful, and this one isn't really. These companies keep trying to push AI into everything, because they've invested so much money into it. I at one point woke up and found that the button to turn off my phone had been re-assigned in a patch to be a button to activate the new AI assistant (buckwild!). CEO's love it because of the promise that they can save a buck by laying off a lot of staff. But it's just not fundamentally a useful tool.

 

[Chronicler]

The issue of course is further muddied by the fact that there are at least a dozen different technologies that have been marketed as "AI" over the years.

So people will point to an "AI" doing something useful and be like "How can you say AI isn't good?", missing that the AI in question is not the technology that inputs information and outputs less reliable information.

 

[Black Elk]

I was just reading a study from Cell Press: Patterns, cited in an article for Digital Camera World earlier today. It caught my eye for coining the phrase "visual elevator music" to describe the type of generic imagery being produced in about a dozen clusters of image types lol.

"The clustering reveals several dominant attractor categories, which can loosely be described as sports and action imagery (cluster 0), formal interior spaces (cluster 1), maritime lighthouse scenes (cluster 2), urban night scenes with atmospheric lighting (cluster 3), gothic cathedral interiors (cluster 4), pompous interior design (cluster 5), industrial and vintage themes (cluster 6), rustic architectural spaces (cluster 7), domestic scenes and food imagery (cluster 8), palatial interiors with ornate architecture (cluster 9), pastoral and village scenes (cluster 10), and natural landscapes and animals with dramatic lighting (cluster 11)."

https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(25)00299-5

I imagine that this is a sort of distillation of the first gen imagery that was scrapped en mass from places like Myspace, Flickr, ConceptArt, DeviantArt etc, whatever other spots ( mostly defunct by now), where students or amateur/aspiring concept artists or env artists used to post/ and share their work in the early aughts. Mainly since the list reads a lot like a commission blurb from an art director who was trying to just phone it in at the time. In other words take any of those twelve broad categories, and maybe insert something figurative on top, and you're pushing the limits of what can be achieved at present using those "tools." Not just because the image sets it's pulling from are same-samey, but also because the descriptive language is same-samey. So the problem goes beyond just whatever the machine is being fed, but also presses up against the limits of language to account for visual impression. So like a semiotics sort of dilemma where our shitty descriptors add or our inability to put these things into words adds to the entropic doom. I mean that if you think as I do, that visual art was historically a kind of language that didn't require much scaffolding to prop it up in terms of the word play. Even excluding things like the more abstract abstract expressionisms or things like conceptual art, where the meaning statement would surely muddle things even more, it's already pretty muddy before you even get into some of the modernist movements. Like by the time you hit the 20th century, which is I'm sure what's it's pulling from the most, there's already a pretty big problem of topology, even if the person doing the inputs was hella fastidious (which seems doubtful) with all their hyper specific and nuanced categories like some kind of librarian with an encyclopedic grasp of how to refer to art images, or whatever has passed for that historically. The glut of inexact information would just produce something like a terrible ever expanding thesaurus that can't help reducing everything into like a dozen of the most common expressions or turns of phrase. Just keeps adding more pages with "maritime lighthouse scene" or "palatial interiors with ornate architecture" as like the ultimate expression of the artistic achievement of humankind lol. Seems like a bust to me. It's like that problem of knowing what it is, or what you want, but not what to call it, compounded by the fact that what it's trying to achieve is some inephable something to begin with. It's going to have just a levelling effect on the whole thing, where like sure it's easier to get those dozen things than ever before, but then nobody will want that anymore. I predict that ubran night scenes with atmospheric lighting will be passe by the time I finish this post, but it's sorta like how far could they really go with it, before people tune out? Or before they just beg whoever to come back around when they hit the limit or what people just won't pay for because it's too commonplace and generic-y to stand out from the rest of the cluster?

I'll probably want the BG4 portraits to be like actual oil paintings or totally pen and ink now where they like hang up in a museum somewhere afterwards heheh

 

[Antimatter]

Stranger Things co-creator Matt Duffer credits the inspiration for the show's finale to Baldur's Gate 3.

"We were thinking about D&D, and I was playing Baldur’s Gate 3 at the time, and we felt it was very important that the only way for them to defeat it was for the entire party to work together," Duffer told Variety about the final battle between Vecna, the Mind Flayer, and the gang. "Everyone had fully realized—either through self-acceptance or they've resolved all their various issues—moving into that final battle, they're absolutely primed. They're the ultimate team, and it's the party working all together to defeat this thing.

"And they each have their own individual skills, right? And that's where I go back to Dungeons & Dragons, and something like Baldur's Gate. Because that's how you take down these monsters that seem otherwise unstoppable. Lots of videogame references were applied to that final battle."

'That's pretty cool': Larian boss Swen Vincke responds after Stranger Things co-creator credits Baldur's Gate 3 for inspiring the show's climactic battle

Matt Duffer's been playing Baldur's Gate 3 lately, and apparently it gave him an idea.

www.pcgamer.com