After comments this week from Larian CEO Swen Vincke revealing that the Baldur’s Gate 3 developer is using generative AI in its workflow prompted a massive backlash on social media, several developers have been weighing in. While Vincke said most of Larian’s workers were “okay” with how the team had integrated the technology, the public outcry from fans and developers told a different story. The latest games industry veterans to weigh in include Kingdom Come: Deliverance lead Daniel Vávra and ex-Naughty Dog director Bruce Straley, and both of them seem to think generative AI is here to stay in game development, though one of them is at least standing firm against the trend for now.
Vávra posted a lengthy response to Vincke’s statements on X, saying that while he’s “no fan of of AI generated art,” detractors need to “face [the] reality” that it’s here to stay.
You know what I hate most about making games? The fact that it takes 7 years and 300 people and tens of millions of dollars to make. And the fact that Tom had to spend 500 hours in the studio recording completely generic heckling and generic bars.
If AI can help me make an epic game in a year with a smaller team like in the old days, I’m all for it. That game will still have an art director, writers, programmers, graphic designers, but they won’t have to do the tiresome and boring tasks, they’ll have to focus on the essentials.
I have ideas for lots of games, but I’m fifty years old and so far it’s taken me seven years on average to make one game. If AI helps me realize those ideas faster, I’m all for it.
This AI hysteria is the same as when people were smashing steam engines in the 19th century. @LarAtLarian said they were doing something that absolutely everyone else is doing and got an insanely crazy shitstorm.
I’ve even seen someone accuse us of using AI in KCD2. I don’t… https://t.co/l7pNbTxeIT
— Daniel Vávra ⚔ (@DanielVavra) December 17, 2025
Vávra goes on to raise a bunch of hypotheticals about being able to ask NPCs anything and the technology generating appropriate answers and so forth, as if human writers can’t generate something more interesting.
Straley, meanwhile, also believes that generative AI is here to stay, but says that he’s taken a stance against it at Wildflower Interactive, though he admits that he might not be able to do so forever.
“We don’t need AI,” Straley said in an interview with Kinda Funny. “I really do think it’s the demise of the human species. Our brain…we need a frontal lobe. Hundreds of thousands of years of this supercomputer that’s built, and they’re making football fields and draining water supplies, etc. to try to replicate something that a human can already do. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
Is AI needed in gaming? Bruce Straley (Co-Director of TLOU) gives his thoughts. pic.twitter.com/msJdOS9Rlm
— Kinda Funny (@KindaFunnyVids) December 17, 2025
It’s nice to hear someone like Straley taking a stance against using generative AI, though it is disheartening to hear that he also thinks it’s an inevitability that it will stay in the industry. Vávra says that “absolutely everyone else is” using generative AI in some capacity in game development, and if that’s true now, it doesn’t have to be. You can want better for your creative medium than plagiarizing slop machines that leave talented people out of work. If believing that bad things don’t have to happen is foolish, then I’d rather be a fool than an AI shill.
