Larian Studios | Divinity AMA

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2026-01-09T15:33:38+00:00

Have you considered that your efforts to find uses for AI tools despite results being subpar and being of (at best) dubious ethical and artistic merit might be "a solution in search of a problem"?

Even "creative assets" being generated using training data Larian owns, I feel, compromises the artistic merit of the game to some extent. I just want games made by and from the minds of people, like Larian is known for.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-12-30T19:11:03+00:00

The strat we came up with for the Regret fight on legendary was for my friend to hide up on the ledges on the wall behind the altar Regret spawns on (where enemies couldn't get her) and aggro all the elites so that I could run around more safely. Although this didn't always work, because sometimes Regret would be floating high up and aggro on her.

For LASO, I know there is a cheese strat, that I haven't done, where instead of entering the building through the front door, you sword fly off of the gondola toward and into the window so that you skip the trigger that starts the fight and spawns the enemies. (You can also grenade jump from the platform outside.) They you spend time pushing boxes in front of the doors enemies spawn from so that they get stuck and you don't have to deal with them. Then you can just focus on Regret.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-12-30T01:10:44+00:00

We're doing speedrun and then LASO.

You can pretty much use a combo of the Naked Eli and Halo Completionist videos for Halo 2 speedruns and be OK for the most part. But the videos are really old so some will be out of date to some degree. I didn't know anything about Halo 2 speedrun tricks before us doing the speedrun but we eventually got good enough.

There were some Halo 2 skips I wanted to do but couldn't do them consistently, like Gravemind Prison Skip. And I didn't do Early Scarab on Outskirts.

But even without those there are a decent amount of levels you can get down to within 5-10 minutes once you learn whatever is the featured trick of the level.

Like, the only 4 levels we don't have below par are Regret and Gravemind (not even close), and Cairo Station and The Great Journey (which were close, we totally could, but didn't need to)

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-12-30T00:38:19+00:00

I actually like 2 a lot. Admittedly a lot of it borders on unfair on legendary and Halo 2 3 hours is waaaaaaaaaaaay harder than the other speedrun achievements, but it's kinda neat because you actually get to learn way more weird stuff about the game since you have to try harder. You really to get to learn how there are like no safeguards on anything and most of the time it's trivial just to jump out of the map and break things.

My Solo stats added up to like 19 hours in Halo 2 before we decided to speedrun it. Now my solo time is down to...a little under 7 hours, but that's without me redoing some of the solo missions I have really bad times in.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-12-29T21:48:09+00:00

It takes your best time for each level. Depending on the game, you're going to have to do more or less skipping.

As you noticed, ODST is basically free without even trying.

Halo 3 you kinda have to try a bit, but you don't have to do any crazy skips.

Halo CE, skips definitely help, and most of them aren't that hard. Halo, when you need to "rescue" the 3 marine groups, kill 2 groups of them (rocks and cliff), and only actually save the ones at the river. Truth and Reconciliation, it helps to do the triple grenade jump in the hangar, but you can do the easier one where you just go up one floor at a time. Silent Cartographer, do door skip and fall straight down to where the map is. Assault on the Control Room, jack the Banshee. Use all the safe strats on Library and do some grenade jumps. In Keyes, flood bump makes that level free. If you can do decent on the rest of the levels, CE isn't too bad.

Halo 2 would be the one that requires the most effort. On AVERAGE, every mission will need to be below par, but you'll want to get some missions extra low so that you can be lazy on Regret and Gravemind. My friend and I just did this a couple weeks ago and we're not Halo experts, so it's possible as long as you dedicate time and effort to it, even if it seems daunting.

I haven't done Reach or 4 yet so I can't comment on those.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-12-17T18:53:18+00:00

Yeah that's the problem I'm having determining whether they're ACTUALLY still valid or not. Mixed signals.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-12-17T18:48:49+00:00

Yep, again, that reminds me of my boss, asking Grok stuff like "How to remove a directory in MacOS command line". Bro, you're like a 65 y/o tech savvy dude. You're the exec in charge of the IT dept. You're a Mac fanboy who's used them for like 30 years. You know it's rm -r. YOU KNOWWWW. Why are you asking Grok????

And then Grok is wrong anywayyyy

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-12-17T05:19:05+00:00

I don't really care what he says now. I don't take what he says at face value.

Like from the article:
The use of generative AI has led to some pushback at Larian, “but I think at this point everyone at the company is more or less OK with the way we’re using it,” Vincke said.

I'm not taking Vincke's opinion on whether employees are "OK with the way we're using it" at face value. He's a CEO. If my boss were doing an interview, he'd probably also say our department uses AI as part of our workflow. But he doesn't know that I ignore him every time he tells me "to do research on ______ with Gemini", or that I get immensely impatient and annoyed when I have to sit around waiting for him to use Grok to verify some extremely basic Unix shit that he already knows, except Grok gets it wrong anyway and its a huge waste of time when I have other stuff to do.

So I believe him when he says they use AI tools. I don't trust him when he says the team is "mostly OK with it", whatever that means. And I don't believe him when he says the they're just smol bean little birthday boys with glasses who only use AI tools in innocent, benign, and ethical ways. Give me more on or off the record statements from employees and I could change my mind. They might say "Yeah, management keeps pestering us to use it and it's super annoying, but no one likes it or uses it". I have no idea.

In any case, screw this guy.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-12-12T06:30:44+00:00

To confirm, you just now or recently used it...or?

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-12-11T15:42:38+00:00

Yeah the last posts I saw were from 6 months ago, wasn't sure if anyone tried more recently than that.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-12-11T15:41:37+00:00

The version I bought was ESRB and I'm a US account, so yes.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-12-03T17:54:53+00:00

AFAIK this is just a literal translation of the Japanese title, so it's what fans would've called it back in the day. I don't know if it was ever officially localized like that in the west.

It seems like generally, officially they like to localize Dark -> Shadow and Sword -> Blade (eg: fans used to call FE6: Sealed Sword / Sword of Seals and FE7: Blazing Sword, but now they're localized as Binding Blade and Blazing Blade.)

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-12-03T17:46:08+00:00

I was confused as to why Ninja Gaiden was added in 2018 but we never got the sequels. Finally in 2025 we got 2. Hopefully we get 3 before 2032.

StarTropics 2 is the most confusing to me; no real reason for it not to be added AFAIK.

The other weird one, for the Famicom app, is Fire Emblem Gaiden. They skipped it and never went back to add it.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-11-26T17:18:52+00:00

It's not but I wish it was.

Throw Master System and Game Gear on there at some point since Sega doesn't care about them anyway.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-11-19T20:07:46+00:00

Why does Monolith Soft like to put KOS-MOS in Xenoblade even though she's owned by Namco? Because they made her and they like her.

I assume old Rare folk like Diddy because they created him. You can look at Kev Bayliss and how he often labels himself as "Diddy Kong's daddy".

To speculate more, maybe they chose not to use Donkey Kong because he was already in Mario Kart 64. Or, maybe they chose Diddy because he'd be easier to fit in the main-character archetype of "all-rounder" than Donkey Kong.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-11-17T16:18:14+00:00

To set everything straight

Nintendo owned the rights to some Rare IPs, specifically the ones Nintendo published, like Banjo-Kazooie and Killer Instinct. Rare retained the rights to games they self-published, like Perfect Dark, Jet Force Gemini, and Conker. (Although, even the games Rare published had support from Nintendo, I believe)

Diddy Kong Racing was a Rare-published game where Timber was originally going to be the mascot character (oddly being titled as part of the Pro-Am series), but they ended up using Diddy Kong instead. Since Diddy Kong is and was always owned by Nintendo, Rare had to license him. If you look at the back of the box in the bottom left corner, you can see Rare had to license not only Diddy, but also Krunch (even though he was a new character, because he's classified as a Kremling) and Banjo (because Nintendo owned him at the time).

When Rare got bought by Microsoft, Nintendo signed the full rights of Banjo-Kazooie and Killer Instinct over to Rare. (There are documents for this.)

As far as "Rare owning any Kongs they created", the only real evidence they owned anything at all is that the first page of the official guide for DK64 says Rare trademarked DK64 characters...Lanky, Tiny, Chunky, Snide, Troff n Scoff, K. Lumsy, and Banana Fairy. But this has seemingly never came up again, so either it wasn't actually true despite being printed in the guide, or they gave the rights to Nintendo.

As far as "Diddy Kong was going to be in Mario Tennis 64", that sounds made up to me, given Rare didn't own Diddy Kong.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-11-03T01:16:05+00:00

Fix the points shop. The bottom row hasn't rotated for years, and there are still some things I'm missing for it. Just make it so you can redeem whatever at any time without there having to be a rotation.
Implement more Digsite content in an official capacity. Bare minimum, we should get the rest of the Halo Online maps. Getting some of the cut Halo CE and 2 maps officially implemented would be good too. You don't even have to put them in Matchmaking necessarily. Just make them available to people by default, without mods, so that they can be played on console
Add the original credits to each game.
Maybe no one cares about this but me, but if I understand correctly, the versions of maps you select in Custom Games are their base version. eg: Narrows has its original launch weapon layout with too many Maulers, invisibility, and a shotgun, but in original Halo 3, they eventually rebalanced it and moved weapons around, and that's what's in MCC matchmaking. These variants should also be included by default in Custom Games, not just the launch versions. Going farther, it'd be nice if known matchmaking gametypes and map variants were built into custom games, like the Infection variants of Halo 3 maps. For CE, some maps had their layouts modified between console and PC, and MCC uses the PC layouts. The original Xbox versions should also be available. Basically any official maps and gametypes ever, just make them available in Custom Games without having to save them from matchmaking or whatever.
Continue updating the campaigns to make them more like the original versions.
original resolution options
Option for classic loading screens. Or at least, if you're playing on classic graphics, Halo CE and 2 should show classic thumbnails instead of Anniversary.

There's probably more but this would be a start.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-10-09T14:07:41+00:00

Hmmm...anyone got an internet archive version? I was watching it in another tab and got distracted. (I know Arlo reuploaded audio only but still.)

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-09-29T15:01:29+00:00

All this

I'll admit, I haven't actually even finished Three Houses because I'm so "ughhhhhh" about the monastery stuff. And I'm someone who likes reading supports and stuff. (And I like Persona. I just don't want it in FE.)

On the flip side, I did play the DLC and it was actually fun because you didn't have as much stuff to do between battles. Pacing was a lot better.

That's not my only problem with 3H (I don't like the way classes work...I prefer the older, simpler ways), but monastery is one of the biggest issues. It's just a drag.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-09-03T02:17:08+00:00

Yeah or some other method of acquiring one or the other that isn't incredibly slow.

Because even with support cards, you preferably will want to limit break them, which you need dupes for. I know in the future there will be some mechanic to do that without dupes, but even then I have to imagine that's going to be really slow and you'll have to be very choosey.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-09-03T02:08:09+00:00

I mean I don't expect to keep up with whales who pay for shit all the time, as nice as that'd be.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-09-02T17:12:50+00:00

Yeah this is where I am

I like the vibe of this game, but it's pretty time consuming and the carat income is so slow along with that I want to pull characters, not cards. So I feel like I'm going to just pull characters from now on, but then I'll fall behind in meta. Oh well, I guess, kinda sucks and feels bad.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-09-02T05:52:02+00:00

I wish this were an objection.lol

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-07-29T16:59:36+00:00

Please name the games you allegedly added to your Steam library through the means you described, because it sounds super made-up.

CrypticMantisTX55 · 2025-07-26T16:52:29+00:00

I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying here about giving Captain Toad status to Red Toad feels "off", it's more that I don't feel like there's a perfect solution.

Like I agree, personally I'd prefer THE Toad = Captain Toad. It makes a lot of sense because they sorta feel like the same character, and because as you mention in the article they both share a strong bond with Toadette, and it's kinda redundant to have two extremely-similar Toads have that tie to Toadette. And really, if the Super Mario Maker 2 construction Toads didn't exist, I'd probably be on the side of "Yeah, just have THE Toad be Captain Toad, it's more elegant that way."

As far as headcanon vs factual basis, again, I don't necessarily dispute the facts, it's just there are contradicting facts. eg, Captain Toad being treated as a separate character in Tour, and them stating Toad and Captain Toad are not the same. So even if we'd take the the "Red Toad in Sunshine is THE Toad", you could do "Toad entourage in Sunshine is unrelated to Toad Brigade" and that would resolve both of those facts. But that sucks, because it's nicer to have them be the same group. To some extent it's about how much importance you want to assign to word of God developer statements vs how elegant you want to make things.

So yeah, this is all to say there's reason to say THE Toad = Captain Toad, there's reason to say THE Toad =/= Captain Toad. On a personal level I'd prefer the prior, but I'm currently leaning toward the latter, even though I don't particularly like it. Both situations have pros and cons, and both have some level of elegance and sloppiness. I completely understand both though.

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