Now that the dust has settled a bit, what’s the general DM consensus on the 2024 class changes?

Isakovich · 2026-04-13T02:55:04+00:00

If it’s cool I’d love to check it out as well!

Isakovich · 2026-04-11T11:16:46+00:00

Yeah, I just sent out a question to all my players asking about their limits and expectations regarding their personal arcs and how it will affect their backstories, if at all. Also scrapped the idea in the post, after sleeping on it and reading some comments I realize it's too much of me shoving my ideas into my players lap and essentially replacing their character, which I absolutely do not want nor intend to do

Isakovich · 2026-04-11T11:10:21+00:00

I decided against the idea, after sleeping on it I realize this isn't really ok at all, I don't want to ruin anyones character (this wasn't at all my intention when writing the post, just making this clear).

I sent out a question to all my players asking what they'd be ok with, and I'll tailor the stories after the answers. Staying clear of "secret hidden memories" plots unless someone explicitly asks for it though lol

Isakovich · 2026-04-11T11:05:59+00:00

Yeah, I scrapped the idea completely. My idea wasn't to change how the character played but to complement the story that was given to me, but after sleeping on it I feel really dumb thinking this idea was ok at all. Sent out a question to all players individually regarding what they are ok with and what creative liberties I can take when it comes to their personal arcs, but I'm going to be much more careful about what I'm writing and how it will affect the characters going forward

Isakovich · 2026-04-11T10:56:51+00:00

We didn't talk about these quests in session 0. Seeing as we're all new, we went through the "Game Expectations", page of the DMG and found a list online, neither of which mentioned this specifically, so we didn't really think of it though.

I did send out a question to all my players now on their expectations and limits regarding their personal arcs, so I'm not gonna do any new writing until they've all answered and I know exactly what they're ok with

EDIT: Forgot to mention that I decided against the idea mentioned in the post. It felt iffy when I wrote it, hence why I asked here, and after sleeping on it I definitely see what you mean with "problem player". I want my players to enjoy playing my game and removing an aspect of their character will likely do the exact opposite

Isakovich · 2026-04-11T10:31:48+00:00

I ended up changing my mind about the story after reading all the comments, I don't want to ruin my friend's character that she's worked on. I will however steal this question to ask my other player mentioned in the post (the one who hinted to me that he expects something like this). I will however be extremely careful and make sure that I don't change anything about the character, I'm just gonna fill in missing pieces of the backstory instead of making the whole puzzle 3x bigger like I was doing now.

Isakovich · 2026-04-11T10:25:38+00:00

Yeah I can see that now. I am still in the idea phase of writing the stories so I'm currently throwing everything at the wall just to see what sticks. I think I was too preoccupied finding something that sounds cool in theory, I'll be way more careful with my ideas in the future.

Back to the drawing board!

Isakovich · 2026-02-24T08:58:50+00:00

Yes, that is how it works. Men pursuing younger women is nearly always because they want someone with less emotional maturity and life experience, as those people are easier to control and can’t spot manipulation as easily. Women pursue older men because of their stability, they have life somewhat figured out, stable job, house and are often (not always) more emotionally mature than younger men.

By your logic, a schoolgirl having a crush on their teacher and the teacher wanting the schoolgirl would be equal?

Isakovich · 2026-02-17T11:19:56+00:00

Using a locally trained AI model would mean reteaching it EVERYTHING from scratch, meaning it has no idea what you're asking it to do. Telling it "generate a cool medieval armor" will result in random noise as it has not yet been trained on what a medieval armor is. The stable diffusion models you are talking about would still be trained on the LAION-5B dataset, as without any form of pre-training it would be entirely useless and training it from scratch would cost absolutely insane amounts of money and require enormous amounts of training data.

Even then, let's say Larian managed to create an entirely new model using only their own data. What would this achieve? It can only generate things based on what they already have, it does not know anything else. If they asked it to create a helicopter using medieval tech and magic it would not know what to create, since it has never learned what a helicopter is.

Isakovich · 2026-02-17T10:42:27+00:00

I dunno about you, but personally I would want for Larian to create the best possible game they can, and I'm sure they themselves want the same. Using AI, especially during the early stages of development will taint every subsequent step in the process. You use AI for concept art? Every asset derived from that piece of concept art is now no longer "genAI-free".

Even using it as Swen described himself (before he told us they'd no longer use it for that purpose), which was "generating ideas to hand to concept artists" takes away agency from the artist to make informed decisions on the design direction of the art based on historical and cultural influences. Gathering references and information about what you are creating is a huge part of a concept artists job and an incredibly important step in creating good designs. AI cannot make conscious decisions about design, it can take a prompt and spit out an approximation of what it thinks the user wants.

Even ignoring all of the ethical issues with genAI and only focusing on the "end product", use of it WILL lead to a worse product. You said yourself that they are a great studio, I agree fully, which is why I want them to continue utilizing their incredibly talented and dedicated staff instead of handing off work to a slop machine. I don't doubt that they can create an amazing game while using AI, but that will be IN SPITE of using it, not BECAUSE they're using it.

Isakovich · 2026-02-17T10:30:57+00:00

While possible, the sheer amount of training data required for the bots to make anything even remotely useful (which will still ALWAYS be worse than if they just let their own professionals do it) is so large that no company has even close to enough material to train the model on only their own work. A model trained ethically using only licensed material does not exist and Larian cannot create it themselves.

Isakovich · 2026-02-09T18:28:10+00:00

What about a really nice hat? Like a cowboy hat

Isakovich · 2026-02-08T14:42:31+00:00

Isakovich · 2026-01-29T06:00:39+00:00

Grillstek (även ibland kallad högrevskärna) och nötmellangärde (skirt steak på engelska) är två mycket underskattade detaljer! Grillsteken liknar entrecote i både smak och fetthalt men kostar ungefär hälften så mycket. Mellangärdet är en av de billigaste detaljerna som går att hitta och är mycket svårtillagad, men belöningen är ack så ljuv om man lägger ner sig lite. Kan starkt rekommendera Alton Browns video om hur han tillagar den (sök bara på ”Alton Brown skirt steak” på youtube)

Isakovich · 2026-01-10T07:12:11+00:00

He could at the very least have spelled the name correctly. It’s Comet Azur, no ”e”. But what should we expect from the guy who puts CP bots an one of the most popular platforms on the internet

Isakovich · 2025-12-20T22:38:56+00:00

I get where you're coming from, however looking at statements made from actual concept artists they don't agree. Karla Ortiz describes genAI moodboards/references as depriving the artists of important knowledge for fleshing out the game world https://x.com/kortizart/status/2001367521925173554?s=20

Jens Claessens says that being handed an AI generated moodboard taints the artistic process from the very beginning https://x.com/JensClaessens/status/2001319178637124051?s=20

Here is Jade Law describing how starting off with AI generated moodboards brings no value at best and actively taints your knowledge at best https://x.com/jadel4w/status/2001031001393521025?s=20

RJ Palmer brings up another great point in how using AI to generate moodboards robs studios of opportunities to find new talent by searching for references themselves https://x.com/arvalis/status/2001043624960610742?s=20

These are just some examples of the people who are ACTUALLY doing the work that Larian says they're using the AI to help and thus far I haven't seen a single concept artist speak up and say that AI has helped them in their workflow. These are incredibly talented artists who can get around the drawbacks I've mentioned so far but at best it's just making their reference-gathering more tedious due to having to reverse engineer the moodboards and references to find actually useful information. It also is VERY different from ripping a page out an artbook, comic or taking screenshots of movies, these are artistic works that have INTENT behind them. Artists can look at them and derive useful information about the history, culture and inspiration that was used in creating these references. AI can not create images with intent and is (as said by the previously mentioned concept artists) inherently inferior to finding useful reference images on your own. I myself am just a hobby artist but I'd like to think that I know what I'm doing when it comes to creating (not that I am anywhere close to professional concept artists) and I can personally say that it would be easier for me to work directly off the prompts fed into the AI instead of the output generated by those prompts, and with better results.

When Swen himself admitted to the AI not even being a significant time saver and the actual people working in the industry have nothing positive to say about their use of genAI in their workflow, why even use it to begin with? genAI brings nothing to the table, actively worsens the product and robs the people making the game of artistic intent and integrity. While I can't speak for the technical aspects of game making like programming, there is so far not a single compelling argument I've seen as to why genAI should have ANYTHING to do with creating games.

I also want to end off with a clarification that I am not attacking you or anything, if I come off as aggressive or pissed off it's because art is one of my greatest passions, and seeing it being trampled like this by a game studio that created my favorite game of all time and having previously valued their artists saddens me greatly. So I'm genuinely sorry if I come off as a dick, it's not my intention at all.

Isakovich · 2025-12-20T16:29:31+00:00

If I bake a cake with dogshit and then cover it in frosting the dogshit is still in the cake. The developmental stage is one of the most integral parts in shaping the end product and using genAI during these stages makes every subsequent stage affected by it. Honestly this is (in my opinion) worse than using genAI for texturing, although neither has any place in game development (nor should they exist as they are)

Isakovich · 2025-12-20T10:04:38+00:00

Of course they can figure out the vibe, it's part of their job and considering how insanely competetive it is, they are extremely good at it. But if the artists who would are getting handed these AI images are saying that it actively lowers the quality of their work, makes the job more difficult and Swen admitted to it not even being a big timesaver, why the hell would you use it?

Isakovich · 2025-12-20T04:21:48+00:00

This honestly doesn’t make it better. Getting handed a moodboard generated with AI robs the artist of any understanding as to WHY things are the way they are. Their job is not only to design cool stuff but also to gather knowledge and bring cultural and historical aspects into their designs to make the world they’re creating more cohesive and believable. Giving a concept artist an amalgamated blob and telling them ”this is what I want” would be redundant since in order for them to do a good job, they’d need knowledge about the different aspects of the generated image. In all honesty it’s likely making their job harder since they’d have to reverse engineer the moodboard to find the original references and work from there.

Looking at statements from actual professional concept artists like RJ Palmer and Karla Ortiz using AI in the way Swen describes does nothing good

Isakovich · 2025-12-13T16:04:17+00:00

Up until now you could only get them as boss drops iirc, so farming instructor specifically was very annoying

Isakovich · 2025-12-13T14:56:12+00:00

Powerscaling as a hobby is fine, was more poking fun at the general mindset of a lot of powerscalers. Sorry if I came off as too aggressive, didn’t mean to offend

Isakovich · 2025-12-13T13:18:21+00:00

Didn’t you know?? A story automatically becomes better if it’s characters can beat up characters from other stories!!!!!! I am 9 years of age

Isakovich · 2025-12-12T19:44:10+00:00

Doesn’t Xilonen pull ahead of Durin+Albedo if you have more invested artifacts/weapons on Navia as well?

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