🍪 Larian, Expedition 33, and the Internet’s Panic Over AI

Hello there, developers, artists, and players trying to keep a straight face while Twitter lights itself on fire again.

This week’s meltdown started with Larian Studios. Or more accurately, with an interview featuring Swen Vincke that most people did not watch, followed by screenshots of sentences stripped of their context and dropped into the outrage machine.

Then, almost immediately, Sandfall Interactive Expedition 33 got dragged into the blast radius. The same game that just swept The Game Awards. The same game people were calling a love letter to RPGs a few days earlier. Now suddenly, it too was being “cancelled” for AI use.

So let’s slow this down and talk about what actually happened.

What Swen Vincke actually said

Larian did not publish a manifesto. There was no surprise announcement blog post. This came from an interview where Vincke was asked about AI and machine learning in development.

His answer was clear, even if people don’t like it.

Larian uses AI tools internally to:

Explore ideas
Help structure presentations
Assist early concept exploration
Generate placeholder text during development

He also stated, explicitly, that:

No AI-generated content will ship in Divinity
All writing, acting, and final art is done by humans
The studio is hiring more artists and writers, not fewer

That last part matters, because it came before the AI discussion even started. Larian is expanding its creative teams and developing quests in parallel rather than cutting corners. The studio’s own words describe the creative process as something that cannot be accelerated.

🦊 Kiki: People heard “AI” and stopped listening right before the part where humans still do the work.

🍪 Chip gently holds up a “placeholder” sign and waits for someone to read it.

Why the backlash still exploded

The problem is not that people misunderstood one sentence. It’s that AI has become a symbolic trigger, not a technical discussion.

For a certain part of the internet, AI is no longer a tool or a category. It’s a moral shortcut. Once the word appears, intent stops mattering. Implementation stops mattering. Outcomes stop mattering.

The conversation immediately jumps to fear of replacement, theft, and exploitation, even when the studio in question is publicly hiring more creatives and committing to human-made final content.

That fear is understandable. The creative job market is brutal right now. People are anxious, and anxiety looks for villains.

But that still doesn’t excuse ignoring what was actually said.

Enter Expedition 33

This is where the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore.

Expedition 33:

Used modern tooling, including some AI-assisted processes
Was built by a small team with heavy outsourcing
Relied on Unreal Engine 5 assets and pipelines
Cost under $10 million
Won nine Game Awards
Was praised almost universally on launch

No one cared. No one asked which tools were used. No one demanded purity tests.

Only after AI became the villain of the week did people retroactively decide Expedition 33 needed to be “reconsidered.”

🦊 Kiki: If AI was a dealbreaker, the trophies would’ve been controversial too.

🍪 Chip stares at the award shelf, confused.

The part nobody wants to say out loud

If Expedition 33 used AI in its pipeline and still delivered one of the most beloved games of the year, then the outrage is not about results.

It’s about symbolism and timing.

Players do not evaluate games based on development workflows. They evaluate them based on whether the game is good. Whether it works. Whether it respects their time and money.

That doesn’t mean job displacement isn’t real. It is. That doesn’t mean generative AI is ethically clean. It isn’t. That doesn’t mean regulation shouldn’t exist. It should.

But pretending every use of AI is the same, regardless of context, intent, or outcome, is not ethics. It’s performance.

Why this discourse keeps collapsing

The entire argument keeps mixing three different things into one panic bucket:

Automation tools
Generative AI for exploration and iteration
AI-generated final content

Larian is talking about the first two. Critics are reacting as if it’s the third.

That gap is why the discussion feels hysterical instead of productive.

🦊 Kiki: You can’t have an ethics debate if you refuse to define what you’re actually mad about.

🍪 Chip quietly closes a comment thread before it gets worse.

Where this actually leaves the industry

AI is not going away. That’s already decided.

The real choice studios face now is whether they:

Use AI quietly and pretend they don’t
Or talk about it openly and get punished for honesty

Right now, transparency is treated as guilt. Silence is rewarded. That’s not a healthy incentive structure for an industry that already struggles with trust.

Larian didn’t do anything radical. It just said the quiet part out loud.

And Expedition 33 accidentally proved the other half of the problem. Players will celebrate the outcome, then panic about the tools after the fact.