It's easy for us, sitting in our chairs of critique and our long, weary experience with the live service wringer, to decry the model as something inherently toxic for the industry. And yet we participate in a society—I mean, er—still play them. And while monetisation's gone far off the reservation in recent years, leaving us craving good singleplayer, one-and-done games, it's hard to forget that there was a time where live service really seemed like the future.

A person who bought into that glimmering well of potential was Chris Wilson, co-creator of Path of Exile, who left Grinding Gear Games in 2023 and has started a new studio since then. He's also, as many seasoned developers have done, begun a YouTube channel where he shares his thoughts (thanks, GamesRadar+).

In a recent Q&A, Wilson spoke on his changing opinions about game development. One such ideological shift? "10 years ago, I felt that live service was entirely upside, in all cases.

"It often meant that a game could be free, it meant that a game had variable monetisation, so people who didn't want to spend money didn't need to spend very much money … it meant that because a game was getting constant updates, there was always more to the game."

Seems like a win-win for everyone involved on paper, though 10 years in the live service wringer and we're all certain that's not the truth. Wilson says that, naturally, "there are also some drawbacks related to a game constantly needing to change to keep up with stuff and the relationship that community feedback has on the way that a game changes".

For instance, "a situation where you have to make certain changes, even if you do not believe that it's the right thing for the game because otherwise, your release will get boycotted, or you'll get review bombed … games that do not have any changes because they're just finished and complete often don't have these pressures because the players aren't going to be getting any patches".

Wilson makes a point that this isn't him dunking on live service games, particularly given that he was the creator of one of the most successful ones—after all, taking from Diablo's plate is no small feat: "I'm not arguing that one is necessarily better than the other."

However, he's "come to realise this is a far more nuanced field than I thought it was 10 years ago, where I just basically thought live service games were the future and I would've scoffed at something like Baldur's Gate 3 … There are so many different ways to monetise a game, every one of them has drawbacks."

I'm about to split hairs on poor Wilson, here—but Baldur's Gate 3 is an interesting game to cite, because it did sort of blend the two for a time. Not that I'd suggest Larian's masterwork is a live service game, but it went through an extensive early access period with suggestions from the community, and eight significant patches with new features. Technically-speaking, that's around a year and a half of continued support.

But it is absolutely a game that's done, finished, polished to a sheen—and personally-speaking, I do like it when videogames start and finish, as well as an appealing dopamine-hit grind. It's past time the pendulum swung the other way, especially given the mass graveyard of live service games plaguing the industry at the moment.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Surprise, surprise. Our quizzes on the RPG that swept awards shows all through 2023 (and even into 2024) continue to be some of our most popular. Baldur's Gate 3 really left an impression on everyone, and even after finishing up our quiz on the final act, I'm already thinking about how I'll revisit the series with more trivia.

So until the brainworm inspires me again, I'm collecting all of our BG3-related quizzes in a single hub so you can take them as one big final on Faerûn.

I don't have any interesting loot rewards to give out for good grades, but I promise that anyone who does well gains instant approval with the entire party—except for Astarion. He's never amicable.

Brave the Baldur's Gate 3 quiz gauntlet

Test your knowledge on Baldur's Gate 3 books

Lightning round: Can you identify these Baldur's Gate 3 books?

I dug through every rotten basket and chest of drawers in the realm, stealing books from the rich and poor to expand my own collection. Even if you did the same I'm not sure you'll recall all five of these, but you'll at least get a good chuckle out of them.

Sort Baldur's Gate 3 classes by popularity

Lightning round: Put the classes in order by popularity

Baldur's Gate 3 has 12 base classes to choose from, but according to Larian's official 1st anniversary stats, we have a few clear favorites. Based on those official 1-year rankings, can you put all 12 classes in order by their popularity? You've got four minutes to complete three sets of four. Good Luck.

Vote in our Baldur's Gate 3 romance poll

Now kiss and tell, who was your favorite romance option?

I'll go first: Karlach is my wife now and forever, but I did kiss the Emperor in a heated moment of weakness. I save scummed like a coward when Karlach caught me. Now you tell me: which companion had your favorite romance in Baldur's Gate 3? I'm letting you only select two, so choose wisely.

And finally, who was your favorite non-companion tryst?

You already know I voted for The Emperor, no shame here. Tell us who you couldn't resist, but just pick one this time.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a phenomenal game—noteworthy not just for being a very good RPG, but also several brilliant performances and a heck of a lot of mocapping. Having spoken to some of its cast myself in the past, I can speak to the thought and weight they've put behind their work.

As can Alix Wilton Regan, voice of the female inquisitor in Dragon Age: Inquisition, who recently spoke with GamesRadar+ at the BAFTA game awards: "Video game acting is, at times, hard, demanding, and also challenging, and it's also joyous, and it's filled with, literally, blood and sweat and tears, especially if you're on the [performance capture] stage."

That can be hard for certain videogame companies (cough cough, Amazon Games) to remember, especially during the industry's current obsession with AI, which could cut out all sorts of creative "middlemen" such as writers, actors, artists, and QA testers. Heck, let's get rid of developers while we're at it—you get the picture.

"Video game actors, they deserve their flowers, because we help pull the audience in to elevate the writing, the animation, the direction, the tone," Regan continues. "I give a massive shout-out here to the Baldur's Gate 3 crew, because they were the ones who made all the other video game actors sit up and take note and realize, 'Yeah, actually, we are loved, our work does have value, and we too deserve to stand up and be counted.'

"I've literally said this to, like, Jennifer English's face, or Neil Newbon. I've been up to Ben Starr, and I'm like, 'You changed the game.'"

The unwarranted disrespect towards videogame actors isn't anything new, mind. Take this quote—fittingly, from BG3 star Neil Newbon himself—speaking to Entertainment Weekly last year: "I had conversations about, 'That's going to look really good when we get the real actors in.' I was like, 'What do you mean real actors?' I'm a real actor. I went to the f*cking Edinburgh Festival, man!"

And while I don't think actors aren't appreciated by people who are into videogames—if you've played enough, you almost certainly have favourites—I will admit, it's nice to see Baldur's Gate 3 doing well enough for Neil Newbon to snap up an award while competing in the same category as movie star Idris Elba.

It has been almost three years⁠—33 months, to be exact⁠—since the release of Baldur's Gate 3, and in that time, we could not stop playing it on Steam Deck. It has only fallen out of the platform's top five most-played list in four of those 33 months. Even then, Larian's masterpiece has never left the top ten.

Valve keeps a running list of the most-played games on Steam Deck that's available to the public, and you can sort by weekly, monthly, and yearly winners, with the list updating each week/month/year. After seeing Gaming on Linux's coverage of April 2026's most-played, I decided to go back into the archives, with occasional gaps filled by Steam Deck HQ and Steam Deck Gaming on YouTube.

There's a lot of takeaways to be had from the data⁠—I've got to dust off my gunbelt and spurs and put this stuff into an Excel spreadsheet or Gdocs equivalent⁠—but something that really surprised me is how doggedly Baldur's Gate 3 has stayed near the top. Some stats that wowed me:

• BG3 held the number one most-played spot for six straight months after launch, a record only surpassed by Balatro at 7 months⁠—at least going back to August, 2023. I'd like to see how Vampire Survivors did in 2022. The runner-up? Stardew Valley with four nonconsecutive months at #1.
• BG3 stayed in the top five for exactly two years straight after launch, only dipping to number six for the first time last August.
• The lowest BG3 dropped was number eight last October, but it's had a rebound, staying in the top five most-played games so far this year.

This all fascinates me, because Deck has never really been the best way to play Baldur's Gate 3: It's not on our best Steam Deck Games list, and it tends to punish the handheld's poor little APU while sucking up every last drop of battery. I remember getting around 20-30fps on Deck around launch, a compromise I lived with because I was traveling for work at the time.

But BG3 controls well on a gamepad, and I've yet to see how its native Linux port improved things. Being a turn-based game as well, poor framerate isn't as detrimental to the experience as it would be in a fast-paced action game.

It speaks to the all-encompassing popularity of Baldur's Gate 3 that people just gotta have it, even on the go, and nearly three years on. I've arranged links to the most-played games by month lists since BG3's release below, with Baldur's Gate 3's placement highlighted. Valve doesn't make historical data like this readily available, so I relied on Gaming on Linux, Steam Deck HQ, and Steam Deck Gaming.

2023 (Overall: unordered top 12)

• August: #1
• September: #1
• October: #1
• November: #1
• December: #1

2024 (Overall: #4)

• January: #1
• February: #2
• March: #4
• April: #4
• May: #5
• June: #5
• July: #4
• August: #3
• September: #2
• October: #2
• November: #4
• December: #5

2025 (Overall: #4)

• January: #3
• February: #3
• March: #3
• April: #3
• May: #2
• June: #4
• July: #4
• August: #6
• September: #7
• October: #8
• November: #7
• December: #4

2026 (Avg. #4 so far [surprise])

• January: #3
• February: #4
• March: #5
• April: #4

Larian has some big aspirations for its next RPG, Divinity, which it hopes will surpass even the mighty Baldur's Gate 3. It will be "even larger" than BG3, with "deeper sequences of consequence," more interesting fail states, better character customization, and even more natural and complex NPC relationships. Given how good Baldur's Gate 3 was in all those regards, that's aiming very high indeed.

Larian publishing director Michael Douse is aiming even higher than that, though. He wants the launch of Divinity, when it happens, to utterly destroy Steam.

A little background to begin: Baldur's Gate 3 launched into early access in October 2020 and was an immediate hit—not without issues, but it laid a very strong foundation for the full game, and Larian's subsequent high-visibility development over the next few years built anticipation for the full release even higher. It reached the point that, when Baldur's Gate 3 hit 1.0, Steam felt the impact. It trembled; it shuddered; it wobbled; it didn't go down, but boy, it was shook.

Larian boss Swen Vincke actually apologized for the trouble—tongue in cheek, perhaps, but a nice gesture nonetheless.

You know who's not sorry? Douse. The only regret he has, apparently, is that Baldur's Gate 3 didn't leave a smouldering crater where Steam used to be, and by god, next time he wants to make sure.

"Walked past this in the office. Forgot this happened," Douse wrote on X, alongside an image of a report about Steam's troubles when BG3 hit early access. "At the time we even fact checked it with Valve.

"I hope we absolutely demolish it next time. You remember so little when doing so much."

Well! Them's fightin' words, although I'm obligated to say (just in case it needs to be said) that I don't think Douse is seriously wishing harm on Steam, just that he hopes Divinity will be a successful release. But if it does somehow "demolish" Steam? Yeah, that'll be a pretty funny bonus.

For those who haven't been following along with Divinity, I should also clarify that this demolition train isn't likely to be pulling into the station anytime soon. Divinity was announced with a hell of a trailer at the end of 2025, and like Baldur's Gate 3 the plan is to go with an early access release, but so far there's no sign of when that will be: BG3 went from initial reveal to early access launch in 16 months, so 2027 feels like a pretty decent maybe, but at this point it's anyone's guess.

(Here's that Divinity reveal trailer if you haven't seen it. Stick with it—trust me, it goes places.)

Update: Whoops. Sorry.

Prolific tweeter and take-haver Michael Douse, Larian's publishing director, has delved into the Crimson Desert discourse. The man knows his RPGs (I know, I know, Pearl Abyss says it isn't an RPG), so he offers an interesting and informed perspective. I just think he's dead wrong this time.

"Crimson Desert is fun to play, but it is such a cynical amalgamation of borrowed mechanics," he says in the original tweet. "It is Now That's What I Call Gaming plucked off a gas station shelf, for better & worse. Expect a lot more of this in premium & F2P. There is less risk in it."

In follow-up tweets, he acknowledges that this is very much par for the course when it comes to open-world games, adding, "At least it's adding spice to the stew, rather than removing it."

Responding to Douse, Ivory Moose asks him to "name a better videogame that's more immersive or fun to play recently," to which Douse replies, "By no means is it bad, it's fun."

This is a take I've seen quite a lot recently: that it's fun, but it's basically just a cynical hodgepodge of mechanics borrowed from other games. I get it—but it still strikes me as an unfair assessment of both Crimson Desert and other games that take advantage of popular mechanics and systems.

Videogame development is over 50 years old, and it's rare to see something entirely unique. Baldur's Gate 3 is one of the best games ever made, but there's almost nothing truly new in Larian's greatest RPG.

BG3 is full of nods to older CRPGs, the combat system is drawn from Larian's previous games and D&D, and the smartest move the studio made was borrowing mechanics and concepts from tabletop roleplaying. All these things come together to create a singular RPG, but the ingredients are not unique.

And you'd look like a nutter if you called Baldur's Gate 3 cynical.

Granted, I do think there's a valid argument that Crimson Desert is more cynical than BG3, but that doesn't make it inherently cynical. All the sky island stuff feels like a last-minute addition inspired by Tears of the Kingdom, and it doesn't remotely fit Crimson Desert—but aside from that, there's very little in this open-world romp that seems to exclusively exist because of trend-chasing.

Pearl Abyss's approach makes a lot more sense when you remember that this is an MMO studio, and that was the genesis of Crimson Desert.

This is a singleplayer game built on the philosophy of MMO design. Indeed, many of the mechanics that contribute to the game's hodgepodge feel are directly lifted from Black Desert, Pearl Abyss's previous game. The economic and trade goods system, for instance, is something I had a great deal of fun with in the MMO, where I turned into a potato baron. Is it cynical to take a popular system from your previous game and apply it to your new one? Or is that just common sense?

I'd be really surprised to see other games doing something similar outside of the MMO space, despite Douse's assertion that we should expect it.

Crimson Desert is a rare game—one that was given the opportunity to flourish, full of dense systems as far as the eye can see. This is not normal! The time and investment required for a game like this is vast, and most publishers are risk averse, while independent studios are constantly learning that reining in the scope of their projects is the smartest thing they can do.

Indeed, I think one of the main reasons Crimson Desert is resonating with so many people is due to its big swings and the freedom it was given to take big risks. It is a messy and sometimes incomprehensible game, but its scope and ambition are unusual, and it's been a treat to explore the world of Pywel and see what the game's going to throw at me next.

Cynical games aren't fun. I sincerely believe that most gamers are savvy enough to recognise when a game's been designed just to check some boxes—this is an era obsessed with authenticity. So the only cynicism I'm detecting is coming from the folk who have tarred Crimson Desert with this brush.

Two and half years since Baldur's Gate 3 released, and players are still finding new ways to bend & break Larian's preposterously flexible RPG. Indeed, far from running out of bizarre exploits to discover, the glitches and hacks are if anything becoming weird and more impressive.

Take this wild exploit discovered by BG3 YouTuber ProxyGateTactician, which essentially allows players to "Time Travel" back through the RPG. Oh, and it reveals four naked Gales who are hanging around your camp the whole time, which isn't strictly related to the glitch, but who wouldn't want to hear about that?

While ProxyGateTactician discovered the exploit, the job of explaining how it works was left to fellow YouTuber SlimX. Normally, once you've completed an Act in Baldur's Gate 3, you move on to the next area never to return. But SlimX explains that by performing some convoluted Resting shenanigans during the opening of Act 3, you can prevent the cutscene in which you're attacked by the Gith from activating, which re-enables the use of waypoints in Act two.

If you return to the Shadow Cursed Lands, however, you'll find a very different scenario compared to how you left it. Last Light Inn, for example, is full of aggressive shadow creepers that will start battering you the moment you arrive, while other characters are attacking random enemies and, in some instances, even their own allies.

The reason this happens is complicated. But basically, moving to a new Act in Baldur's Gate 3 causes the game to delete the level cache file for the previous area, which contains all the world state data for that area. If you then return to that area, the game reverts to what is essentially factory default setting for it (which is not the same as the play-state when you arrive at that act in the first instance). As a result, NPCs may be scattered around in weird locations, and characters who should be invisible or inactive might be extremely visible and very much active.

Which brings us to Gales au naturel. Again, the reason there are so many Gales hanging out while, er, hanging out is convoluted. But basically, there are various plot and romance scenes in Baldur's Gate 3 that necessitate multiple versions of Gale. Some of these are doppelgangers, while others are spectral version of him.

These multiGales are always present, but they are invisible and inactive in the game world unless you meet the specific criteria that requires them. Yet the Time Travel glitch makes them all reappear, clustered together in your camp like emperor penguins huddling for warmth. There's also a fifth naked man among them, though he is technically not a Gale. Why is he bunched up with the nude Gales? Who knows. Maybe he thought it was a game.

Once you've backtracked to Act two, you can also use a separate glitch that SlimX details to travel back to Act one, which is similarly discombobulated as the game frantically resets the table to accommodate your unexpected return.

Why would you want to do this? Well, aside from the obvious answer of four naked Gales, you can also farm XP from these areas by fighting enemies who have reappeared and respawned. Whether or not you can actually take this forward into Act three isn't clear, given that travelling backward involves skipping some major story events. But even if you can't do it right now, I'm sure someone will discover a glitch than ensures you can soon enough.

Astarion from Baldur's Gate 3 is certainly up there in the hall of fame of killer RPG companions—not just because he's literally a killer as a vampire, but because he's a nuanced, complicated character performed by a very talented actor. It's no shock that Neil Newbon, who played him in Larian's finest, received awards for his work.

But he's not really interested in retreading the same ground. That's per a recent interview with FRVR, where the actor explained his reasoning while discussing David Bowie: "I think he understood that extreme repetition breeds stagnation as an artist … I always liked that about him as an artist, that he was constantly trying out new things."

As a matter of fact, it's Bowie's influence on Newbon that's encouraged him to mix things up: "I've definitely avoided a few roles recently not because they were bad projects or anything, just because they, for me, the character—they kinda want the Astarion thing.

"It was just like, 'Well, I don't really want to do that again. It's too close to the character I've already done, I don't think I could offer anything necessarily that's interesting to this particular character'." In the specifics, it's more about the role itself than the actual timbre of his voice, though: "That’s a different thing, I’m talking about when people say: 'This character’s just like Astarion!'"

This is actually something Newbon's expressed before, speaking in a separate interview last year with YouTuber Luality. Back then, he said that "I'd love to play Astarion again, but I wouldn't necessarily enjoy playing an Astarion-like character."

It all makes sense—after all, Newbon really seems like he adores the craft, and I cannot imagine a worse torture than being stuck in the same type-cast venn diagram of flamboyant and tragic for the rest of your acting career. Torture for him, mind—dulcet tones for us, but I'm certainly glad he's able to stretch his legs. For instance, as a religious space insect in Starfinder: Afterlight.

Back in February, Larian rolled out a small update for Baldur's Gate 3 that aimed to fix a few crashes, technical issues, and in particular, corrupted saves. And it worked! Except, well, it apparently also broke a few things along the way. So you know what that means: A new hotfix to fix the old hotfix.

"Our last small update, which aimed to resolve some lingering corrupted savegames, seemingly also introduced performance issues that triggered crashes for some players," Larian explained. "A hotfix is now rolling out to resolve these. Thank you for your patience!"

It is indeed a very small patch, coming in at under 100MB in size, although some players on Steam are finding the process of actually installing the patch to be rather drawn out.

Overall, though, the reaction to the update seems quite positive, at least to the extent that people in the comments are complaining about other things, like long-standing unrelated issues with the game and why doesn't Divinity have a release date yet? The usual thing, really.

The latest Baldur's Gate 3 patch—hotfix 36, for those keeping score—is live now. As for what it actually does, here's the full lowdown:

• Fixed a framerate drop and eventual crash when loading a savegame.
• Fixed several crashes.
• Fixed a bug on Xbox where tooltips in the Inventory and Trade windows wouldn't display correctly.
• Fixed a bug on Mac preventing you from progressing past Character Creation after starting a character introduction cinematic on Honour Mode.

If the reams of art and lovelorn fanfiction are anything to go by, Baldur's Gate 3's romance system was one of its most successful parts. Keep, Larian, your remarkably complex imsim-y RPG gameplay; we just want to kiss vampires.

But did you know that, in the fantasies of BG3's writers, it would have been possible for others to kiss vampires*? In an interview in the most recent edition of Edge magazine, Lae'zel's writer Kevin VanOrd admitted that the BG3 romance system we got is not, perhaps, the BG3 romance system of his dreams.

"We had a lot of great ideas that never made it into the game because of time constraints", said VanOrd. For instance, what if the romance system had a kind of platonic equivalent? "I would love to have a friendship system in addition to a romance system, where you get special events like dates."

I absolutely would have found Gale more tolerable if he had tried to get me to join his five-a-side football club instead of relentlessly trying to bone me.

Also? "I think it would have been really cool for characters to have romances with each other, outside of the player," said VanOrd. I've never agreed with anything harder. One of my favourite parts of Mass Effect 3—a pretty flawed game, all told—was that characters like Tali and Garrus would kick off their own little romance plotlines if you weren't buttering up either of them. It was cool! It made the world feel more alive, and it made my character feel less like the centre of the entire universe.

But make no mistake, VanOrd isn't glum about how BG3's romance system turned out in the end. It's just that, like possibly ever game dev who ever lived, he would have done more given more time.

He's still rather chuffed at how much the game's characters continue to set the internet on fire and, yes, he has seen your AO3 smut: "Something that makes me happy is getting to see all the wonderful artwork—safe for work and not safe for work—with which players interpret the characters."

*Yes, I know Lae'zel and Astarion hook up if you reject them. Please do not send me emails about this.

Is there any greater love than that between a weird fascist space alien and the victim of a cult abduction? There is not. That's why Romeo and Juliet is probably about exactly that, and it's why gamers over the globe can't get enough of Shar'zel. Lae'zart. Lart.

They love it when Shadowheart and Lae'zel in Baldur's Gate 3 kiss, is what I mean, which is a thing that can happen if you choose one or the other as your player character and work real hard at it. It's a classic enemies-to-lovers thing, as Shadowheart gets over her hatred of Githyanki, Lae'zel gets over her hatred of everything, and each realises the other is a total worm-brained smokeshow. Happily ever after.

In a recent chat with Edge magazine, Lae'zel's writer Kevin VanOrd said that, actually, writing the pair's romantic arc wasn't as tough as it might initially sound. With both Shadowheart and Lae'zel working their way around to questioning the systems they were raised under, John Corcoran (Shadowheart's writer) and VanOrd realised "we were writing the same story from different directions, and so that allowed us to reframe their initial clash and inform their later conversations."

They had a whole bunch in common, in other words, which is a pretty decent basis for a relationship. Just, you know, once they'd both gotten over themselves a bit. That part could have taken longer, actually, as VanOrd remembers that his earlier versions of Lae'zel were even harder to handle.

"If you can believe it, she was more aggressive initially. But I realised that you wouldn’t want her around, that you wouldn’t want to engage with her," so we got the (slightly) more chilled version of the character we know today. Early access helped with that, as players were able to tell VanOrd that Lae'zel could be a bit much. "For me, the feedback mostly confirmed things I knew already. It gave me confidence to go in the direction I already wanted to go."

If you're not a fan of random violence and sadism—you know, a nerd—the words "Astarion disapproves" were probably burnt into your retinas like the afterimage of a nuclear blast when you finally rolled credits on Baldur's Gate 3. Your party members in that game always have a goddamn opinion on your decisions, and Larian communicated it in time-honoured fashion: little pop-ups like in Dragon Age or Knights of the Old Republic 2.

In the latest issue of Edge magazine (via GamesRadar), one of BG3's writers, Kevin VanOrd, reflected on its use of that system, and also copped to the fact that one of its key advantages is it skips, like, a whole bunch of writing.

"We can’t have every character reacting to every situation," said VanOrd, "otherwise we would be working on the game forever. So this is a way of showing how they feel without writing new dialogue."

It's also, kind of, a violation of that fundamental Larian design philosophy of letting players do whatever the hell they want—you're never going to get Astarion to approve of charity and kindness (at least early on) just like you'll never get Wyll to clap when you kick a child in the shins.

"Sometimes the answer is to just let the player break the game, but when it comes to party members, usually not," says VanOrd. He's right, of course: letting me cunningly stack boxes to sequence-break some quest or overcome an obstacle makes me feel like a genius. Letting me romance Wyll after massacring the Druid Grove would feel like a bizarre cop-out.

It's a system with issues, though. In real life, love is not really a matter of filling someone's approval meter until they fall for you; it's weird and illogical and often very embarrassing for everyone involved. Reducing the whole process to accruing enough niceness points risks making it all feel a little hollow.

That's why Larian still busts out the D20 at critical moments: "If a character trusts you enough, they’ll go along with whatever you say, but if you need to convince them, that’s when it becomes a dice roll." It keeps things at least a little random (and, hey, those dice rolls do get easier if a character really likes you).

I don't envy VanOrd or any writer for a big and complex RPG. Fitting in a natural-feeling romance in a game that allows so much player freedom has gotta be tough. "Sometimes I yearn for linear storytelling," says VanOrd. Yeah, I bet!

Baldur's Gate 3—a videogame about dressing up hot elves—had fans scratching their heads earlier today when it suddenly pulled down north of 100 MB with no explanation whatsoever. What could it be? What could it mean? What's Larian up to now?

Valid questions, and they all have quite underwhelming answers if you're of a "Why can't it be Christmas every day?" sort of spirit (as am I, comrade, as am I). No, the studio isn't preparing the ground for a surprise patch 9, nor is it gearing up for a shock DLC or some kind of Divinity tie-in thing. Or at least, if it is doing any of that, it's sure as hell not telling anyone about it.

It's just, you know, doing patch stuff: fixing crashes and ironing out glitches. Well. Fine.

The good news, though, is that some of those fixes will be quite meaningful if you fell victim to the bugs they squash. After teasing "Bet you thought you’d seen the last of these," on the Larian Discord, the studio wrote that "As it turns out, a few crashes and technical issues were still knocking about, so if you were getting stuck while loading saves, or trying to progress from Act 2 into Act 3, your corrupted saves should now be fixed!" That's as much as we're getting right now, in terms of patch notes.

That last one is especially heartbreaking for honour mode players. I took a crack at BG3's ironman difficulty a few times last year, and it was bad enough when I got vaporised by Zhentarim six hours into Act 1. Getting all the way to Act 3 only to find you can't load your save? I'd lose my mind, and it's not too hard to find examples of such players asking for help with corrupted saves in Act 3.

So hey, good news: those saves should work now. In fact, at least some players already report they do. "This update fixed my Honor Mode save, now opens again. BLESS YOU LARIAN" wrote a user named bladesmantis on Reddit. "My run that crashed at 75% on every load is now playable after updating. Blessed" writes another user, stahnke_as_pho. A lot of blessing going on. Larian's saving throws must be through the roof.

Larian recently streamed Divinity: Original Sin 2, the studio's last RPG in the Divinity series before it made Baldur's Gate 3. During the stream, communications developer Aoife Wilson brought up the topic of hints in D:OS2 about what Larian was working on next.

"Originally the reference to BG3 was very explicit," Larian CEO Swen Vincke explained while plotting out his next move in the famously flammable oil fields of the Blackpits area. "We did it very last-minute because we actually, in the summer when D:OS2 shipped, we wrote the first draft of BG3 because we had a contract with Wizards of the Coast and we needed to do it then. It was very bad."

The hints ended up quite opaque. In the epilogue of D:OS2, your party member Fane can mention that octopuses are secretly plotting, and the necromancer Tarquin talks about "a mysterious race from another world—beings that feed on minds." Both are references to mind flayers, but not ones you'd notice unless you were looking for them. In retrospect, the jars of mind maggots scattered around D:OS2 also seem like nods to the tadpoles of BG3.

Tarquin the necromancer also brings up "Gustavchen", the written language of the beings from another world. In development, BG3 was called Project Gustav after the name of Vincke's dog, which is why the default name for the player-character is "Tav".

The references go both ways. In BG3, there are a couple of nods to Tarquin's worldhopping adventure. A letter from the cleric Lenore De Hurst to the wizard Lorroakan discusses a man named "something with a T and Q... Tuqueen?" who uses strange magic, and a note in the House of Grief also describes him, going by the name "Marco Creenn", which is an anagram of necromancer. After that the trail goes dry, and perhaps he returned home to Rivellon. We'll see if he shows up in Divinity.

Baldur's Gate 3 is too big for Hasbro to leave alone. We already knew that, despite Larian moving onto greener pastures, Wizards of the Coast and its owner wanted to do a sequel, and we'll almost certainly see a sequel. But first we're getting a TV show, and I can't help but think that's a big mistake.

Canon is a weird concept for D&D because it's an entirely player-driven experience. In the Forgotten Realms there are some big, immutable events, like the Time of Troubles, when the gods temporarily became mortal, or the chaos caused by the Absolute, but within those events are countless stories authored by players, a million headcanons and narratives forged around the table.

Any direct sequels, then, should take that into account, respecting and reflecting the potential choices we made in its predecessor, allowing players to contort the world so it fits their previous personal adventure. This is impossible for a linear TV show.

I've enjoyed several playthroughs of BG3, but generally I consider my first run of a game like this to be my canon adventure. A half-drow bard led a group of heroes to defeat the absolute, sacrificing himself to save everyone by becoming a mindflayer. Everyone lived.

For you the story might be different. Maybe Gale is simply the name of the person who originally owned the bloody hand you keep in your inventory, rather than a problematic BFF. Maybe the destroyer of the Absolute previously helped slaughter defenceless tiefling refugees rather than rescuing them. BG3 isn't a singular story—it's thousands of them.

HBO ain't gonna use all these stories. It's going to pick one. A new canon that turns the stories we created over hundreds of hours into flights of fancy.

But who cares? Just as the choices you made don't undermine the ones I made, why shouldn't HBO be allowed to present its own canon? No, I can't trick my brain into believing that. HBO isn't just hosting a let's play or a tabletop adventure, it's going to tell a concrete story with our characters, and I feel really weird about that. I'm protective of them.

When I visited Larian just as it was about to have a massive conference to determine the direction of its next game, lead writer Adam Smith told me that he did feel a bit strange about losing control over the characters he and his colleagues created. He spent years crafting them, but now he had to let them go, let Hasbro do whatever it wanted with them. That's how I feel now. We're all BG3's authors, and now we've got to let some TV writers tell us what actually happened.

Look, it could be amazing. The last D&D film was an absolute delight, and the age of every videogame adaptation being a stinking pile of drek is long behind us. But I can't help but feel like my favourite RPG is being utterly wasted on this unsuitable endeavour. Save it for BG4, where we can write our own stories again.

It just reeks of cynicism. From what little we admittedly know, the show is going to follow a new party of adventurers, but familiar faces from BG3 will be making an appearance, lending a hand or getting in the way. They won't be the main characters. This won't be their story. So what's the point? Leave them alone to enjoy retirement. But of course that can't happen, because this isn't just a D&D show (which I would have absolutely preferred). BG3's immense popularity is the driving force behind this project, so our beloved party must be sacrificed on the altar of cynical tie-ins.

Since the announcement yesterday, I've wondered if I'm being a bit silly. A 40-year-old man who's getting all in a tizzy about someone writing a story based on characters I played in a videogame. Don't I have better things to worry about? But BG3 matters a great deal to me. And I know it matters just as much to many of you. Larian made something spectacular, and then gave it to us. These characters and stories mean something. I don't invest this much time in anything that doesn't.

It's a testament to what Larian achieved. I don't, for instance, care what Amazon does to pre-existing Fallout characters or lore. That's largely down to Fallout being more of a messy sandbox, with protagonists that never end up feeling like fully-formed characters and companions we have less control over.

Despite this, Amazon made the smart move to make a show that only overlaps a little with the games, set during a period we haven't played through. It managed to tell a story that never undermined our stories. That's how you make a TV show out of a non-linear game.

Larian head honcho Swen Vinke says Craig Mazin (of Chernobyl and The Last of Us fame) has already reached out and a studio visit may be on the cards. So at least Larian will be somewhat involved. And there's no denying that Mazin is very talented: Chernobyl is one of the most harrowing things I've ever seen on TV, and The Last of Us is a top-tier adaptation… of a linear game.

Vinke also defends the direct sequel approach by saying, "The endings of BG3 were created so they could serve as narrative soil for new adventures." Which is fair, but I'm pretty sure Larian thought those new adventures would be videogames and tabletop romps, where players once again get to craft their own stories.

I'm with Larian's publishing lead, Michael Douse, here. He's also been tweeting about the show, and while he certainly wasn't bad mouthing it, he did say, "I genuinely don't think anyone can trump our writers." I really don't want to see someone else's take on my demonic wife Karlach.

Baldur's Gate 3 is just too much a product of Larian's history and style for me to imagine anyone else taking the reins, right down to the default protagonist name being inspired by Swen Vincke's beloved dog, who passed away during development. Gustav the dog also appears in the game, and it was the codename for BG3 prior to announcement. Hasbro might own the game, but this is Larian's baby, and we are its adoptive parents. Yes I'm getting extremely sentimental.

So yeah, I'm kinda dreading this. But of course I'm going to watch it.

HBO is cooking up a Baldur's Gate TV show helmed by Chernobyl and The Last of Us (the show) creator Craig Mazin, and boy you better believe that people have feelings about that. With Larian decisively moved on from Dungeons & Dragons and the new series likely featuring a whole new adventuring party anyway, can it rightly be called a Baldur's Gate game? And if it can, can HBO and Mazin be trusted to do it justice?

Well, depends who you ask. For instance, if you ask Larian CEO Swen Vincke, the future seems pretty bright, all things considered. In a post on X, Vincke said that "The endings of BG3 were created so they could serve as narrative soil for new adventures," so a series that builds on them makes perfect sense.

Even more promising, despite Larian having no official involvement with the series, Mazin and co are apparently in touch with the studio: "Craig did reach out to ask if he could come over to the studio to speak with us," wrote Vincke. "From the conversation we had, I think he truly is a big fan which gives me hope."

Hooray! Perhaps the Baldur's Gate show will be… good? Well, here's me dropping the other shoe: at least one Larian honcho is less keen. Publishing lead and serial tweeter Michael Douse reacted to news of the series thusly, "I've spent the last eight to 10 years of my life with the writers & creators of Baldur's Gate 3 and they're the most incredible storytellers & creators in the space… I genuinely don't think anyone can trump our writers."

To be clear, Douse isn't out here declaring the show is going to suck. Or at least, not directly. He certainly is retweeting quite a lot of people saying they won't watch the show (I don't believe that for a second) and reacting to news of the show with (one hopes) jokes about suicide. So, you know, not really an endorsement.

But amid threats to "crash out on main," Douse pitches himself as, well, maybe not a cautious optimist, but not a full-blown doomsayer either. "Don't abandon hope, but do expect the world. That's the job."

So where does that leave us? You do you, my friends, but personally the news that Mazin and his team are at least in touch with Larian gives me a little bit of optimism. I'm not quite in a space to start posting Gomer Pyle gifs over the show's announcement. And if it sucks? We'll always have the game.

Larian is currently offering a Divinity franchise sale on Steam, with markdowns of 75-90% off for each game. If you're grabbing all six Divinity games together, it'll only cost you $23 for 17 years and hundreds of hours of RPG from the studio that made Baldur's Gate 3.

Just don't grab the Divinity: Original Sin 2: Eternal Edition pack, also on Steam. For some reason, that's only been marked down 60%, or $10 more for only five of the series' six games⁠—the furtive Dragon Commander, so easily forgotten…

23 bucks feels like a steal for Original Sin 2 alone. Our 2017 game of the year remains a fresh, surprising RPG almost a full decade after launch. And don't believe the haters: Its magic/physical armor system is actually brilliant, and it's an incalculable loss for all mankind that Larian will not be revisiting it in the upcoming Divinity. That's just "Divinity" coming soon, nothing Divine, Beyond, 2, Dragon Commander, Original Sin, or Original Sin 2 about it.

As for how to tackle this bottomless brunch buffet of RPG, we have a full guide to the series and how we recommend approaching it. For the TL,DR: Go in more or less reverse order of release until you stop having fun, but skip or save Beyond Divinity for last: Only truly curious RPG freaks need apply. So that's:

1. Original Sin 2
2. Original Sin
3. Dragon Commander
4. Divinity 2
5. Divine Divinity
6. Beyond Divinity (if you want to hurt yourself)

The initial excitement around Divinity (the new game, not the series, Jesus Christ) turned to controversy shortly after its announcement, as more players found out about Larian's openness to using generative AI tools in the development process. Alongside an AMA about the game, the studio backed off from using any image or text generation tools, be that in the final product, concept art, or prototyping.

But it seems to have left the door open for other applications. The one the studio has spoken of most frequently is using automated processes to resize animation rigs for different sizes and shapes of 3D models, but now I'm confused if that's an example of generative AI, or of everything from machine learning to Clippy getting tagged with the designation now.

Regardless, there was no genAI in the first six Divinities because it hadn't been invented yet. The Divinity sale will continue until February 9, when the series will jump back to $157 in total price.

Larian's community-focused Channel From Hell normally hosts videos like livestreams and developer interviews. The latest upload is a bit different. Borrowing the chill beats aesthetic every videogame from World of Warcraft to Victoria 3 has riffed on, Larian presents Chill Demonic Beats To Long Rest To, half an hour of a relaxed version of Raphael's Final Act playing while Spud Gun Studios' animated versions of the origin PCs relax at camp.

Wyll plays fetch with Scratch while Karlach tries to get a drink out of a keg, Shadowheart meditates, Astarion paints, Gale studies, and Lae'zel plays hacky sack with a mind flayer's severed head. Just camp things! There are a ton of easter eggs hidden in the video too, like the sign pointing to Baldursgata, a real place in Iceland whose street sign was discovered by Baldur's Gate fans years ago.

If you remember the video Larian released to celebrate the official launch of mod tools, in which the Wizard of Mod unleashed chaos on the Forgotten Realms including a plague of giant rabbits and also human noses for githyanki, there are plenty of references to that here—including a giant rabbit that fetches Scratch. (BG3's best boy can also sometimes return with Barcus instead of his ball.)

The Wizard of Mod, with his eightball staff and traffic cone hat, pops up to turn Shadowheart into a tabaxi and make Karlach look like Let Me Solo Her (here's the Elden Ring and Dark Souls Gear mod, close enough). Gale practices his mage hand cantrip on stew ingredients including a boot, presumably a magical one, and then pulls a Glock. Astarion's paintings include a Karlach so saucy it's censored, Larian CEO Swen Vincke, and Handsome Astarion.

Bless them for still doing fun stuff like this—as if I needed motivation to get back to my honor mode playthrough. Meanwhile, Larian's next game Divinity looks like it'll be learning a few lessons from Baldur's Gate 3 and trying to improve on a few areas, with companions who feel more like a natural part of the world, and hand-crafted loot.

I played the first act of Baldur's Gate 3 a few times in early access, which is why I'm always slightly surprised on subsequent playthroughs that there aren't a bunch of mind-controlled anglers protecting the dying mind flayer you encounter near the start of the game. They were cut in the final release, along with a bunch of dialogue and scenes, much of which has now been restored by modder HyperspaceTowel.

"This mod brings over 100 conversations and more than 1000 lines of voiced dialogue back from the dead", says the description of Early Access Scenes Restored. It restores a lot of companion reactivity in particular, enabling extra responses to, er, what you see behind the barn door. It's mostly dialogue for Astarion, Shadowheart, Gale, and Lae'zel, since Karlach and Wyll had different voice actors in early access, though a smaller amount of their dialogue has been restored by splicing existing lines of audio.

HyperspaceTowel plans to continue work on this mod, restoring more scenes including the one with the thralls on the nautiloid from the tutorial—another thing I always forget was removed until I start a new game. I can see why you'd want the prologue to be shorter, given how much people complain about tutorials, but I do miss hearing the poor brainwashed suckers ramble about rats in the flour and bulls on the loose while dragons and imps battle around them.

Apparently one issue with this mod is that it can interfere with how Gale's beard looks, though that's fixed with a mod you should already have: Gale's beard fix, which prevents his chin from clipping right through his flavor-saver.

You can get Early Access Scenes Restored from Nexus Mods. It's recommended you install it before starting a new playthrough, since a lot of what it restores is right at the start of the game, and then don't uninstall it mid-playthrough since the new characters and camp events it adds will need to hang around.

Over the course of two years and 126(!) episodes, Astarion actor Neil Newbon has been streaming a co-op playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3 alongside his friend Tom de Ville, with occasional guests like Amelia Tyler and Devora Wilde. And yes, he did romance himself. The series has finally wrapped up now, and Newbon spent a chunk of the final episode summing up his feelings about a game he clearly enjoys playing as much as he enjoyed working on.

"Baldur's Gate 3, the game that just keeps on fucking giving," is how he sums it up. "It is one of my all-time favorite games," he goes on to say, "not because simply I'm biased because I'm in it, it actually is one of the best-crafted games I've ever, ever played. It's absolutely extraordinary and really wonderful."

And, of course, it's a deeply personal game for its creators. "Just goes to show to you folks," Newbon says, "fuck AI. This game could never be made by AI. It's too interesting, subtle, crazy, off-the-wall, pathos-filled—it's too human. There's no fucking way AI could make this."

Near the end of the episode Newbon lets the credits play, giving shout-outs to several of the individuals involved, and making sure we see the names of the huge number of people who helped create it. "I hope you don't mind that we probably will just let this roll," he says to his viewers, "because I think it's important to see all the people that went into making this amazing game. It will take a few minutes, but I urge you to watch credits."

"Neil wants to get to his credit," laughs Tom.

The two have already started their follow-up project, which is a let's play of Larian's previous RPG, Divinity: Original Sin 2. Place your bets on how long it takes one of them to ignite a surface and light the other one on fire, the definitive D:OS2 multiplayer experience.

Larian's next game, Divinity, is gonna have some big changes to the usual Original Sin formula—and it's thanks to Baldur's Gate 3, so sayeth a Larian lead in a recent Reddit AMA. Nick Pechenin, head of design at the studio, said that its take on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset informed a lot of how Divinity's shaping up.

"We went through our original ideas for DoS1 and DoS2," Pechenin writes, "Looked again at how they worked out in practice, picked up some inspirations from our BG3 EA and post-release journey, consulted the star charts to see what we need to do to stay competitive—and cooked a new action economy and character progression system."

As for what that action economy and character progression system looks like, I can only make guesses at this point. Which is fair, works in progress are, indeed, works in progress. It'll really depend on which direction Larian swings the needle—D&D's action economy has a heavy reliance on crowd control, given you only have one action per turn (alongside a bonus action and movement).

While DoS2 was also crowd-control heavy, you also had a bunch of action points to spend—which, via certain abilities, could be refreshed, allowing for some pretty drawn-out turns. While you started each turn with four, you could have six total, including some Action Points banked from your prior turn: So not having something to do wasn't all that punishing.

Contrast this to D&D 5e, where whiffing your one attack leaves you with your pants down unless you're built around having more. If I were to soothsay a bit, I reckon the sentence: "We hope that both fans of BG3 and fans of DoS2 will find the new system intuitive but deep" suggest a balance between the two. Maybe something like Pathfinder 2e's three-action system? A guy can dream.

In another reply, Pechenin re-affirms something I feel like everyone's felt playing DoS2. That being, the surfaces can sometimes get a bit much: "It is cool to have alternative versions of elemental surfaces that change how you have to play around them. We maybe went too far last time with giving every surface a cursed and a blessed variant. Few people immediately guessed the function of blessed oil for example.

"The duration of combat encounters is also on our mind. [The] Oilfield fight directly inspired the tech we showcased in BG3 that allows multiple simple enemies to move and attack at the same time, cutting down waiting by the player. We also try to avoid monsters crawling around veeery slooowly."

The biggest of Pechenin's reveals, though, is a veer away from randomised loot, inspired by D&D's magic item system. While Baldur's Gate 3 was far more madcap than the TTRPG, allowing you to equip an entire MMO character's worth of magic gubbins (rather than D&D's limit of three attuned magic items), it was still a far cry from randomised loot, given the stricter ruleset.

"The BG3 approach of handcrafting every magic item worked well, and it's something we've always wanted to do for DOS2," Pechenin explains. "Something we realized when working on randomized loot for DoS1 and DoS2 is that fully random loot is frequently confusing, so we added more and more rules and pre-made patterns to make it feel more intentional."

And yet, did this actually save time when compared to just hand-crafting things? Not really, no: "In the end randomization did not save us much time." Sometimes it's just easier to do it yourself.

It wouldn't be a Dungeons & Dragons-inspired RPG unless it featured character creation, and Larian's character creators have certainly improved over time. While Baldur's Gate 3 is easily the studio's best in terms of sheer fidelity, Divinity: Original Sin 2 had a bit more personality—cannibal elves, playable skeleton versions of each race, and so on. Larian said in a Reddit AMA Friday that the upcoming Divinity game should have the best character creation in the series.

"We are planning to have an even better one [than Baldur's Gate 3]! More colors, more options, more control," commented Alena Dubrovina, Divinity's art director in response to a question from Suspicious_Force_890. Redditors quickly retorted with all sorts of requests for sliders, body types, and customizable origin characters.

I understand their pain. I shudder to think about how much of my playtime in Baldur's Gate 3, which is several hundred hours to begin with, was spent in the character creator alone. Analysis paralysis is already a burden when trying to choose a class; throw dwarves, elves, gith, tattoos, piercings, body types, circumcision preference, and dozens of hairstyles into the mix, and suddenly making the ideal player character becomes the game's most difficult encounter. And it's the first one!

This was compounded in Baldur's Gate 3 since you also had to customize the figure that appeared in your character's dreams, though after my first playthrough I was content to just slam the random button on that one. Dreams are weird, after all.

Dubrovina's comment isn't much to go off of, but the note about "more control" does make me think we are in for sliders at the very least. I'm curious to know if we can expect the return of certain character creation features that had nothing to do with how my character looked—will Divinity, which in the past has boasted a classless system a la Fallout or the Elder Scrolls, retain its loose build presets like rogue, warrior, or the more exotic "Shadowblade?"

Will I still be able to choose an instrument for the musical motif that plays when I do a cool thing? That one did see a bit of a return in BG3's bardic instrument choice, so Mr. Market's bullish on that possibility. My favorite feature from Original Sin 2 was the tag system that let me be both a snobby intellectual and a snarling barbarian.

It's all speculation until we see the actual game, I suppose. As long as I can be a flesh-eating elf that learns the memories of my victims by eating their sweetbreads, I'll be happy.

I'm mourning a friend today, and what's more, my friend's memory is being slandered. Not only will Divinity not carry forward the unique armor system Larian crafted for Divinity: Original Sin 2, my coworkers keep bashing it. PCG guides writer Rory Norris called it "broken" in giant letters on our front page.

I forget what PCG news writer Morgan Park said to me exactly during our Friday meeting, but it was something like D:OS2's armor system sucks, I'm stupid for liking it, and I'm a stupid moron with an ugly face and a big butt, and my butt smells and I like to kiss my own butt.

There is nothing out there like D:OS2's armor system. It lends the game a combat rhythm that is completely unique among CRPGs, and I was thrilled at the prospect of Larian returning to it with fresh eyes and a Baldur's Gate 3's worth of design experience. The saving grace here is the possibility of something new and even better, but I can't let the moment pass without sticking up for my fav.

Far out, man

Crowd control⁠—stuns, knockdowns, anything that hampers an enemy or player instead of directly damaging them⁠—is a key part of RPG combat, but it's almost always based on a certain amount of random chance, like Dungeons & Dragons' D20 saving throws. It works well enough as a genre default, but D:OS2 is the only CRPG I've played that went back to the drawing board to replace this core assumption with something else entirely.

In D:OS2, every character and enemy has physical and magic armor bars over their health bars. The physical is reduced by weapon damage and abilities centered on those weapons, like the warrior skill tree. The magic armor protects against spell and elemental effects.

Once an armor bar is depleted, the corresponding attacks then affect the base health bar. The curve ball is that crowd control effects do not work until the relevant armor has been depleted, but once a character's armor is gone, those crowd control abilities have a 100% success rate. Take the warrior charge attack Battering Ram: When an enemy's physical armor is up, it's just a way to deal damage and reposition your character, but when that armor is gone, Battering Ram will knock over an enemy every time you use it.

This means that every character, even ones you don't usually associate with battlefield control like rogues and warriors, is an important vector for both damage and crowd control. You have to leave certain assumptions at the door when playing: There's no need for a traditional tank or healer, because enemies can just ignore your tank (especially with all the mobility powers like teleportation), and health just isn't as important as armor. The few armor restoration abilities in the game are part of skill trees with ample offensive options.

Every character has to pull triple duty as a tank, DPS, and controller, with build differences coming in the form of which weapons, armor, and skill trees a given character takes advantage of⁠—you don't want two archers squabbling over the best bows, for example. It all results in a highly aggressive form of turn based tactics where you're racing to strip enemy defenses and lock down priority targets before they can do the same to you.

Bigger and better

Original Sin 2's system has weaknesses, but no more than the genre-standard, random chance-based alternative. I've always felt that D:OS2's few missteps lie elsewhere, like its randomly generated, leveled loot or dearth of non-combat questing. One of Rory's main complaints that I do get regards party composition: You're incentivized to go all elemental or all physical, and the mixed-damage party from my first playthrough struggled in the endgame.

But even this, I'd argue, is less of a weakness and more of a difference. There's a ton of character build variety even within the elemental/physical silos, and D:OS2 is no more restrictive with what constitutes a well-built, viable character than any other RPG, particularly as you go lower in difficulty. On my last playthrough, I ran with an all-physical party consisting of a dual daggers rogue, two hand warrior, archer, and summoner.

When I return to the game for yet another cheeky replay, I was eyeing an elemental party⁠—I'm particularly excited by some builds I've seen for a melee-focused battlemage who pairs elemental staves with warrior abilities. It's a great system, but I'm more broken up by my colleagues' slander than Larian not revisiting it for Divinity. This is a studio I trust to come up with something equally inventive.

In its big Divinity AMA yesterday, Larian clarified its use of generative AI tools in development: No AI art or concept art, but the studio is leaving the door open for other applications like using machine learning⁠—and potentially generative AI, it's unclear where it draws the line in some of its communication⁠—to help clean up and resize motion captured animation.

One other use that was shot down definitively, however, is AI-generated text, placeholder or final. User AmihanTheStoic asked about AI text in the context of the no AI art promise. Specifically, how generated placeholder text helps development, and whether "good enough" AI placeholder text might make it to the final game, voiding Larian's promise to keep generated assets out of Divinity.

Comment from r/Games

"The stance applies to writing as well. We don't have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries or other writing in Divinity," said writing director Adam Smith. "To answer your second question, 'how does generated placeholder text benefit development over simple stub text'—it doesn't.

"We had a limited group experimenting with tools to generate text, but the results hit a 3/10 at best and those tools are for research purposes, not for use in Divinity. Even my worst first drafts⁠—and there are a LOT of them⁠—are at least a 4/10 (although Swen might disagree :p), and the amount of iteration required to get even individual lines to the quality we want is enormous. From the initial stub to the line we record and ship, there are a great many eyes and hands involved in getting a dialogue right."

That lines up with the AI-generated text I've seen out in the wild: Whether it's Grok, Claude, or ChatGPT, people can never seem to get the genAI stink off, a by turns smarmy and sycophantic tone that I find utterly repulsive. At a certain point, editing bad writing is just more work than starting from scratch.

I am curious now, though, whether Smith was intimating that company boss Swen Vincke is a gentler critic of his worst work, or even harsher. Regardless, we also learned from the AMA that Original Sin 2's broken flawless armor system won't be making a return in Divinity, as well as how the dev team is thinking about save scumming while designing the game.

While the gory trailer certainly turned heads, we still don't know much about Larian's upcoming Divinity game. Even the teases seem shrouded in mystery—design head Nick Pechenin responded to a Reddit AMA question yesterday with a comment that sounds like a reveal, but confirms nothing.

He wrote in the thread: "There was something that bothered me when I explored the starting areas of DOS1, DOS2 and BG3. It stares you right in the face if you think about it. In Divinity I can finally do the thing I wanted to do in every previous game." Given the comment he's responding to, this mystery feature is apparently the new mechanic Pechenin is "most proud of."

Commenters quickly piled on with speculation discussing what he's on about. The prevailing theory in that thread is swimming, which makes sense; both Original Sin games and Baldur's Gate 3 all funnel players onto a beach through their intros, and shores flanked by inaccessible water has sort of become the studio's signature the same way Bethesda seems fixated on starting each Elder Scrolls game in a prison.

For my money though, implementing swimming sounds like a lot of work for not much payoff. Sure, I yearn to travel the oceans, but throwing a new axis of movement into what I assume will be a top-down CRPG sounds like a nightmare. Maybe swimming here would just include treading the surface of the water, but then what makes it such a cool feature?

I think water as the common thread is interesting, though; maybe the new mechanic is fishing? I may be surrounded on all sides by the PC Gamer team's fishing minigame haters, but I love a game where I can cast spells and cast lines in equal measure. Sailing also comes to mind, but I'm trying not to get overexcited here.

This is where I beseech you, dear reader, to let me know what you think this mystery feature could be. What's missing from those opening acts?

We all save scummed in Baldur's Gate 3⁠—except, apparently, for my friend Jack and coworker Morgan Park. They both accidentally killed everyone at the Last Light Inn and just kept trucking. As part of Larian's big Divinity AMA on Reddit, the game's writing director, Adam Smith, revealed how the studio is factoring players' save scumming tendencies into its next game's design.

For a quick definition, I think "save scumming" is best understood as using a game's save/load feature for anything other than quitting the game and coming back later, or continuing from a game over⁠—no moral judgement here, mind you, just an observation of our tendencies. The incentive to save scum could be argued to be a design failure, or merely a natural function of games as wish fulfillment. We already have to live with our mistakes in real life, why do so in our fantasies?

Comment from r/Games

The big Baldur's Gate 3 example has to be quickloading every time you fail a skill check until the 20-sided dice finally lands your way. But for RPGs that are all about choice and consequence, this ever present temptation to never have to live with failure can adulterate some of a game's chew, removing stakes from the story and preventing you from seeing interesting plot developments from failure states.

"Are there any plans to try to make failing these dialogue/non-combat checks more interesting, a la Disco Elysium," asked user Nidies in the AMA, "to try to encourage players to accept 'bad' [random number generation]?"

"Our ambition is certainly to make failure more interesting," replied Smith. "There are already a couple of situations in the game where I think the most exciting⁠—and extensive⁠—outcome comes from 'failure', but you'll be the judge of how well we do."

Early in 2024, I corresponded with Baldur's Gate 3 lead systems designer Nick Pechenin about this topic for a story in PC Gamer's print magazine⁠—Pechinin is also working on Divinity, and answered questions elsewhere in the AMA. He was of the opinion that save scumming is a perfectly reasonable player behavior, and bristled against the tendency among some RPG fans to disparage it.

If a designer wants players to accept failure states, Pechenin argued, those failure states need to be interesting and worthwhile, which lines up with Smith's statement in the AMA. For an example of a game nailing this, Pechenin cited a long Crusader Kings 3 run that fell apart over a small miscalculation⁠—it was such an interesting and surprising development, he found it a fitting climax to the game.

Pechenin also pointed to quick rewind features like you see in racing games, Prince of Persia, or the more recent Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew as a way to better integrate the quicksave-quickload impulse into a game. That's far from a guarantee that Pechenin or anyone else at Larian will act on this admiration in Divinity, but a one turn mulligan button strikes me as a potentially strong and versatile addition to Larian's house style of combat.

In a similar vein, Pechenin seemed open to "static checks" as a way to avoid save scumming to redo dice rolls. Rather than augmenting a random chance with your investment in a skill, a static check simply requires a minimum investment to pass, and if you don't have enough points, too bad. Fallout: New Vegas is a notable RPG built on these sorts of skill checks, and this is even how Divinity: Original Sin 2 handled persuasion, though its non-combat options were far more limited than Baldur's Gate 3's.

"We had long internal discussions and even prototypes for making some of the checks [in BG3] more static," Pechenin revealed. "This is usually relevant to physical checks that thematically can be attempted again and again⁠—pushing a stuck door open for example.

"In the end we did not have enough relevant cases to introduce yet another system to this chonker of a game, so we went all in on the big shiny D20 and made sure that it feels as good as it can."

Elsewhere in the AMA, Larian further elaborated on its AI use in Divinity, committing to not using it in concept art, but retaining the option to use it elsewhere in development. The studio will also not be reprising Divinity: Original Sin 2's armor system (but I strongly disagree with Rory about it having been "broken"—it was good!). Also? No WASD controls for you.

Not that there was much doubt, but now it's confirmed, and it's good news for Larian fans. Borislav Slavov, the creator of the Baldur's Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 soundtracks, is composing the music for the studio's next game, Divinity.

"We wouldn't be able to stop him even if we wanted to," Larian boss Swen Vincke responded when asked about Borislav's return during today's AMA on Reddit. "He's been very busy composing and recording new material. It's pretty great."

It's not entirely a surprise: Slavov posted on X that "we are back" when Divinity was revealed at The Game Awards in December 2025. Still, it's nice to have official word from the top, and the interest in Slavov's return runs deep enough that the question was asked twice. Larian publishing director Michael Douse fielded the second one, writing, "Bobby never left. He's cooking."

(They call him Bobby, you see.)

Slavov began working with Larian on Divinity: Original Sin 2 after the unexpected death of Kirill Pokrovsky, the composer on every Divinity game through Original Sin, in 2015. Pokrovsky was well-known and loved among the Larian fan base, but as tough as his act was to follow, Slavov has done an admirable job of it, earning plaudits from fans and critics alike, not to mention a BAFTA award in 2024 for the Baldur's Gate 3 soundtrack.

Prior to his time at Larian, Slavov composed scores for numerous other games including Gothic 3, Crysis 2 and 3, Two Worlds 2, and Ryse: Son of Rome.

Larian's AMA was a big one: The studio also swore off the use of generative AI art during the development process (though it is still "trying things out across departments" related to generative AI), gave us a hard no on WASD controls in Divinity, and talked about why that Game Awards reveal trailer—the one with the pustules and vomit and the guy in the thing—is the way it is.

Remember that Divinity reveal trailer at The Game Awards? It was a banger, alright, from the puke-eating pigs to the orgy in front of the guys getting burned to death Wicker Man-style and then the big finish, where everyone dies horrifically—except the pig, which I thought was a nice touch. It is dark, to put it mildly, and doubly shocking in the moment because it came from Larian, the guys who gave us horny grinning bears (and voyeuristic squirrels) in Baldur's Gate 3. What a turn, right?

Well, not really: Once the moment had passed, we all recalled that the very first Baldur's Gate 3 announcement trailer was pretty grody too. Want to watch a guy barf out his own teeth?

In that light, the Divinity reveal trailer maybe isn't so shocking after all. And either way, it's not just about shock value: Speaking in today's AMA on Reddit, ostensibly but not really about Larian's use of AI in game development (which, by the way, it was now forsworn, in a limited sense at least), writing director Adam Smith said the real purposes of the trailer is to establish a baseline for what players can expect in a game world that many of them may not be familiar with.

"If you've seen our announcement trailer, you have an idea of how dark the world of Divinity is," Smith wrote. "We want to give players the opportunity to be the light in that darkness—an inspiration, a hero, a champion. We'll also let them leave the world even worse than they found it. We're pushing as far as we can on player agency."

Truthfully, the Divinity setting has never struck me as particularly dark as fantasy RPGs go, but that's doubtlessly in part because it's never made any sort of lasting impression at all. I like the games an awful lot, but primarily for their systems and environments rather than the stories they tell. I feel much the same way about The Elder Scrolls games so maybe it's a me thing, but either way I applaud efforts to make the setting more memorable, and given Larian's experience with Baldur's Gate 3, my hopes are high.

Baldur's Gate 3 is also likely a factor in Larian's desire to set the table so definitively. The Divinity setting predates BG3 by a couple decades and a half-dozen games, but it sasn't until the studio took on D&D that it became a household name among gamers, rather than a favorite of RPG nerds. That means a lot of Baldur's Gate 3 players will be coming into Larian's bigger work without any real idea of what to expect. Well, now they've got a little warmup, so to speak.

I left it to the end to avoid any unnecessary spoilers or gross-outs, but in case you haven't seen it, or want to see it again for some reason, here's that Divinity reveal trailer from The Game Awards. That dude sure takes a long time to die, eh? Glad the piggie made it out, though.

In Larian's big AMA for its next RPG, Divinity, there were aspects of the game the studio wasn't ready to share, but we got a definitive answer to a surprisingly granular aspect of its controls: No WASD movement, everything will still be mouse-driven on PC.

User Plastic-Guarantee976 posed the question about keyboard controls⁠—similar to the ones in Dragon Age or Knights of the Old Republic⁠—in the AMA, pointing out that "the WASD movement mod was one of the most downloaded and beloved mods for Baldur's Gate 3." Divinity gameplay lead Artem Titov did not leave any room for doubt, replying with a simple "No."

Comment from r/Games

Presumably, Divinity's M&K control scheme will closely hew to Baldur's Gate 3's then, though hopefully with a similar jump in quality as the one between Original Sin 2 and BG3. On the one hand, it's surprising to see Larian shoot down such a popular feature so far in advance of release, especially since such driving controls will be built into the game anyway for controller support on both PC and console.

The PC is all about choice and flexibility, after all, so why am I not bothered? Perhaps it's easy for me to say, having never touched the WASD mod, but these days I appreciate when a developer of any size sticks to its guns on questions of design or preference, even if it means refusing to give players what they say they want. It's the FromSoftware special, a certain "I know better" imperious remove that refuses to cater to the tastes of a fleeting moment, which I find can result in something more timeless.

Of course, when Nintendo does the same thing it just pisses me off, so I'm clearly biased and you should take my assessment with a grain of salt. If you're one of those annoyed by this, then rest easy anyway: WASD movement support will undoubtedly be among the first mods for Divinity. And I am glad that Larian is responding to one vector of popular pressure and taking its criticism for AI use⁠ seriously.

Baldur's Gate 3, you may have heard, was quite a good videogame. Good enough to make PCG history, even. But not every part of it shines equally. Wyll, the origin character and (if you're not playing as him) party member, is notoriously a little underbaked. He's so straightforwardly good as to be, well, maybe a little dull, and he even gets outshone by other characters in some of his own big plot scenes—not because of a deficit in his performance, but because of how those scenes were written.

It turns out that Wyll's writer, Kevin VanOrd (who also wrote Lae'zel, by the by), knows just how fans feel. In a Q&A on Reddit, VanOrd wrote in response to a question from a disappointed Wyll-liker that "I wish Wyll had gotten more content and a more fulfilling arc too." Alas, it sounds like circumstances conspired to make that difficult, if not impossible, to do.

"We weren't connecting with Wyll's early access recruitment and initial questing," writes VanOrd, "so we started over at a point when most of the other companion stories were fairly solid." Way back when, before BG3 left early access, Wyll was a different sort of character and even had a different actor, Lanre Malaolu. But it all changed relatively late in the process. "A lot of decisions came later in development than was ideal," writes VanOrd.

To some extent, Wyll fell victim to bad luck and cuts. "There was a key situation near Baldur's Gate that I intended to heavily involve Wyll in (the Red War College) that got cut," writes VanOrd. "We eventually tied him to Duke Ravengard and started to work on that element of his arc just in time for me to get unexpectedly ill. I was out of the office for quite a while, and again after the epilogue's release." That illness made it difficult to give Wyll more stuff to do in post-release patches.

"Wyll's content is sparser than I'd have liked as a result. He's also split into two stories, really—the Mizora story and the Ravengard story, and that might have been a mistake in hindsight." I'm actually not sure I agree with that. The tension between those two sides of Wyll, represented by Mizora and his honourable pops, is probably the most interesting thing about him to me, it just never really comes through enough in how he's written.

Anyway, VanOrd also has his regrets about Wyll's endings. "I also wish I could given him a stronger endpoint—it always bugged me that he can end up just as he started, as the Blade of Frontiers, without any meaningful difference." Then again, sending him and Karlach off to be superheroes in hell is pretty heartwarming.

"All that said, I love the Blade and I am really proud of him, his sincerity, his good nature, and his eager heroism. I'm truly sorry I didn't give you more quality time with him." Also, he can eldritch blast people off cliffs, so he's still precious to me.

Larian landed in hot water last month when—in a chat with Bloomberg—bossman Swen Vincke mentioned that the Baldur's Gate 3 and Divinity studio had using generative AI at the studio and that devs "often use AI tools to explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text."

That set the cat among the pigeons. There was an immediate and intense reaction as fans wondered what this meant for the studio's future games. Would Divinity be stuffed with AI slop? Would it be built with gen AI trained on artwork of dubious provenance? Eventually, Larian promised a Reddit Q&A session to give players a bit of transparency into the studio, its processes, and how it's using AI.

Or how it's not using AI, I guess. As was prophesied, Larian kicked off its Q&A—with Vincke and a load of other studio honchos—earlier today. One key takeaway? Larian's swearing off using gen AI tools in concept art development.

"First off—there is not going to be any gen AI art in Divinity," wrote Vincke. "I know there’s been a lot of discussion about us using AI tools as part of concept art exploration. We already said this doesn’t mean the actual concept art is generated by AI but we understand it created confusion.

"So, to ensure there is no room for doubt, we’ve decided to refrain from using gen AI tools during concept art development."

So, hooray, right? Death Star blown up, the rebels are victorious, truth and justice prevail once again. Well, kind of. Vincke might be vetoing AI in concept art, but the gen AI genie isn't going back in its bottle entirely. "We continuously try to improve the speed with which we can try things out. The more iterations we can do, the better in general the gameplay is. We think gen AI can help with this and so we’re trying things out across departments."

What things is Larian trying out specifically? Vincke doesn't say, and I have to admit that sort of vagueness means I'm still a little concerned. One thing we can be sure of: it doesn't mean gen AI assets will never work their way into Larian videogames to come.

"We will not generate 'creative assets' that end up in a game without being 100% sure about the origins of the training data and the consent of those who created the data," Vincke wrote. "If we use a GenAI model to create in-game assets, then it’ll be trained on data we own." Better than a model trained on stolen artwork, I suppose, but it still makes me nervous.

Following what you might call a sub-optimal response to its apparent enthusiasm for the use of AI in game development, Larian boss Swen Vincke promised an AMA in January to clarify where exactly the studio stands on the matter. A message on X has now nailed that little online tête-à-tête down to 5 am PT/8 am ET/2 pm CET on January 9, on Reddit.

That's pretty early, at least in my part of the world, but bear in mind that Larian is not based in my part of the world but in Ghent, Belgium, where the whole thing can go down after a nice extended lunch.

If you're wondering what this is all about, a quick refresher: Larian unveiled Divinity, its next game, at The Game Awards 2025 with a shockingly dark, brutal trailer that reminded us all that Baldur's Gate 3 got rolling the same way before all the, y'know, sex.

But the studio's big moment went awry just days later when Vincke said in a Bloomberg interview that Larian was experimenting with generative AI in the early stages of game development, and that developers at the studio were happy about it.

This did not go over well with a significant portion of Larian's fan base, and suddenly Good Guy Swen was being portrayed as just another over-monied game executive looking to cut headcounts to the bone.

Vincke had previously expressed some cautiously positive thoughts about AI, saying in April 2024 for instance that AI "is a tool that we use to help us do things faster." He was more specific on the topic a year later, when he said developers at Larian used AI for the "automation of tasks that nobody wants to do. The obvious things, like motion capture cleaning, or voice editing."

But, perhaps because they didn't come in the wake of a major game reveal, those comments went relatively unnoticed and didn't cause nearly the stir the post-Game Awards interview did. Vincke tried to smooth the waters with a strategic F-bomb deployment on X, but rather than getting caught up in extended beefing he quickly announced the AMA, promising to be fully transparent on how exactly Larian does and does not use AI.

You can't put too much stock into what anyone says on social media, and particularly X, but the responses to the AMA timing announcement are interesting. Questions about generative AI in Larian's development processes are largely absent—instead, people are asking about Divinity itself: Whether it will feature turn-based or RTWP combat, how it will relative to the rest of the series, whether it will have cinematic cutscenes on the scale of Baldur's Gate 3, and of course how much "romance" there will be.

The odds of any of those questions being satisfactorily answered are pretty much nil, but hey, shoot your shot, I guess. To see what Larian actually is willing to talk about at this point, head over to the r/Games subreddit at the appointed hour—that is, 5 am PT/8 am ET/2 pm CET—tomorrow.

A team of would-be heroes working together to take down a powerful bad guy that none of them could handle on their own is hardly a novel concept. One might think of the Super Friends, for instance, or the time Kiss battled an evil genius to save an amusement park. So it's maybe a bit, well, odd that Stranger Things co-creator Matt Duffer credits the inspiration for the show's finale to Baldur's Gate 3. But it's also pretty cool, right?

"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."

Using teams of folks with individual skills to whomp the bejeezus out of some soul-sucking unpleasantness is Gaming 101, really: With a little bit of luck and a can-do attitude, a fighter, a mage, and a cleric can solve pretty much any problem you want to throw at them. Baldur's Gate 3 is certainly the latest (and possibly greatest) example, but you could say the same about the original heroes of the Sword Coast, or the squad Khelben Blackstaff sent to Temple Darkmoon, or the gang who saved the city of Phlan in Pool of Radiance, or—well, you get the idea.

And while there is a temptation to be too cool for school about it, the truth is that those of us who are in the know about such things likely represent a relatively small portion of the overall Stranger Things audience—and for those who are not, hearing about the Baldur's Gate 3 inspiration might come as more of an interesting surprise.

And hey, spreading the word about one of the best videogames ever made is pretty cool, after all.

The inspiration works both ways, as it turns out: After Vincke posted about the Baldur's Gate 3 inspiration, Larian head of publishing Michael Douse responded, "Damn now I really should watch Stranger Things."

Two years on and it's still Baldur's Gate 3's world we're living in. Every new RPG is measured against it, and Larian's next game, Divinity, is still hotly anticipated even amid criticism of the studio's admission of experimenting with generative AI.

Until Larian unveiled Divinity, we didn't know what it was doing next—only that it wouldn't be Baldur's Gate 4. At GDC 2024, about nine months after BG3's release, Larian boss Swen Vincke dropped a bombshell: The studio would not make an expansion pack or sequel to its most successful game to date, and was parting ways with Wizards of the Coast and D&D entirely.

But they sure took their time saying goodbye, huh? Cyberpunk 2077 is the only recent singleplayer game I can think of that has received more free, post-launch additions⁠—and that was in response to a deeply compromised launch. Baldur's Gate 3 started on top, and just kept climbing.

Before Vincke's early 2024 farewell, BG3 had already gotten the überhard, permadeath Honour Mode, as well as an expanded, playable epilogue. Here are some highlights from after:

• New evil ending cinematics
• Modding tools and an in-game mod manager/browser
• Console cross-play
• Photo mode
• 12 new subclasses, one for each new base class

Taken together BG3's post-launch support feels like a diet expansion pack, or a reprise in all but name of the "Definitive Edition" updates for Larian's Original Sin games. It's been a rare delight to be pleasantly surprised over and over again by improvements to one of my favorite games.

The playable epilogue is a treat, but as a sweaty buildcrafting boy, Honour Mode and the new subclasses have been the most transformative for me. The former reminds me of the Hardcore/Survival modes in Skyrim and the Fallout series, which introduce requirements for drinking, eating, sleeping, and sometimes even save game restrictions.

They all make the game more difficult, but not by increasing the reaction speed requirements or ballooning enemy health bars into war of attrition territory. They instead inject more consequences into small decisions. You have to think, plan, and engage with the game on a deeper level, and when you take a risk, the stakes feel more pressing.

In an RPG that invites replays while encouraging mastery and familiarity, I find these conditions very grounding and immersive: You can't take the same things for granted anymore. The game demands more from you, but that means you get more out of it. The new subclasses are the perfect tools to handle such a challenge in BG3. The College of Swords Bard, available from day one, remains the Baldur's GOAT in my book. But new additions like the Hexblade, Bladesinger, and Arcane Archer come close, while also just being plain fun.

The new subclasses added this April seem to signal the official end of Larian's major additions, but the party doesn't have to stop. Modding continues apace, and even aside from user-made additions, Baldur's Gate 3 is so malleable it demands you return to it again and again⁠.

Now's as good a time as any for a replay. And if you're one of those people who got 20 hours in at the end of summer 2023 and always meant to go back⁠—we have a few of those at PC Gamer⁠—just make a new character.

There's a really good build guide I can recommend for you. Just don't run with that version of the Swords Bard, I've been meaning to update it⁠—Bard 6 / Thief 3 / Champion 3 is "What's Not." Bard 10 / Fighter 2, trading Hand Crossbows for The Dead Shot and Band of the Mystic Scoundrel in Act 3, is officially "What's Hot."

Larian dropped a big bomb at The Game Awards earlier this month with the surprise reveal of Divinity, its "biggest game ever," which is quite a promise given that the studio's previous game, Baldur's Gate 3, was huge. For some (definitely not talking about myself here, just, you know, some people) the announcement was especially exciting because it also provided us (sorry, them) with an opportunity to remind the world that we liked Larian before Larian was cool.

Larian was cool way back when, but mostly among RPG nerds. You may recall that the studio was relying on crowdfunding campaigns as recently Divinity: Original Sin 2, its pre-Baldur's Gate 3 release. For those of you who are relatively new to the scene—that is, if you discovered Larian through BG3—well, Larian boss Swen Vincke thinks it might be best if you start with the Original Sins (or maybe just don't brother at all).

"If you play [the Divinity: Original Sin games] you will see things in this Divinity that reference those two," Vincke told GamesRadar. "If you played the first Divinity, you will see it referenced properly inside of this Divinity. Ego Draconis, same story, or The Dragon Knight Saga, all of it is being referenced, but it's just part of the history of what happened in this world, and it helped shape the world to the point where it is now."

As someone who liked Larian before Larian was cool (have I mentioned that?) I feel obligated to note that playing those earlier games may not provide as much clarity as you might expect. Divinity lore is pretty loosey-goosey, at least without putting serious study effort into it, and my own experience is that it doesn't really matter because the connection between the games is pretty tenuous anyway.

Even the chronology of the Divinity timeline is tough to puzzle out. The first game in the timeline is Divinity: Dragon Commander, which came out after Divine, Beyond, and Ego Draconis, but before Original Sin and OS2. Also, it's a political strategy game.

I defy you to explain what the hell is going on here.

So the bottom line here is that if you loved the combat or co-op multiplayer of Baldur's Gate 3, then Divinity: Original Sin 2 might be worth a look, and maybe the original Original Sin if you just can't get enough. But if you were pulled into BG3 because of its "cinematic narrative experience," then there's probably no point in looking at the prior Divinity games unless you're really eager to dive into the lore. But that is a long, hard road to travel.

"If you really want to know everything, there's games that came before [Original Sin]," Vincke said. "But they're a bit outdated by now, they are quite old."

They sure are: The first game in the series (but not the timeline), Divine Divinity, came out in 2002, followed by Beyond Divinity in 2004, and their age definitely shows. As a counterpoint, though, both games are available for less than $1 each in GOG's Winter Sale, and they include absolutely wonderful soundtracks composed by the late Kirill Pokrovsky—music that's more than worth the price of admission all by itself.

So, my advice? Heed the words of Divinity aficionado Ted Litchfield, who says the OG Divinity games are only for "the true sickos": Enjoy the music, and just read a timeline.

It's been a bad few days for Larian Studios and CEO Swen Vincke. Instead of basking in the glory of its first post-Baldur's Gate 3 project, revealed at The Game Awards as Divinity, the studio has been dealing with the ugly aftermath of Vincke's comments about the use of generative AI at Larian. In a new effort to set the record straight, Vincke said today that Larian will hold an AMA in the new year, giving gamers an opportunity to learn more about how developers at Larian actually get things done.

Larian's AI controversy erupted earlier this week in the wake of a Bloomberg interview in which Vincke touched on some of the ways developers at the studio are making use of generative AI tools. He made clear that the studio isn't using generative AI for any in-game content, like art, writing, or voices, but that did little good: The backlash against what was perceived as Larian's pro-AI stance was immediate and fierce.

Vincke tried to smooth things out with a subsequent post on X in which he was more specific about how exactly Larian developers use generative AI, but that did not satisfy many of the studio's fans. So now the plan is to let the developers themselves jump into the fray.

"Larian's DNA is agency," Vincke wrote on X. "Everything we work towards is to the benefit of our teams, games, and players. A better work day, and a better game. Our successes come from empowering people to work in their own way and bring the best out of their skill & craft, so that we can make the best RPGs we can possibly make.

"In that context, it would be irresponsible for us not to evaluate new technologies. However, our processes are always evolving, and where they are not efficient or fail to align with who we are, we will make changes. To give you more insight, we'll do an AMA featuring our different departments after the holiday break, in which you'll get the opportunity to ask us any questions you have about Divinity and our dev process directly."

It's been interesting to watch the ferocity of the blowback against Vincke's AI comments—it was just a year ago, after all, that he received widespread plaudits for calling out the failures of the game industry in a speech at The Game Awards.

Whether this AMA will change any minds is an open question at this point, but my own inclination is to give Vincke and Larian the benefit of the doubt for now: I'm no fan of generative AI and I think the headlong pursuit of "artificial intelligence" in a wider context is reckless at best, but I'm willing to at least hear more about the specific tools being used and the attitudes of Larian's artists before writing the whole studio off. At the very least, this AMA should allow for some nuance in the conversation, and help us all form more well-considered opinions about how much this sucks.

Vincke said a date for Larian's AI AMA will be announced in the new year.

RAM prices have been, uh—bad. You can keep track of them yourself via the work of our diligent hardware team, but the rampant use of generative AI by big tech has led to such sharp increases, you could basically watch them climb in real time. This has also impacted Larian, of all people.

That's per an interview with TheGamer, wherein Larian CEO Swen Vincke told the site that it's facing issues with "the price of RAM and the price of SSDs and fuck, man. It's like, literally, we've never had it like this".

The problem is, it seems, the slow pace of game development—especially if you're Larian, you're going to be designing architecture for a game that'll be both simultaneously coming out in a few years but also releasing now, so figuring out a level of optimisation that's reasonable (while still making the thing look good) takes a bit of soothsaying.

"It kind of ruins all of your projections that you had about," he explains, "because normally, you know the curves, and you can protect the hardware. It's gonna be an interesting one. It means that most likely, we already need to do a lot of optimization work in early access that we didn't necessarily want to do at that point in time."

In this handy explainer by PC Gamer's own Jacob Fox, the problem for everybody—including big game studios—is that AI is guzzling up all of the technological real estate. While SSDs had a brief window where they were downright cheap for the amount of oomph they gave you, those times are long past.

Basically, and I'm just going to quote Jacob here because he does a better job explaining than I can: "This isn't the same as the DDR memory we get in our gaming PCs, but the memory chips are DRAM just like we use in our familiar DIMMs. AI servers buying up HBM means less DRAM in the market for our RAM kits, which causes prices to rise."

Combine that with hundreds of billions of dollars being pumped into AI infrastructure, and—yeah, any hardware projections go to pot, bubble or no bubble.

If you're reading this and have been paying attention to the news/social media, you might also know that Larian's hot off the frying pan for its (minor, Vincke argues) use of AI, which Vincke maintains is only used to explore concepts "just like we use Google and art books. At the very early ideation stages we use it as a rough outline for composition which we replace with original concept art. There is no comparison".

It's tricky. Obviously, the easy dunk—not that I'm taking it—is that Vincke is complaining about skyrocketing SSD and RAM prices in one hand, while also making contributions (however small) to the industry that's causing those issues in the first place.

But Larian's usage seems to be mostly in line with other studios I am not, at present, raking over the coals: Unless something's changed, WoW's just been using it to resize shoulder-pads for other races, and I cannot rightly get incensed about that either. Either way, Larian's feeling the burn from a hardware pricing perspective like the rest of us.

Larian CEO Swen Vincke said earlier this year that the Baldur's Gate 3 studio is using generative AI to automate certain prototyping tasks, such as creating mock levels for designers to work with before replacing them with handmade art. The comments didn't attract much notice at the time, but similar remarks in a new Bloomberg interview about Larian's next big RPG, Divinity, have kicked up a storm of complaints which the studio is now pushing back on.

In Bloomberg's words, Larian has been "pushing hard" on generative AI and its developers "often use AI tools to explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text."

Vincke reiterated in the interview that the studio isn't using generative AI to create any of the art, voices, or writing we see in its games. After the interview was published, he also said that "pushing hard" isn't a correct characterization of Larian's AI policy and that AI is not being used "to develop concept art" in his view—though it is being used in "the very early ideation stages."

Above: Our post-Game Awards interview with Larian about its next RPG.

The Larian CEO has previously rejected the idea that generative AI tools can replace creative workers, saying in April for instance that when the studio needed more concept art, it hired 15 more concept artists. But word of Larian's generative AI use has been taken as a betrayal by some fans, who've taken to social media to express their displeasure, and an ex-employee has urged the company to reconsider its stance.

Artist Selena Tobin, who's credited as a junior environment artist on Baldur's Gate 3, said on Bluesky that she loved working at Larian "until AI."

"Reconsider and change your direction, like, yesterday," wrote Tobin. "Show your employees some respect. they are world-class & do not need AI assistance to come up with amazing ideas."

Others are speculating on the likelihood of AI-generated placeholders slipping into Divinity, a phenomenon we've seen several times in other games, including this year's Game Awards winner Clair Obscur.

On X, Larian publishing director Michael Douse responded to the criticism, contrasting Larian's use of the technology with that of less-scrupulous developers who would directly feature AI-made assets in their games, or use the technology as an excuse for layoffs.

"Back in April our stance on AI in workflows was established so I'm not sure why this is coming up now as a controversy (the timing of it!)," wrote Douse. "We continue to hire people across all departments, not trim. Our goal is to make life better for individual workflows, not worse. We want to make better games that don't feature AI content in them, where much of the industry will feature AI content. We want everyone to have fulfilling, creative roles & keep their jobs, in an industry of mass layoffs. In other words, I'm not entirely sure we are the ideal target for the level of scorn."

An exasperated-sounding Vincke also elaborated on the studio's generative AI use on X, denying the "pushing hard" characterization, and saying that AI tools are used for ideation and rough composition, but not beyond that.

"Holy fuck guys we're not 'pushing hard' for or replacing concept artists with AI," Vincke wrote. "We have a team of 72 artists of which 23 are concept artists and we are hiring more. The art they create is original and I'm very proud of what they do.

"I was asked explicitly about concept art and our use of Gen AI. I answered that we use it to explore things. I didn't say we use it to develop concept art. The artists do that. And they are indeed world class artists.

"We use AI tools to explore references, just like we use Google and art books. At the very early ideation stages we use it as a rough outline for composition which we replace with original concept art. There is no comparison."

The Larian boss pointed to the Gamespot interview from April for further elaboration, and added that the studio has "hired creatives for their talent, not for their ability to do what a machine suggests," but allows them to "experiment with these tools to make their lives easier."

If there's a limit to Larian's ambitions as an RPG studio, founder Swen Vincke hasn't found them yet. In an interview with PC Gamer about the deeper consequences and "much higher" level of agency in upcoming RPG Divinity compared to Baldur's Gate 3, Vincke didn't hesitate for a moment when asked if they were feeling more or less pressure now.

"It's more. It's more pressure," he said.

"The weight of the expectations weighs high. We're trying not to think about it, because we have to make our own thing," Vincke added.

Vincke has previously admitted that Larian planned to work on another D&D game following Baldur's Gate 3; ultimately the team wasn't excited about spending years working on a sequel and pivoted to a new project, which we now know was Divinity. There will still be similarities between BG3 and Divinity—Larian confirmed it's sticking to turn-based combat—but if you think that means developing its next intricate RPG will be easier, you'd be wrong.

Larian was wrong, too.

"When we started on this, it was like, 'Oh, we know how to do this.' By now, we've been humbled by the development experience, by the actual development again: No, we don't know anything," Vincke said. "We have to relearn everything, but we do have the experience of the past with us. Every game has its own language that you need to learn."

After parting with D&D, Larian didn't have anything prepped for its next project—but part of the studio had already been working on updates to its game engine for the future, which could be fast-tracked for Divinity. Improved graphical fidelity is a given, but Vincke hinted that he expects new things they can do with the gameplay will excite players the most.

He recalled Larian's first public reveal of Baldur's Gate 3, when the game was initially criticized for looking too much like Original Sin 2. "We don't want to make the same game," Vincke asserted—that was true then, and it's still true with Divinity.

"We want to make a better game which has new things in there that lets you do things you haven't done before. I think we have those things in the game, so we just need to make them work all together, which might take some time."

Baldur's Gate 3 lead writer Adam Smith emphasized the need for novelty and ambition in any new game Larian makes—to the point that you could probably say the pressure Vincke referred to is largely coming from inside the house.

"There was a moment we realized our hearts weren't in [more Baldur's Gate]," Smith recalled. "Our hearts are in this. We're excited. We wouldn't be excited if we were making the same game again. We play it every day, and we need those moments where we go 'oh shit, I haven't seen this before.' One of the worst things about trying to make this goddamn game is the amount of times we do something and go, 'This is really cool, but also, we did do it in Baldur's Gate 3.' It's not a specific thing, but you recognize the patterns.

"We were very harsh on ourselves when we were making BG3—same for every Larian game—where you go, 'I don't want to repeat a pattern.' You want to keep giving people something new so they don't get familiar and don't say, 'Eeh, I did this quest already. This is the one where I do A, then B, then C.'"

Vincke, Smith, and Larian writer Chrystal Ding answered some of our most pressing questions about Divinity in our post-TGA interview: Here are the six biggest things we learned.

If you'd like to bone up on your Divinity knowledge ahead of launch, we've got a guide for how newcomers should approach the series. Divinity's launch may seem a long way away, but please recall that these are some long-ass games.

When a developer announces the follow-up to one of PC Gamer's highest rated games of all time, you can bet that we'll have questions—too many to fit into the few minutes we had to interview Larian after The Game Awards last week.

While the developer is keeping most of its next game, Divinity, secret for now, we still pried loose a few details about Larian's "biggest most ambitious RPG yet," including the style of combat, broad technical advancements, and how representative that wildly dark and violent reveal trailer is of the game as a whole.

Don't get your hopes up about a release date, though—Larian isn't throwing any days, months, or even years out yet. But if you were worried that cinematic teaser meant Divinity was just starting pre-production, we've got some good news. Read on for a quick overview of the key things we learned straight from Larian.

1. Yes, Divinity is still turn-based, but it's not recycling Original Sin 2's combat

Despite being a matter of fierce debate immediately after Divinity was unveiled, it seemed pretty unlikely that Larian would drop turn-based combat after the success of Baldur's Gate 3 (and Original Sin 1&2). Now we have confirmation: Divinity will be turn-based, but it's not just bringing back an old combat system.

"It's a new rule set, a rule set built on everything that we learned from all the previous games that we've done," Larian founder Swen Vincke told us.

2. The planned level of player agency is "much higher" than in Baldur's Gate 3

Immediately after announcing Divinity at The Game Awards, Larian called the game its "biggest most ambitious RPG yet," and the team elaborated on what that means in our interview. Divinity has 'deeper sequences of consequence' based on your choices than Baldur's Gate 3, intended to give players even more control over how their adventure plays out.

"The level of agency that we're going to give you is very, very high⁠—much higher than what happened in BG3. At least that's our ambition," Vincke said. "And this is agency at pretty much all levels, so it's at the narrative as well as systems level. That makes it our most ambitious. It's the biggest game that we've ever made.

3. Larian updated its game engine for Divinity

Perhaps it's obvious that a new game means some new tech, but Larian told us a bit about why updates to its game engine matter for Divinity. "Everything we do is to allow our efficiency to become higher, and then we use that efficiency to try more," Vincke said.

For example, the motion capture pipeline is now automated to the point that "almost the moment it's recorded it's in the game," and a new system "allows designers to more rapidly experiment with rules." A better analytics engine makes playtesting more effective.

"It's taken years and years to get to this point. Every single game we've improved this tech a little bit. … It's built, obviously, on the existing tech we had before, but there are a lot of things we can do now that we couldn't do before that's going to be really cool. In gameplay—I think that's going to be the bit that excites most people, other than the visual fidelity that's obviously come up."

4. Divinity is already in full production

Divinity has moved beyond pre-production and is in production; in fact, Larian is already recording performances and dialogue with actors. But don't take that to mean the game's almost finished. Vincke said that Larian will be recording "recording nonstop" throughout development.

5. Divinity may launch in early access, but Larian hasn't decided yet

While discussing how character stories tend to evolve throughout development, Vincke said "if we go to early access," suggesting that the studio hasn't decided how it plans to release Divinity yet.

Given how well early access worked out with both Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Baldur's Gate 3, my bet is that Larian will end up going with the same path this time.

6. Divinity is Larian's darkest game yet, but it's not nonstop grim

PC Gamer's Harvey Randall has already guessed that Divinity's gross-out reveal trailer may not set the tone for the full game, and in our interview Larian writing director Adam Smith pretty much said: Yep! It's dark, but it's not just dark.

"We're not in the grimdarkness where there's only war," he said, referencing the Game Awards reveal of Total War: Warhammer 40,000. "There is light and hope. We don't want to make something that is all that tone. We want to confront you with horror and then say, 'What are you going to do with it? And about it?'"

Vincke added that D:OS2 was already pretty dark, but the game's more limited graphics and pulled-back camera meant you "didn't see them cinematically."

"Now you can see it cinematically, and it makes everything more intimate and direct," he said. "It makes for a much more engaging experience. When you see the darkness you're going to understand that this is a game about contrast, where you can really be the beacon, the last hope of everyone, or the one that really fucks everything up."

In the wake of its gruesome Game Awards reveal, everyone was arguing about whether Divinity would be turn-based like Baldur's Gate 3, or an action RPG. Wonder no more: in a post-TGA interview with PC Gamer, Larian boss Swen Vincke confirmed that Divinity will be a turn-based RPG, and elaborated a bit on what we can expect from its combat and systems.

"It's not a clone of D:OS 2 in that sense, it's a new ruleset, a ruleset built on everything that we learned from all the previous games that we've done," said Vincke. "I think you're gonna enjoy it. It's very easy to learn, very hard to master, but it allows you to do fantastic things, which is the most important bit.

"It's going to give you a really good time figuring things out, and how you can chain things to one another and come up with all kinds of shenanigans."

When asked whether Divinity would be turn-based and have a similar party size to Baldur's Gate 3, Vincke responded in the affirmative. Baldur's Gate 3, as well as both Original Sin games, allow four characters in your active party at any time. So while Vincke didn't provide the exact number, four seems like a sure bet. An open question remains whether we'll see the return of BG3's party camp, or if you'll be limited to only the four characters in your active party for the whole game, which was the case in Divinity: Original Sin 2.

From there, we've got room to speculate. I'd expect at least as much of a change in rules and mechanics as the one from Original Sin to OS 2, but there are fundamental design choices they share in common, some of which strike me as core to the series identity.

Here are some of the key mechanical commonalities between the Original Sin games, ordered by most to least likely to return in Divinity, according to my gut:

• A focus on environmental and elemental combos⁠—also shared with Baldur's Gate 3⁠—such as pools of water or active rain improving your lightning damage.
• Classless character building, with starter classes being more of a jumping off point.
• Combat abilities and spells bought from merchants or found in the world, rather than unlocked per level.
• Action point-based turns, like the OG Fallout games, rather than the discrete actions and bonus actions of Baldur's Gate 3.
• Randomized, leveled gear: The Original Sin games don't support taking the same weapon from the beginning to the end of the game, like you might with BG3's Phalar Aluve or Titanstring Bow. Late game weapons do exponentially more damage to account for the way enemy health and resistances scale. This one strikes me as the most up in the air.

We got answers to some of our most burning Divinity questions during the conversation, and you can see them all in our rundown of the six biggest things we learned about Divinity. We also have a guide to how you should get into the series if the only Larian game you've played is Baldur's Gate 3.

On stage at The Game Awards 2025, Geoff Keighley said that Divinity was a bigger, more ambitious game than Baldur's Gate 3. In a post-show interview, Swen Vincke explained to us where that ambition is going: More choices, deeper reactivity, bigger consequences, and thoroughly interconnected storylines.

"The level of agency that we're going to give you is very, very high⁠—much higher than what happened in BG3. At least that's our ambition," Vincke said. "And this is agency at pretty much all levels, so it's at the narrative as well as systems level. That makes it our most ambitious. It's the biggest game that we've ever made."

Asked whether this will be in terms of sheer volume of choices, or their depth, Vincke said that it's both, but that there would also be "longer, deeper sequences of consequence."

"One of the things that gives my heart joy when I play our games is when the things click into each other⁠—the narrative, the systems themselves," Vincke said. "When you have several situations that are going on and they all click into each other, and they feel like a consequence of things, then it becomes really, really good."

For me, this called to mind some of the quests in Act 3 of Baldur's Gate 3: The Iron Throne rescue mission, Wyll and Karlach's companion quests, destroying the Gondian factory, and probably even more that I'm not thinking of have a ton of interplay with each other.

The order you take them in and how you resolve the quests can have substantial knock-on effects with other, seemingly-unrelated storylines. There are even payoffs and consequences here that reach back to quests and decisions in the first two acts, like helping the Ironhand Gnomes. Something even more complex and rich than that would be a sight to see.

Of course, this level of ambition is presenting its own challenges. "If you make the connections between characters, narratives, situations, gameplay, more complex in how they ripple out, then they don't feel complex to the player, because they're just naturally experiencing them," said Baldur's Gate 3 writer Adam Smith.

"For us though, my god, [we're] looking at this matrix and saying, 'How does it all fit together?' What you want is for the player to just experience it and go, 'Yeah, that was just a story that I got told.'"

But it all seems to be worth it, according to Smith. "There was a moment we realized our hearts weren't in [more Baldur's Gate]," he recalled. "Our hearts are in this. We're excited. We wouldn't be excited if we were making the same game again."

For more from our post-TGA Larian interview, you can check out our list of the six biggest things we learned about Divinity.

Baldur's Gate 3's fully motion captured and voiced dialogue was the clearest sign that the developer had stepped into the big leagues after Divinity: Original Sin 2. The earlier RPG had great writing and voice acting for key dialogue, but it didn't pull you into the performances in the way BG3 would a few years later. Larian knows that's what people now expect from its RPGs, and it's already bringing actors into the studio to work on Divinity.

"We're still casting, but we already have a bunch of actors in," studio founder Swen Vincke told PC Gamer in an interview after The Game Awards, where Divinity was revealed. Unlike a film that's written first and then shot, Larian's creative process entails capturing its actors' performances as soon as development is out of pre-production. "This gives you an idea of the ambition," he said.

"We built a huge studio in Guilford, with six recording studios in there. The idea is that these are going to be recording nonstop on this game, which gives you an idea of the ambition. It's big, because we want you to have lots and lots and lots of choice. This is a project where recording is almost at the beginning."

Vincke didn't give even a rough estimate of when Divinity will be released but did say that the game is already past pre-production. It sounds like much of the writing—and even deciding how the story will play out—is still to come. Writing director Adam Smith said that "because of the way [Divinity] works, the players are the most important characters."

"Anything else is reacting to them, which means you don't know what the character needs until you know what the player needs. One of the great things about working on Baldur's Gate 3 was you'd have these moments where you'd say, 'Oh shit, if I say or do this, they'd have to do this.' You hadn't planned it, but once you know them you know how they react. So you're kind of improvising along with them. We have characters that I'm already happy with, but I don't know who the hell they are yet, because I don't know the end of the journey yet. We'll know who they are then. Right now, they're a sketch, and we're starting to piece them together."

Vincke added that as the graphics are finalized through development, the look of a character can have a big impact on their identity. And if they decide to release in early access—currently still up in the air—player feedback will likely play a big role, too. In Baldur's Gate 3, Shadowheart and Astarion both went through "a journey of transformation" in early access, as he put it.

"I was talking to someone who had worked on a game and had the script locked before having a level built, and I was like, 'How do you do that?'" Smith said. "For us, we have to be walking around the game world to know the writing is good. You have to see it in the game. Obviously it's an imperfect version of the game, but the closer it is to the thing that the player will be looking at, the better we know it. We're writing for a very specific medium, and a very complicated genre within that medium."

Lead writer Chrystal Ding added: "You'd be amazed how often you find yourself writing dialogue, and you read it through in the file and you're like, 'That seems fine.' Put it in the game, and: 'That's garbage. I don't believe any of that.' You feel it in your gut, it's not even in your brain. You just go: 'I don't buy that.'"

So yes, Divinity is in production—but as for how far along it actually is at this point, your guess is probably as good as Larian's.

"Production is hell with a developer that iterates so much," Vincke said. "The game resists us, but we shall vanquish it."

AI-generated voice 'acting'—despite the fact I've never heard an example that hasn't immediately made me less interested in a videogame—has still become more ubiquitous in gaming. Arc Raiders, by all accounts a dang successful videogame, uses it for text-to-speech lines.

Speaking to PCGamesN, the voice actor for Baldur's Gate 3's Astarion, Neil Newbon (who knows a little bit about voice acting because he's won friggin awards for it), was very down on AI voiceover, echoing statements both he and his fellow BG3 cast members have made before on the subject:

"Comparatively speaking, the amount of money it costs to do those voice lines compared to the rest of the game's development is peanuts. When a game's successful, I don't really get why [developers] don't go 'well, at the time we couldn't afford to do it—it was too much or too difficult—but now we've been super successful, why don't we go back and actually redo the lines with actors?' That's an option; I'm just saying."

It's hard not to empathise with Newbon, here. The rational, sensible grown adult in me whole-heartedly agrees with him—compared to other development costs, hiring someone to go into a booth for a couple hours is basically nothing, especially when your game's making a million bucks.

The cynical goblin in my heart I've got locked up in a basement is, unfortunately, completely unsurprised that a studio like Embark would go for the cheaper, tackier option simply because it's… well, cheaper. We're in an industry plagued by layoffs where seemingly history-blind and overambitious executives make big, stupid decisions, then turn around and grind studios through crunch and burnout while they buy vintage cars with their paychecks.

Point being, we are not necessarily dealing with sensible people here—if all you care about's a budget, then why make something better if no-one's complaining all that much?

"I don't really think it's legitimate," Newbon continues. "If you're going to not record the lines in the first place and just use AI to take somebody's voice and manipulate it however the hell you want, that's a problem. You're robbing that performer of that day's fee, and you're robbing that performer of the ability to look after themselves or their family—most actors, notoriously, are not rich. Most of us struggle [for] our entire career."

Andrew Wilson, the CEO of EA, took home 260 times more money than what the median EA employee made this year. I share this not to argue with Newbon, more to just—sigh and nod along with him. Anyway: "The justification is difficult. 'Ah, we couldn't really afford it;' well, maybe find a way, now that you've made your money, to go back over those lines and do it better."

He also, rightly so, states that it all sounds bloody uncanny. Not enough to turn players away, clearly, but enough to make some (and certainly this writer) feel like they're playing a Temu version of the real deal:

"It's dull as hell. I don't believe it; it takes me out of the immersion. People are saying it helps the immersion because it's reactive. It takes me out of the experience because I just hear something that doesn't sound like a human being in jeopardy, or in combat, or excitement, or whatever emotion you're supposed to be aiming for. It doesn't feel real."

The trailer for Divinity, the new Larian joint, was one of the definite highlights of the announcements from this year's Game Awards. Yes, I will play a Wicker Man folk-horror RPG from the people who brought us that creepy House of Healing monster hospital in Baldur's Gate 3.

The announcement has sent a bunch of people back to Larian's last RPG in the Divinity setting, Divinity: Original Sin 2, which has bounced back into the list of most-played games on Steam. At the time of writing it's number 228 in the top 250 and according to Steam Charts it hit a 24-hour peak of 10,898 players, which is almost double last month's peak of 5,930 players.

Though the numbers are lower, similar percentages have been checking out the earlier Divinity games, with the original Divinity: Original Sin going from a monthly peak of 941 players to 2,150, while Divinity: Dragon Commander (the result of a strategy game and a dating sim walking into a bar at the same time) went from 14 players to a whole 23.

If you're one of those people going back to Divinity: Original Sin 2, we've got a handy beginners guide and a slightly more advanced build guide to help you out. It's not a super forgiving game, and you'll probably find yourself having to back out of a quest and find some more level-appropriate challenges at least once.

That's if you even make it out of Fort Joy, the opening area with a wild number of ways you can escape from it. If you're the kind of player who just replays the first act of Baldur's Gate 3 over and over, you'll find Fort Joy to be a real vortex of decision paralysis. You'll probably end up learning to quicksave the hard way, but you'll also get to experience one of the best RPGs on PC.

Despite the enormous success of Baldur's Gate 3, Larian bid adieu to D&D after the completion of its landmark RPG and has opted to go back to its original world: The Divinity series, which includes one of our all-time favorite RPGs, Divinity: Original Sin 2.

The new Larian RPG, which is just called Divinity, is probably not going to require you to be up-to-date on the series lore. But the series has a lot to offer for the curious, even if the games do get pretty crusty the further back you go.

Here's what Baldur's Gate 3 fans and anyone else interested in the next big Larian RPG should know about Divinity.

What are the games in the Divinity series?

What order should you play the Divinity games in?

Rather than experiencing the Divinity games chronologically by release date, or according to the internal timeline of the series, we suggest investigating them in reverse order of release. That has you starting with the best of them and working backwards until they get too crusty for you. So our recommendation is:

1. Divinity: Original Sin 2
2. Divinity: Original Sin
3. Divinity: Dragon Commander (If you're into strategy games)
4. Divinity 2: Ego Draconis
5. Beyond Divinity (you can skip this one unless you're a real completionist)
6. Divine Divinity

Start with Original Sin and Original Sin 2

Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2 are the most Baldur's Gate 3-like of Larian's other games, with turn-based combat, co-op, as well as the intensive simulation and reactivity of BG3.

The biggest things they're missing are Baldur's Gate 3's supremely generous storytelling and production values. Original Sin 2 has a fun, distinctive, and romanceable cast, but there's just a smaller volume of dialogue and quality time with them. Original Sin 1, meanwhile, is almost closer to Shrek in tone than a BioWare game⁠—it's funny and quirky, with great quests and surprises, but not much in the way of character work.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 was our 2017 Game of the Year pick, and remains an easy recommendation today. There are even aspects of its combat and mechanics I'd argue are superior to BG3, or at least not a downgrade: It has a stronger emphasis on elemental combos and interactions, as well as a unique health system where crowd control doesn't work on enemies until you've removed all their defenses, but after that, it has a 100% success rate.

Original Sin 1 is starting to feel crustier and finickier in that old school RPG way, but it's still relatively approachable. Its biggest foibles are some gnarly difficulty spikes, as well as a complicated, poorly explained crafting system where most of the best weapons and gear are hiding⁠—but once you've mastered it, it's kind of satisfying in its own way.

The best resource I've ever managed to find for character builds in OS1 is buried in this couple's personal website, for some reason. One of those bits of load-bearing internet esoterica⁠—if the server ever goes down, it will be the burning of the Library of Alexandria for Original Sin 1 buildcrafting. The guides can be confusing at first⁠—they assume an intermediate familiarity with the skill system⁠—but the builds are good fun and at the very least make for a solid starting point.

Thank you Ashley and Micah English, wherever you are.

Should you really play the pre-Original Sin games?

I've still yet to play RTS spinoff Dragon Commander⁠—I'm not much of an RTS guy⁠—but it has plenty of devotees on the PC Gamer staff. The more you like strategy, the more you should prioritize it, I'd say. It was an ambitious game that mixed large-scale strategy, real-time battles, and political maneuvering.

As for the OG Divinity games, Divine Divinity and Divinity 2, this is where only the true sickos should tread. In the first Divinity press release, Larian boss Swen Vincke only makes reference to the Original Sin games for parsing the lore in the upcoming RPG, and Original Sin 2 directly contradicts the story told in Divinity 2 (no Original Sin).

But if you want to play some great old RPGs, and don't mind some crust and rougher edges, I can heartily recommend Divine Divinity and Divinity 2.

Beyond Divinity is more an exercise in completionism or historical curiosity: It's fascinating, because its dual-protagonist structure has the outlines of the seamless co-op design Larian would pioneer later on, but it's a bit of a slog to play.

What is Divinity's fantasy setting like?

The Divinity series takes place in a classic fantasy world called Rivellon, which includes humans, elves, and dwarves, plus lizard people and undead skeletons. (Larian seems to particularly like skeletons—Withers fans may be interested to know that you can marry one in Divinity: Dragon Commander.)

The first games were action RPGs, and the Diablo influence perhaps extended to the plot, too, though without quite so much Catholic mysticism. In Divine Divinity, an evil organization called The Black Ring is trying to bring back a demon called Chaos, while you naturally try to stop them—helpfully, you are a chosen one who can become a messiah called the "Divine."

It's not the most exciting fantasy setting ever conceived, but then again, neither is D&D's Forgotten Realms, where Baldur's Gate 3 is set. It was the characters and the specifics of the narrative that hooked us in that game.

We discuss Larian's return to its original series in much more depth here. One thing that surprised us about the Divinity reveal trailer, embedded above, is how gruesome it is, though Harvey speculates that the game itself might not be as grisly as all that.

The days of doubt are past us. Larian Studios is officially that girl, the debutante with a stacked dance card who nary an RPG-liker would commit the social gaffe of insulting in public. With all that adoration comes the freedom to do as you please, and for Larian that's returning from the megabucks success of Baldur's Gate 3 to play around in its very own fantasy setting.

The next RPG from your new favorite developer is called, simply, Divinity. It's the studio's "biggest most ambitious RPG yet," set in Rivellon of Divinity: Original Sin fame, where big red lizardmen are princes and elves gnaw on severed forearms.

Is there a Divinity release date?

There is no release date or even release year for Divinity, so don't let the AI lie to you when you ask.

All we know that even hints at a release date is that Larian founder Swen Vincke told us in an interview after The Game Awards 2025 that Divinity is in full production, with Larian already recording performances and dialogue with actors. This doesn't mean Divinity's release is imminent, however, as Vincke said that Larian will be recording "nonstop" throughout development.

Vincke also claimed that Divinity is "in that stage of development where there is a lot that is still rough or missing, but where you sense that a game is coming alive," and that "things are still very moldable." Doesn't sound like a game coming out in the next year to me, but I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong.

So, can we speculate about the timeline at all? Surely we can narrow it down to something more specific than sometime in the next decade.

Back in April 2025, about eight months before revealing Divinity, Larian boss Swen Vincke said the studio was "deep in the trenches" with its next project. Vincke also answered a question about the studio's five year plan saying that "I hope that definitely five years from now I can tell you about it and say 'yeah this is working out, this is what we're doing.'"

Here's the timeline for Baldur's Gate 3's release, to help illustrate what pace Larian might be operating at:

• Summer 2017 - Larian submits a BG3 design document to Wizards of the Coast the month before Divinity: Original Sin 2 launches
• June 2019 - Larian reveals the first trailer for Baldur's Gate 3
• October 2020 - Baldur's Gate 3 early access launch
• August 2023 - Baldur's Gate 3's full launch

I'm not going to put words in Swen's mouth, but the time from first trailer to first public release for BG3 was only 16 months. Divinity is the studio's biggest project yet though, so it may not be able to match that speed.

What will the story of Divinity be?

We're already familiar with Rivellon as Larian's high fantasy setting from the Divinity games, but there's no telling quite what the story will be this time. The reveal trailer included a man being burned to death in a giant wicker man contraption during a busy summer festival outside the walls of a large, medieval-y city, attended by all sorts of folks from Rivellon's handful of races—humans, elves, dwarves, lizards, and orcs are definitely shown. The gluttony, lust, and ritual sacrifice of it all somehow summons a giant corpse portal that Larian's publishing director explained is called the Hellstone. You know, heroic sword and sorcery stuff!

One of our BG3 freaks, Harvey Randall, suggested that Divinity may not wind up being as dark as that first trailer suggests, and Larian writing director Adam Smith pretty much confirmed this in our interview after The Game Awards 2025:

"We're not in the grimdarkness where there's only war. There is light and hope. We don't want to make something that is all that tone. We want to confront you with horror and then say, 'What are you going to do with it? And about it?'"

In a Divinity Reddit AMA, Smith also said that "We want to give players the opportunity to be the light in that darkness—an inspiration, a hero, a champion. We'll also let them leave the world even worse than they found it. We're pushing as far as we can on player agency."

Larian founder Swen Vincke also added that Divinity: Original Sin 2 was already pretty dark, but the game's more limited graphics and pulled-back camera meant you "didn't see them cinematically."

"Now you can see it cinematically, and it makes everything more intimate and direct," he said. "It makes for a much more engaging experience. When you see the darkness you're going to understand that this is a game about contrast, where you can really be the beacon, the last hope of everyone, or the one that really fucks everything up."

Out of what we know for sure and speculation cap firmly on now, the studio has always played pretty fast and loose with timelines, continuity, and even geography, so nothing story-wise is set in stone here. Divinity could be a reboot. It could also just be a strong, splashy way to reintroduce the setting of its earlier games to all its new BG3 fans.

To tide us all over until Larian reveals more, here's some very small teasers (seriously, they're microscopic) that we know about the story of Divinity so far:

• Divinity "ends with a lot of fire."
• Want a single word Divinity spoiler that's not really a spoiler? Here you go: alligator. Let's all have a swell old time theorizing over that for the next few years.

Do you need to know the other Divinity games?

Larian says nope, referring to Divinity as "a brand-new game that doesn't require experience with previous Larian titles." Larian boss Swen Vincke even warned newcomers that they probably shouldn't play the early games in the Divinity series. However, the studio did add that "Those who've played Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2 will be able to enjoy greater understanding and continuity."

That is how these things tend to go. You're rarely going to get a game developer suggesting that you shouldn't just hop on into its latest and greatest game. I'd bet on this being a bit like the jump Obsidian made from Pillars of Eternity to Avowed—a familiar setting to those who know it with lots of easter eggs but no required reading.

Will Divinity come out in early access?

Yes, Larian is planning to launch Divinity in early access. Despite initially playing coy elsewhere, Larian founder Swen Vincke told Bloomberg that Divinity will launch into early access, as the developer has with previous games, but that it’s unlikely to be out in 2026.

What do we know about the gameplay in Divinity?

We know that Divinity is an RPG, and we know it's bigger—in project scope or actual game area or maybe both—than Baldur's Gate 3. We also know it will have turn-based combat (sorry to those who thought otherwise), with Larian founder Swen Vincke telling us that "It's a new rule set, a rule set built on everything that we learned from all the previous games that we've done."

In the same interview, Vincke also stated that Divinity has 'deeper sequences of consequence' based on your choices than Baldur's Gate 3, intended to give players even more control over how their adventure plays out:

"The level of agency that we're going to give you is very, very high⁠—much higher than what happened in BG3. At least that's our ambition. And this is agency at pretty much all levels, so it's at the narrative as well as systems level. That makes it our most ambitious. It's the biggest game that we've ever made."

Adam Smith, Larian's writing director also revealed that the team's main focus for improvements in Divinity is companions, and other characters, to feel like a more natural part of the world than they did in BG3, and previous Divinity games. Smith also specifically raises focus on wanting to deepen character relationships. Smith claims they're aiming "to ramp up player friendship and romance more subtly, so relationship building feels natural" this time around.

The last thing we know for sure is that Larian updated its game engine for Divinity. While this may not sound as sexy as other reveals, Vincke says that "There are a lot of things we can do now that we couldn't do before that's going to be really cool. In gameplay—I think that's going to be the bit that excites most people, other than the visual fidelity that's obviously come up."

What else does Divinity have?

We'll add more of the small stuff here as we find it, but for now, here's everything we know about what Divinity is adding, or changing, this time:

• Divinity will not keep the magic armor system from DOS2.
• Larian is sticking to its guns on not including WASD movement.
• Loot will be fixed liked in Baldur's Gate 3, not randomized like in previous Divinity games.
• There's a new action economy and character progression system, but there's no specifics on what this will look like just yet.
• Alena Dubrovina, Divinity's Character Art Director said that Larian is aiming to have an even better character creator system than Baldur's Gate 3, with "More colors, more options, more control."

What else COULD Divinity have?

Aside from what Vincke and Co have told us, everything else is just conjecture at this point. Here are some things that Larian did in both Baldur's Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 that might tell us what to expect from Divinity:

• Sandbox-y rules and a love of players discovering exploits
• Four-player co-op support
• An adventuring party with personal quests and optional romances
• Talking animals—so many talking animals

So... is Divinity using generative AI or not?

Uh, it's complicated. Divinity is not implementing generative AI concept art tools, but it is trying generative AI "things" across other departments.

The AI chat surrounding Divinity started when the studio's boss Swen Vincke revealed to Bloomberg that Larian had used generative AI and that devs "often use AI tools to explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text." As you might imagine, that did not go down well, so Vincke started a Reddit AMA by swearing off using AI tools in concept art development.

"First off—there is not going to be any gen AI art in Divinity," wrote Vincke. "I know there’s been a lot of discussion about us using AI tools as part of concept art exploration. We already said this doesn’t mean the actual concept art is generated by AI but we understand it created confusion.

"So, to ensure there is no room for doubt, we’ve decided to refrain from using gen AI tools during concept art development."

But...

"We continuously try to improve the speed with which we can try things out," Vincke continued. "The more iterations we can do, the better in general the gameplay is. We think gen AI can help with this and so we’re trying things out across departments."

Nothing kills a studio's golden child image these days like doubling down on gen AI, so here's hoping those gen AI "things" aren't as robustly implemented as it seems they might be right now.

Okay but how, like, adult is Divinity going to be?

On a scale from 'totally wholesome' to 'sex with a druid in bear form', the cinematic trailer for Divinity lands at: summer festival public lizard orgy. Do with that what you will.

It is 2019: Larian is announcing its new RPG, Baldur's Gate 3. The studio releases a short, cinematic teaser with an emphasis on body horror—the ceremorphosis of an unwitting guard rendered in horrible, gory detail. Teeth tumble out of his mouth like popcorn, cheekbones snap, and his thumb goes at all sorts of weird angles while hair sloughs off his head.

It was a pretty evocative trailer but, a couple years on, after multiple Baldur's Gate 3 playthroughs—was it really the vibe? I mean, sure, it was a game about mind flayers, and there are plenty of grisly scenes in it. In one part of the game, you delve into a nest stitched together out of pulsing human flesh.

But on the whole, Baldur's Gate 3 is a bright heroic fantasy with bloody dark spots—it's a colourful, lively game that (unless you kill everybody) is about troubled people overcoming their worst nature and horrifying fates to save the realm. The body horror in that original trailer is a theme, but it's only one of many. Evil endings that matched the tone one for one didn't come out until several patches later.

Outside of that? You've got a worm in your brain, sure, but aside from a menu where you plug tadpoles into upgrades and the option to maybe turn squid, if you want, the ticking pressure of cereomorphosis isn't really an issue at all. Even Larian knew this—just look at the actual launch trailer: Sweeping, orchestral, heroic scores! Devils playing chess! And, like, maybe a few cumulative seconds of body horror, as a treat.

Skip to 2025: Larian is announcing its new RPG, Divinity. The studio releases a short, cinematic teaser with an emphasis on body horror, and—are we starting to sense a pattern, here?

And hey, I'm certain the events in the announcement trailer will have plenty of impact on the full game: That big ol' flesh obelisk will probably be an inciting incident or location of some sort, and we're likely dealing with demons—but if your first trailer can be considered an elevator pitch, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were looking at a Diablo-style descent into Hell here.

Once we're out of the elevator and being shown the full game, though, I strongly suspect we're all going to go: "Hey, so, what was that pitch about? You guys got really into describing how that guy's arm got pulled apart, there."

I'm reasonably confident I'm right, because unless Larian's taking a right turn into survival horror or something, I don't think we're actually in for what the trailer promises as a persistent, pervasive theme. I'm gonna call this now: We'll be fighting great evils, sure. There'll be bloody fortresses and flesh pillars and whatever. Divinity's gonna be an adult game.

But if you watched that trailer and went 'maybe this is a bit dark for me', you're probably going to be okay when the actual game arrives. I'd bet two nickels on the fact that this has happened twice. I will happily put money down on the fact that Divinity will, ostensibly, be a high-magic fantasy adventure with some moderate blood splatter, brief bouts of body horror, sex, and some cartoonishly-rendered meat obelisks.

Which begs the question: Why is this the second time in a row one of Larian's cinematic reveal trailers hasn't really captured an accurate vibe? Again, could be wrong—this could be Divinity's dark, gritty, grimy horror-RPG reboot—but like, with as little assumption as I can muster, I have to ask:

Hey, Larian cinematic designers, do you guys wanna like, talk to somebody? You okay over there? They're not feeding you mindflayer tadpoles? Swen doesn't have a monolith in the basement that's making you think xenomorph thoughts? You want some orange juice or something? Snacks, maybe?

In all seriousness, I'm not clutching pearls here. The trailer rules from an artistic standpoint, just not really an advertising one—Larian hasn't set the tone as much as it's gone "ooga booga!" and run away. And don't get me wrong! It was a pretty good ooga booga. Very lovingly rendered, very scary.

I'm interested in whatever background event or persistent plot thread the "Burning Man gone wrong (sexual)" cinematic is setting up, and I'm convinced it's going to be great fun. But, respectfully, I'll be waiting keenly to see the actual videogame before I cement an idea of what it'll actually be like in my head.

… The lizard sex orgy is probably indicative, though.

Geoff Keighley flytipped a statue in the desert, Larian made some cryptic tweets, there was a brief period where lots of people were saying The Elder Scrolls 6 and Half-Life 3 for some reason, and now it's all over. We know what Larian's next game is. It's Divinity—just Divinity—and I'd bet several dollars it's a soft reboot for a series which is going to pull in exponentially more players after the mondo success of Baldur's Gate 3.

So if we can't argue about what that statue is or what Larian's next game will be anymore, what's left to us? Fear not: we've already started arguing about whether Divinity will be a turn-based game when it eventually arrives, or if it'll revive the old, hallowed ways of realtime with pause, like its Infinity Engine forefathers of olde.

In fact, the debate went on before Divinity was even officially revealed at The Game Awards. "There are rumors that Larian's next game 'Divinity' is NOT turn-based…" tweeted content creator SynthPotato. Well, that set the cat among the pigeons.

"That would be terrible. They're the best in the world at turn based," read one reply.

"I would love for them to try out an ARPG again," read another.

My assumption is one or both of the repliers have since perished in some kind of dawn duel.

It's not just X replies where the argument proceeds, mind you. "Ain't no way Divinity isn't turn-based" declares a poster in the Divinity: Original Sin subreddit. "They have done real time before, and they were fun. Let the devs do what they think is the best fit," reads a remarkably sober reply in a separate thread. Across TikTok and YouTube, comments sections reverberate with all the mutual enmity of turn-based stalwarts and real-time sickos.

Which, to be honest, I find a bit odd. To be fair, it's not like there's no reason to think Larian's new Divinity will be a real-time ARPG. After all, that's what the series was originally. Beyond Divinity, Ego Draconis, and Divine Divinity? All some flavour of real-time. It was only really the Original Sin games—which bear a lot of similarities in how they play to Baldur's Gate 3—that got so many people thinking of Divinity as a turn-based CRPG series.

And yet, I feel pretty confident saying Divinity, whenever it releases, will hew to a similar turn-based mode as BG3 and Original Sin 1 and 2. For one thing, that's the style that put Larian as we know it today on the map—Original Sin 2 and especially BG3 were successes like nothing else it's ever made, and plenty of its newest ardent fans will expect more of that gameplay. Heck, it already turned Baldur's Gate—a real-time with pause series originally—into a turn-based game in the mould of Original Sin.

For another, Larian specifically namechecks Original Sin 1 and 2 in Divinity's announcement. "While Divinity is a brand new game that doesn’t require experience with previous Larian titles, those who’ve played Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2 will be able to enjoy greater understanding and continuity."

Maybe it's just referring to the series' narrative there, but I doubt it. I think Larian's saying if you can already deal with Original Sin's systems, you'll be able to handle Divinity.

Then again, Swen Vincke is a complete mad lad. Maybe it'll be an RTS.

After a mysterious desert statue and trademark-filing snafu, Larian has officially unveiled its next game after Baldur's Gate 3 at The Game Awards. Larian is returning to its home-grown fantasy series with a new entry simply titled Divinity. We do not yet have gameplay or a release window, but Geoff Keighley described it as Larian's "biggest game ever," and "even larger than Baldur's Gate 3."

After some surprise live antics, including performers being hoisted over the crowd in a high wire act, we got a pre-rendered trailer showing a much darker sort of game than we're used to from Larian. A tortured man is shown being burned alive in a Wicker Man-style enclosure, with celebrating peasants degenerating into an orgiastic bacchanal outside, overseen by flagellants and a masked cultist under some kind of celestial conjunction.

This predictably unleashes some kind of unholy force that attacks the revelers, and after a fade to black, we can see that they've been incorporated into a gruesome amalgamation of bodies in the shape of that mysterious desert statue everyone was buzzing about.

Well, now we know it was neither a portent of the end times, nor a marketing stunt for The Elder Scrolls 6—and honestly, this is an equally exciting use case for a hell obelisk as far as I'm concerned.

Shortly after Baldur's Gate 3 took the world by storm, Larian shocked everyone by revealing that it would not be making an expansion pack or sequel to our 2023 game of the year and two-time Top 100 champion. The studio subsequently revealed to us that it had two projects in the pipeline.

Smart money was that at least one of those would return to Divinity and its world of Rivellon, the setting for all of Larian's mainline games before Baldur's Gate 3. The name, "Divinity," has big reboot energy, and it's unlikely that Larian is aiming to throw the Lore book at all of its incoming Baldur's Gate 3 fans.

At the same time, I'd wager it's no more of a hard reboot than either of the Original Sin games. 2014's Divinity: Original Sin took place thousands of years before the rest of the series and completely rewrote aspects of the world and its history.

Our 2017 game of the year, Divinity: Original Sin 2, was sandwiched in-between 2002's Divine Divinity and Divinity 2: Ego Draconis from 2009. But it completely changes the characterization of one of Divinity 2's main characters, and it's even possible to kill him—Beast, you've created a Time Paradox! I've always loved how much Larian disregards the feelings and sanity of wiki editors with its approach to continuity, and I wonder if that will continue, or if the studio will try to shape the series' spaghetti timeline into something more cohesive.

In a press release accompanying the trailer, Larian noted that "While Divinity is a brand new game that doesn’t require experience with previous Larian titles, those who’ve played Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2 will be able to enjoy greater understanding and continuity." So despite the name, it sounds like Divinity will most closely follow up on the Original Sin games.

This will actually be the first game in the series just called "Divinity"—2002's crime against marketing, Divine Divinity, was the very first entry in the series. Speaking of getting off on a nomenclature technicality, Larian publishing director Michael Douse was not lying to us when he tweeted that "there aren't currently any plans for a new Divinity Original Sin 3 game."

This is something Larian founder and CEO Swen Vincke touched on in a press release. “Despite our long history with the series, this is our first game entitled 'Divinity,'" said Vincke. "We’re ready to bring everything we’ve done previously into one place. This marks the beginning of something with more breadth, depth, and intimacy than anything we’ve created before. We’ve been building toward this moment ever since we took our fate into our own hands. This is the Divinity we’ve always wanted to make and you're going to have loads of fun with it.”

Divinity does not yet have a release date or window—we don't even know if Larian will pursue the early access model again—but we've got our ears to the ground for any further information.

Vincke himself has taken to Twitter to talk about the announcement a bit more. "I don’t think I’ve ever been so nervous about an announcement as this one but here it is," Vincke wrote. "This is our biggest, most ambitious RPG yet and we can’t wait to show it to you!!!"