Divinity: Original Sin 2 easter eggs hinting Baldur's Gate 3 would be Larian's next game had to be toned down: 'Originally the reference to BG3 was very explicit'

(Image credit: Larian)

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.

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Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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