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.
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