The big mystery of the big Game Awards statue in the desert may be solved, and if the sleuthing is correct it does not herald the announcement of a new Elder Scrolls Online expansion. It looks instead to be a tease for the next game from Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian.
Before Larian became known to the world as the developer of Baldur's Gate 3, you see, it was known to RPG nerds as the developer of the Divinity games. The series goes all the way back to 2002 with Divine Divinity, Larian's second game, and stretches to the 2017 release Divinity: Original Sin 2, one of the best RPGs to come along in years and recipient of our 2017 Game of the Year award.
Where things really take a turn, though, is in the appearance of a separate filing, made at the same time by the same firm, that doesn't carry the name but does look awfully familiar:
Cast your memory back to that big statue in the desert, and then dare to compare—that tentacled-eyeball-thing in the middle is a spot-on match for the Larian trademark filing.
A third image was included in another simultaneous filing—I don't recognize it, but it's been a long time since I played a Divinity game so the floor is open to anyone who might be able to place it.
So it sure looks like something is cooking on the Divinity front, although all of this is purely speculation: I haven't heard a peep about what Larian is getting up to for its next project, except that it's not going to be Baldur's Gate, it is going to be "crazy ambitious," and if we're lucky we'll see it before 2030. Oh, and there are two of them.
I will remind everyone, however, that this isn't the first time speculation about a new Divinity has cropped up: Back in May the Larian account on X briefly changed its handle from @larianstudios to @divinity, although Larian publishing boss Michael Douse said at the time that it was just some meaningless internal work and nothing to get wound up over.
In the immediate aftermath of the trademark filling's discovery, Douse shared some thoughts on X about a completely separate and unrelated matter that obviously has nothing to do with anything that's happened today:
It'll be very interesting to see—if that's what this is—how Larian fares with unleashing its own original RPG world on an audience that knows it mainly, or exclusively, for Baldur's Gate 3. D&D is instantly recognizable and has a marketable heft that Divinity simply cannot come close to—but as Justin Wagner correctly noted earlier this year, Baldur's Gate 3 is Divinity: Original Sin 3 in all but name, so the transition from one fantasy realm to another may not be all that jarring. (I'm less convinced that he's correct about the world needing a new Divinity: Dragon Commander, but yeah, I'd give it a shot.)
Not too long after his initial post, Douse did more directly address the trademark filing in a separate message on X, writing, "There aren't currently any plans for a new Divinity Original Sin 3 game but once we are ready to show what we've been working on we will."
I can't help but take note of the specificity of that denial: "A new Divinity: Original Sin 3 game" does not necessarily exclude the possibility of a new Divinity RPG. Am I seeing ghosts, grasping at straws? Maybe—but maybe something all new in the Divinity universe is happening, too.
We won't know for certain what the big statue in the desert is all about until The Game Awards 2025 reveals its secrets—that happens on December 11, beginning at 4:30 pm PT/7:30 pm ET.
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