Larian’s new Divinity game is a turn-based CRPG that both builds on their achievements from Baldur’s Gate 3, and follows on from the events of Divinity: Original Sin 2. So sayeth Swen Vincke, studio CEO, in an interview with RPS following the project’s bloody and bawdy announcement trailer at the Game Awards last week.
Concrete specifics remain few as of writing, but I can tell you that this is perhaps more reboot than sequel. It’s an attempt to firm up and clarify Divinity’s narrative universe, both for returning Braccus Rex devotees and for Baldur’s Gate 3 players who’ve yet to try Larian’s non-D&D games. It’s also going to allow for more “freedom” than any Larian game before, thanks partly to running on a new version of Larian’s in-house engine tech. Ah, the eternal videogame promise of more freedom. I’m mostly just here for the piggies.
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The Geoff Fest trailer made waves for its scenes of human sacrifice, inter-species shagging, cosy mother-daughter moments, and vistas of perky porkers guzzling Orc vomit. Aside from reviving wider discussion about this year’s crackdown on “adult” games – if this is fit for a mainstream award show, why not the similarly macabre Horses? – the trailer felt like a parody of the ceremony that hosted it. The figure of the man strapped to a monstrous burning idol isn’t worlds away from the winged golden TGA emblem, and there were piggies at Geoff Fest, too. Miss Piggy, specifically, who at one point suggested that she and Geoff Keighley once had sex – a charming bit of bestiality Vincke promises he did not know was coming while Larian were making their trailer. Though he does acknowledge that Larian have previously burned Geoff Keighley in effigy.
“Oh my god, no, it was not deliberate!” he frantically assures me, when I ask what he’s got against Miss Piggy. “It was only when we saw Miss Piggy that we realised, ‘oh shit’. We did not, I repeat, we did not do that on purpose. I would never, never seek a fight with Miss Piggy.” It’s OK, mate. I’m pretty sure Miss Piggy doesn’t know how to cast Corpse Explosion.
The trailer is actually about “contrast”, Vincke goes on. It takes quite specific cues from the realm of film, where ‘shocking’ material of this sort is relatively non-controversial. “We were inspired by the Wickerman movie, the original one, and then at the time [of the trailer’s creation], we had just seen The Substance also,” he says. “The idea really is that you create a very dark world in which the player can be the light, or the one that snuffs out the light. So it’s really going to be up to you, because it’s giving lots of choice, and so, it has that entire vibe with a world that can turn dark very rapidly.”
Divinity: Original Sin 2 had several possible endings, some of them very gloomy indeed. While the trailer blurb’s reference to ‘silent gods’ suggests that one of these is now canon, Vincke declines to either pin this down or share how much time has passed in the Divinity world since the last instalment.
He does, however, note that refining the backstory is an objective. Released in 2002, the original Divine Divinity was Larian’s second game. The series has taken many forms over the ensuing years, from action-RPG to strategy, and as Vincke concedes, the narrative and setting are partly the product of scattershot improvisation.
“One of the very first things we’ve done, when we started working on [the new Divinity], was to say that we need to have a really good look at our world-building,” he explains. “Because in the past, it was just like, invent as you go. And so, we’ve spent a lot of time cleaning up, making sure that people that play the previous games would still find continuity once inside of the game. But at the same time, also making sure that there are hooks in there that would make it unique.” Again, there’s nothing specific to share, but Vincke hints that “it goes beyond what you expect”. Ruminate on that, God King fanciers.
The desire to consolidate the lore is, of course, written large in the simpler title. “We called it Divinity, because as I said, we tried to clean up our universe and make some really solid world-building, with which we can build things in the future,” Vincke notes. “In that sense, it’s almost as though it’s the first one in the series, because there’s never been a Divinity, actually – all the other ones had all kinds of prefixes or postfixes for better or worse. This one is going to say ‘this is it, this is the universe, this is what we’re going to work with’.”
Naturally, Larian hope to entice players who’ve never touched a Divinity game before. In this, they’re trading on the experience of selling Dungeons and Dragons to people who’ve never known the gossamer texture of a D20. “It’s going to be like Baldur’s Gate 3, where if you’ve never played a D&D game, you will understand everything, and if you’ve played a D&D game, you will say ‘oh shit, there’s the Guild, and so forth’,” Vincke spells out. “It’s going to be the same thing here. If you’ve played the previous games, you will recognise things, if you didn’t, fine, here’s a new universe, with a whole bunch of cool things that are going to surprise you.”
The overall tone of the world will remain “dark fantasy with a touch of humour”, and notwithstanding Larian’s desire to join some dots, the in-game story will be whatever you make of it. “You are going to have so much agency that everybody will have their own story, that they’re going to be creating in it,” Vincke says. “And in that sense, it is like a D&D tabletop RPG session.
“I think one of the places where it will be very different is that this is a ruleset that was made for a video game, not for tabletop,” he goes on. “Baldur’s Gate 3 was a tabletop game that was adapted into a video game. So I think that’s where you will see a lot of differences. If you didn’t play D&D, you will get in it right away. Whereas with D&D you have to explain spell slots, all that kind of stuff – every single class had a different ruleset, almost, so you won’t have those things. But in the sense that this is a role-playing game, where agency drives what the continuation of the story is, in that sense they will be the same.
“D&D is a system,” Vincke adds. “It’s not the world-building. There’s lots of campaigns with different worlds in there, right? And so, there’s no real comparison bits where you can say ‘this is the D&D world’. Most people mean Forgotten Realms, and I think, when you compare Forgotten Realms, [the Divinity world] is definitely more grounded than you would expect, at least in the beginning. And definitely darker.”
In yet another fistful of chum for the speculators, Vincke says that “we’re extending the things that you can do in the world, with a lot more actions and a lot more freedom as a result. So in that sense it’s a CRPG, you would call it.” As you’d expect, Larian have devised some fresh technology for the job. Divinity runs on Framework 5, the latest version of Larian’s in-house game engine, which the developers have been working on alongside Baldur’s Gate 3. It offers “a whole bunch of new bells and whistles, modernises a bunch of things and allows us to do things that we couldn’t do before”.
The game is being developed across Larian’s seven locations – the studio headcount now stands at around 530, Vincke says, and “almost all” of those devs are now working on Divinity. Some of the remainder are presumably working on Larian’s other, unrevealed big project, about which Vincke refuses to be drawn.
And that’s your lot, right now. Judging by Original Sin 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3, it seems inevitable that Divinity will be an excellent RPG in the sense of giving you myriad ways to play around with a fascinatingly written world. I’m most interested right now to discover whether the rest of the game will be as rank and squalid as that trailer, with its whimsical closing imagery of a solitary surviving pig nosing around a pyre of fused bodies. It occurs to me that I would absolutely play a no-frills Larian horror RPG.
Invited to discuss responses to the trailer in the context of this year’s payment network crusade against ‘taboo’ adult material, Vincke is nonplussed, again referencing the mayhem of The Substance and Wickerman. “I don’t think there’s anything different here in what we’re doing, to what was done in those movies,” he says. “So I think it’s still OK. I mean, it is an adult game, a game for mature audiences, similar to what you see on HBO or on Netflix or in cinema.”
I blather open-endedly about whether the year’s backlash against NSFW gaming is just one of those “growing pains” situations for the artform and culture. Vincke comments that videogames tend to get “more engagement” than films on social media, when they feature this kind of material, but doesn’t really expand on the argument, concluding instead with a quote from Douglas Adams: “in the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
In other words: some people will complain about anything. You could accuse Vincke of dodging a complicated discussion, I guess, but I couldn’t really fault the man for wishing to avoid controversy. After all, he’s already made a lifelong enemy of Miss Piggy.
Disclosure: Former RPS deputy editor Adam Smith (RPS in peace) now works at Larian and is the lead writer for Baldur’s Gate 3. Former contributor Emily Gera also works on it.
