After some unusual teases and a trademark accidentally showing Larian Studios’ hand, the next game from the creator of Baldur’s Gate 3 was officially unveiled at The Game Awards along with an incredibly disturbing trailer. It’s Divinity. Simply divine.
We don’t have any details about the match myselfbut we can deduce something from the very cinematic trailer. We saw a festival with a medieval appearance, full of all kinds of revelry and a enormous wicker man ready to be burned. Inside the man, a real man is chained and tortured while an effigy is burned. But when he drowns (it’s gross, okay?), his blood (?) drips onto the ground, weird screaming plants grow, the wicker man goes crazy, there’s a lot of screaming, and then we see the statue that everyone has been guessing about for the past few weeks. Divinity!
Following the announcement, we received a press release with a few more clues. “The gods are silent. Rivellon is bleeding. New powers are moving,” we read. “Built by the team that created Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios unleashes its ambition to bring you an RPG with more breadth and depth than ever before.”
It goes on to state that Divinity is a “completely new game” that requires no knowledge of other Larian games, but players of Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 may “be able to enjoy greater understanding and continuity.”
“Despite our long history with the series, this is our first game titled Divinity. said Larian CEO Swen Vincke. “We are ready to bring together everything we have done before in one place. This marks the beginning of something with greater breadth, depth and intimacy than anything we have created before. We have been approaching this moment since we took our fate in our own hands. This is the Divinity we have always wanted to create and you will have a great time doing it.”
Larian first released Divine Divinity in 2002, followed by Beyond Divinity in 2004, Divinity 2 in 2009, and Divinity: Dragon Commander in 2013. Divinity: Original Sin was released in 2014, and Original Sin 2 was a direct sequel. Unlike Original Sin, the rest of the Divinity games are action RPGs, not turn-based games. Given the much bigger eyes on the studio after the successes of Original Sin 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3, it makes sense that Larian would want to go back to its roots a bit and show off its own IP.
Larian’s hit a series of home runs in his RPGs. We gave Divinity: Original Sin 2 a score of 9.6/10, saying: “Divinity: Original Sin 2 may have been designed in the spirit of decades-old RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 2, but that legacy only serves as a foundation for the expansive game Larian has built on it.” We recently gave Baldur’s Gate 3 a 10/10, saying: “That’s not to say that every next CRPG should aspire to be like Baldur’s Gate 3. It doesn’t all have to be that big and ambitious, or even that dense. But it’s a landmark moment in the genre, and if I had to point to one template that I’d like everyone else making these games to draw inspiration from, it would definitely be this.”
For those wondering why Larian isn’t working on Baldur’s Gate 4, I’m sorry, it’s already been sorted out and the future of Baldur’s Gate remains in Hasbro’s hands.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Have a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
