The days of doubt are past us. Larian Studios is officially that girl, the debutante with a stacked dance card who nary an RPG-liker would commit the social gaffe of insulting in public. With all that adoration comes the freedom to do as you please, and for Larian that’s returning from the megabucks success of Baldur’s Gate 3 to play around in its very own fantasy setting.
The next RPG from your new favorite developer is called, simply, Divinity. It’s the studio’s “biggest most ambitious rpg yet,” set in Rivellon of Divinity: Original Sin fame, where big red lizardmen are princes and elves gnaw on severed forearms.
Is there a Divinity release date?
There is no release date or even release year for Divinity, so don’t let the AI lie to you when you ask. Can we speculate about the timeline at all? Surely we can narrow it down to something more specific than sometime in the next decade.
Back in April 2025, about eight months before revealing Divinity, Larian boss Swen Vincke said the studio was “deep in the trenches” with its next project. Vincke also answered a question about the studio’s five year plan saying that “I hope that definitely five years from now I can tell you about it and say ‘yeah this is working out, this is what we’re doing.'”
Here’s the timeline for Baldur’s Gate 3’s release, to help illustrate what pace Larian might be operating at:
I’m not going to put words in Swen’s mouth—especially because we don’t know if Divinity will launch first in early access the way Larian has done in the past—but the time from first trailer to first public release for BG3 was only 16 months. Divinity is the studio’s biggest project yet though, so it may not be able to match that speed.
What will the story of Divinity be?
We’re already familiar with Rivellon as Larian’s high fantasy setting from the Divinity games, but there’s no telling quite what the story will be this time. The reveal trailer included a man being burned to death in a giant wicker man contraption during a busy summer festival outside the walls of a large, medieval-y city, attended by all sorts of folks from Rivellon’s handful of races—humans, elves, dwarves, lizards, and orcs are definitely shown. The gluttony, lust, and ritual sacrifice of it all somehow summons a giant corpse portal that Larian’s publishing director explained is called the Hellstone. You know, heroic sword and sorcery stuff!
One of our BG3 freaks, Harvey Randall, has suggested that Divinity may not wind up being as dark as that first trailer suggests, and I’m inclined to agree. Baldur’s Gate 3 also had a pretty body horror-ific reveal trailer but “on the whole, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a bright heroic fantasy with bloody dark spots,” Harvey reminds us. Like Baldur’s Gate 3’s original mindflayer invasion cinematic trailer, I’d bet this is setting up the big, world-threatening inciting incident for Divinity.
The studio has always played pretty fast and loose with timelines, continuity, and even geography, so nothing is set in stone here. Divinity could be a reboot. It could also just be a strong, splashy way to reintroduce the setting of its earlier games to all its new BG3 fans.
Do you need to know the other Divinity games?
Larian says nope, referring to Divinity as “a brand-new game that doesn’t require experience with previous Larian titles.” It also adds “Those who’ve played Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2 will be able to enjoy greater understanding and continuity.”
That is how these things tend to go. You’re rarely going to get a game developer suggesting that you shouldn’t just hop on into its latest and greatest game. I’d bet on this being a bit like the jump Obsidian made from Pillars of Eternity to Avowed—a familiar setting to those who know it with lots of easter eggs but no required reading.
What else do we know about Divinity?
We know that Divinity is an RPG. We know it’s bigger—in project scope or actual game area or maybe both—than Baldur’s Gate 3. Aside from that, it’s all just conjecture. Here are some things that Larian did in both Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 that might tell us what to expect from Divinity:
- An early access launch
- Turn-based combat (already hotly debated)
- Sandbox-y rules and a love of players discovering exploits
- Four-player co-op support
- An adventuring party with personal quests and optional romances
- Talking animals—so many talking animals
Okay but how, like, adult is Divinity going to be?
On a scale from totally wholesome to sex with a druid in bear form, the cinematic trailer for Divinity lands at: summer festival public lizard orgy. Do with that what you will.
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