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If there’s a limit to Larian’s ambitions as an RPG studio, founder Swen Vincke hasn’t found them yet. In an interview with PC Gamer about the deeper consequences and “much higher” level of agency in upcoming RPG Divinity compared to Baldur’s Gate 3, Vincke didn’t hesitate for a moment when asked if they were feeling more or less pressure now.
“The weight of the expectations weighs high. We’re trying not to think about it, because we have to make our own thing,” Vincke added.
Vincke has previously admitted that Larian planned to work on another D&D game following Baldur’s Gate 3; ultimately the team wasn’t excited about spending years working on a sequel and pivoted to a new project, which we now know was Divinity. There will still be similarities between BG3 and Divinity—Larian confirmed it’s sticking to turn-based combat—but if you think that means developing its next intricate RPG will be easier, you’d be wrong.
Larian was wrong, too.
“When we started on this, it was like, ‘Oh, we know how to do this.’ By now, we’ve been humbled by the development experience, by the actual development again: No, we don’t know anything,” Vincke said. “We have to relearn everything, but we do have the experience of the past with us. Every game has its own language that you need to learn.”
After parting with D&D, Larian didn’t have anything prepped for its next project—but part of the studio had already been working on updates to its game engine for the future, which could be fast-tracked for Divinity. Improved graphical fidelity is a given, but Vincke hinted that he expects new things they can do with the gameplay will excite players the most.
He recalled Larian’s first public reveal of Baldur’s Gate 3, when the game was initially criticized for looking too much like Original Sin 2. “We don’t want to make the same game,” Vincke asserted—that was true then, and it’s still true with Divinity.
“We want to make a better game which has new things in there that lets you do things you haven’t done before. I think we have those things in the game, so we just need to make them work all together, which might take some time.”
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Baldur’s Gate 3 lead writer Adam Smith emphasized the need for novelty and ambition in any new game Larian makes—to the point that you could probably say the pressure Vincke referred to is largely coming from inside the house.
“There was a moment we realized our hearts weren’t in [more Baldur’s Gate],” Smith recalled. “Our hearts are in this. We’re excited. We wouldn’t be excited if we were making the same game again. We play it every day, and we need those moments where we go ‘oh shit, I haven’t seen this before.’ One of the worst things about trying to make this goddamn game is the amount of times we do something and go, ‘This is really cool, but also, we did do it in Baldur’s Gate 3.’ It’s not a specific thing, but you recognize the patterns.
“We were very harsh on ourselves when we were making BG3—same for every Larian game—where you go, ‘I don’t want to repeat a pattern.’ You want to keep giving people something new so they don’t get familiar and don’t say, ‘Eeh, I did this quest already. This is the one where I do A, then B, then C.'”
Vincke, Smith, and Larian writer Chrystal Ding answered some of our most pressing questions about Divinity in our post-TGA interview: Here are the six biggest things we learned.
If you’d like to bone up on your Divinity knowledge ahead of launch, we’ve got a guide for how newcomers should approach the series. Divinity’s launch may seem a long way away, but please recall that these are some long-ass games.
Read the full article here
