Baldur's Gate 3 director was shocked that people dubbed the RPG a Divinity: Original Sin 2 "rip-off" before launch: "I got a call from my mother who said 'What have you done?'"

Baldur's Gate 3 the vampire Astarion — (Image credit: Larian Studios)

Baldur's Gate 3 developers were shocked to hear that some fans thought the game was just a Divinity: Original Sin 2 "rip-off" when the threequel was shown pre-release.

During an anniversary panel at PAX West 2024, Larian Studios CEO and Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke recalls showing the hit RPG to the public shortly before it came out last year, as well as some of the unflattering responses from players who thought it looked too familiar to the studio's previous games.

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"We were showing it to the crowd, and we got a lot of engagement from the crowd, and so we felt really positive when we got out of that room," Vincke explains in the panel above. "It was also being streamed. So we came out of the room, and I got a phone call from my mother, who says 'What have you done?' And I said 'What do you mean?' and she said 'People are so angry at you.'"

Vincke then says that many online commenters were calling it a "Divinity: Original Sin 2 rip-off," which obviously left the team feeling "super, super, super surprised" since the game had already been in early access for years before that showcase. "And this was obviously because we started from the DOS2 engine."

Now that Baldur's Gate 3 has been out in the wild for over a year, it should be clear to even the biggest naysayers that it definitely isn't surfing on Divinity's success as the studio's headcount absolutely ballooned during development to mainly support their fancy, and apparently very expensive, cinematics pipeline that on show in every crevice of Baldur's Gate 3's chaotic world.

Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 were priced “below their value” because Larian devs had “faith” they could recover the cost.