Larian Studios is not an outfit known to rest on its laurels. Just two years after finding huge success with Baldur's Gate 3, the company has announced a new Divinity game, with a massive showing at The Game Awards. Expectations are high, but founder Swen Vincke is excited, in part because the team isn't as tied to the structure of Dungeons and Dragons anymore.
"Every game has its own identity and its own language that you have to talk to," he tells GamesRadar+ when asked about challenges facing the upcoming Divinity. "So it took us some time to figure that out, but I think we've got it more or less now."
He notes that the size of the team presents its own problems, because keeping everyone ticking over in the right direction is trickier than when Larian was developing the Divinity: Original Sin games or projects further back. "Our ambitions are high, so we want to innovate," he adds. "That means that we will fail on certain things, because we're trying new things. So we'll see where that leads us."
But beyond the high expectations and how ambitious the devs are, Vincke is optimistic because everyone's high on what they're doing. Divinity has all of Larian stoked to be going to work, which wasn't necessarily the case previously.
"We'll do our best, making the best game that we can," he states. "We're excited about what we're making, which is already a step in the right direction, because we weren't excited about what we were making back when we were doing the D&D thing."
While Baldur's Gate 3 has been incredible for Larian's status, it did involve changing tact as a studio. The team moved away from Divinity for the first time in decades and took on the challenge of carrying on an established property within a broadly defined universe.
Larian had to make the systems and ideas work within the Dungeons and Dragons framework, which was no doubt a bugbear when everything was up to the devs beforehand. The team’s discontent definitely isn't evident in the final work, and now everyone has more scope than ever for the next chapter of Divinity. Talk about a crit pass.
