It’s been less than a week since Larian Studios revealed Divinity. Fans have spent much of that time debating whether it would be an action-RPG. While much of the new game remains mysterious, studio head Swen Vincke isn’t trying to keep that part a secret. He recently confirmed it will indeed be a turn-based game like its other recent hits, including Baldur’s Gate 3. Except he’s also promising it will be “way better” than the 2023 Dungeons & Dragons-based GOTY.
“Baldur’s Gate 3 was a good game and I’m proud of it, but I think this one is going to be way better,” Vincke told Bloomberg this week. One challenge during its development was taking the existing rule set for Wizards of the Coast’s pen-and-paper RPG and adapting it to a video game. “Here, we’re making a system that’s made for a video game. It’s much easier to understand,” he explained.
Considering BG3 is already one of the most beloved games of the last decade, surpassing it will be a tall order. The veteran developer does not seem worried. “[Divinity] is going to be us unleashed, I think,” Vincke said. “It’s a turn-based RPG featuring everything you’ve seen from us in the past, but it’s brought to the next level.”
That next level includes growing development resources spread across a larger number of studios that will allow the team to make more of the game in parallel, Bloomberg reports. Ideally, that should cut down on the development time. Vincke said Larian is aiming for three to four years with Divinity, rather than the six it took to make BG3. It will still start in Early Access, however, and won’t be arriving anytime in 2026.
Where will this new level of investment show up? More cinematic scenes and narrative experiments. In other words, the parts of BG3 fans loved the most. “We’re doing a couple of things that you haven’t seen in RPGs before, I think,” the Larian cofounder said. I hope Divinity delivers.
