Larian reveals Divinity, its 'biggest game ever,' that will be 'even larger than Baldur's Gate 3'

After a mysterious desert statue and trademark-filing snafu, Larian has officially unveiled its next game after Baldur's Gate 3 at The Game Awards. Larian is returning to its home-grown fantasy series with a new entry simply titled Divinity. We do not yet have gameplay or a release window, but Geoff Keighley described it as Larian's "biggest game ever," and "even larger than Baldur's Gate 3."

After some surprise live antics, including performers being hoisted over the crowd in a high wire act, we got a pre-rendered trailer showing a much darker sort of game than we're used to from Larian. A tortured man is shown being burned alive in a Wicker Man-style enclosure, with celebrating peasants degenerating into an orgiastic bacchanal outside, overseen by flagellants and a masked cultist under some kind of celestial conjunction.

This predictably unleashes some kind of unholy force that attacks the revelers, and after a fade to black, we can see that they've been incorporated into a gruesome amalgamation of bodies in the shape of that mysterious desert statue everyone was buzzing about.

Well, now we know it was neither a portent of the end times, nor a marketing stunt for The Elder Scrolls 6—and honestly, this is an equally exciting use case for a hell obelisk as far as I'm concerned.

Shortly after Baldur's Gate 3 took the world by storm, Larian shocked everyone by revealing that it would not be making an expansion pack or sequel to our 2023 game of the year and two-time Top 100 champion. The studio subsequently revealed to us that it had two projects in the pipeline.

Smart money was that at least one of those would return to Divinity and its world of Rivellon, the setting for all of Larian's mainline games before Baldur's Gate 3. The name, "Divinity," has big reboot energy, and it's unlikely that Larian is aiming to throw the Lore book at all of its incoming Baldur's Gate 3 fans.

At the same time, I'd wager it's no more of a hard reboot than either of the Original Sin games. 2014's Divinity: Original Sin took place thousands of years before the rest of the series and completely rewrote aspects of the world and its history.

Our 2017 game of the year, Divinity: Original Sin 2, was sandwiched in-between 2000's Divine Divinity and Divinity 2: Ego Draconis from 2009. But it completely changes the characterization of one of Divinity 2's main characters, and it's even possible to kill him—Beast, you've created a Time Paradox! I've always loved how much Larian disregards the feelings and sanity of wiki editors with its approach to continuity, and I wonder if that will continue, or if the studio will try to shape the series' spaghetti timeline into something more cohesive.

In a press release accompanying the trailer, Larian noted that "While Divinity is a brand new game that doesn’t require experience with previous Larian titles, those who’ve played Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2 will be able to enjoy greater understanding and continuity." So despite the name, it sounds like Divinity will most closely follow up on the Original Sin games.

This will actually be the first game in the series just called "Divinity"—2000's crime against marketing, Divine Divinity, was the very first entry in the series. Speaking of getting off on a nomenclature technicality, Larian publishing director Michael Douse was not lying to us when he tweeted that "there aren't currently any plans for a new Divinity Original Sin 3 game."

This is something Larian founder and CEO Swen Vincke touched on in a press release. “Despite our long history with the series, this is our first game entitled 'Divinity,'" said Vincke. "We’re ready to bring everything we’ve done previously into one place. This marks the beginning of something with more breadth, depth, and intimacy than anything we’ve created before. We’ve been building toward this moment ever since we took our fate into our own hands. This is the Divinity we’ve always wanted to make and you're going to have loads of fun with it.”

Divinity does not yet have a release date or window—we don't even know if Larian will pursue the early access model again—but we've got our ears to the ground for any further information.

Vincke himself has taken to Twitter to talk about the announcement a bit more. "I don’t think I’ve ever been so nervous about an announcement as this one but here it is," Vincke wrote. "This is our biggest, most ambitious RPG yet and we can’t wait to show it to you!!!"