Last year, Larian Studios confirmed that it would not be developing expansion packs for Baldur's Gate 4 or Baldur's Gate 3, leaving Dungeons & Dragons with its own feature series, Divinity.
There has been a lot of speculation as to why the team refused to make a sequel, with many citing Swen Vincke's comments about the Wizards of the Coast firing as a possible reason. “There are very few people left in the original conference room.” While that may have been a factor (Vincke disputes this), speaking with GamesRadar+, he explained that the team is no longer interested in D&D.
“We will do our best to make the best game,” Vinke said. “We're excited about what we're building. This is already a step in the right direction, because when we were working on D&D, we weren't excited about what we were building again.”
“There were many restrictions on D&D production.”
This is something Vincke mentioned at GDC last year, when he explained that “there were a lot of constraints in making D&D, and 5th Edition is not an easy system to adapt to a video game.” He pointed out that the team had a few combat ideas they experimented with, but unfortunately “they weren't compatible” with the 5e rulebook.
These limitations may not have appeared in the final product, as Baldur's Gate 3 won countless awards for its boundary-pushing cRPG mechanics and storytelling, but it's exciting to imagine what Larian will do now that he's freed from the shackles of the D&D system.
“Our ambitions are high, so we want to innovate,” Vincke said. “It means we’re going to fail at certain things because we’re trying something new, so we’ll see where that leads us.”
There's no release date for Divinity yet, but Larian is open to the idea of adopting the early access model again.
- released
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August 3, 2023
- ESRB
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M (Mature): Blood and gore, partial nudity, sexual content, strong language, violence.
- engine
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Divine 4.0
- multiplayer
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Online co-op, local co-op
- cross platform play
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Full cross-platform play.
