A New RPG That Aims To Top Baldur’s Gate 3
Larian Studios is not trying to repeat Baldur’s Gate 3. Instead, the team is putting its energy into Divinity, a new project that game director Swen Vincke calls the studio’s biggest and most ambitious game yet.
Speaking on stage at The Game Awards 2025, Geoff Keighley introduced Divinity as an even bigger and more ambitious game than Baldur’s Gate 3. In a follow up interview, Vincke expanded on what that actually means for players.
At the core of this ambition is one key goal: to give players far more agency. If you enjoyed the freedom to tackle quests in different ways and see wildly different outcomes in Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian wants to push that feeling much further in Divinity.
Massive Player Choice And Deep Consequences
Vincke explains that Divinity is built around very high player agency at every level of the game. That means both the story and the gameplay systems are designed to react to what you do, not just in obvious ways but in interconnected and surprising ones.
Instead of just offering more choices on the surface, Larian is aiming for both:
- A higher volume of meaningful choices
- Deeper and longer chains of consequences
- Storylines that interlock and affect one another
Vincke talks about his favorite moments as a developer being when gameplay and story click together. You might make a decision in one questline, forget about it, and much later find that it changes how another situation plays out. The goal is for Divinity to be full of these organic payoffs.
If you played Baldur’s Gate 3, you probably remember how Act 3 pulled together threads from all over the game. Quests like the Iron Throne rescue, companion storylines for characters like Wyll and Karlach, and the fight to destroy the Gondian factory could all connect and influence one another.
The order in which you tackled these quests could change outcomes, as could your choices in earlier acts. Helping the Ironhand Gnomes or ignoring them, for instance, could echo forward into later events. According to Larian, Divinity is aiming to be even more complex and rich than that web of interactions.
For players, that should mean a campaign where your path feels personal and reactive. The same quest may look completely different from one playthrough to the next depending on who you travel with, the problems you choose to solve, and how ruthless or heroic you decide to be.
The Challenge Of Building An Interconnected RPG
Creating this kind of reactive world is not easy. Baldur’s Gate 3 writer Adam Smith describes the internal complexity behind the scenes as a huge matrix of characters, story beats, situations, and gameplay systems that all have to line up.
The trick is that players should not feel that complexity. Instead, the game should feel natural and seamless. You simply make choices and experience the story, without seeing all the calculations and branching logic that makes it work.
Smith describes the team poring over this giant network of interconnected content and asking how it all fits together. The goal is for you as a player to walk away thinking you just experienced one coherent story, even though dozens of variable threads were weaving together in the background.
Despite how demanding that is, Smith says the effort is worth it. The team realized their hearts were no longer in making more Baldur’s Gate. What truly excites them is pushing their own ideas further with Divinity, instead of trying to recreate the same game.
That creative energy is good news for players. When a studio is both technically challenged and creatively invested, you are more likely to get a game that feels bold rather than safe. Baldur’s Gate 3 already set a high bar for modern RPGs, especially in how it blended cinematic storytelling with high player freedom. Divinity is positioned as Larian’s next leap forward.
While we still have to wait to see gameplay in more detail, the direction is clear. Expect a huge RPG that doubles down on what made Baldur’s Gate 3 special: freedom of choice, reactive storylines, and systems that collide in unexpected ways. If Larian can deliver on this bigger and deeper design, Divinity could become a new benchmark for narrative role playing games on PC and beyond.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/divinity-choices-vs-baldurs-gate-3-we-wouldnt-be-excited-if-we-were-making-the-same-game-again/
