Larian made one heck of a splash during The Game Awards earlier this week, announcing its next game, Divinity, with a trailer so sickeningly vile that it turned even seasoned games industry veterans into temporary pearl clutchers. We saw a lot of blood, vomit, and every other nasty bodily fluid that you can think of, but one thing that we didn’t see was gameplay.
What with Divinity coming from Larian, the studio that made Baldur’s Gate 3, you’d naturally assume that Divinity will be relatively similar from a gameplay perspective. Divinity itself is also strongly associated with the Divinity: Original Sin series, two games which both play very similarly to Baldur’s Gate 3. Larian has been working on nothing but CRPGs for the past decade, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Divinity is going to be one.
While Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel are the more popular games, the series originally started out as an action RPG called Divine Divinity that more closely resembled Diablo. After a fairly underwhelming sequel called Beyond Divinity, Larian decided to use the power of the Xbox 360 and Bethesda’s Gamebryo engine to make Divinity 2 a more standard 3D action RPG and released it in 2009. Divinity: Original Sin was up next, and the rest is history.
Larian Fans Are Split On Whether Divinity Should Be Turn-Based
That brings us to Divinity, a new game in the series that is not attached to the Original Sin spinoffs, so there’s every chance that Larian could have decided to have a crack at an action RPG again now it has almost unlimited resources and all the time in the world. However, it seems like fans of the studio can’t really decide on whether it would be a good idea or not.
A tweet from Twitter user Synth Potato (thanks GamesRadar) ended up stirring that particular pot, as they reckon that Larian’s writing and gameplay prowess could be “insane” if applied to a more traditional RPG. Check the replies to that tweet, and you’ll see that there doesn’t appear to be a consensus on what Larian should do.
You have users like Last Chalice, who always thinks that a turn-based game would be “cooler if it was action”, while a user called AmericanLogicX is hoping that Divinity is actually a follow-up to Divine Divinity and its sequel. In the same vein, a user called ImbratorX thinks that Larian could “dethrone every Western RPG dev” by going the action route.
Divinity Isn’t Just Going To Fill Baldur’s Gate 3’s Shoes, It’s Going To Outgrow Them
Larian Studios has announced the game that will follow in the footsteps of Baldur’s Gate 3.
On the other hand, you have users like NeoNeco42, who claim that turn-based gameplay is now “the core of their now very popular style”, and that Larian shouldn’t stray away from what they’re best at. RedStallion41 argues that Larian’s attempts at action RPGs were pretty poor, and were “never good enough” for people to know they even existed, strengthening the argument to stick to turn-based.
Personally, I’m of both minds. I think Larian has enough brownie points with its own fanbase that it should be allowed to experiment with different genres if it wants to. It’s also a very risky gamble though. Either way, it’s exciting that a new Larian game is coming at all, and here’s hoping we’re not waiting too long to see some actual gameplay.
