Larian made quite a splash at The Game Awards earlier this week when he announced his next game, Divinity, with a trailer so sickeningly badass that it turned even seasoned gaming industry veterans into temporary pearls. We saw plenty of blood, vomit, and every other nasty bodily fluid you can think of, but one thing we didn't see was gameplay.
What with Divinity by Larian, the studio that made Baldur's Gate 3, you would naturally assume that Divinity would be relatively similar in terms of gameplay. Divinity itself is also heavily tied to the Divinity: Original Sin series, two games that both play very similarly to Baldur's Gate 3. Larian has worked on nothing but CRPGs for the past decade, but that doesn't necessarily mean Divinity will one day.
While Divinity: Original Sin and its sequels are the more popular games, the series originally started as an action RPG called Divine Divinity that was more Diablo-like. After a rather 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 next and the rest is history.
Larian fans are divided on whether the divinity should be turn-based
This brings us to Divinity, a new game in the series that is not connected to the Original Sin spinoffs, so there is a good chance that Larian could have decided to break into action RPG again, now with almost unlimited resources and all the time in the world. However, fans of the studio can't seem to really decide whether or not this would be a good idea.
A tweet from Twitter user Synth Potato (thanks to GamesRadar ) finally stirred this particular pot, as they believe that Larian's ability to write and play could be “insane” if applied to a more traditional RPG. Check the replies to this tweet and you'll see that there doesn't seem to be a consensus on what Larian should do.
You have users like Last Chalice who always think that a turn-based game would be “cool if it was action”, while a user named AmericanLogicX hopes that Divinity is actually a sequel to Divine Divinity and its sequel. In the same vein, a user named ImbratorX thinks that Larian could “dethrone every Western RPG developer” by going the action route.
Divinity will not only fill the shoes of Baldur's Gate 3, but outgrow them
Larian Studios has announced a 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 deviate from what they do best. RedStallion41 claims that Larian's attempts at an action RPG were weak enough and “never good enough” for people to know they even existed, which strengthens the argument for sticking with a turn-based game.
I personally have both. I think Larian has enough brown spots with his own fanbase that he should be allowed to experiment with different genres if he wants to. However, it is also a very risky gamble. Either way, it's exciting that a new Larian game is coming at all, and we hope we don't have to wait too long to see some actual gameplay.
