I get this is the best ending and all that, but it really irks me Lucian set up all that evil as fuck shit that you witness, and had his hands tied to all of it, and just walks away to be King-God again (as we know he does because there are games set after), there were niggas feeding people alive to Dogs under his command, they did some really fucking nasty shit, and I'm all for the "get rid of Source" plan, but after, all the people involved need to be clubbed to death.
It's a very "necessary evil" thing where it depends on whether or not you think the ends justify the means. There are endings where you kill Lucien and become a deity yourself but having Lucien survive + kill the 7 has a world free of immortal, soul-eating leeches and an an immortal deposed God-king who wants to take back what he thinks is his. It's similar to the plot of Fable 3 where your brother was being a merciless cunt because the big bad was coming, except Divinity was less PG-13 about it.
I wouldn't be surprised if Divinity goes one of 3 routes for the main story:
1. We need new Gods to act as a counter balance to the devil (probably your character + the party)
2. We have no choice but to lift the barrier between "our" world and the void so the devil has to compete with someone (maybe the God-king has mellowed out now that the 7 are dead)
3. We have to kill the devil.
There's also a 4th, which extends from 3. It's reliant on being put into a lesser of two evils situation, where allowing him to live is better than killing him outright. In canon the devil is locked away or something and can only do stuff in the material world via intermediaries (one such intermediary is Damien, who is basically the Anti-Christ) and isn't at full strength. The new game might be the result of the Devil being free of his prison, or fully regained of strength, and the ultimate choice comes down to killing him or locking him up again - the reason it's a choice at all is because a world without Gods/Divines at all is one that just stops working properly. They might even go full "There must always be a Lich King" and after killing him you need to occupy his role in order to keep the world from tearing apart. Or maybe you get Damien as a party member and similar to Loghaine from Dragon Age Origins his moment of redemption is to sacrifice himself to save the player having to make it instead.
Though the trailer has the interesting plot possibility of doing that whole, "The devil = good because he only harms bad people" talking point, but done unironically, where the devil is in a position of punishing his own worshippers because he's been left occupying the role of both judge and executor, which I don't think I've seen done before. There's stories of villains becoming the hero, but the devil becoming god doesn't bring any examples to mind, especially interesting if he's not doing that bad of a job at it. Lawful Evil is one of those moral alignments which basically become "good" if it's done in the context of the alternatives being a lot worse ala Warhammer 40k or Regill from Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.
It'd be a rather humorous moment if the needle drops and you realise you couldn't give less of a shit about anyone killed in the game because they were all degenerates and evil, which is the reason they were killed in the first place. The moral quandary then becomes whether the divine being should so freely get to dole out punishment on a whim like that or not.
Hedonism for the sake of hedonism sounds about right for modern Larian, while we won't know until it's out I highly doubt it's for much else than shock value and "horny." Fingers crossed I guess.
At the risk of sounding like an insufferable Centrist, it could be both.
(1) Shock value trailer to get people talking about it thus free marketing.
(2) Hinting to the plot/story of the game itself.
With all I've played of their catalogue, my experience with Larian is they like to contrast moods and images, either for comedic or shocking effect in a lot of instances but contrast also helps make something compelling. Good and evil, kind and mean, beautiful and ugly. The exterior vs interior contrast (Lohse, D
S 2), the brutality of the actions vs the purpose they serve (Lucian, D
S2). Straightforward cop vs by the book officer. Sexually forward vs extremely chaste romantic*. It's a very basic story device and it is everywhere. It's when one side isn't counterbalanced by another that it can be excessive but at that point it's probably serving some other purpose or is counterbalanced by something you're not considering.
Good act (killing the hedonists) done by (possibly) evil entity (red screaming tornado thing).
Family friendly festival (tame) being full of debauchery and sin (not tame).
Child smiling and clapping (innocent) but for a man who is melting and screaming (not innocent).
*
i.e. every late 20th century and 21st century romance story. It's so popular a trope that Larian just plastered it on four of BG3's romance options and reversed it for some others. Laezel is aggressive but traditionally romantic, whereas Shadowheart is more passive but non-traditional. Gay-but-also-not-gay vampire aggressive but traditional, Halsin passive but non-traditional. Absent contrast stories/characters tend to be boring. It's why Quaritch (old soldier guy) from Avatar 1 was interesting to people because he's occupying the role of antagonist but for an objective/goal which some people would consider justifiable if not outright virtuous. Contrasts of story role and actions make for far more interesting characters, usually. I think part of the reason I like the idea of the screaming vortex thing being a force for good is because it's not something you'd visually associate as being good.
his wouldn't even be that exhausting if we actually had to consider every choice, but usually it's pretty obvious. The exhausting part is more of a fatigue of shitty, in-your-face, think what we want to think (which goes back into your point on removing the audiences need to think. There's no higher thought process for some of these scenes, to use the example of The Boys you used,
the writers (what I hear every time I think of them, thanks Bunjee) are constantly trying to hammer their beliefs into you. "Homelander bad, Homelander fans are Trump supporters, you should hate all of them."
Now extend that to a headache inducing amount of media and now it's less paranoia and exhaustion from "can we trust our eyes" and "what did the author truly mean" and more "I wish I didn't have any" and "how can anyone think the author means anything else" respectively.
That's the thing with the point I raised about how they constantly need to dumb shit down just to give as few interpretations of a scene and/or character as possible. The Boys is a show which fumbles this constantly given Homelander will pressure a teen girl to finish her aborted suicide attempt but then will torture and kill a group of scientists who experimented on him as a child. Even if you take out the political influences, constantly giving the villain reasons to justify his behaviour and win back the audience whilst stating an intent outside the show that he's an irredeemable monster is just schizophrenic. I remember how they tried to downplay Soldier Boy by saying his achievements were fake, but it's the word of one man who insists he was there versus a decrepit producer who hates him – to the writers, the word of the latter is meant to be stronger than the former. You are told something is so, it isn't corroborated, but it's meant to be true regardless of how the audience perceives it.
Switching your brain off becomes the only viable way to consume media at a certain point because you're always thinking, "what did they mean by this?" and you're stuck wondering whether the whole thing is now just insulting you and people like you, and whether you have a moral or principle obligation to ignore the content.
I remember watching the Lethal Weapon franchise for the first time last year with family. The films were constantly hammering certain themes and messages alongside genuinely good and funny scenes but despite featuring Mel Gibson in a staring role the films were damn near excessive with liberal messaging that'd get complained about today. I suppose the difference between how such messaging is inserted today is more overt and common than it was in the past but you can also attribute that to the messages being a lot less tolerable. There's a league of difference between, "Apartheid bad," (Lethal Weapon 2) / "We should help immigrants/human trafficking victims," (Lethal Weapon 4), and "Society's standards for women are too high" (Barbie) or "[Political figure that'll date the fuck out of the story] is bad!" (The Boys) There's also a ratio of entertainment to preaching. Because the former don't make it more than a 1/4th of the plot, people tend not to care. It's when it's above a 1/3rd or higher that it sticks out too much to be ignored. You can watch Lethal Weapon 1-4 and consider the preachy elements ignorable. You can't watch Barbie and ignore those elements but because they're front and centre, it's expected you absorb them to understand what's going on.
To some
any tolerance is too much (No, I don't consider Debra Wilson by herself enough - Wolfenstein II? Yes. Doom: The Dark Ages? No - but that game isn't great on its own merits.) At that point you'd be hard pressed to find anything that can't be interpreted as being covertly political, especially if you're looking for it. This is what they mean when they say, "all art is political." You can more or less pull out of your ass any meaning you want from a work if you can argue it good enough.
"The next Divinity game is going to be a right-wing masterpiece, extolling traditionalist values. The first sign of this is we saw a mass of race-mixing degenerates get massacred. We even see from the trailer how these degenerates casually expose their children to degeneracy and get them to celebrate it, mirroring real life actions of the left. Then? They're killed by the very demons they're worshipping, and then their ugly rictus faces are put on display amongst the burnt remains of their festival. Extremely based, extremely red-pilled."
"The Divinity trailer was a great allegory for reactionary suppression of individual freedoms. The fair, full of consenting adults, is then suddenly and mercilessly wiped out by a screaming
red wave, mirroring the right-wing's opposition to people just having a good time and minding their own business. Also, a
religious-looking guy is the one who started the fire, so clearly there's some anti-religious undertones present as well, highlighting the cruel nature of religion and how faith blinds people to the horrors they witness and the actions they commit."
My definition of "woke" is effectively anything that abides by Critical Theory principles i.e. something done and communicated as a result of the person believing including it is an act of "resistance" against an oppressive society. Trying to encapsulate "woke" as also including liberalism is a losing battle (just as the Liberals can't ever truly defeat Conservatism either) but specific concepts/ideas that are mere facets of one larger ideology are more than killable.
Absolutely, there has been dogshit throughout the centuries, but I'm mostly comparing the greatest works of our past and how they stand up where as modern works are universally forgotten much quicker. Then again you also have to factor in how generations worked and how classics tend to be made when very few other things like it existed, if at all. But so far most modern anything I've witnessed tend to just produce cancer fanbases, cancer trends, and inspire more cancerous works to exist.
I found myself more interested in shit works from the past than shit works of today too, but that's just my perspective. Also notice how interesting this discussion is when some faggot isn't flinging shit because they're pissy someone thinks differently. Cheers.
My main thing with that also is we won't know nor will we get to decide ourselves which of "our" works are great. It's up to a future lot to decide for us what our generation's best works were. Our relationship with the art/entertainment media released during our time is similar to how past generations treated the art released during their time. They didn't have prescient knowledge that this is going to be remembered a century from now, it was consumed and then they moved onto the sex. The ceiling for entertainment doesn't exist so people from 1700 or 1800s onward had a perceived infinite amount of reading material to choose from similar to how we have an infinite number of games, movies, books, comics, podcasts, songs and so on, to pick from. We've decided for them which of the work during their time was worth remembering or not, and it'll be the same for us.
Never mind past "shit" - which can end up becoming celebrated in the present i.e. The Thing – even past "gold" becomes forgettable. The stuff championed as a 10/10 today may get forgotten in a decade or two because in order for a classic to be a classic it has to be universally appealing whilst also telling a story that can't be mired by time. Ordinary People (1980) vs The Shining (1980). The latter was seen by fewer people, panned by critics, nominated for 2 razzies and went largely ignored by audiences. People today regard it as a classic. Today's mid might be tomorrow's gold, which may or may not be horrifying depending on the title.
Almost all works contain pieces of other work, subconsciously or consciously, a trace or whole chunk, etcetera. It's like food recipes, where all that differs "pancakes" from "crepes" is a leavening agent, and the individual's choice of embellishments on top –
I'm not sorry for using a food analogy – but despite the only difference being one ingredient, they're still considered different foods, as they should. However, where you get a shit piece of art instead of a good one typically comes from someone trying to inject a deeper meaning when they have nothing of substance to add or say. It just becomes hollow, and the harder they try to insist on it, the shitter it becomes.
One issue we are having with modern entertainment for better or worse is attempting to be profound or meaningful, but having nothing
new to say. Thanks to the internet we end up encountering the platitudes expressed in a lot of modern media frequently and so any sentiments that make it into film have already been run through already. We're probably more overexposed to politics today than people living through the cold war so nothing any movie can say about any issue will be original to watchers/readers/players. You would think then universal appeal would be the prime objective then but no, there's a continued insistence of exclusionary entertainment that makes it all a circle jerk, where the intent isn't really to say anything new, it's to pat themselves on the back and give a not-so-subtle nod and wink to likeminded people. And because they're aware of this, this ends up leading to a complete lack of sincerity, which happens even if the creator legitimately believes they're translating an honest perception, because there's nothing sincere to convey.
Using The Boys, the show's attempt to insist upon the right-wing/Trump being the most evil thing ever is hollow because, even if they'll never admit or acknowledge it, the writers do not have a sincere experience or fear of the people they're criticising. This is because the material is just a surface-level reflection of their perceived reality, and despite what Freud said, the world is not shaped by your perception of it. They do not have a lived experience of oppression, just a perception of it, which does not translate unto a universally appreciable depiction on-screen. Your perception can be tempered by humility, and acknowledgement that it could be as wrong as you think it's right, but without it, you assert an absolute view of the world which does not mesh with human experience. It's essentially fiction set in a universe where only those who are aware and understanding of that universe can actually appreciate it. We, as outsiders, might be able to
understand it, but it does not mean we're capable of liking it, because it wasn't made for us.
I've had enjoyment out of plenty of modern stuff. Though you are wading through shit to find quality. Older stuff by default is thought of as "good" because it's already been sorted through. Though for games, because there's generally fewer of them released compared to films, tv, books, music, it's easier to see bad/mid stuff in a smaller pool versus the much larger pools of other media.
Bloomberg article.
Baldur's Gate 3 Developer promises Divinity will be "next level"
Hi everyone. Today we’ve got a bonus issue of Game On featuring an interview about one of last week’s most exciting video-game announcements.
‘Larian Studios Unleashed’
Larian Studios has hit the big time. Until somewhat recently, only hardcore fans had even heard of the Belgian video-game developer, which was founded in 1996 and specialized in turn-based role-playing games filled with elves and wizards. But thanks to the release of 2023’s
Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian has become one of the most-beloved game companies, and its next project has been the subject of speculation for more than two years.
Last week at The Game Awards (a ceremony that ostensibly exists to honor this year’s games but is mostly for announcing new ones), Larian revealed
Divinity, its next big game — a departure from
Baldur’s Gate 3 and a return to the dark fantasy universe in which Larian previously operated.
This time, there’s a lot of pressure.
Baldur’s Gate 3, licensed from Hasbro Inc. and based on
Dungeons & Dragons, ranks among
the best-reviewed games of all time and won Game of the Year from countless media outlets. It has sold more than 20 million copies, Swen Vincke, Larian’s founder, chief executive officer and creative director, said in an interview. That makes it one of the best-selling games ever, which gives Larian the resources to keep expanding but also ramps up the pressure for the company’s next game.
Speaking to me on Dec. 11 in a hotel suite in downtown Los Angeles ahead of the awards ceremony, Vincke said Larian plans to do an early-access release of
Divinity, as the company has with previous games, although it’s unlikely to be out in 2026. He wouldn’t offer many specifics about the new game other than to say it will continue to iterate on the studio’s previous work.
“This is going to be us unleashed, I think,” Vincke said. “It’s a turn-based RPG featuring everything you’ve seen from us in the past, but it’s brought to the next level.”
At first, Larian had planned to continue working with Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast division on
Dungeons & Dragons, but Vincke said he and his team spent a few months working on a new project before realizing they weren’t feeling the excitement they once did.
“Conceptually, all of the ingredients for a really cool game were there except the hearts of the developers,” he said.
They abandoned that game last year and pivoted to
Divinity, a franchise that Larian also happens to own. “
Baldur’s Gate 3 was a good game and I’m proud of it, but I think this one is going to be way better,” Vincke said, noting that the underlying systems of
Dungeons & Dragons were difficult to translate from tabletop to digital gaming. “Here, we’re making a system that’s made for a video game. It’s much easier to understand.”
For this game, the developers are making some big bets. They recently switched to a new engine — in video-game parlance the technology and tools used to make a game — which has led to some growing pains that Vincke says will be worthwhile. The team is hoping to improve their systems for streaming content into the game and doubling down on the cinematic storytelling that worked so well in
Baldur’s Gate 3.
Larian is trying to find ways to cut down on development time and aims to finish
Divinity in less time than
Baldur’s Gate 3, which
took six years to make because of its scale and Covid-19 disruptions.
“I think three to four years is much healthier than six years,” Vincke said.
One thing they’re not doing is getting smaller. One tactic for reducing the development time is to develop many of
Divinity’s quests and storylines in parallel rather than in a linear fashion. That’s requiring significantly bigger writing and scripting teams than Larian ever had before.
But at the same time, Vincke said, “the creative process itself actually is something you cannot accelerate.” Giving writers, designers and artists time to iterate and explore ideas is what led to the success of
Baldur’s Gate 3. “People underestimate how many times we’re implementing something and realize in the middle that it’s just not going to work,” Vincke said.
Under Vincke, Larian has been pushing hard on generative AI, although the CEO says the technology hasn’t led to big gains in efficiency. He says there won’t be any AI-generated content in
Divinity — “everything is human actors; we’re writing everything ourselves” — but the creators often use AI tools to explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text.
The use of generative AI has led to some pushback at Larian, “but I think at this point everyone at the company is more or less OK with the way we’re using it,” Vincke said.
The success of
Baldur’s Gate 3 has allowed Larian to keep growing and stay in step with Vincke’s ambitions. The studio now has 530 employees across seven offices in Europe, North America and Asia. For Vincke, the growth has been unexpected.
“I think a lot of founders have the same problem,” he said. “I have to be large, otherwise I can’t make my video game. With growth suddenly comes a whole bunch of responsibilities that you didn’t necessarily think you were ever gonna have, but you have them and then you make the best of them. Size exposes you to new problems that you couldn’t imagine existed.”
Vincke and his wife own the majority of Larian shares, while Tencent Holdings Ltd. maintains a significant minority stake. Vincke says the Chinese company is represented on his board of directors but doesn’t influence how Larian operates. Without Tencent’s support, Larian wouldn’t have been able to take a swing like
Baldur’s Gate 3.
“It gave me the confidence to say, OK, I’m never gonna end up at the fuel station anymore, calling my wife to say I can’t pay,” he said.
Now, thanks to the previous game’s tremendous success, Larian is in a healthy financial position. Vincke says that all of the
Baldur’s Gate 3 cash will allow the company to double down on even more narrative experimentation for
Divinity. Players loved
Baldur’s Gate 3, in part because they were constantly making significant decisions, some of which could have ripple effects throughout the game. Every playthrough could feel different, depending on which faction the player chose as an ally, where they chose to go and what they chose to do.
Vincke says his developers want to expand that type of storytelling even further for
Divinity.
“The idea is that when you talk to fellow journalists about the game, you’ll have completely different stories,” Vincke said. “We’re doing a couple of things that you haven’t seen in RPGs before, I think.”
TLDR:
Divinity will get an early access release, worked a few months on the next DnD-related project before realising they didn't care and abandoned it, gonna use a new engine to better make use of the usual system and won't have to repeat the ass-ache it was to translate DnD tabletop to vidya.
Are aiming to have the game finished in less time than it took to finish BG3 (3-4 years as opposed to 6) which they're gonna do by writing stories/quests in parallel rather than linearly.
They're going to make use of AI to generate placeholder text and explore ideas and generate concept art and its use has been normalised at Larian despite initial pushback.
Vincke and his wife own a majority of the company but the Tencent minority lets them get their foot in the door on big projects and probably allows them to skip the kickstarter-phase like was necessary with Divinity Original Sin 2.
Baldur's Gate 3's success gave them enough capital to do experimental stuff with Divinity and do stuff that you "haven't seen in RPGs before."
If he's hoping for the game to be done in 3-4 years, then it means 3-4 years from when they started development in full swing (2024) points to 2027/8.
This points to 2027 early access and 2028 full release
