Baldur’s Gate 3 was already a chaotic time, chock full of ways to ‘break’ or generally mess with the game by, say, scaling a wall with a million boxes stacked on top of each other. Now, Larian Studios is only leaning further into that chaos and unpredictability in its next game Divinity.
Larian decided to blow the lid off the project last month with a gnarly reveal, and it’s now emptied the jar of all its contents in a recent Divinity AMA online.
When asked about how or if the team is accommodating players who like to play quests out of sequence, writing director Adam Smith says the studio’s “writing process is to embrace the chaos. To encourage the chaos. To be at one with the chaos.” Kind of a ‘takes one to know one’ approach.
“The first thing we tend to do when playtesting our own situations is run them out of sequence, break them in every conceivable way, and see how far we can push the boundaries of what’s possible,” Smith writes. “The greatest joy I get is seeing somebody go so far off the beaten path that they assume we’ll have lost track of them, and then they stumble across something that we put there just for them.”
Larian’s games are stuffed with so many choices and consequences and seemingly little variables that it’s a surprise they don’t topple over themselves more often. But Smith explains how the team keeps it all afloat. “We track choices in documentation, but the best resources are the developers and the game,” he says. “We spend a lot of time playing the game, and we try to add in the options that we’d want to experience as players. Usually, there are a few different specialists attached to a situation – writers, scripters, level designers, artists, combat designers and more – but no situation stands alone, so we are never silo’d away from one another. Collaboration and iteration are the key.”
Larian learned Divinity: Original Sin’s random loot is “frequently confusing” and didn’t “save us much time,” which is why Baldur’s Gate 3 and now Divinity are handcrafted
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