Preordering in general is nuts.

Larian is very ambitious in their aims. Divinity: OS, DOS2, and Baldur's Gate 3 were all huge games with incredible interactions and stories, and the games hold together even if you intentionally make an effort to break them by being a murder hobo or just not playing "correctly." Their games are pretty awesome, because there is no "correct" way to play them, they're very wide open and flexible.

I don't always like everything they do (in fact, I kinda hate BG3), but I respect their efforts. They don't half-ass anything.

Yeah, marketing

They do say it sometimes, like Microsoft admitting defeat on this year's Call of Duty. It's not, "We're going to release a mediocre product," but when they say, "We hear you, and we're making changes" or "we've made the difficult decision to..." or "we're trying to stay agile", that's usually what it means. Beyond just hyping up their next product, there's substantive information in here, like engine upgrades, expansion of the studio, reduction in production timelines, the damn genre of the video game (because that wasn't a foregone conclusion given this series), etc.

Their concept artists are allowed to use some generative AI tools to explore ideas and speed up their workflow. They're currently hiring a bunch more concept artists (both juniors and a senior character artist) so if you're trying to get a job: https://larian.com/careers/4fd694b3-ece7-4307-9949-15cac512a815

Great place to go if you're looking for a concept artist job.

Edit: Turns out Larian is going to use gen AI for concept art. I guess fuck all those concept artists trying to get entry level jobs. Very disappointed.

It's misinformation. They have almost 30 concept artists employed. They use GenAI for quick ideation, not for concept art.

Yeah, first two games Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity were awesome!

…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are just too many things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.

Larian's track record is good. They used an in-house engine for Divinity: Original Sin, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and Baldur's Gate 3. They also made their own game engine for their older Divinity titles (Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity). And Vincke attributes at least part of their success to using in-house tools instead of "off the shelf" engines.

Re D&D,

It's because Hasbro gutted the D&D division and burned their goodwill with Larian. https://www.pcgamer.com/theres-almost-nobody-left-ceo-of-baldurs-gate-3-dev-swen-vincke-says-the-dandd-team-he-initially-worked-with-is-gone-due-to-hasbro-layoffs/

Hasbro could have done nothing and made a bunch of money, but they chose temporary short term gains. Baldur's Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.

They said very little about what that new engine entails, but much like Starfield, I suspect it's largely reusing their old engine and only remaking select parts of it. Larian is doing something in the RPG space that, to me, makes nearly all of their competitors feel outdated, and it makes sense to me to make their own engine to do that as efficiently as possible. To make one of their games in an off the shelf engine like Unreal, with all of the bespoke physics objects and the ways every entity interacts with spells, elements, and other effects, could easily result in huge performance costs above and beyond what we saw in Act 3 of BG3.

The first Divinity was called Divine Divinity, and it was closer to Diablo than Baldur's Gate. As per this interview, this game is going to be the same style as BG3 and the Original Sin games.

And now, thanks to bg3, they have fuck you money. This next game is going to be insane.