Editor-in-Chief of MeinMMO, Leya Jankowski, spoke to Swen Vincke, the Game Director and CEO of Larian Studios (makers of Baldur’s Gate 3), shortly after the reveal of the new Divinity game.
In a deep conversation, Swen Vincke openly discusses the mammoth task of expanding the universe after the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 and explains the key design pillars of the new role-playing game – maximizing player choice and the contrast between hope and darkness.
These insights are available in the interview:
- The Curse of Sir Lora: Swen Vincke admits which detail from Divinity: Original Sin 2 he deeply regrets – and why he almost removed it from the Switch 2 version.
- Farewell to D&D: How liberating it is to leave the more complex D&D rule set behind to create a more intuitive combat system that feels instantly better than anything in BG3.
- The “Megalomania” Accusation: Swen Vincke answers the question of whether Larian is at risk of becoming megalomaniacal after the global success of Baldur’s Gate 3.
- The True Definition of Success: What truly matters for Larian – it’s not the sales figures, but the players’ “shoe campaigns”.
Learn in the full interview how the intensive optimization of the cinematic pipeline is enabling Larian to offer even more freedom of choice in the new Divinity and what the series personally means to Vincke after 30 years of development history.
Divinity is a game about hope
MeinMMO: We have to go back to the Game Awards. The lights go out, the audience sees the dramatic reveal of the Divinity trailer. After months, if not years, of secrecy, the world sees your new baby. What exactly went through your mind at that moment?
Swen Vincke: There is a recording of that. Unknowingly, I said: My heart is beating so hard. I didn’t know how the reactions would be. We could have been booed or, worse, there could have been no reaction at all. But we received powerful applause, and that was such a relief! You could see that on the whole team. We even sat up high and had a very good overview of everything. There were about 15 of us there, and it was just a huge relief. We didn’t know which direction it would all go, but thank God, it worked out.
MeinMMO: Yes, the trailer was something special. I slept through the Game Awards and watched right after the reveals in the morning. When I saw Divinity in it, I watched the trailer eight times in a row. I was immediately very excited because the trailer was extremely interesting to me. I’m sure you’ve seen some fan theories already. Given the first public reactions: Do you feel that the central mood and message you intended for Divinity were successfully conveyed? If so, why? If not, which aspect of the game’s identity would you have liked people to notice more?
Swen Vincke: We conveyed half of it, but that was intentional.
The interviews we are currently conducting are the second half. We showed a very dark trailer, but Divinity is actually a game about hope and about bringing light into darkness. We painted a dark picture of the world so that the contrast lies within the player. We are the ones who decide: Are we bringing hope to these poor people or are we bringing them even more darkness and misery? Because this will be a game with a lot of freedom of choice. Exactly that is conveyed quite well by the trailer. You can be the person who brings the man to the pyre, or you are the person who says: Stop, we will not burn this man.
If you also take Divinity: Original Sin 2 and add cinematics in the style of our new trailer, then this would be what that game looks like. So yes, visually it is very dark. But that is exactly the level we already had with Divinity: Original Sin 2. Now you can just see it better, and then it is also quite shocking.
The most important thing is that you are able to change things in this world.
MeinMMO: In the trailer, it looked like the people were already excited to burn the man!
Swen Vincke: Everything has its reason. I’m not yet talking about the story details, but everything you see in this trailer is intentional.
MeinMMO: The trailer is undeniably dark and bloody. However, Larian is known for weaving deep, dark stories with a characteristic sense of humor. How will your writing and design work together in Divinity to maintain that crucial contrast and ensure that the humor lands without undermining the serious themes, and vice versa?
Swen Vincke: Yes, the trailer has a good level of body horror. When we conceived it, we referenced The Wicker Man, which is an old film. Exactly what you see [in the trailer] happens there. There are also references to the movie The Substance within the trailer if you look closely.
For the balance, we will do it as we always do. When our writers start, the contrast comes automatically. I can already tell you that there will be moments that will definitely make you laugh. Just as there will be things that will shock you at first. If you are playing a game for hundreds of hours, you also want a variety of emotions.
Regret about the squirrel due to publisher pressure
MeinMMO: Exactly. I actually played Divinity: Original Sin 2 again at the beginning of the year. And I laughed so much while doing it. One of my personal favorites is Sir Lora.
Swen Vincke: Oh, really?!
MeinMMO: Yes, for me he is a good example of the silly, charming humor you incorporate into dark settings. I agree with you that Divinity: Original Sin 2 is already dark and bloody, but you just can’t see it well because of the graphics. And then there is this squirrel riding a dead cat that can come with you.
Swen Vincke: It’s funny that you like Sir Lora. I hate him. If there is one thing I regret about Original Sin 2, it’s bringing Sir Lora into the game.
MeinMMO: No! Why?
Swen Vincke: I even tried to remove him from the Switch 2 version. But the QA team said it was too late to do that. I really tried to get rid of him.
MeinMMO: But he is perfect!
Swen Vincke: I’m glad that at least one person in this universe appreciates Sir Lora.
MeinMMO: I know he can be super annoying because he dies all the time. But he is so funny.
Swen Vincke: I will tell the others that I found someone who likes Sir Lora. They will be excited to hear that.
MeinMMO: Please send them my best regards and tell them that I’m glad you didn’t get your way here.
Swen Vincke: I’m looking at the message where my Head of QA says: We tried to remove Sir Lora and almost succeeded. But we have a problem where it works in one region and not in another. We couldn’t figure out why. Sir Lora just wouldn’t die. We lost several days debugging to find an answer to that. Now it’s too late, so we have to keep him.
You have just heard this exclusively.
MeinMMO: I’m glad he stayed. There is always someone who appreciates something.
Swen Vincke: Yes, sometimes you are surprised at what story is behind something.
Back then, we worked with a publisher who absolutely wanted a free DLC. So we just brought him in as a joke that really doesn’t add anything to the game. And later we regretted bringing Sir Lora in because it only happened due to publisher pressure. And now we just want to get rid of him. But it’s okay, it makes me happy that you enjoy him. There are people who put a lot of effort into creating him.
MeinMMO: With that background, I understand why you are not happy about him. But I still appreciate him even if he always dies. Wow, I need to digest that story.
But let’s get back to my interview script.
Divinity is a breakthrough
After the massive success of Baldur’s Gate 3, where you had to adhere to the D&D rules, how liberating and perhaps intimidating is it to return to Divinity to your own toolkit, where you essentially set every rule of the universe yourself?
Swen Vincke: It feels good. It’s extremely liberating. D&D is a good system for a tabletop game, but it was difficult to translate it into a video game. I believe we handled that quite well, but it was never intended to be in a video game originally. Now we can create something designed from the ground up for a video game. We can make it more accessible, easy to learn, and hard to master, as it should be.
When I played a version of the first combat and used features that we are not talking about yet, my first reaction was: This is so much better than any combat I have ever played in Baldur’s Gate 3. That was mainly because you don’t need any prior knowledge and everything just feels natural.
I’m not trying to downplay Baldur’s Gate 3 now.
I am very proud of the game. But you can somewhere guess that we designed a game with a rule set that was not meant for a video game. Nobody in their right mind would make every single class different with bonus actions, spell slots, and make you learn a completely new system every time you recruit a new companion. I’m glad we don’t have to do that anymore.
6 years of development for Baldur’s Gate 3 were too long
MeinMMO: I can imagine that well. There’s one thing I’ve wondered since the release of Baldur’s Gate 3. It was clear that your next project would be a very ambitious game. I have a big concern, and that is the possibility that Larian will become completely megalomaniacal without external pressure holding you back. Swen, how do you actively deal with that as a studio head? What keeps Larian grounded?
Swen Vincke: I think you underestimate how loud my team can be. We are definitely ambitious and want to make better games than before. But none of us wants to make a game whose development takes 6 years.
That was too long. We want to be faster this time. But we want to improve and still make big games. Some interviewers have asked me if I think games should be shorter nowadays. And I said that of course there is room for that, but there are also many people like us who want someone to make these big games. That is how some movies have to be seen in theaters that you won’t find on television. We define ourselves as cinema developers – it takes time to make these games.
How do we stop ourselves from becoming megalomaniacal now? We will probably have to exercise self-restraint, I think. It’s a big team with many opinions. I trust they will speak up when it gets too much.
MeinMMO: You know, that may be a bit rude to say, but I see you as somewhat megalomaniacal with your life path.
Swen Vincke: Really? I mean, it took us 30 years to get to where we are now. We built it piece by piece. I mean, there were bigger leaps with each game, but I don’t think we have jumped too high.
MeinMMO: No, but I believe you have always had a very big vision in mind that you have been working towards. Even when you look back on your life. We talked about that back in Ghent, that there were times when you didn’t know how to pay for your gas, and that didn’t stop you from moving forward. My personal opinion is that you need a certain tendency towards megalomania to keep going at that point and not say that it’s time for smaller rolls. Do you understand what I mean?
Swen Vincke: Yes, I believe so. That view is fair. I have not felt myself to be megalomaniacal. But I definitely love reaching for the stars.
Offering more freedom of choice for Divinity means becoming more efficient
MeinMMO: Let’s talk about the lessons learned. What is the most important single learning experience from the development of Baldur’s Gate 3 – whether technical, design-wise, or in community interaction – that you will absolutely carry over to Divinity?
Swen Vincke: To include your previous question: We learned a lot about pursuing our philosophy and seeing how many things we can do. These are very big, cinematic games.
Cinematics come with very high costs. I believe we have become much better at assessing how many cinematics we can create. We can now integrate this better when we write the script without losing the narrative – and that is the tricky part. It’s easy to plan a cinematic, but it’s not easy to plan something where there is so much freedom of choice like in our games. One of our goals is to increase the scope of player choice. We have become better at finding that balance. That’s very important to even be able to make such big games as we do.
Better pursuing this and implementing it into our development pipeline was crucial for us to learn and continue optimizing that. It’s also about getting faster at bringing an actor into the studio and putting their performance into the game. That used to take us three weeks, and now we can do it in two hours. These are the things we have also heavily invested in. We are not quite there yet, but we are very close.
And that is essentially what we are trying to implement for our entire pipeline. When you change something, we want to see the effect in the game within two hours.
MeinMMO: I remember you once said that it’s important for you to have something in your game that only a tiny percentage would ever see. Is that something that has changed for you now, considering the costs of cinematics?
Swen Vincke: No, quite the opposite. That is also one of the reasons why we are working so hard on efficiency. We do not want to compromise. The more efficient your pipelines are, the better the game will be and the more freedom of choice you can give the player.
We are also working with a new version of our engine. This is Engine No. 5, and it allows for a highly automated pipeline. This reduces mundane tasks like filling in Excel sheets. This way we can focus even more on the actual player experience. But we are not at the point where everything is perfect and running like a dream yet.
The most important pillar for Divinity will be freedom of choice
MeinMMO: Yes, I think that is extremely important for your games. That’s part of the Larian identity, that as a player you get so many freedoms of choice. I assume that will be the case in Divinity as well.
Swen Vincke: The most important pillar for Divinity is to maximize player choice. Be it your character identity or what you can do during combat, through the dialogues in which you need to make decisions. We want you to feel that you are driving the story forward. We try to create the biggest sandbox for you that we can provide with our means, and to experiment.
I looked at something in the game yesterday and was able to combine several things together, and it was just beautiful because I could see how everything clicked together. I sat there thinking: I can’t believe I can do this right now and now this as well. That is just a fantastic feeling that brings me a lot of joy.
That is exactly what we want to create for you – and that is a lot of work because we have to build every single one of those moments. But we are getting better at it. I can see that the team has learned so much from Baldur’s Gate 3 and DoS 2.
MeinMMO: I already asked what you want to keep from Baldur’s Gate 3. But I also think it’s interesting to talk about Divinity itself. It’s your own baby. So same question here: What do you definitely want to keep from the Divinity series?
Swen Vincke: There are a lot of mechanical things that I don’t want to answer yet. I want to discuss gameplay when we can show it. I believe what makes Divinity is also what we transferred to BG3. A sense of exploration. You should not be bound to a specific order, but just take off. Just see what looks interesting to you, and the game catches you exactly where you are. That is the most important part for me.
I think the system of Divinity is also pretty cool. Divinity: Original Sin 1 was the first game that allowed teleportation at level 1. And normally, that is always a spell for much higher levels. We just put it at the beginning and had so many opportunities for experimentation. Those are the things we find exciting because they give you joy.
The problem with that is that we then have to also reach very high to still give you fun towards the end of the game. That is a challenge.
After release, Swen doesn’t play his games – not even with his wife
MeinMMO: That makes me happy to hear. If I had to choose between Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2, I would take DoS2 because you can just play so much with the systems.
That brings me to another thing I really love about your games. I believe, unlike Sir Lora, we also agree on this. I came across an interview from 13 years ago with you that you did with the YouTube channel Co-Optimus. You said that Divinity: Original Sin 1 became a co-op game only because you wanted to play a CRPG with your then-girlfriend, whom you are now married to.
Are you planning to play Divinity again with your wife?
Swen Vincke: I have never done that.
There is a problem I have. I can no longer see the games once they have been released. I haven’t played a single one of our games after they have been released. That’s because I can only see the flaws. So they hurt me. She always refers to these interviews.
She plays the games with our kids. The boys want to rush through much faster than she can keep up. The only thing I ever did was play the arena from DoS2 with my sons. And that was the only time I played our games with my family. I play other games with them. To my shame.
MeinMMO: I can relate to that. I like to paint in my free time and have a hard time hanging up my own pictures for the same reasons. But sometimes it’s good to just do it and accept everything about them. So maybe you should do your wife a favor. At least once.
Swen Vincke: I have thought about that many times, and then I just can’t. I’m just not there yet. But I also forget many things that are in our games. Maybe I just need to wait long enough to forget everything, and then it will work.
The definition of success lies in the shoe campaign
MeinMMO: I really hope that you can someday get over your shadow. You’re really missing out. Can I give you an example of one of my coop campaigns in Baldur’s Gate 3?
We had a silly home rule that you must be naked at camp but keep your shoes on. In our role-playing brains, it made sense that you at least need shoes if you need to run away quickly. You have no idea what monster that created. Nice shoes suddenly became a status symbol. Everyone naturally wanted the prettiest shoes for camp, making looting very chaotic.
That’s the kind of chaos I need in your games!
Swen Vincke: I did not say that I don’t play them in co-op. Just not when they are released. I have already played them for thousands of hours by then. I might even be the one who plays them the most before release.
I have never heard of a shoe campaign before. I will remember that.
MeinMMO: One thing I am still very curious about. Ignoring the commercial sales figures: What would need to happen for both of you to look at Divinity about six months after release and confidently say, “That was a real success for Larian?”
Swen Vincke: Hearing people talk about their shoe campaigns.
That’s why we do this. When we hear people talking about their campaigns and they had all different experiences and played different characters, then we know we’ve succeeded. Your story is one of many I have heard, and none is like the other. That gives me the confidence to say we achieved what we wanted to achieve.
MeinMMO: I mean, you also won the Community Support award at the Game Awards for the third year in a row now.
Swen Vincke: That made me very happy for the team. They put so much effort and work into it. I believe people also underestimate how hard it actually is to support a game once it has been released.
MeinMMO: Baldur’s Gate 3 is somewhat of a unicorn here, it must be said. We are still writing many articles about the game, and people still enjoy reading them, whether it’s cool community stories or how to optimize their build. Even after three years, people are still talking about Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s something special for an CRPG. Was that a surprise for you?
Swen Vincke: That feels incredibly rewarding. That means to me that you can see we are getting better at what we do. Our player numbers have consistently risen for each game, meaning we have been able to convince players better and better. That shows the evolution of the team. They are pretty much at the peak of their craft, which is why I have very high hopes for our new game.
No one of us expected that Baldur’s Gate 3 would be played for so many years. We thought back then we had a month, and then Starfield would come. We thought that would be the maximum life our game would have. To see it three years later like this is a huge relief.
The ultimate wish for the new Divinity
MeinMMO: What does Divinity personally mean to you? What drives you? I mean, yes, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a great game and will surely touch you emotionally. But the Divinity series is what you have done for the years before. That is your baby.
Swen Vincke: That’s a really good question. I’ve never thought about that. I mean, I know how it all began. Ultima 7 was the biggest inspiration. I wanted to create something similar. Our first two games were flops, and the first Divinity was the third attempt.
I believe since then it has all been an attempt to improve role-playing games. Divinity will be the result of everything we have learned and tried over the years, is my hope. Now also with cinematics, as we had in BG3.
If you put all of that from the last 30 years into a game, it can mean it will spectacularly fail or spectacularly succeed. Obviously, I hope for the latter.
Ultimately, I hope it will be exactly what a role-playing game should be. And that is very simple for me: You should be able to do whatever you want and the world should respond to that. And it should all be motivated by a good narrative.
That is what Divinity means to me.
MeinMMO: That is a really beautiful answer that excites me right now.
Swen Vincke: Maybe you will hate it if there are no squirrels and skeleton cats. Although, there might be squirrels on a pyre.
The second pillar is contrast
MeinMMO: Now don’t burn the squirrels just because you don’t like Sir Lora! The squirrels shouldn’t be punished for that.
At least no squirrels were burned in the trailer, although there was a lot else to see.
I really love how the trailer looked visually. Especially the contrast you mentioned was so pronounced. The man being burned is so dark and has a pale coloring around him. The celebrating people have such vibrant colors and are almost cloaked in golden shimmer.
Swen Vincke: Yes, you hit the nail on the head. Because contrast is the second pillar of the game.
MeinMMO: Then you really conveyed that well. Because the contrast was the first thing I noticed. Then I lingered on the man for a while. I’m not even sure if he is really supposed to represent a victim.
Swen Vincke: I can definitely tell you who the inspiration for that was. It’s Adam Smith, my writing director.
The first version was the classic American hero. And I immediately said we are not going to do that. I told the team, make him look more like Adam.
At the Game Awards, he was also costumed as a lizard.
MeinMMO: Yes, I saw photos online showing several of you wearing masks. At the statue you erected, I even thought of you before the reveal because I saw a bear in the statue.
Swen Vincke: The bear actually has a multi-layered meaning. You will understand what I mean when you see it. It’s more than you think right now.
MeinMMO: I think that’s the perfect conclusion to this interview. Thank you for your time, Swen.
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