Former Dragon Age Lead Calls Larian's New Divinity a Calculated Risk After Baldur's Gate 3

Larian Studios has built an enormous amount of goodwill through Baldur's Gate 3, but its decision to return to Divinity now comes with an unusual challenge: the studio's audience may be much larger, and somewhat different, than it was before the 2023 role-playing game became a breakout success.

That is the central concern raised by Mark Darrah, the former BioWare developer and executive producer on Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Speaking on The Examined Game podcast, Darrah described Larian's next move as a risk, while also arguing that the developer is avoiding a major organizational problem that affected BioWare during its years supporting multiple flagship RPG franchises.

GamesRadar+ reported on Darrah's comments following the trailer teasing the next chapter of Larian's homegrown Divinity series. The footage presented a fiery and grim vision consistent with the franchise's established identity. But Darrah's point was not that the trailer had misrepresented Divinity. Instead, he questioned whether it necessarily reflects what the newly broadened Larian audience now expects from the company behind Baldur's Gate 3.

A question of what Larian has become

Darrah framed his concern around whether Larian's internal creative center changed during the making of Baldur's Gate 3. The project was a massive undertaking built around the Dungeons & Dragons setting and license, and it reached a far broader audience than Larian's earlier work. Its critical and commercial impact also brought enormous attention to the studio itself, not simply to the Baldur's Gate brand.

"The question I would have for Larian is did their core shift with Baldur's Gate 3?" Darrah said. "Did they take a big step, with meaning to or not, to a different place? And is that new place where they actually want to be now?"

That is a meaningful question for any developer that follows a major cultural success with a project that is familiar to longtime fans but potentially unfamiliar to the newcomers who arrived with the hit. Larian has deep roots in Divinity, a series it has worked on in different forms for decades. Yet Baldur's Gate 3 was not merely another Larian release. It became a defining RPG of its era, introducing the studio's party-based, reactive approach to players who may never have tried Divinity: Original Sin or its sequel.

For those players, the shift from the Forgotten Realms back to Rivellon may not immediately read as a natural continuation. The name recognition of Baldur's Gate and Dungeons & Dragons carries particular weight, while the setting, tone, characters, and expectations around a new Divinity game are its own proposition. Darrah suggested that some people whose only experience with Larian is Baldur's Gate 3 could see the new trailer and be left wondering what they are looking at.

"If I'm a Baldur's Gate person and the only Larian game I've ever played is Baldur's Gate 3, I think some people are going to look at that trailer and go 'what, what?'" Darrah said.

He added that the issue is not a lack of authenticity. The trailer may be true to the Larian that made its earlier games, but it could be less immediately recognizable to players whose impression of the studio was formed entirely by Baldur's Gate 3. In other words, the potential risk is not that Larian is abandoning its identity. It is that public assumptions about that identity may have changed faster than the developer itself.

Why returning to Divinity could still be the right move

There is another way to read Larian's choice, however. Returning to Divinity gives the studio a chance to work in a universe it owns and has shaped over years, rather than immediately seeking to replicate the exact circumstances of its most recent success. That can be valuable creatively, particularly after a game as unusually large and all-consuming as Baldur's Gate 3.

A sequel or spiritual follow-up does not need to erase the lessons Larian learned through Baldur's Gate. The studio can carry forward experience in reactive storytelling, cinematic presentation, multiplayer role-playing, encounter design, and player freedom without making another game under the same license. At the same time, a new Divinity can pursue its own tone and worldbuilding rather than being judged solely as an extension of the Forgotten Realms.

Darrah did not present the move as a mistake. His comments instead acknowledge the balancing act involved. A company that earns a dramatically larger audience must decide how much to accommodate that audience, how much to educate it about its older work, and how much to remain committed to the kind of games it wanted to make in the first place.

For Larian, the new Divinity project appears to be a declaration that the studio's future will not be dictated entirely by the brand that made it a household name. That does not guarantee every Baldur's Gate 3 player will follow it into the next game, but it may be important for maintaining a distinct creative identity over the long term.

Darrah praises Larian's one-game-at-a-time approach

Where Darrah was especially positive was in his assessment of Larian's development structure. He argued that the studio is doing something BioWare did not consistently do during its expansion: committing itself to one major thing at a time.

BioWare spent years associated with both Mass Effect and Dragon Age, with the two major RPG brands existing alongside each other. That gave the company multiple successful pillars, but it also created pressures around staffing, leadership, technology, production demands, and the broader question of what the studio represented. Separate teams can develop different habits and priorities, even when they operate under the same company name.

"Larian's doing something that BioWare never did, it's very much deciding to be one thing at a time," Darrah said.

He acknowledged that such an approach has real risk. When a studio has one central project, it has fewer places to distribute the consequences if that project encounters trouble or fails to connect with players. It also means that a long development cycle can leave the public waiting longer for the next major release.

But Darrah sees a powerful benefit in that focus. A studio centered on one big game avoids splitting into branches that gradually become very different from one another. In his view, trying to reunite those divergent branches later can create friction as teams, processes, and creative instincts bounce against each other.

"The power of that is there's never a moment where your studio is branching into two different things and slowly evolving away from itself," Darrah said.

This is not simply an argument about the number of games in production. It is an argument about institutional cohesion. Larian's focus means its developers can bring the experience of the Baldur's Gate 3 era into the next Divinity project together, rather than dispersing across competing franchises with separate goals. That could make it easier for the studio to identify which elements of its recent success are worth retaining and which belonged specifically to Baldur's Gate.

BioWare's history provides the cautionary comparison

Darrah's perspective carries extra weight because of his long history at BioWare. His comments do not reduce the difficulties of game development to a single cause, nor do they claim that managing more than one series automatically leads to weak results. BioWare's catalogue includes major successes across both Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

Still, the examples invoked in the discussion point to the hazards that can emerge when a studio's identity and production priorities become strained. Mass Effect: Andromeda and Dragon Age: The Veilguard are part of the broader context for Darrah's warning about teams and franchises gradually moving apart. Larian's current model does not make it immune to difficult decisions, but it may spare the studio from some of the complications that arise when multiple enormous RPG pipelines demand attention at once.

The new Divinity will ultimately be judged on its own execution, not on the wisdom of its organizational chart. The trailer does not settle how the game will play, how closely it will resemble Baldur's Gate 3, or how newcomers will respond to a return to Larian's original universe. Those details remain to be seen.

What Darrah's comments make clear is that Larian is entering a different phase of its history. The studio has more visibility than ever, more players watching its next move, and more expectations to navigate. Choosing Divinity after Baldur's Gate 3 may indeed be a risk. But according to the former Dragon Age lead, it is also a focused risk--one that could help Larian preserve a stronger, more unified sense of itself as it moves beyond its biggest success.