While Baldur’s Gate 3 still represented a major technical leap over Divinity: Original Sin 2, Larian Studios has now admitted that its engine was far from flawless. In fact, one specific limitation turned out to be a much bigger issue than many players realized, especially for modders and co-op users: characters could not move between Acts individually. That was not just a minor inconvenience either, because it directly shaped the way the studio had to build the world and structure the story.

Bert van Semmertier, Larian Studios’ technical director, discussed the issue in an interview with EDGE magazine, where he also explained that the studio deliberately does not want to chase the same kind of technical arms race as the biggest AAA companies. The Belgian developer would rather stay slightly behind the bleeding edge when it comes to graphics technology, because that allows the team to remain focused with its current size and avoid the kind of uncontrolled growth that can easily hollow a studio out from the inside.

That approach, however, did not spare Larian from dealing with serious technical obstacles during the making of Baldur’s Gate 3. According to van Semmertier, one of the long-running multiplayer limitations was exactly this inability for players to progress through Acts individually, meaning the whole party always had to move forward together. That restriction directly influenced how the world was built and how the story had to be structured. In other words, this was not some trivial technical quirk, but a real constraint that forced design and narrative decisions across the game.

The New Divinity Has Finally Left That Limitation Behind

Larian is not talking about the problem now just to explain, after the fact, why Baldur’s Gate 3 works the way it does. The technical director also revealed that this issue has already been completely removed in the development of the new Divinity. With Divinity Engine 5.0, that limitation is gone, which means there are no longer the same restrictions on how large an Act can be, nor on how player progression has to be chained together behind the scenes.

And that is only one part of the upgrade. Swen Vincke has previously said that Divinity Engine 5.0 is better in every way, more capable, more visually impressive, and able to do things the studio simply could not pull off before. On top of that, it also introduces much more automation into the development pipeline, which means the benefits should be felt not only by players in the final presentation, but also internally by developers working with the toolset. The system is still not fully finished, but Larian says it is getting close to the point where this new technology can be used at full power in the next Divinity game.

For now, the new Divinity still has no release date, so players will have to wait before they can see what this technical leap really looks like in practice. What is already clear, though, is that Larian has no intention of dragging the same technical compromises into its next major RPG that it had to swallow while making Baldur’s Gate 3.

Source: 3DJuegos