After the critical and commercial success of Divinity: Original Sin 2, Belgium based developer Larian Studios has begun work on their next game codenamed ‘Project Gustav’. Larian head Swen Vincke confirmed the news in a documentary by Gameumentary on the history of the studio.
Vincke says that “as we were already finishing DOS2, we actually a month before sat in a hotel room for a weekend and worked on the next thing.” According to Swen, Project Gustav “blends the same things that we’ve been exploring all the time. It’s going to be narrative, systems, multiplayer, new things, new ideas.” Another interesting thing is that the game is codenamed after Swen’s pet dog.
The question looming atop Larian at the moment is how to surpass the bar set by the Original Sin series. “How can we make something that’s better than Divinity: Original Sin 2. How do we make sure that we don’t lose what was good and how do we know that we innovate on the things that people would not want to do again because they did it once and it was cool but they won’t do it twice, which is typically a trap that sequels fall into. But it’s fun. This is why you do this, right? You make new things, you explore new avenues of gameplay.”
Larian’s latest outing Divinity: Original Sin 2 is available now for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. We called Original Sin 2 one of the best RPGs of all time in our original review and it will be interesting to see where Larian will go with this newfound success. If you ask me, they’ve been working on the Divinity series for too long and it’d be great to see a new IP embracing the innovations of Original Sin and beyond.