Who is Larian Studios? From Divinity to Baldur’s Gate 3 and back again
Larian Studios spent almost three decades building role-playing games before Baldur’s Gate 3 transformed the Belgian developer into one of the most recognised RPG studios in the world.
Founded in Ghent in 1996, Larian Studios built its reputation through the Divinity series before creating Divinity: Original Sin, Divinity: Original Sin 2 and eventually Baldur’s Gate 3. Today, the independent developer operates seven studios across Europe, North America and Asia.
However, Larian has now closed one important chapter.
Major development on Baldur’s Gate 3 is finished. The studio will not develop Baldur’s Gate 4, either. Instead, Larian has returned to its own universe and has already revealed its next RPG.
Divinity is coming back.
That makes 2026 an ideal time to look at Larian Studios, how it reached Baldur’s Gate 3, and where the developer intends to go next.
Larian Studios began in Belgium in 1996
Larian Studios was founded by Swen Vincke in Ghent, Belgium, in 1996.
The official Larian Studios website describes those beginnings simply: a small office in Ghent with ambitions to create world-class video games.
The developer did not begin with hundreds of employees or an internationally recognised licence. Instead, Larian had to establish itself gradually.
That process eventually produced the fantasy RPG universe most closely associated with the studio before Baldur’s Gate arrived.
Divinity.
Divine Divinity launched in 2002 and combined traditional RPG mechanics with real-time combat, exploration and an interactive fantasy world.
More games followed. As a result, Larian gradually developed its reputation for RPG systems that allowed players to approach problems in unexpected ways.
That philosophy eventually became the foundation of its modern games.
Swen Vincke remains at the heart of Larian Studios
Nearly 30 years after founding the company, Swen Vincke remains CEO of Larian Studios.
Vincke has never presented himself purely as an executive removed from development. Instead, he has remained closely associated with game design, production and Larian’s creative direction.
That visibility became particularly noticeable during the development and launch of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Players regularly saw Vincke presenting updates and discussing development decisions. He also became known for appearing at industry events wearing armour.
Behind the humour sits a consistent development philosophy.
Larian wants players to experiment.
It wants decisions to have consequences.
Most importantly, it wants its RPGs to react to players rather than constantly forcing them down predetermined paths.
You can see that philosophy developing throughout the Divinity series.
Divinity created the foundation
Larian’s catalogue stretches across several games in the Divinity universe, including Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity, Divinity II, Divinity: Dragon Commander, Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2.
Those games are not mechanically identical.
In fact, Larian experimented considerably.
Some games used real-time combat. Dragon Commander mixed RPG systems with strategy and political decision-making. Later, the Original Sin games moved towards turn-based party combat.
That willingness to change became important.
Larian was not protecting a single formula. Instead, it was gradually discovering what kind of RPG developer it wanted to become.
The breakthrough came with Divinity: Original Sin.
Crowdfunding helped change Larian’s future
The original Divinity: Original Sin became Larian’s first successfully crowdfunded project.
Rather than relying entirely on a traditional publisher, crowdfunding gave the developer more direct contact with players and greater freedom over development.
The result became a major turning point.
Larian says Divinity: Original Sin accumulated more than 150 awards and nominations.
More importantly, it established the modern Larian formula.
Turn-based combat became deeply systemic.
Elements interacted with each other.
Environments mattered.
Objects became tools.
Dialogue offered different approaches to problems.
Meanwhile, multiplayer allowed two people to disagree about what their party should do.
Those ideas became considerably more ambitious in the sequel.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 proved the formula could scale
Divinity: Original Sin 2 arrived in 2017 and became one of the most important games in Larian’s history.
The sequel expanded almost every part of the original.
Origin characters received personal backgrounds and stories. Combat became deeper, while environmental interactions became more elaborate.
Narrative choices expanded as well.
Multiplayer even allowed players to cooperate while pursuing different goals.
Most importantly, the game demonstrated that Larian’s design philosophy could support a large and polished RPG rather than remaining a niche experiment.
That success opened another door.
This time, it led to Dungeons & Dragons.
Then came Baldur’s Gate 3
Larian received the opportunity to develop Baldur’s Gate 3 using the Dungeons & Dragons setting and rules as the foundation for its next RPG.
It was an enormous step.
Baldur’s Gate already carried considerable history, while the earlier games played an important role in the development of computer RPGs.
Dungeons & Dragons itself brought decades of rules, characters, settings and player expectations.
Therefore, Larian had to accomplish two things simultaneously.
It needed to create a convincing Dungeons & Dragons game.
At the same time, it needed to make a recognisable Larian game.
The developer achieved that by adapting lessons learned through Original Sin rather than abandoning them.
Baldur’s Gate 3 spent years in Early Access
Baldur’s Gate 3 entered Early Access before its full release.
That allowed Larian to put part of the game into players’ hands while development continued.
Consequently, feedback became part of the process.
Systems changed.
Classes were adjusted.
Characters evolved.
Technical problems were addressed.
By the time the complete PC version arrived in August 2023, Larian had spent years observing how real players behaved inside its RPG.
That matters because players rarely behave exactly as designers expect.
Give people enough freedom and they will attempt ridiculous things.
Larian deliberately designs around that problem.
Instead of asking players to stop breaking the intended solution, the studio frequently tries to make its games respond.
Baldur’s Gate 3 transformed Larian Studios
Calling Baldur’s Gate 3 successful would understate what happened.
The game became a major commercial and critical success. Larian says it received more than 200 Game of the Year awards, including recognition from the BAFTA Games Awards, Golden Joysticks, Game Developers Choice Awards, DICE Awards and The Game Awards.
That recognition placed Larian Studios in a completely different position.
It was no longer primarily known among CRPG enthusiasts.
Instead, Baldur’s Gate 3 became a mainstream gaming phenomenon.
Characters such as Astarion, Shadowheart, Karlach, Gale and Lae’zel developed communities far beyond the traditional computer-RPG audience.
Turn-based combat also reached players who may never previously have considered a game built around Dungeons & Dragons rules.
Most importantly, millions of players encountered Larian’s approach to RPG design.
TechnologyBlog has already examined that game in our Baldur’s Gate 3 in 2026 feature.
INTERNAL LINK: In WordPress, link Baldur’s Gate 3 in 2026 above to the TechnologyBlog Baldur’s Gate 3 article we just published.
Player freedom is the real Larian formula
The easiest way to understand a Larian RPG is to examine how it treats problems.
Another game might present a locked door and expect you to find a key.
A Larian game starts asking questions.
Can you pick the lock?
Can you destroy the door?
Can you teleport someone to the other side?
Can you find another entrance?
Can you reach a window?
Can you convince someone to let you inside?
Can you simply avoid the building?
Not every situation supports every possibility. However, the philosophy remains consistent.
Systems should overlap.
Players should experiment.
Whenever possible, the game should respond.
That is what makes Larian’s RPGs feel different from games where choice primarily means selecting one of several dialogue options.
Failure becomes part of the story
Larian is also unusually comfortable allowing players to fail.
A persuasion roll can go wrong.
A companion can leave.
An important character can die.
A quest can become impossible.
A situation can turn into combat because someone made a terrible decision.
That sounds perfectly normal in a tabletop RPG.
It is considerably harder to accommodate in a video game.
Developers spend enormous amounts of time creating content. Allowing players to miss that content can appear wasteful.
Larian often accepts that risk because consequences make decisions meaningful.
If every road eventually reaches the same destination, player choice becomes cosmetic.
Baldur’s Gate 3 frequently allows roads to disappear completely.
Baldur’s Gate 3 remains heavily played
TechnologyBlog recently examined why Baldur’s Gate 3 remains heavily played in 2026, even though major content development has ended.
INTERNAL LINK: Link Baldur’s Gate 3 remains heavily played in 2026 to the same TechnologyBlog article.
Its longevity reinforces an important point about Larian’s development approach.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was not designed around an endless seasonal content schedule.
Instead, Larian built an enormous RPG that remains replayable because its systems support different stories.
Classes change the experience.
Companions change relationships.
The Dark Urge changes the narrative.
Multiplayer introduces unpredictable situations.
Mods add another layer.
Therefore, players do not necessarily need Larian to provide another season every few months.
They can restart and create another story.
Larian deliberately finished Baldur’s Gate 3
That makes Larian’s decision to stop adding major content particularly interesting.
Patch 8 launched in April 2025 as the final major Baldur’s Gate 3 update.
It added cross-play, Photo Mode, 12 new subclasses and further modding improvements.
Larian was also unusually clear about what would happen afterwards.
Outside smaller bug fixes, it would not continue adding major narrative content, significant storyline changes or major companion expansions.
The developer explained that continuing indefinitely would prevent it from moving on to something new.
That is very different from the live-service model dominating parts of modern gaming.
Larian allowed its successful game to become finished.
Readers can explore the final major update through Larian’s official Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 8 announcement.
Larian Studios is not making Baldur’s Gate 4
This is another important distinction.
Larian developed Baldur’s Gate 3.
It does not own Baldur’s Gate or Dungeons & Dragons.
After spending years working inside the Forgotten Realms, the developer decided to return to intellectual property it controls.
Therefore, Larian will not develop a Baldur’s Gate 3 expansion or Baldur’s Gate 4.
Instead, the company moved towards projects based on its own IP.
We now know the identity of at least one of those projects.
Larian Studios is returning to Divinity
In December 2025, Larian revealed a new Divinity RPG.
That brings the studio back to the universe it was building long before Baldur’s Gate 3.
More importantly, the developer is taking years of experience from Baldur’s Gate back into an IP it controls.
Larian has described the project as an RPG intended to offer greater breadth and depth than its previous work.
That makes it enormously significant.
Baldur’s Gate 3 gave Larian experience building an RPG at a scale it had never previously attempted.
Now that experience is returning to Divinity.
The new Divinity is not simply Original Sin 3
At present, the project is being presented as Divinity, rather than Divinity: Original Sin 3.
That distinction matters.
Larian has not revealed enough about the game for TechnologyBlog to assume its structure, release date or platforms.
Therefore, we should treat it simply as Larian’s next announced RPG in the Divinity universe until the developer confirms more.
What we already know is significant enough.
Larian owns the world.
It controls the creative direction.
The developer can apply lessons learned from Baldur’s Gate 3 without working within another company’s tabletop ruleset.
That gives the studio considerable freedom.
Larian Studios now operates seven studios
Modern Larian is no longer a small Belgian team.
The Larian Studios careers page currently lists seven locations:
Ghent, Belgium; Barcelona, Spain; Dublin, Ireland; Guildford, United Kingdom; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Quebec, Canada; and Warsaw, Poland.
That global network matters because games like Baldur’s Gate 3 require enormous development resources.
Different teams can collaborate across locations and time zones.
Furthermore, the structure gives Larian access to wider talent pools instead of relying entirely on one city.
The company that created the first Original Sin has therefore changed considerably.
Growth creates opportunities and risks
Seven studios provide Larian with substantially more development capacity.
However, size also creates problems.
More people need coordination.
Communication becomes harder.
Production costs increase.
Maintaining a consistent creative vision becomes more difficult.
Consequently, Larian’s challenge is not simply becoming bigger.
It needs to grow without losing the development culture that made its games distinctive.
That may prove especially important as expectations around the new Divinity increase.
Larian remains independently controlled
Larian continues operating as an independently controlled developer.
There is an important ownership nuance.
Tencent holds a minority financial interest in the company. However, Larian is not a Tencent subsidiary, and Swen Vincke retains control of the developer.
That distinction matters more than simply saying Larian is independent or externally funded.
Outside investment exists.
Creative and corporate control remain with Larian.
The company’s decision to move away from Baldur’s Gate provides a useful example of why that control matters.
Independence influences what Larian chooses to make
Corporate structure matters because it can influence creative decisions.
Baldur’s Gate 3 became enormously successful.
The obvious commercial response would have been another Baldur’s Gate game.
Larian chose differently.
Instead, it walked away from the licence and returned to its own intellectual property.
That does not mean commercial considerations disappear.
Large RPGs require enormous budgets.
Hundreds of developers need salaries.
Games still need to sell.
However, maintaining control gives Larian greater freedom to decide which opportunities it wants to pursue.
The new Divinity may be the clearest demonstration of that freedom.
Larian never abandoned turn-based RPGs
Another interesting part of Larian’s story is what the developer did not do after becoming successful.
Turn-based RPGs were once considered relatively niche compared with action games.
A developer seeking a broader audience might have moved towards faster combat.
Larian instead doubled down.
Original Sin used turn-based combat.
Original Sin 2 expanded it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 retained it.
Rather than assuming mainstream players would reject slower tactical combat, Larian concentrated on making those systems accessible, interactive and reactive.
The success of Baldur’s Gate 3 suggests that audience size can depend as much on execution as genre.
Multiplayer has been part of the formula for years
Baldur’s Gate 3’s cooperative multiplayer did not appear from nowhere.
Multiplayer already played an important role in the Original Sin games.
Larian appears to enjoy the unpredictability created when another human enters an RPG.
One player may approach a situation carefully.
Another might steal something and start a fight.
Someone could begin a conversation before everyone else is prepared.
The resulting chaos creates situations that even an enormous branching narrative cannot script completely.
In that sense, multiplayer becomes another game system.
Players create the chaos.
Larian gives them enough tools to make that chaos interesting.
Larian is willing to let players be ridiculous
This may be one of the most overlooked reasons its games reached such a broad audience.
Larian’s stories can be serious.
Baldur’s Gate 3 deals with trauma, identity, abuse, faith, mortality and power.
However, the game also allows ridiculous things to happen.
Characters can be shoved from cliffs.
Objects can become improvised weapons.
Conversations can collapse spectacularly.
Players can solve serious encounters through absurd strategies.
That tonal flexibility prevents the games from becoming relentlessly self-important.
It also resembles tabletop role-playing.
A campaign can contain genuine emotional drama and complete nonsense within minutes.
Larian Studios rewards curiosity
Many modern games tell players exactly where to go.
Larian frequently rewards players for asking what happens if they try something strange.
What happens if I move this?
Can I reach that ledge?
Can this spell solve a problem outside combat?
Can I speak to that animal?
Can I avoid the encounter entirely?
Not every experiment produces something meaningful.
However, enough of them work that players continue experimenting.
That creates trust between the game and the player.
Once the world responds to one strange idea, you start wondering what else might work.
Curiosity becomes part of the gameplay.
Baldur’s Gate 3 created a new problem for Larian
Success creates expectations.
The next Divinity will not be judged only against earlier Divinity games.
Players will inevitably judge it against Baldur’s Gate 3.
They now expect substantial narrative flexibility.
They expect memorable companions.
They expect cinematic presentation.
They expect deep systems.
They expect choices to matter.
Perhaps most dangerously, they expect Larian to anticipate bizarre player behaviour.
That creates a difficult position.
The game that transformed Larian Studios into a globally recognised developer also established the standard its next RPG must face.
Returning to Divinity could provide greater freedom
There is another side to that pressure.
Baldur’s Gate 3 had to operate within Dungeons & Dragons.
Classes came from an established ruleset.
Spells had histories.
The Forgotten Realms came with decades of lore.
Larian could adapt those systems, but it did not own them.
Divinity removes that restriction.
Larian controls the world.
It controls the rules.
The developer can change systems that no longer fit.
It can create characters, creatures and mechanics without conforming to an external tabletop ruleset.
That freedom could make the next project more experimental than Baldur’s Gate 3.
Baldur’s Gate 3 remains part of Larian’s legacy
Moving forward does not erase what Larian created.
TechnologyBlog’s Baldur’s Gate 3 in 2026 feature shows how strongly the RPG continues performing after major development ended.
INTERNAL LINK: Link Baldur’s Gate 3 in 2026 above to the published TechnologyBlog article.
Patch 8 completed major development with cross-play, Photo Mode and additional subclasses.
Smaller fixes can still occur, but Larian has effectively handed the finished game to its community.
That community now has official mod support, multiplayer and an RPG designed to support repeated campaigns.
Baldur’s Gate 3 can continue without becoming Larian’s permanent development project.
Why Larian Studios matters
The story of Larian Studios is not simply the story of Baldur’s Gate 3.
It is about how long it took to reach that game.
Larian began in a small office in Ghent in 1996.
It experimented with Divinity.
It survived difficult periods.
It embraced crowdfunding.
Original Sin established its modern identity.
Original Sin 2 proved that identity could support a larger RPG.
Then Baldur’s Gate 3 demonstrated that deeply systemic, turn-based role-playing could become a mainstream phenomenon.
Today, Larian Studios operates seven locations around the world.
Yet its core philosophy remains recognisable.
Give players systems.
Give them choices.
Allow those systems to collide.
Then make the world respond when players inevitably do something nobody sensible would attempt.
Baldur’s Gate 3 took that philosophy further than any previous Larian game.
Larian could have spent years extending it.
Instead, the studio decided the game was finished and moved forward.
Now it is returning home.
A new Divinity is coming.
After Baldur’s Gate 3, the question is no longer whether Larian can build an ambitious RPG.
It is how far Larian Studios intends to push the genre next.
