Lampyre

GA Divinity trailer - you're shocking, not telling

One of the 2025 Game Awards most popular announcement has been Larian Studios' trailer for their latest and upcoming game, Divinity.

I spent hundred of hours on Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3) and I am still amazed by the game's quality and level of polish. While I never finished Divinity: Original Sin 2 (DOS2), I can still praise it for its excellent and addictive combat gameplay, as well as for its overall progress curve. Truly well made games.

I am happy the studio is expanding its original licence, but to tell the truth, this trailer made me feel upset and a little kind of worried. The footage is gorgeous, the storytelling is clear. But I felt it was completely empty, unappealing and remembered only its gross and shocking visuals. And it sounds I may not be alone.

so dark. much nothing. very spook.

The trailer's structure is pretty simple and very clear to understand (a proven token of good storytelling !).

It is an introduction, as it should be. The picturing of a world (and its problems) we'll be diving into when the game launches. But what's supposed to be the message here ?

A surprising large amount of people are gathering around to feast, celebrate, praising mysterious entities during what seems to be a ritual ceremony (I remember almost nothing of DOS2 lore, so consider me a newbie on that subject). Poor lads have been messed up and hung up into giant strawmen adorned with a bazillion flammable effigies. Everything burns in front of a mute priest and - surprise ! - an otherworldly goo gets spat out the flames, ravaging everything around and goring every living being not running away fast enough.

First wholesome and merry, the atmosphere progressively turns to madness through a colorful palette of gruesome symbols - greasy meat chewed on, pigs feeding on vomit and sh*t, prisoners burning alive, guys reverently whipping their own back to a bloody pulp and an extra bonus found in a casual orgy happening in front of the show (side note: it's always funny seeing people being more offended by sex scenes in games than routinely beheaded or dismembered people).

None of this is a problem. Everything has been carefully designed to be revolting (let's have a empathic thought for the artists who painstakingly crafted all of this with months of hard work - Hey, Jude, you still have the reference sheets for three-point fractures and melted flesh ? - Oh yeah, they're right next to the fanatics cloths design sheets and the blood palettes !).
It IS the obvious purpose of the material to be gory. But again, what is the message here ? I could think of nothing else than :

  1. random common folks doing bad things in ceremonial/religious rites
  2. really bad things - look mom, they're piling up all kind of sins and enjoying them !
  3. oh no, this time, bad stuff comes out of a satanistic-like ritual and kill the people ! holy moly

"Hold on." I first thought afterwards. "Maybe you're just old. You find this boring because you've been consuming games and movies for more than twenty years. You've seen all the horror clichés, the Resident Evil teasers, the jumpscares, so you're not impressed - but it's still honest content."

No, it's not. I feel like a cat trying to climb a slippery soapy metal wall. I have nothing to hang onto, no storytelling elements to identify an interesting lore or a lever on which we could act (you know, something that makes you want to play the game, to be in that story world so you could act and interact). At best, you could be curious about the various races seen (lizards with elves on top, now that's a refresher) or the not-so-friendly religion that implies burning people inside grinny straw figures (it's always nicer when you draw a smily face on it). And to me, the clear culprit is dark fantasy.

Being edgy is harder than it looks

As little as I remember of DOS2, I do recall that its lore were always darker and grisly than others - say, D&D lore. These are fantasy worlds made to dream. We need these alternatives universes where we can see humanity struggle against merciless gods, cold realities and the violent consequences of their own acts. Morally ambiguous stories make heroes shine brighter and messages land with more impact than their bland opposites - rose-tinted, unicorn-filled prairies where nothing harmful ever happens.
But they are also very difficult to balance toward a meaningful message and can easily transform into a deadly writer's trap.

Dark fantasy worlds inherently have one or multiple of these :

It is then the authors' duty to build main characters and plots where a glimmer of hope can shine, even briefly, to shed light on a gloomy landscape. The conclusion need not to be happy or even solve all the problems. But if everything is perpetually sh*tty and none is ever coming to the rescue, then you don't have a story anymore. All is left is a long, boring, pointless slog depicting misery and helplessness.
That's what you feel when you just binged eighty hours of Diablo 3 and you hear the story of another village that got horribly sacked by demons who used all manners of nasty tortures techniques. You don't care. They're probably idiots or weaklings who deserved it and triggered it through a forbidden rite. It's in their human nature, and there's nothing your hero can do to prevent that from happening again in five, ten, or twenty years.

And from what I recalled from DOS2, it's why I never got past the start of Act II. Though the background lore was rich and detailed, every character was so inherently bad or weak that I could not care less about the tentacles running rampage everywhere or the whole Divine plot. This world sounded like perpetual, bland misery where the best you could hope for was fifteen years of peace with some flowers growing around your cottage. The party members did not help, as the interactions with them were pretty limited and it made each of their story disconnected and selfish.

"But maybe it's not so bad in Divinity. Maybe the trailer is depicting a prologue. It is an outlier event of a really messed up, single village, and heroes will come soon to adress the situation."

It's a really big and diverse crowd shown in this trailer. And it's a really, smily little girl watching a burning stake-orgy-flogging party perched on her mother's shoulders. Again, I don't care that they're using a kid to show the horror of a situation. But that reinforces the point that these people, whatever cult they're into, have been for into it a long time. It's their yearly Christmas party. They love it.

So, they are either 1) enthralled/charmed so far by godly entities that they're not responsible for their actions anymore (unlikely, given the video's ending) - or they are 2) profoundly, nasty people who enjoy f*cking strangers on moist mud and pig manure, amidst the crying howls of men burnt alive. I know some cultures are rougher than others but, dude. These deserved to be annihilated (a feeling I suspect Larian wanted people to feel when the crowd flees in terror).

Monsters and monsters

"What you just described is the whole plot of The Witcher series - showing that humans can act in more monstrous ways than the worse foes imagined. And then, your hero have this dilemma whether to side with its own kin or not."

For all its edginess, The Witcher series have nuances. It has powerful characters shifting the tides of events. Simply seeing a witcher or one dude that is slightly more honest than others goes a long way to show you that life is not only suffering. For every bloodthirsty ghoul, you can also have another benevolent or interesting creature to talk with. You can act for good in spite of a group of nasty villagers (even if most of the common people are depicted as pretty lowbrow).

Divinity's trailer have no hero. The menace is vague and unrecognizable ("Oh no ! An aggressive flesh-tearing puddle !"). Characters, clothes and settings are all used-up fantasy clichés. The whole catastrophy is triggered by people acting like monsters for no other apparent reasons than "we always revered the strange glowy moons" and you feel pretty happy when they all get murdered.

And at this point, if you're not someone who enjoys gory visuals for the sake of it, you're left wondering "what was all of that for ?" with no clue about what this world is about (or, if there is a clue, it's about a washed-up corruption plot that you've seen multiple times with no indication of any interesting variation).

This post is now way too long

I am surprised this trailer stirred up such a reaction for me. Maybe because I care about dark and slightly dark fantasy worlds. About writing in general. About great games. I certainly got disgusted by its visuals and won't be rewatching it anytime. It only strengthened my disappointment not understanding what the studio wanted us to see (and feel excited about).

Now I may just be too demanding. It just seemed that with their newfound experience acquired through BG3, I would have expected a deeper and more refined trailer from Larian Studios. There are many dark fantasy trailers that I enjoyed (e.g The Witcher trailers, namely I / A Night to remember / IV, No Rest for the Wicked cinematics, Warhammer Vermintide, the brutal Astartes II among dozens of others). Even Diablo IV launch trailer now feels more catchy than Divinity's when I though it was plain boring and impersonal at its release.

"The phrase "treating the audience with a level of intellectual respect" came up a lot in planning. It isn't about trying to shock them, it's about trying to match their powers of comprehension so that it resonates. We know people are capable of appreciating a three dimensional world." responded Larian to people's reactions.
I completely believe them. But if a message there is, it is buried too deep and they massively underestimated the blandness of their licence's surface. If you flood your audience eyes with gore or shock, you must bring immediate meaning to it. A human with pointy ears, two lizards, and a dual or triple or quadruple moon will not do.

I still trust them to make an exceptional game and I am eager to see gameplay and alternative trailers ! But please, all I want for Christmas is no more orgies with people dying around.

#various