Ten days ago the gaming world was rocked by a gauntlet thrown down by Geoff Keighley, event producer and head of The Game Awards, the gala that will culminate the 2025 calendar with the Game of the Year awards, as well as making big announcements of titles coming in 2026 and beyond. Keighley clued us in to a marketing move around the gala that has won the day this year for its genius and for holding up almost right up until opening night.
We're talking, of course, about the strange statue that appeared overnight in the Mojave Desert, where a bizarre orb surrounded by claws that glowed red under the stars was surrounded by a base full of twisted skeletal creatures. Then a wave of curious onlookers made a pilgrimage to visit the object, while gamers and media alike racked their brains trying to figure out what possible announcement the statue was referring to - could it be from Housemarque's upcoming title Saros, a new DLC for Blizzard's Diablo IV, or maybe even Bethesda is predicting a big reveal for The Elder Scrolls VI? As it turns out, it was nothing of the sort, and credit to MP1st for being the first to find out.
The media outlet reported that the statue had a design virtually identical to a registered logo along with the license Divinity, referring to the original game franchise created by Larian Studios, which pretty much confirms that tonight will see the announcement of the next game in the franchise. And by all accounts, it will be a reboot.
The first title, Divine Divinity, was released in 2002 to fairly modest success, and since then the franchise has expanded with varying degrees of success into its most recent and popular instalments, the spin-offs (and partly prequels) Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2. It was these that led to Larian being chosen as the studio to take over from BioWare in the Baldur's Gate franchise to develop the third instalment of the franchise, and the rest, as we all know, is history.
Going into much more swampy and speculative territory, right now it would be difficult for a full remake of Divine Divinity to maintain the gameplay of the original, as it was a fairly archaic action RPG heavily influenced by the style of Diablo at the time. A reasonable assumption is that it would have more of a third-person or shoulder-view feel to it, or perhaps even rework the game to suit its winning turn-based style, which is also why Larian is now held up as a reference in the medium.
Either way, the statue in the desert bodes well for an exciting future, because Larian Studios is back, and that alone is enough to make tonight's audience at The Game Awards 2025 historic.
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