As Larian disgusts and excites with the Divinity trailer, Obsidian’s Josh Sawyer says “it’s crazy what’s going to upset people in games,” then applauds “Wicker Man x Event Horizon.”
Somewhere at Larian Studios sits a worn whiteboard with a bulleted list marked in marker: “The Grossest Stuff We Can Think of.” At least I assume so, and I also assume that all of these listed ideas were included in the trailer for Divinity, the highly anticipated upcoming RPG from the creators of Baldur’s Gate 3.
“The new Divinity trailer was great,” opines RPG mastermind Josh Sawyer in a Bluesky article, “but it’s crazy to see what bothers people about games, content-wise, and then be completely fine/enthusiastic about Wicker Man x Event Horizon.”
This reveal was really something else – three minutes of a man being burned alive in raunchy detail, public orgies, pigs eating vomit (twice!) and a child imposed by the levity in the crowd watching alongside his mother with a mixture of excitement at the vigorous festival and understandable concern at the sprouting blood demons. Who among us hasn’t played the Pigs Eating Vomit card, thought, “Damn, that hits home,” and then immediately played it again? Who didn’t enjoy Take Your Child to Execution Day? If you fell asleep in the late hours of the time zone-unfriendly showcase of The Game Awards 2025, it was surely pleasant and defibrillating.
Look on it
“I definitely felt like it was too much,” Iconoclasts creator Joakim Sandberg responded to Sawyer’s post. “It wasn’t from a puritanical point of view, rather it was pure indulgence and an attempt at the grotesque.” I don’t disagree; I thought it might be a bit much the second time I watched it. It’s indulgent and grotesque, and the reaction online seems to echo feelings towards a particularly graphic trailer for The Last of Us Part 2 that gleefully indulged in its own violence, but I won’t blame the developers for a certain nastiness or discomfort. It’s certainly memorable, and discomfort in art is not something to fear or avoid. Obviously, the world of Divinity is not comfortable. Message received.
“A friend pointed out that the first trailer for BG3 also featured some pretty extreme body horror and I don’t remember there being a similar reaction,” says Respawn Entertainment senior level designer Nicholas Cameron. “I don’t know whether to attribute this to a more puritanical attitude in our culture today or whether there is sex in it.”
And yes, go back and watch the cinematic teaser for 2019’s Baldur’s Gate 3. We’ve got the contorted flesh, the public massacres, and most importantly, the vomit. None of this is unprecedented for gaming or for Larian.
“And at that time people were saying this trailer was brutal…” reads a new comment on this teaser.
In its appeal to Valve over Horses, developer Santa Ragione said it had heavily edited a scene — which it suspected was a deciding factor in Steam’s liquidation — that once involved a young girl riding on the shoulders of a naked woman who had been reduced to the role of a “horse” in the power dynamic of the game’s twisted world. In the released game, the two women in that scene are clearly adults. I expect comparable outrage and pearl-clutching over Divinity holding public orgies next to public executions with a little girl standing just a few feet away.
I’m joking, of course; both games – rather both aesthetics, since Divinity is still just a trailer and a statue – are completely fine and it would be ridiculous to treat them as unacceptable or worthy of banning. But as Sawyer says, the extremes and timing of Divinity’s reveal highlight strange, undefined standards for acceptable grotesques, acceptable violence and an arbitrary moral compass that always seems to stop when the fashion train whistles loud enough.
Divinity is a “brand new game” that requires no experience with Larian Studios’ older RPGs – but you’ll be better off if you’ve played Original Sin and its sequel.
