Why Swimming Could Transform Larian’s Next Divinity RPG

Larian Studios has built a reputation on reactive, systems-driven RPGs where almost everything in the environment can be poked, moved, burned, frozen, or exploded. Yet one element has always stayed strangely off-limits in both the Divinity series and Baldur’s Gate 3: fully-featured swimming. Recent teases around the studio’s upcoming Divinity game have sparked fan speculation that this longstanding omission might finally be addressed.

This article explores why a seemingly simple addition like swimming is such a big deal in a modern role-playing game, what it could mean for the next Divinity title, and why it matters to fans who loved Baldur’s Gate 3 but still notice that missing blue frontier.

The Long Road From Isometric RPGs to Immersive Worlds

To understand why swimming has become such a hot topic, it helps to look at how Larian’s design philosophy has evolved. The studio’s games have moved from relatively contained isometric experiences toward increasingly cinematic, reactive worlds.

• Early Divinity titles focused on classic action-RPG combat and questing with limited environmental simulation.
• Divinity: Original Sin and Original Sin 2 greatly expanded interactivity, turning elemental surfaces, elevation, and physics-based tinkering into core gameplay pillars.
• Baldur’s Gate 3 adapted Dungeons & Dragons 5E rules into a lavish, fully voiced campaign with deep systemic combat, verticality, and a cinematic presentation.

Across this evolution, one pattern stands out: each new project attempts to erase a few more boundaries between player intent and what the engine can realistically support. Environmental effects, thrown objects, destructible surfaces, and clever use of elevation all help the world feel tangible. Water, however, has mostly remained a visual barrier or a hazard, not a space you can inhabit.

Water as a Wall: How Larian Currently Uses the Environment

In both Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3, bodies of water are everywhere: harbors, rivers, lakes, underground pools, and endless stretches of ocean. Yet players typically interact with them only in limited ways.

Common water-related interactions in current Larian games include:

• Surface manipulation: Freezing, electrifying, or boiling water to create battlefield hazards.
• Environmental storytelling: Shipwrecks, river crossings, and coastal vistas that set the tone but can’t be fully explored.
• Boundary enforcement: Oceans and deep rivers that act as natural walls, signaling the edge of playable space.

This approach has clear advantages. It keeps navigation straightforward and allows designers to tightly control encounter spaces. But it also means huge portions of the visual world are essentially impermeable, especially noticeable in highly reactive games where nearly everything else feels fair game.

Why Fans Zeroed In on Swimming

When Larian leadership recently teased a “series-first” feature for the next Divinity RPG and noted that it was also missing in Baldur’s Gate 3, fans quickly pointed toward swimming as the likely candidate. This isn’t random guessing; it reflects years of accumulated player expectations.

Modern RPG players are increasingly accustomed to water as a playable space. Titles like The Witcher 3, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, and Subnautica let you dive into oceans, explore wrecks, or fight underwater creatures. While Larian’s games are built on different design foundations, the visual prominence of seas, rivers, and ports makes their inaccessibility more noticeable than ever.

From a player’s perspective, swimming ticks several boxes:

• It’s a feature obviously absent the moment you notice it.
• It fits the studio’s focus on environmental systems.
• It opens up new types of exploration and combat challenges.

Whether or not swimming is the teased feature, the speculation highlights a broader conversation about how Larian might push immersion and world design in its next major project.

What Swimming Could Change in a Divinity RPG

Adding swimming isn’t just about letting characters wade into deeper water. In a Larian-style RPG, any new traversable space will likely ripple across almost every aspect of design: exploration, combat, stealth, traversal puzzles, and even story pacing.

1. Exploration Becomes Truly Three-Dimensional

Larian already leans heavily on verticality—cliffs, bridges, towers, and multi-level dungeons. Making water a fully navigable layer would expand that into a truly three-dimensional world.

Such changes would likely encourage:

• Layered zone design with surface routes, cliff paths, and underwater shortcuts.
• New types of secrets that reward careful observation of shorelines and coastal structures.
• More organic worldbuilding around ports, fishing communities, and maritime trade.

2. Combat and Systems: New Opportunities and Risks

Combat is where any new system has to integrate cleanly with Larian’s existing design pillars. Turn-based fights that span multiple elevations, surfaces, and environmental hazards are already complex; adding water introduces new layers of tactical decision-making.

Potential underwater combat considerations include:

• Movement constraints: Reduced mobility, altered jump distances, and slower repositioning.
• Weapon behavior: Heavy weapons swinging slower; projectiles losing effectiveness underwater.
• Magic and elements: Enhanced lightning damage in water, but reduced fire effectiveness.

These ideas aren’t unique to fantasy RPGs. Underwater combat in games like World of Warcraft eventually proved divisive because movement constraints could overshadow the fun of creative builds. Larian would likely need to design underwater encounters sparingly and intentionally, emphasizing novelty and distinct tactical puzzles rather than simply mirroring standard fights in a slower environment.

3. Stealth and Alternative Approaches

Swimming can also enable alternative solutions to quests and encounters. For a studio known for encouraging creative problem-solving, that might be the most compelling reason to implement it at all.

Imagine, for example:

• Bypassing a fortified gate by diving into a sewer outlet beneath the walls.
• Smuggling contraband into a city via underwater entrances to a warehouse.
• Using water to avoid patrols or reach otherwise inaccessible vantage points.

In turn-based games where navigation and positioning already matter, these kinds of options reinforce role-playing and build diversity. A rogue with aquatic skills becomes valuable in different ways than a purely land-focused warrior, and parties might tailor their composition for specific missions or regions.

Design Challenges: Why Swimming Takes More Than a Toggle

Experienced players often ask why studios “don’t just add” swimming, flying, or climbing systems. From a development standpoint, these features require rethinking large chunks of the game’s architecture.

World and Level Design Overhaul

Once water is fully explorable, every riverbank, coastline, and harbor becomes potential content. Designers must answer questions like:

• Should this lake have a bottom the player can reach, or is it a deep ocean trench?
• What stops players from swimming around a story-critical gate or blockade?
• How do we visually communicate safe vs. dangerous waters?

Solving these issues often involves a mix of lore (dangerous currents, magical barriers, territorial monsters) and practical design, ensuring that swimming feels expansive without trivializing carefully constructed challenges.

Technical and Animation Complexity

Underwater movement also demands substantial technical work. Characters need new animations, camera behaviors, and collision systems. In a party-based game, that multiplies quickly: every companion, summon, mount, and enemy type must behave coherently in and around water.

Studios working with complex physics or simulation-heavy engines sometimes treat water as a separate “mode” or mini-biome precisely because integrating it deeply into the entire world is so resource-intensive. For Larian, which already simulates surfaces, verticality, and numerous elemental interactions, the bar for consistency is higher than in many more scripted RPGs.

Why Baldur’s Gate 3 Fans Care About Swimming

Baldur’s Gate 3 set an unusually high standard for reactivity and player freedom in mainstream RPGs. Players can shove enemies off ledges, stack crates to create makeshift ladders, turn barrels into portable bombs, and use spell combinations to bypass encounters in ways the designers clearly anticipated but didn’t prescribe.

Against this backdrop, the inability to swim stands out more starkly. When almost everything else “just works,” hard boundaries like impassable waist-high water feel less like genre convention and more like a gap in the fantasy of freedom. That doesn’t mean Baldur’s Gate 3 is incomplete, but it does explain why a hinted “missing feature” pushes fan speculation straight into the ocean.

In practical terms, many players don’t want underwater content to dominate the next game. Instead, they want the world to acknowledge water as a logical extension of the studio’s systemic design philosophy—used sparingly, but used meaningfully.

How Swimming Could Support Storytelling and Atmosphere

Beyond mechanics, making water explorable can significantly enhance storytelling and mood. Larian tends to ground its fantasy narratives in concrete details: decaying fortresses, beleaguered villages, and morally ambiguous factions. Seas, rivers, and lakes are natural story engines in such worlds.

Potential narrative benefits include:

• Maritime cultures with depth: Ports, smugglers, navies, and fishing communities whose livelihoods and conflicts play out above and below the waves.
• Environmental storytelling: Sunken battlefields, drowned temples, or flooded ruins that preserve the past quite literally beneath the surface.
• Tonal variety: Quiet, eerie dives between louder, land-based adventures, offering pacing relief and visual contrast.

Submerged spaces can function almost like dream sequences in a traditional fantasy story—liminal zones where normal rules are bent, and the past is preserved in unexpected ways. Used thoughtfully, swimming could become a narrative tool rather than just another traversal mechanic.

Balancing Accessibility and Depth

If Larian does introduce full swimming, it will need to balance mechanical depth with accessibility. Underwater segments that are too complex or frequent can quickly become a chore, especially in a long-form RPG where players spend dozens of hours mastering land-based combat.

Some principles that could guide a satisfying implementation include:

• Optional complexity: Make the most intricate underwater areas optional side content for players who enjoy exploration.
• Short, impactful segments: Use swimming for memorable set pieces and key secrets rather than repetitive traversal.
• Clear communication: Signal depth, danger, and potential rewards visually so players feel in control of their risk.

Done right, swimming becomes one more lever players can pull when crafting their own approach to the world. Done poorly, it risks becoming the kind of feature people endure for loot rather than genuinely enjoy.

What This Means for the Future of Divinity and Larian

Whether or not swimming is the exact feature Larian has teased, the ongoing discussion reveals a lot about expectations around the studio’s next big project. Fans aren’t simply asking for more content or bigger maps; they’re asking for deeper integration between world, systems, and storytelling.

For the next Divinity game, key takeaways from this speculation include:

• Players see water as the most glaringly unclaimed space in Larian’s design toolkit.
• Any new traversal or environment system needs to respect the studio’s systemic, reactive design ethos.
• Features like swimming are not just checkboxes; they’re opportunities to reinforce the feeling of a coherent, living world.

If Larian decides to fully embrace aquatic exploration, it could mark a significant step in its ongoing effort to reduce the gap between what players imagine and what the engine allows. And even if the teased feature turns out to be something entirely different, the conversation around swimming underscores how thoroughly the studio has trained its audience to expect ambitious, interconnected systems—not just prettier graphics or bigger maps.

FAQs: Swimming and Larian’s Next Divinity RPG

Is swimming officially confirmed for the next Divinity game?

No. As of the latest public information, Larian has only hinted at a major new feature that hasn’t appeared in previous Divinity titles or in Baldur’s Gate 3. Fans have speculated that this feature could be swimming, but the studio has not formally confirmed it.

Why didn’t Baldur’s Gate 3 include swimming if it’s so important?

Developers often prioritize features that best support their core design goals within limited time and resources. Baldur’s Gate 3 focused on delivering a rich, choice-driven narrative and deeply tactical combat that already stretch the engine and production pipeline. Comprehensive swimming systems can be technically and design-wise expensive, so they may have been ruled out to keep scope manageable.

Would underwater combat become mandatory if swimming is added?

Not necessarily. Many RPGs that support swimming use underwater sections sparingly or keep combat above the surface. Larian could choose to focus on exploration, stealth, and puzzle-solving underwater while reserving most combat for land or shallow water zones that support existing systems more cleanly.

How might swimming affect performance or hardware requirements?

Fully simulated water, complex shaders, and additional animations can add to performance costs. However, modern engines and hardware are increasingly capable of handling such features, especially when developers design water-heavy areas with optimization in mind. Larian would likely test aquatic environments extensively to ensure they run well across target platforms.

Could swimming be implemented in a future Baldur’s Gate 3 update?

That’s unlikely. Large new systems that require reworking level layouts, encounters, and AI are typically reserved for new projects rather than patched into completed games. If Larian introduces robust swimming, it will almost certainly be in the context of a new game built with that mechanic in mind from the start.