Larian recently streamed Divinity: Original Sin 2, the studio's last RPG in the Divinity series before it made Baldur's Gate 3. During the stream, communications developer Aoife Wilson brought up the topic of hints in D:OS2 about what Larian was working on next.
"Originally the reference to BG3 was very explicit," Larian CEO Swen Vincke explained while plotting out his next move in the famously flammable oil fields of the Blackpits area. "We did it very last-minute because we actually, in the summer when D:OS2 shipped, we wrote the first draft of BG3 because we had a contract with Wizards of the Coast and we needed to do it then. It was very bad."
The hints ended up quite opaque. In the epilogue of D:OS2, your party member Fane can mention that octopuses are secretly plotting, and the necromancer Tarquin talks about "a mysterious race from another world—beings that feed on minds." Both are references to mind flayers, but not ones you'd notice unless you were looking for them. In retrospect, the jars of mind maggots scattered around D:OS2 also seem like nods to the tadpoles of BG3.
Tarquin the necromancer also brings up "Gustavchen", the written language of the beings from another world. In development, BG3 was called Project Gustav after the name of Vincke's dog, which is why the default name for the player-character is "Tav".
The references go both ways. In BG3, there are a couple of nods to Tarquin's worldhopping adventure. A letter from the cleric Lenore De Hurst to the wizard Lorroakan discusses a man named "something with a T and Q... Tuqueen?" who uses strange magic, and a note in the House of Grief also describes him, going by the name "Marco Creenn", which is an anagram of necromancer. After that the trail goes dry, and perhaps he returned home to Rivellon. We'll see if he shows up in Divinity.
