Another year of The Game Awards is in the books with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 taking home the GOTY trophy, but we’re not going to pretend the three-plus hour marathon isn’t also totally about the world premieres. We’ve of course collected all of this year’s Game Awards winners, and every announcement as it happened, but let’s talk about the major trailers, shall we?
As usual, some of the biggest announcements leaked in the few days (or hours) before the show, but this year had several big announcements that we’re actually excited about—not just re-releases of remasters. We got the reveal of Larian’s next game, the Star Wars game we have been looking for, and a big new Total War announcement. Here are the biggest announcements you won’t want to have missed from The Game Awards 2025:
Larian is making a new Divinity game
We don’t know a dang thing more about it aside from the fact that the reveal trailer is even more messed up than the first body horror-filled cinematic trailer for Baldur’s Gate 3. Oh, and that big statue in the desert, appearing at the end of the trailer, is called the “hellstone.” Geoff Keighley described it as Larian’s biggest game ever, bigger even than BG3.
Last we heard from Larian Studios boss Swen Vincke, the team was “deep in the trenches” on its next game codenamed “Excalibur.” The only other thing we knew was the nope, it’s not Baldur’s Gate 4 and that the studio was invested in working on its own original IPs. We suspected that meant it would be returning to the Divinity series in some fashion, not moving on to entirely new, original settings, and now we know for sure. Now to just wait for an indeterminate amount of time to hear more about it.
A new KotOR game is really happening
KotOR 3 is real and it’s a “spiritual successor” by Arcanaut Studios called Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic. Former KotOR and Mass Effect leader Casey Hudson is returning to the helm for FotOR. Arcanaut says it’s “a single-player narrative-driven action RPG” where “every decision shapes your path towards light or darkness.”
While “spiritual successor” speaks to some kind of funny business with retcons, reboots, or what have you, that crashed ship in the trailer is unmistakably one of the Sith capitals from the Knights of the Old Republic games, implying that their events took place in this continuity, however long ago. It’s up in the air when in the Star Wars timeline this might take place: There’s basically thousands of years unaccounted for in between KotOR and The Old Republic MMO, then The Old Republic and the Star Wars movies.
Fate of the Old Republic is in “early development” at Arcanaut, a studio Hudson co-founded after leaving BioWare (again). One other interesting detail: Arcanaut describes this as an action RPG. I’d expect something like Mass Effect meets Jedi: Fallen Order, leaving feats, active pause, and D20 dice rolls firmly in the past.
Frictional Games’ next freaky narrative thing is Ontos
The studio that brought us the Amnesia games is working on a spiritual sequel to the horrifying underwater existentialism of Soma. This one’s called Ontos: “a sci-fi thriller taking you to the edge of existence,” and it’s coming in 2026 It’s also got Stellan Skarsgård in it because why not?
“What begins as a search for answers quickly spirals into something far stranger,” Frictional says in the reveal. “As you delve deeper, guided by fragments of your father’s past, you must confront disturbing revelations about the nature of reality- and your place in it.”
The reveal trailer’s got the top half of some guy’s head hooked up to wires, horrible exposed neck tendons, needles and knives—oh my! I’m just going to be tense the entire time waiting for the section where some terrible thing chases you down a hall.
Control 2 is called Control Resonant
It’s called Control, but that’s one of the few things Remedy’s followup has in common with the first game. This one is an action-RPG instead of a third-person shooter, is set in an open-world Manhattan instead of The Oldest House, and stars Dylan Faden rather than original protagonist Jesse.
It still looks plenty surreal though, with New York City going full Inception mode folded in on itself. “Unleash the extraordinary powers of Dylan Faden as he fights for his humanity and survival against a reality-bending cosmic threat,” Remedy says. Which it looks like he’ll be doing with a magical pair of metal fragments that become, among other things, a big old walloping hammer.
This one is also coming in 2026.
Total War is doing Warhammer 40,000
As if Dawn of War 4 isn’t enough, we’re also getting Total War: Warhammer 40,000. It’ll feature four factions: space marines, orks, Astra Militarum, and the space elf aeldari, though we sure can expect more to come as DLC post-launch. The scale seems massive, with the trailer showing orbital strikes, tanks, gigantic mechs, and huge numbers of enemies on screen, with a UI that seems substantially different to any other Total War game to keep track of them.
Not to discount the titanic amount of effort that went into Creative Assembly’s last three games with the Games Workshop license, but it feels like Total War: Warhammer was a proving ground for honing the craft of simulating otherworldly combat. It’s hard to imagine a better fit—nothing embodies “total war” like Warhammer 40K.
There’s no release date, but there is a Steam page for some more information.
