Studio Profile
How RPG maker Larian Studios took on a challenging 20-year quest to find its independence
Larian Studios works a 16-hour day. Not, you should understand, because it’s in a state of constant and debilitating crunch. Larian’s lights are on for two-thirds of the day because it’s spread across time zones, beginning in Saint Petersburg in Russia, continuing as Ghent in Belgium wakes up and then Dublin. Finally, as its eastern wing begins to wind down, the Quebec City studio opens. Aside from its smaller Dublin office, which focuses on writing and business, each of Larian’s four studios sports a similar headcount and the same balance of programmers, designers and artists. They all contribute equally, a setup which allowed Larian’s 150 staff to make an RPG as deep and intricate as Divinity: Original Sin II in just two years.
Larian cuts a distinctive figure in the RPG world. Entirely independent, it was founded by Swen Vincke in 1996 with the very same ambition that it has today. “We basically want to make worlds and tell cool stories in them, where you can be a hero and you also play with other players,” Vincke tells us. It was an idea that sparked when he was growing up in a small town on the coast of Belgium. He didn’t have a computer and no one around him was playing pen-and-paper RPGs, but whenever he visited a large city and saw people playing them he was fascinated. When he finally laid his hands on his own computer, he leapt straight into classic RPG series like Ultima. “But there was always this thing missing: you were alone in these stories. Then MMOs came, and they were cool because you were walking around with other players, but they were pretty bland. There was no story being told.”
Vincke wanted to translate the freedom of the pen-and-paper RPG with the openness of online 3D worlds, so that every player progresses through an interesting story and their actions have an impact on the storylines each of their companions are playing. Larian’s first project, The Lady, The Mage And The Knight, was a reflection of this idea, with three playable characters who could act independently in the world. But Vincke couldn’t find a publisher who’d support it, and so began Larian’s long and rather tumultuous first phase. Its debut game, released in 1998, was not an RPG, but an RTS called LED Wars. It wasn’t until 2002 that it released Divine
Divinity, an action-RPG which established the world of Rivellon. Three months later, Vincke had to lay off almost all his staff because, though Divine Divinity sold well, it didn’t perform well enough to earn the studio any royalties. The next few years saw Larian rebuilding itself, releasing a sequel in 2004, but its real business was coming from a series of educational games based on an online gaming platform called KetnetKick, including one for the BBC called Adventure Rock.
Released in 2009, Divinity II: Ego Draconis was meant to pull the studio out of the work-forhire cycle and back towards its founding principles. Backed by money in the bank, a licence to use Bethesda’s Gamebryo engine, a populist vision of free-roaming hack-and-slash action, and a plan to also release on Xbox 360, it could have done just that. But as delays kicked in, publisher CDV Software – for the second time in its relationship with Larian – forced the studio to release the game before it was finished. CDV went bankrupt the following year, pulling Larian along with its misfortunes. A re-release of Divinity II followed thanks to a new publisher, but it was clear to Vincke that the old model was no longer fit for purpose.
“There was a huge switch at Larian in 2010,” he tells us. “We had this entire history with publisher relationships not working out and we said, ‘OK, we’re going to follow our own path, and publish ourselves’.” The studio successfully approached venture capitalists to raise capital for two games: an RTS called Divinity: Dragon Commander, and Divinity: Original Sin. Dragon Commander, released in 2013, is a genretwisting curio, featuring a Risk-style strategy game that puts the player into RTS battles in which they can take an active role by flying on the back of a dragon. It was reasonably well-received, but it wasn’t until Original Sin, a richly detailed, storydriven, top-down RPG with turn-based battles and multiplayer, that Larian really found its own feet.
Original Sin sat in the genre where the studio started out, but it also introduced Larian to new things, specifically crowdfunding. “Kickstarter was important. We had the money from venture capitalists, but we burned through it, and we were heading in the direction we were typically heading into, which was to release before we were ready,” says Vincke. The game was successfully funded in April 2013 for $945,000, more than double its original target. “Kickstarter allowed us to continue developing past the point we ordinarily would have shipped, and it made all the difference, I think. We are a company that iterates a tremendous amount of times. We need to feel and play what we’re making to figure out what it should be, and that takes time.”
Original Sin still shipped with many bugs, but it had a level of polish that far exceeded Larian’s previous Divinity games, and Vincke says that players tended to accept the odd glitch as part of a large and dynamic RPG which allowed them considerable freedom in how to take on its challenges: “These kinds of games will always have a lot of bugs because they’re so hard to test.” That crowdfunding success, which not only provided money but also began to forge a direct relationship between Larian and its players, naturally led to a return to Kickstarter for the game’s sequel. Original Sin II was successfully funded in September 2015 for just over $2 million, a mark of the waves the first game had made for the studio.
“We’ve been lucky twice on Kickstarter, but you don’t know [if you will be] up front,” says Vincke. “We were super nervous when we
“WE NEED TO FEEL AND PLAY WHAT WE’RE MAKING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT IT SHOULD BE, AND THAT TAKES TIME”
launched our Kickstarters, and while you’re doing it you’re on one big adrenalin rush. With the second one we were better prepared than for the first, but we were still surprised by how fast it went. We weren’t ready; we were at PAX and thought we’d have time to pack up and travel back to the office before we had to start talking about stretch goals, but it happened when we were there. We should have been ready!”
Yet Vincke values the impulsive nature of the Kickstarter experience – the crazy promises made in the heat of the moment. “It forced us into a number of stretch goals for Original Sin II that otherwise we would probably have dropped,” he confesses. It’s a common understanding that stretch goals are a dangerous proposition for a developer, raising backer expectations and adding to pressure on a studio before it’s even overcome the challenge of completing the base game: “In the end the stretch goals were part of the critical acclaim and success that Original
Sin II had.” They added a great deal of extra work, but being able to play as an undead character opened up many new strange and wonderful narrative situations, and giving characters the ability to shapeshift added even more strategic options for play. Game Master Mode, in which GMs can conduct pen-andpaper D&D-style adventures, might only be used by a minority of players, as Vincke is happy to admit – but it also attracted further attention for the game and ended up forming the basis for a set of tools that allow the studio to better prototype and test scenarios and stories.
Along with the independence it’s forged since 2010 in breaking ties with publishers, Larian has also gained technical independence in steadily building up its own tools. Having previously licensed Gamebryo, it was dependent on thirdparty companies, and as Vincke says, “Gamebryo’s roadmap did not at all match what we needed to make our RPGs.” So in 2010 the studio began to make its own engine, which has been in continuous development ever since, the team expanding on it and replacing elements as it’s gone along. “It’s the thing that allows us to make the type of RPGs we want to.”
The main new feature is Larian’s special difference: multiplayer. Original Sin II built on the previous game’s ability to allow two players to independently roam the world by upping the party to four players and allowing any member to get into fights and conversations, and to make choices and affect storylines for everyone. Its features are also available for lone players, who can freely split their party up and switch between characters. Multiplayer imposes a multifaceted challenge. There’s a technical one in streaming the world so the view can instantly flick from some subterranean cavern to the peak of a mountain and also support split-screen modes. The game has to be balanced so that any combination of players can stumble into a fight and still find the right level of challenge and fun. And the narrative design has to allow the game’s consequence-deep stories to encompass the fact that there’s no lead hero, and adapt to the way that storylines can be approached from any direction, in any order, by any character. And all without compromising on freewheeling interactivity and systems-driven emergence. If you’ve the impression that Larian’s worlds are piecemeal and patchwork, the result of responding to crises and opportunities as it’s gone along, you’d be right. Divinity’s setting, Rivellon, is not the fully imagined fantasy setting that backs games like Dragon Age or Elder Scrolls. It was originally founded in three days of hurriedly giving Divine Divinity a plot to follow because it needed one. “The story was not really the concern at that point, it was really like, ‘How can we make it fun?’ It was only later that we started realising the importance of the narrative on top of all the systems, and then even later that we realised that the narrative had to interlock with the systems.” Indeed, the long-lived Divinity name is only product of Larian’s constant need to sell a familiar brand to publishers, venture capitalists and crowdfunders.
“With Original Sin we said, ‘We should start taking this universe seriously and fix things so we’re not just inventing it on the fly. From now it’s like that.’ Canon and lore are the least interesting things about fantasy worlds. What happens to the character is the most important bit. You have to have fun in a game, and lore and worldbuilding set the canvas for that, but part of the fun of RPGs is about interesting things happening for interesting reasons, and interesting choices with interesting consequences.” It’s surely no coincidence that just as Larian has finally begun to deliver on that idea, it’s also finally found its own stride across business, design, technology and production systems. In every sense, Larian is at last the author of its own story.
“IN THE END THE STRETCH GOALS WERE PART OF THE CRITICAL ACCLAIM AND SUCCESS THAT ORIGINAL SIN II HAD”