Divinity: Original Sin II
From a small arena prototype to our 2017 Game of the Year.
With Divinity: Original Sin, developer Larian Studios created its most successful game in its two-decade history, netting a plethora of accolades and comparisons to genre titans like Ultima VII. Not content, the studio rolled out an overhauled Enhanced Edition, all the while working on a fresh prototype. That would become Divinity: Original Sin II, Larian’s newest and biggest success story. That Original Sin II prototype started life as an arena mode, like the one that’s still in-game today, allowing designers to quickly create scenarios and fights to test systems.
“We were using it to prototype how combat would feel, what we were going to do with Action Points, what new elemental combinations we could come up with, and how we’d shape the roles and archetypes,” Nick Pechenin, Larian’s systems designer, tells me. And it was through that prototype that the team came up with new concepts, like the Source Points system that lets players build up to powerful moves.
With these first experiments, the arena mode became a laboratory. “We knew it had to be deep, with a lot of systems and a lot of combinations that we’ll probably never see. We had people teleporting, lava surfaces everywhere, and everyone going around killing civilians left and right.”
Once the Enhanced Edition was finished, work on Original Sin II began in earnest, and Larian quickly tripled in size. “Original Sin II was the first time where we had sufficient resources to do everything well, and even then we had to scramble,” recalls Swen Vincke, Larian’s founder. “We had some growing pains. We grew in one year from 40 people to 130, so that was quite a challenge to manage. We went from one studio in Belgium to four international studios working on the same game.”
A lot of the new members of the team hadn’t made a game before, including several writers. Vincke wanted to bring in screenwriters from outside Larian to help with dialogue, but they had to learn an entirely new way of doing things.
New blood
“There are always pros and cons, of course, and there’s the learning curve and making sure people understand what it is to write for a game instead of writing a screenplay,” says writing director Jan Van Dosselaer. “It’s a linear experience compared to a game like this, which is completely open. But I think when looking from one game to the next, the dialogue is a lot more conversational. It’s clear we tried to do something different.”
For both Vincke and Van Dosselaer, it was imperative that extra attention was given to the narrative and the dialogue, two things they’d already tried to improve in the Enhanced Edition. “One of the main critiques of Original Sin was the story could have been better and could
“the main thing we wanted to do was work on a better narrative”
have benefited from more gravitas,” Van Dosselaer remembers. “We took that to heart. So the main thing we wanted to do was work on a better, more epic narrative, give it more gravitas, and invest more time on characters and character development.” From that goal, the origin system was born.
The system lets players not only pick a character with a fleshed-out backstory, identity, and personal quest, they could choose to bring the other origin characters along as party members. This means it’s possible to experience up to four origins in one playthrough, from different perspectives. It proved to be Original Sin II’s big hook, and the thing that most clearly set it apart from its progenitor. It also proved to be a huge challenge for the writers.
“When we did our postmortem after releasing Original Sin II to learn the lessons about what we did wrong, what we could do better,” Vincke says, “one of the scripters asked us to never let origin moments interact with each other ever again. But that’s what people like the most!”
The origins and quests intersect, not only with the main quest, but the quests of your companions. You might need to talk to a character because it’s integral to the story, but your companion is adamant that they get to kill that person. The writers had to consider the world state, what quests might be underway, how killing one NPC will affect other quests—while trying to make sure actions would have consequences.
“The one thing I don’t want to do again is to write two of them,” Van Dosselaer laughs. “I wrote Red Prince and Sebille, and I love both characters, but near the end it got schizophrenic writing the two of them at a quick pace. I’d prefer to have just one baby to focus on. You have a lot of these conversations where characters reflect on things, and I brought these conversations together and just spent days writing all the observations of all the characters, working like a machine.”
Repeating success
While all of this was going on, Larian was also running a Kickstarter. After years of relying on publishers, and sometimes being burned by them, the studio had become independent, but it needed the community that had sprouted up around its games. With one successful campaign and a extremely well-received product under its belt, the second Kickstarter quickly smashed targets. The game was fully-funded in under 12 hours.
Even with that security, Larian didn’t slow down. On the last day of the Kickstarter, Vincke and other members of the team ran a 24-hour stream, which included PvP battles in the arena. And on the other side of the wall, everyone else was still working, getting things ready for the inevitable events and preview demos.
Pechenin recalls the first PAX showing. “We were just showing the