The Making Of: Divine Divinity
Swen Vincke revisits the RPG that helped define Larian Studios
In 2014, Divinity: Original Sin hit the games industry like a radiant warhammer summoned out of the ether. Original Sin and its sequel have been hailed as two of the best RPGS of recent years, even all time, yet they come off the back of a long series of frustrated ambitions, great storytelling and some ill-conceived alliteration. That series started back in 2002 with Divine Divinity.
Technically, the series’ roots go back even further, to a game that Larian Studios’ founder Swen Vincke suggests may have had an “even worse title” than Divine Divinity. In 1996, Swen and four of his friends began work on a game in the spirit of the great Ultima VII; a dynamic open-world RPG with unbound possibilities, rich character development, and a wicked sense of humour.
The game was called Ragnarok Unless… (yes, the ellipsis is part of the title).
Ragnarok was extremely ambitious for a first game, with two playable protagonists whose storylines would converge into one, co-operative multiplayer, and many of the traits we’d eventually see in Original Sin nearly 20 years later.
Larian Studios was not officially an entity at this point, but when Swen managed to get Atari interested in publishing Ragnarok, he had to give off the image of a studio that knew what it was doing. “We were just a bunch of guys hammering around at Intel 486s in an apartment,” Swen recalls. “We had the idea that if we presented ourselves as a studio we’d get a big cheque for it.”
Atari was impressed by the pitch from the three guys posing as ‘Larian Studios’, and offered them $50,000, which by this point took on the more rhythmical title of The Lady, the Mage And The Knight (LMK). But Larian’s tenuous foothold in the games industry didn’t last long. Atari’s president Sam Tramiel suffered a heart attack, causing his father Jack to step in and sell the company in 1996. Atari Corporation subsequently left the games industry, and with that went the publishing deal.
Larian spent the best part of a year looking for someone to publish LMK, and was eventually picked up in 1997 by German publisher Attic Entertainment. Atari it certainly was not, but at least the lower status of this “B-publisher”, as Swen puts it, meant that Larian didn’t have to cover its work-from-home setup. “I remember buying a table for the apartment to receive the publishers for LMK because we didn’t have a meeting table before that,” Swen remembers.
Finally Larian could get to work with some kind of consistency. LMK was an 8-bit game at this point, which opened it up to people with older machines. “Not everyone had a Voodoo graphics card at this time,” Swen points out.
But every now and then, the games industry gets shaken up by a seminal title that raises the bar, and alters audience expectations of a given genre. Attic Entertainment took a work-in-progress version of LMK to E3 in 1998 with the intention of wooing the public with it, but came back from the show intimidated by something else they saw.
“They came back and said ‘Diablo II’S going to change everything,” Swen remembers. “It was big, it was 16-bit, and we were 256-colour. Attic said they could fund an increase in the size of production if we changed the storyline to fit into the Dark Eye universe – very popular in Germany at the time. Of course we said yes”.
Larian’s team grew from five people to 30. But Attic made this investment with the assumption that its other projects would go according to plan, which they didn’t. Seeing that his employees weren’t getting paid and that the situation wasn’t likely to change, Swen made the tough decision to cancel the publishing deal with Attic in 1998.
LMK was gone, and Larian was back to square one. The studio began doing work-for-hire. There were some strange projects during this time, including a government-made game that involved a giant virtual head greeting the Prince of Belgium when he entered a technology exhibition. “It had a facial capture system that I was actually pretty proud of,” Swen recalls.
More importantly, these projects gave Larian the funds to start working on its first Divinity game – then known as Divinity: Sword Of Lies.
It was a different beast from LMK, pared back in its ambitions and built on a reworked version of the same engine. It was more explicit in its Diablo influences – particularly in the way of combat and a murky aesthetic that evoked a crumbling, forlorn world. This decision was more of a survival necessity than an act of deference to the hack-andslash juggernaut. Swen wryly remarks, “If you wanted to sell an RPG and get money to make it in 1999, and it didn’t have the word ‘Diablo’ in the pitch, you were dead”.