This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 316. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. 

Larian Studios is, for now, the Divinity: Original Sin studio. Its last two games, both Kickstarted and publisher-free, are the biggest successes the studio has ever seen. The Belgian developer didn’t go from obscurity to success, however, and it has been designing notable RPGs and strategy games, within and without the Divinity universe, for over two decades. 

Founder Swen Vincke picks 1997 as the year when Larian started, and an RTS called LED Wars as the studio’s first game, though there had been some experiments and projects before that. Indeed, one of them, The Lady, the Mage and the Knight, had many of the hallmarks of today’s Original Sin series, 20 years before it made its debut. 

“It was an RPG where you controlled three characters and could play in multiplayer,” Vincke explains. “It had all of the values of Ultima VII, which you can recognise today in Original Sin. But we were having a hard time signing it with a publisher, so we decided to make an RTS because everyone was making them and everyone was looking for them. It seemed to be an easy way to make some money.” 

The RPG did get some interest from Atari, though, but soon after expressing that interest, it stepped away from PC games, leaving Larian without a publisher or any money. “It’s a running theme in our history,” jokes Vincke.

Double the bits

During the day, Vincke and some of his friends worked on The Lady, the Mage and the Knight, and during the evening they worked on LED Wars. It paid off, and in March of 1997 Larian convinced an American publisher, Ionos, to sign LED Wars. In that same week, they also signed their RPG to Attic Entertainment, publisher of the Realms of Arkania games. Unlike LED Wars, however, The Lady, the Mage and the Knight never launched. 

While Larian was working on The Lady, the Mage and the Knight, Attic Entertainment took notice of Blizzard’s Diablo II, which had been doing the rounds at trade shows. The publisher was panicking because Diablo II was a 16-bit game, while Larian’s RPG was 8-bit. That needed to change, Vincke was told. 

“We had to throw out everything we had because it was all 8-bit,” Vincke remembers. “They said it wouldn’t be a problem and lent us their artists. Then they came back and told us that we were going to need to make it bigger because it was going to be part of the Realms of Arkania series. They said we’d get a licence and we’d have to convert our story into one that worked for The Dark Eye. So I said, ‘Sure.’” 

It turned out that Attic didn’t have the money to fund the increasingly ambitious game they’d requested. In 1999, Larian was left in dire straits, penniless again.

Vincke found himself responsible for a team of 30 people, including some of the publisher’s employees who had been sent over but who were no longer being paid or being sent back. He ended the contract. That year Larian must have made 20 work-for-hire games, Vincke guesses. These were small things like casino games, and he was just trying to keep the lights on. “It was that or bankruptcy,” he says. 

Larian got through it, though, and from the ashes of The Lady, the Mage and the Knight came the first Divinity. At the end of 1999, it was sold to CDV Software, a publisher that had just released the World War 2 RTS Sudden Strike. 

“Because Sudden Strike was such a success, the CEO of CDV Software decided that every other game needed to be an alliteration,” Vincke recalls. “That was how it ended up becoming Divine Divinity instead of Divinity. Originally it was going to be called Divinity: The Sword of Lies, which, granted, isn’t the best title in the world either, but it was better than Divine Divinity. It won awards for having such a bad title. We talk about Divinity ‘one’; we never call it Divine Divinity.” 

Squashing bugs

Over the next couple of years, Larian laboured on Divinity. The multiplayer component that had been so important to The Lady, the Mage and the Knight was dropped because it was seen as too big a risk by the publisher. It was the largest project Larian had ever undertaken, so there was a lot of on-the-job learning. It launched in August, 2002. 

“It was a classic Larian problem: the game wasn’t ready when it was released,” Vincke admits. “We didn’t even know that the publisher was releasing it. I discovered that Divinity was being released when I was doing a press tour for it in the US. We were horribly late with it, at least by a year, but we still needed some time to polish it. So it shipped with 7,000 known bugs, and the initial reviews obviously focused on them. But as we started tweaking it, people started seeing that it was a good game.” 

Divinity reviewed well, and it sold well, and Larian got nothing. “We were so excited about signing back in 1999 that we didn’t really pay attention to the fact that we should earn money when a game is sold, so we didn’t earn anything from Divinity. It was a standard contract back in the day, but if you didn’t sell millions of your game under the royalties model it was very hard to earn any money out of it.” Larian had just released a critically and commercially successful game and they were broke. Again. The studio went from 30 people to three by 2003, five months after Divinity launched. It was a dark time, Vincke confesses, and one that pushed him to take a fortnight break in South Africa, where his father lived.

“I sat on the ranch and just stared for two weeks, trying to figure out what to do. When I came back, I convinced the bank to give me a little bit of money, and I convinced a Belgian broadcaster to give me some more. It was to make what they thought was going to be a website, but it turned into a big 3D game in which children were able to make creations. It was like an American Idol for kids, and it was called KetnetKick. Kids could make animations, movies and cartoons in this 3D world and send it to the broadcaster. The broadcaster would then use it in a TV show and would say which kid made it, and the kid would become famous in the 3D world.” 

The additional funding allowed Larian to make a follow-up to Divinity, called Beyond Divinity, and release KetnetKick in 2004. The team grew to about 25 people, and Larian’s head was above water again, albeit only for as long as it could keep doing work-for-hire projects. By 2007, however, it finally had enough money in the bank to make a proper Divinity sequel, eventually called Divinity II: Ego Draconis.

Larian licensed The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s Gamebryo engine. Once a prototype was up and running, Divinity II was shown off and DTP Entertainment came on board as a co-publisher, along with CDV. Even with that deal, Larian kept doing work-for-hire. That’s where most of the money was coming from. And it was winning the studio awards for children’s games and educational titles. It wasn’t what Vincke or his team wanted to do, though. 

“We ended up with a sufficient budget to make what we hoped was going to be a triple-A action-RPG where you could turn into a dragon and do all kinds of great stuff. It was also going to come out on Xbox 360 as well as PC. Our ambitions were high, but our resources were limited. We tried to reach for the sky, but at some point the publisher decided the game had to be released, and once again it was released before it was ready. It was really painful, but this was during the financial crisis of 2009, and a lot of publishers were under pressure. They got into financial difficulties and went bankrupt eventually. And we were dragged into that.” 

It was meant to crack open the console market and show what Larian was made of, but after Divinity II launched, Larian was still only just getting by. In 2010, Vincke managed to get the rights to make a new version of Divinity II, called the Dragon Knight Saga. This updated version was sold to Focus, which Vincke remembers as the first publisher to ever treat Larian well. But they didn’t just want a publisher they could work with.

“I was always dealing with mid-sized publishers. The others didn’t want to have anything to do with us. They said we had no future. Literally. So our intention was to become independent, publishing ourselves. We’d had it. We’d been doing it for over ten years, just scraping by. Something had to change, and that was self-publishing.” 

Vincke managed to attract two venture capitalists, one for a game called Dragon Commander, an unusual action-RTS where you could take control of a huge, jet pack-wearing dragon and rain down hell on enemy armies and bases, and another for Divinity: Original Sin. With that money, the results of the work-for-hire projects and the profits from the Dragon Knight Saga, Larian had enough resources to start developing both of the games on its own engine. It was important to Vincke that Larian be able to control its own fate, and that went beyond just untethering itself from the publisher model. 

“Those were the big lessons from that decade of being stuck in that work for hire cycle, continuously scraping to get by,” says Vincke.

Dragons first

While Dragon Commander and Divinity: Original Sin started out being developed simultaneously, eventually Larian shifted its focus to Dragon Commander. It was the game it wanted to release first, though Vincke admits that if it had released second it would have been a better title. But Original Sin was going to be the game Larian poured everything into, including the earnings from Dragon Commander. The plan had an air of finality about it. 

“This was the project where I decided that this was going to be it,” he says. “If this didn’t work out, we clearly didn’t know what we were doing.” Vincke was tired. For well over a decade, Larian had been trying, essentially, to make this game. A multiplayer RPG inspired by Ultima. With The Lady, the Mage and the Knight, and then Divinity, it was close, but cancellations and dropped features meant that Vincke had never quite been able to realise his dream. 

“My first Ultima was Ultima VI, and when I played it for the first time I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ I hadn’t ever played a game like that. I was an Amiga player and I’d just acquired a PC, and it was just so incredibly good. Ultima VI was the gargoyle menace and the Prophet and glass swords, which became something I wanted to put in every single game we did. And then Ultima VII and Ultima Underworld came out and I was like, ‘Who are these geniuses?’ Origin Systems quickly became my favourite studio.”

With this final shot at making the game that had been looming over him for so many years, Vincke did everything he could to make it happen. Even with the investments and the Kickstarter, things were tight, and as the launch date was hurtling towards him, he even stopped paying VAT, just to try to keep development going for an extra month. The bank decided not to extend its loan, prompting Vincke to once again search for help until he found, as he puts it, “the one banker in the entire country that was willing to give me money”. This was two months before the game was finished. 

But the risks and the desperate attempts to keep development afloat paid off. Divinity: Original Sin became Larian’s fastest-selling game and within a few months it had sold 500,000 copies. “It wasn’t perfect, but it had a lot of heart and soul, and I think people recognised this. We were lucky. It could have not paid off. All it would have taken would have been a big save game bug or a few bad reviews!” 

Original Sin represented a breakthrough for Larian. Most of its games had sold well, usually over a million copies, but Vincke now realises that it was a success that was never capitalised on. “We never got access to the profits because we were always in such a weak negotiating position. We were begging for money, essentially. We were the beggars of Belgium. It was really tough financing game development, so once we managed to get that break with the Dragon Knight Saga and then Dragon Commander and Original Sin, it made a big difference.”

Achieving divinity

Since Divinity: Original Sin’s launch, Larian’s thrived rather than just survived. Original Sin was quickly followed up by the Enhanced Edition, which saw the game released on consoles with controller support, along with a richer endgame, a more fleshed-out narrative and tweaked combat for all platforms. And just last year, Larian released Divinity: Original Sin II, expanding on just about everything established in the first game.

“It was a big leap from the first Original Sin. That was made by 35 or 40 people, and Original Sin II was made by 130. The production values went up tremendously as well. But it all came from being in charge of our own destiny, and not being at the whims of a development director who doesn’t understand what we’re doing, or a producer somewhere. 

“We made a lot of mistakes, so I’m not going to blame these people who were trying to protect their investments. Larian is a company where iteration is very important, so we have to be able to try things multiple times before we feel how it’s going to be good, and then we’ve got to finish and polish it. That was always a big problem.” 

Even a power outage during the day of launch didn’t seem to faze the studio, and Original Sin II has gone on to be its most popular title yet. It’s safe to say that Larian has well and truly hit its stride.

This feature was originally published in issue 316 of PC Gamer UK and issue 304 of PC Gamer US. Get our lovely-looking magazine delivered to your door every month and save a bunch of money on the cover price. 

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 V2. Not content, the studio rolled out an overhauled Enhanced Edition, all the while working on a fresh prototype. That would become Divinity: Original Sin 2, Larian's newest and biggest success story. 

That Original Sin 2 prototype started life as an arena mode, like the one that's still in-game today, allowing the designers to quickly create scenarios and fights to test new and returning 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 2 began in earnest, and Larian quickly tripled in size. "Original Sin 2 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 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 2'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 2 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 personal quests of your companions, too. You might need to talk to a character because it's integral to the main story but your companion is adamant that they get to kill that person. The writers had to consider the world state, what quests might already be underway, how killing one NPC will affect other quests—all the while trying to make sure that 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 especially near the end it got schizophrenic writing the two of them at a very quick pace. I’d prefer to have just one baby to focus on. You have a lot of these conversations where the characters reflect on things, and I brought all of 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 an extremely well-received product under its belt, the second Kickstarter quickly smashed targets. The game was fully-funded in less than 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 arena prototype and then we started to show off the beginning of Fort Joy [the first act’s main area]. What it allowed us to do was see what people came up with while using Bless and Curse." These new skills introduced another layer to the magical combos and elemental surfaces. So you could summon a shower of rain, which created puddles of water, and then you could bless those puddles, buffing the characters standing on them. Pechenin was also keeping an eye on how players handled their AI opponents in case they needed to be tweaked. They did. 

While Original Sin's NPCs follow scripts, its sequel's AI constantly makes calculations to determine the best way to murder the player. That also makes it a surprisingly good teacher. "In Original Sin 2, the AI will always know what will happen when it throws a fireball at an oil barrel. What was cool, and we saw it pretty early, was that the AI started teaching players new mechanics. Even if you didn't know anything about the surfaces or how any of this works, you'd see the AI electrifying and freezing water or exploding puddles of oil and poison. You could learn just by watching."

The AI could be too smart, though. "Our combat designers had to remove crowd control from the AI," Vincke explains, "because it focused on one character, made sure to destroy their physical and magical armour, and then would start to control it, then kill it. That wasn't fun because one guy was dealing with everything, but it was a dominant tactic. So we had to nerf it a lot."

The AI knew the systems too well, and was only too happy to exploit them before the nerf. This extended to NPCs not designed for combat, too. If you attack an NPC, they'll try to use all their tricks to survive. If that NPC happens to be a potion vendor, then they'll obviously start quaffing down magical elixirs. Larian wanted them to keep doing that, but had to stop them from drinking powerful legendary potions that might be related to a quest, or at least would be highly coveted by players. 

It was a balancing act, however, because one of the appeals of the first game's combat was that it could be pretty tricky. Larian didn’t want to sacrifice the challenge and complexity of the system, even if that meant letting players die before they could figure out how to win a battle. 

"Spicy"

"In French, we have this saying, 'I have a splinter in my flank,' something that hurts," explains senior combat designer Edouard Imbert. "We have to put something in the flank of the player that hurts them, then they have to identify and defuse it. It could be a high-damage spellcaster. The fight is too hard because this one guy is too strong. Once you take care of that guy, the fight becomes manageable. Of course, you want to have a puzzle with more than one step, boxes within boxes."

Imbert doesn’t really think he makes fights—he creates scenes. With puzzles and dialogue and little secrets. "The term that I use is 'spicy', like a bowl of curry. It has to be spicy or it's boring. If you're only killing enemies and dealing damage without thinking, you're not engaged. The fight has to communicate with you as an equal; it must not insult your intelligence. I remember some QAs telling me that there was a fight where you had to die at least once to get it, and I was like, 'I'm okay with that.' I don’t want it to happen all the time, but some fights, sure."

When Imbert had a battle to prepare for, he'd pay Nick Pechenin a visit to find out what skills, say, a level 12 character would have and then he'd try to come up with a scene where the skill is used in some way. Players automatically get the Bless spell, for instance, so Imbert would know that, after a certain point, he'd be able to create a scene with a cursed NPC or cursed fire, and players would be able to figure out that they'd need to use Bless to get out of the fight alive. 

Sometimes, however, the objective is to push players. "We give the player something that they can do, like healing themselves using Restoration, but at some point we disable that by creating a character that bleeds cursed blood that inflicts decay, so they can't heal themselves. We give them a nice thing and then take it away, briefly. We don't do it too much because then it starts to show, but sometimes the story creates good opportunities for it."

The problem for the designers was that, quickly, it becomes impossible to predict what skills a player might have or how their party will have evolved. With few limitations to progression, countless weird and wonderful combinations are possible. Every fight needed to have multiple solutions, then, to take into account the broad variety of potential character and party builds. 

"Luckily we have a tool, a party editor, which allows me to assemble a party with certain archetypes, which I can save," says Imbert, with no small amount of relief. "So I’ve got a party which is a warrior, rogue, ranger and mage, and I have another that's all rogues. And for a level in the game, I try to have five different parties. So I can test it with different groups of characters. I usually test a fight, like a simple scene, 12 or 15 times. For the final boss, I spent ten days on it. There was always something broken." New tools came to the rescue more than once. 

Conversation starter

"People don’t see it, but obviously our writing isn't done on paper, of course, it’s done in actual tools," says Van Dosselaer. "The better the tools, the more you can do and the less constrained you feel. One of the major downsides of Original Sin was that the tool wasn't dialogue-friendly. You could tell it had limits that made it a lot more difficult to mimic actual conversation, which is why you have parts where you just get to ask a question and then read a block of text. With the new tool we can really recreate proper conversations with banter and a good back and forth. If you look behind the scenes at what dialogue looks like in the editor, then sometimes it's huge, with all these branches that you'll never see. It creates all these unique experiences. It's a lot broader because of that." 

With the release date imminent, the script still wasn’t finished. Vincke remembers that, at one point, there were five studios recording while the team was doing continuous rewrites. Almost up until the last moment. 

"We rewrote the game all the way up to the week before release, and there were many conversations still being modified. It was worth it because you sensed in a lot of the permutations of the game that there was always a story that made sense, sometimes not so good, sometimes a lot better than other times. But I think that was part of the success of the game. The downside was that the translation companies and voice recording companies were going bananas. We were super lucky that they supported us or it would have been a really big disaster."

Despite this, Original Sin 2 launched in time, with a finished script and fully-voiced dialogue. That was when the team could finally sit back and watch players do things that they'd never even considered. 

"We’re still getting gifs of players doing something crazy, with jumps or stacking barrels in advance and all sorts of things," says a grinning Pechenin. "If you can think it up, it should work. It was very important for us to have all the systems work without restrictions." 

Check out our history of Larian piece here, too. 

Larian's founder Swen Vincke never stops moving towards the next RPG on the horizon. We convinced him to sit still for a few minutes and talk about the success of Divinity: Original Sin 2 and what went right and wrong during development. We also talked about the problem of crunch in game development and how to avoid it, and the loads of RPGs coming out in 2018.

Download the MP3 directly

Subscribe on iTunes

Grab the podcast RSS feed

Your flapping heads for this episode:

Wes Fenlon

Swen Vincke