The past, present, and future of the studio behind Divinity
RPG fans are hungry for the next game from Larian Studios. While there haven’t been any formal announcements yet, you can probably imagine the kinds of projects the developers behind the Divinity series would want to work on. During Gameumentary‘s feature-length documentary covering the origin of the studio and its recent rise with Divinity: Original Sin II, Larian lightly teased what’s coming up.
“As we were already finishing DOS2, we actually a month before we sat in a hotel room for a weekend and worked on the next thing,” said Larian Studios founder and CEO Swen Vincke.
The game is codenamed Project Gustav, after his dog, and “it blends the same things that we’ve been exploring all the time. It’s going to be narrative, systems, multiplayer, new things, new ideas.”
“Probably the biggest stress that we have now is how can we make something that’s better than Original Sin 2,” he said. “How do we make sure that we don’t lose what was good and how do we know that we innovate on the things that people would not want to do again because they did it once and it was cool but they won’t do it twice — which is typically a trap that sequels fall into. But it’s fun. This is why you do this, right? You make new things, you explore new avenues of gameplay.”
That’s the future, but how did they get here? It’s a long story! One quote in particular stood out to me.
“[Larian] could’ve avoided a lot of our misery if we would’ve been ready sooner with our games, and if we would’ve been better at making them,” according to Vincke. “But at the same time because we dared reach for the sky, the ambitions were there and we reached where other people would not reach because they would have been much more pragmatic. What was our biggest weakness was also our biggest strength, which was rather annoying. And it’s something that I didn’t want to give up.”
[Disclosure: Destructoid’s parent company Enthusiast Gaming helped fund this documentary.]
