Inside a multi-million dollar Kickstarter with the team behind Divinity: Original Sin 2
Divinity: Original Sin 2 became Larian’s second successfully funded Kickstarter project last week, as well as its most lucrative. For the final days of the campaign, I was in their studio in Ghent, Belgium, watching as the team continued to work ceaselessly, despite having long-smashed their original goal.
Larian Studios have been making games since 1996, cementing their name as an RPG studio with 2002’s excellent Divine Divinity, and its follow up Beyond Divinity. Since then, the Divinity series has been the studio’s bread and butter, and has included third-person RPGs where you can transform into a dragon, and the experimental Dragon Commander, which merged tabletop empire building with RTS battles.
Some of the games reviewed well, some sold well, but with Original Sin they made a game that did both, and had the benefit of a community that grew around one of the first big RPG Kickstarters.
Given the success of that first campaign, it was not a surprise to find out that Larian was heading back to the realm of crowdfunding for the sequel. But Kickstarter’s changed since they first used it, and attitudes toward crowdfunding have turned sour.
Larian had enough money to finance a sequel themselves, but if they wanted to outdo their previous game, they’d need help from Kickstarter. “It allows us to make bigger and better RPGs,” CEO and creative director Swen Vincke explains.
On the morning before I headed to the studio, I quickly checked the Kickstarter page. Only two stretch goals were left. I thought that, perhaps, this would be a relief for Larian, that as they approached the last straight they’d be able to take a load off. The opposite was true.
Part of the team, including Vincke, were returning from TwitchCon after a long month of promotion and development. Exhausted, light on sleep and cursed with jet lag, they returned to work. For some, that meant heading back to the bullpen to continue work on Divinity: Original Sin 2 and the Enhanced Edition of the original game, and for others it meant spending time with the big community that has grown around the series.
As I fought and chatted my way through Original Sin 2’s demo, Larian were setting up a livestream that would run, mostly uninterrupted, for the rest of the campaign, the next 24 hours, and then continue even after the close of the Kickstarter. You wouldn’t know that it had been a tiring month for Vincke and his team as they entertained backers and fans by going through the history of the studio, showing old games, and answering an endless raft of questions.
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