Divinity: Original Sin - Two New Interviews

I managed to roundup two more interview with Larian Studios Swen Vincke about his recently released game Divinity: Original Sin. The first interview is on Gamasutra.

"We always wanted to make an old-school PC RPG with multiplayer," says Swen Vincke, the founder of Larian Studios. "We never managed to sell it to a publisher in the past; every time we proposed, it was refused."

I've called him to ask after Divinity: Original Sin, Larian's recently-released isometric cooperative PC RPG. It's proven remarkably successful despite -- or perhaps because of -- its nostalgia-tinged design, which draws inspiration from German pen-and-paper roleplaying games as well as '90s-era PC RPGs like Baldur's Gate.

The Belgian studio Kickstarted Original Sin (to the tune of just under $1 million) last April despite competition from prominent, concurrent Kickstarter campaigns for isometric RPGs like Richard Garriott's Shroud of the Avatar and inXile's Torment: Tides of Numenara.

Larian managed to beat them both to market, launching Original Sin on Steam's Early Access service in January before bringing it to retail at the end of June. Now it's the top-selling title on Steam and Larian's fastest-selling retail release to date; the studio is well on its way to recouping the roughly $4 million it spent on the game's development.

"We never expected it to be this successful," says Vincke. "It's all due to Kickstarter and Early Access."

The second interview is on PC Gamer.

PC Gamer: How do you guys feel post launch? You said you're still working on the game, but what's the vibe at Larian right now?

Swen Vincke: It's funny because everybody's still so focused on doing the patching that we haven't had time to celebrate yet. Everybody took some breaks to get some sleep, and most of us took a long weekend, but now we're focusing on the patch, and we're going to have our first [release] party next week. It will be a big one, and then we're going to go on a big holiday and then there's going to be a huge party. Right now, actually, everybody's like, "Okay, we released, so we continue to work on it." It's a rather funny feeling to be honest. We're very happy obviously.

PCG: It's the only project that Larian has right now, right? You're not working on anything else.

Vincke: No. This was all-in for us, so we said, "We have one shot at making a good RPG. This is going to be the one, so we'd better not fuck it up." That was basically the attitude, so it was stressing. But we're happy now of course.

PCG: What kind of things are you looking at in the big update?

Vincke: We basically have two types of things. We're doing hotfixes where we see problems that we can fix right away for people, and then the patch will contain some extra content. Balancing fixes. We'll introduce the AI personalities—that was one feature that didn't make it fully for release. [Right now] you only have no personality or random personality, which is rather clunky to play with, or the loyal personality which basically does everything you do. We will add five or six AI personalities, and they have distinct opinions about things, and so it's basically your partner. [And] people will be able to create their own personalities.

They make decisions based on certain type of personality, and it makes the game quite different, actually, because then it's really like playing with a human being, to a certain extent.