Divinity Anthology Announced

This morning came the announcement that the Divinity titles released so far by Larian (Divine Divinity, Divinity II, now re-released in a Director’s Cut edition, and Beyond Divinity) will get bundled together in a goodies-filled collection: Divinity Anthology. The best news yet? It’s only going to cost €29.95/$29.95!

First of all, here’s the full press release:

Larian Studios celebrates the 10th Anniversary of the Divinity® RPG series with a limited release of the Divinity Anthology Collector’s Edition and a digital version is planned too!

GHENT, BELGIUM – Ten years ago Larian Studios released Divine Divinity, an RPG that grew to become one of PC GAMER’s (Top 100 Games of All Time). Ever since then, Beyond Divinity and Divinity II have followed, continuing the legacy of ‘˜the RPG series with an ironic twist’. Today, the Belgian indie studio remembers the good old times with the release of a limited run of the Divinity Anthology Collector’s Edition: a unique compilation of all 3 games for which no costs were spared to produce many thrilling extras!

For the record, the Divinity Anthology Collector’s Edition includes: both DRM-free and Steam multi-lingual versions of Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity and Divinity II: Developer’s Cut; two soundtracks featuring the best works of Kirill Pokrovsky, Divinity’s famous composer, as well as outtakes and rare pieces that never made it into the games; a 130 page Developer’s Journal that tells the story of Larian’s last 15 years in the games business accompanied by many pieces of unreleased art; an old-school sticker set offering skulls, dragons and princesses to customize your phone or notebook; two double-sided posters for your bedroom or office; and two codes for unique in-game items for Divinity: Dragon Commander and Divinity: Original Sin, both of which are expected to be released in 2013.

Only 25.000 copies of this rare package have been produced, and these are now on their way to retail stores in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, South Africa and the United Kingdom, where recommended retail prices are set at around €29.99 (so we don’t really expect the stock to linger). A small run of the Divinity Anthology Collector’s Edition is also available for order directly from https://www.LarianVault.com, with every box signed personally by the development team.

Finally, the Divinity Anthology will also become available digitally with Steam and Larian Vault releases in the works, e.t.a. later this month. GOG.com will be offering Divinty II: Developer’s Cut.

Larian’s Swen Vincke has written some thoughts on the Anthology’s genesis on his blog:

The idea behind the Developer’s Cut was to create a new SKU (the publishing term for a new version of your game, comes originally from Stock Keeping Unit, a unique code to identify the game). And the idea behind that was that it might get us some extra attention at the time of release, sufficient to get attention from those RPG players that didn’t try out Divinity II yet.

We thought long and hard about what we could put in this SKU and came to the conclusion that it would take us too long to put some meaningful content in. Our gut instinct therefore told us that we shouldn’t do it, but then the idea originated to make some kind of a developer’s version of Divinity II.

It’d be a version where we’d share the story of making Divinity II in the form of a documentary, include the design documents & the milestone videos we’d made for the publishers at the time, and the cherry on the cake would be the inclusion of the developer console we’d been using during development. This would enable players to see how we actually looked at the game during development, and allow them to do things only we could do (like flying around in areas you’re not supposed to fly or turning yourself into any creature you could think of). It’d be something we’d give away for free to those who had already bought DKS, and something that might tickle the interest of those who hadn’t.

In short, it was a new SKU created from an old SKU without too much effort, exactly the kind of thing we were looking for, even if tbh to this day we still only have a vague idea of what exactly a SKU is, other than what it says on Wikipedia.

Finally, you might want to take a look at this amazing trailer the folks at Larian have prepared for you!