Divinity: Original Sin Interview

Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin continues to charge ahead in a well-deserved flurry of success, but that doesn’t mean that studio head Swen Vincke is any less willing to answer questions about the company and their latest endeavor. This new interview on Gamasutra covers the game’s inception, crowd-funding, development mistakes, and a whole lot more:

Vincke pitches crowdfunding to me as a better business model, one that affords developers more room to fail in creative ways while working on games like Original Sin because they aren’t in danger of sinking their studio by missing out on critical milestone payments.

“Milestone-driven development doesn’t have real room for failure,” says Vincke. “Maybe your studio can get by with some failures because you have built a financial buffer, but how the hell are you supposed to know up front exactly how much of a safety net you’re going to need?”

By pitching Original Sin on Kickstarter, instead of to a publisher, and then transitioning it to Steam’s Early Access service, Larian successfully funded the game’s development without having to answer to anyone but its players. But explaining complex development decisions — like the removal of the game’s day/night cycle system, a key gameplay feature that had been promised in the Kickstarter pitch — to its backers proved tricky.

“We had to admit defeat,” says Vincke, as the team realized that Original Sin would need to include things like night-time missions, separate NPC schedules and beds in order to simulate day/night cycles. “We’d basically have to make two games at that point, and that was just impossible.”

Vincke says the studio’s fans responded well enough, offering criticism alongside some suggestions on features they’d like to see implemented in lieu of the day/night system. The Original Sin team actually took some of those suggestions to heart.

“Pretty much the recipe that any developer has to follow is just ‘listen to your alpha players’; you have to be able to filter and select things that are doable and don’t ruin your entire production, but there’s golden knowledge there,” says Vincke. “It can save you days of meetings on a single feature, because they debate it for you and you often get a very clear analysis of that feature — you just have to implement it.”

Going forward, Larian expects to rely on crowdfunding for its future projects — though Vincke says his studio has learned a lot from its first brush with Kickstarter.

“Don’t do anything physical,” says Vincke, when I ask him about recommendations for his fellow developers who are thinking about using Kickstarter. “I would never again do all the boxed stuff, and I regret that we spent so much time on everything related to making a physical release happen.”