Larian Studios New Year’s Letter

Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke brings us an informative “New Year’s letter” that looks back at the developer’s progress through 2012 while also focusing on the serious entertainment they’re bringing RPG fans in 2013. Set your rights for May or June, folks:

The first obvious slip-up is that back in December 2011, I expected Dragon Commander to ship in 2012 whereas now it turns out that it’s going to ship only in may or june 2013. Once again Larian’s ability to plan well in advance was put to shame, proving our complete lack of professionalism! 🙂 But tbh, I’m afraid this lack of professionalism tag is going to stay with us for a long time because I don’t think we’ll ever learn to ship a game before we’re happy about it, and I actually also don’t think that we really want to be that (professional). I am pretty sure that In Dragon Commander’s case, I’ll pick the game we’ll ship in 2013 any time above the game we would’ve shipped in 2012 , so even if we’re off schedule, I’ll maintain that delaying it and changing the gameplay were the right decisions.

Back then I also forsaw project E’s announcement, and that one indeed happened, even if in the end it was called Divinity: Original Sin instead of Eyes of a Child (which is where the E in project E came from). In case you are wondering (and you didn’t read the memo), Divinity: Orginal Sin was initially also scheduled to be released in 2012. Nobody believed us, but that didn’t really matter we (well I) believed it until. well until we all fell in love with our own RPG and then went completely berserk on its features, leading to a big scale increase with all the inevitable delays as a consequence. Not that I’m worrying the game really is turning out to be a gem and if we can manage to keep on finding the funds to support its development, so we don’t have to scale down again, we could have a hit on our hands. Obviously, we should aim to release it in 2013 🙂

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The two obvious predictions are that Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Dragon Commander are going to ship. We have target dates for each and we’ll have to see if we manage to reach them. Obviously, the delays are costing us cash, so we cannot delay much more, but looking at the games, I don’t think the need to delay further will be there. Maybe we’ll have to scale up a bit more but we’ll see about that next year. Yes, I said scale up not scale down 😉

And since we’re going to release both games next year, that also means we have to start thinking about what we’ll do afterwards and for which platforms. At this point, I have absolutely no clue what the games industry is going to look like in 2014, and I don’t really believe those that say they do.The one thing I think we can count on is that people are going to keep on gaming and that people are going to keep on playing games that have a beginning, a middle and an end, pretty much the types of games we like ourselves. So I think we’ll focus on the content and worry about the format and platforms afterwards when the dust settles and it’s more clear what works and what not for studios like us.

I assume everybody knows that we pretty much invested everything we have in Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Dragon Commander, meaning that we’re betting the entire company with these releases. That’s a risk but also vote of confidence in the abilities of this team to bring this to a good end. I’m really counting on writing about the fantastic reception both games had when the date will be december 2013 and I’m absolutely looking forward to the day that I’ll be playing the final versions of both games.