Larian Studios Status Update

In his latest status update on the company’s official forums, Larian Studios’ Sven Vincke talks about their plans to showcase “Project D” at this year’s GamesCom and the challenges involved with showcasing the game at such an event without a publisher assisting them in the endeavor.

We’re going to be announcing one of our new games, project D, at GamesCom in Cologone, this August, and so the pressure right now is to make sure that we have something to show, as well as figuring out how we’re going to show it. Turns out we have very little experience with the latter as in the past these things were always done by a publisher. But now that we’re self-funding all of our games, we have to take care of that part too, and it clearly requires a different set of skills, skills we don’t necessarily have in-house, though we’re working on that.

Our main task at GameCom will be that for the next games we don’t want any more WOW, how come thi game doesn’t get more attention? threads, even if we are flattered by all the things you all write in there. I spent quite some time speaking to people (in-the-know) over the past couple of months about how to profile ourselves and our games better, and in the process had to take quite some flak about how we’ve been presenting ourselves to our audiences in the past, but I guess they do have a point. Summarized it boils down to (your website is a mess, you’re not using the social thing like you should, your messaging is a wreck and what the #### is up with your logo ? It looks like washing powder. Oh, and btw, do you call that a presentation ? My Italian designer label toilet paper looks better than that !)

Many were the times during these conversations that I had to resist taking one of the swords and daggers I received from people back when was still called Divinity: The Sword of Lies, and I often had to say to myself (Shut up and listen. You have ‘˜Wow, how come this game doesn’t get more attention’ threads on your forum, this despite your meta-critic being in the top for RPGs in 2010). So I listen and learn, and in the process curse silently and envision exactly how I’m going to have my new mentors (integrated) in one of our next games.

…

But this time, as we have to present (our babies) ourselves, and have 48m² to do it in (which doesn’t sound like a lot but when in reality is actually quite large), we need to figure out not only what the presentation will be like, but also what all the stuff around it’s going to be, and all the presumed experience in these matters just isn’t there ! The horror ! And this is going to be the start of the big announcement for Project D ! Panic strikes !

Well, not really of course, but it does have me slightly worried. I’m having visions of a huge empty booth, with the hardware crashed, the furniture stuck somewhere in some strike and nobody interested in what we have to show, which in the particular scenario that there’s no furniture and no hardware would actually be a bonus. But I guess we’ll rise to the occasion, have plenty of people come to taste our wonderful Dragon Beer and walk away in awe as they see the brilliancy of project D, which I’m sure will be visible to all, even if at this very moment it a) still just looks as a collection of flat shaded stub models floating around (admittedly with some already very good looking terrain and a bunch of hot-but-not-yet-integrated assets 😉 ), b) is the project in which we’re taking the most risk gameplay-wise.

A risky project where Dragon Beer somehow relates… perhaps it’s time for a reimagined DragonStrike? Thanks, RPG Codex.