Larian’s Swen Vincke Talks Divinity: Original Sin Conception

In the course of one of his usual blog posts Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke goes over the initial design for the recently announced Divinity: Original Sin (previously only known as “Project E”) and how it came to be. It’s quite clear from his words that the team has wanted to do something like this for a very long time:

For starters, if you read this blog from to time, you might have figured that I always wanted to go back to Divine Divinity and finish the job. One of the things that bugged me about that game was that it was originally supposed to have a multiplayer mode, which sadly got lost in the trials and tribulations of trying to ship our first major RPG.

Then with Beyond Divinity, multiplayer was back on the agenda, but the Divine Divinity code had evolved to the point that putting it in would’ve meant rewriting everything, and at that time, that was impossible.

And then, came Divinity II. That one too was supposed to have multiplayer (I have a video from a prototype of that which I’m trying to find so I can post it here). Sadly the multiplayer was scratched when the publisher realized what costs this would bring on the QA front, especially on console. In hindsight, given the effort it took to get Divinity II ready, they were probably right about canceling the multiplayer, but that didn’t prevent me from feeling frustrated about the entire thing, because that was the third time.

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Next on the list of reasons why Divinity Original Sin seems to have surprised people is the turn-based combat system. That one comes from the desire of doing something like the first Fallouts. I always wanted to do a turn-based game with action points but my problem was that I couldn’t find a publisher who agreed with me.

Active-pause was considered for some time (and we actually started out like this), but in my heart I really wanted to make one of those games that has epic tactical battles, where you really have to think how you’re going to defeat the enemy. And because I’m occasionally very impulsive, one morning I stormed into the office and told the team that we were going to ditch all the hack & slash stuff and go for turn-based. I was ready to go all despot on them should I encounter any resistance, but to my surprise, they were actually quite supportive of that idea. Then I discovered they were a little bit too supportive, because before I knew it I had an ultra-hardcore system on my plate. Eventually we settled on something that I think is quite accessible, but still offers plenty of opportunity for tactical depth.

You can always release the ultra-hardcore combat system as some kind of unofficial combat mod, Swen, I’m sure players won’t mind.