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How Divinity: Original Sin came to home consoles
We chat to Larian head Swen Vincke on Divinity’s success, and why it’s coming to your living room.
Written by Richard Wordsworth and Pete Dreyer
12 min readPublished on
Divinity: Original Sin.
Divinity: Original Sin.© Larian Studios
If you're not a fantasy RPG nut, you may not be familiar with the Divinity games. Regardless of its relative obscurity compared to the triple-A titles of this world, the series has maintained a dedicated fanbase, so when Original Sin landed on Kickstarter in March 2013, it obliterated its funding targets and raised over a million dollars in contributions.
Fast forward a couple of years and Original Sin has been a smash hit on PC. The gaming press has called it one of the finest RPGs in years, and it's become Larian Studios' highest rated and best selling release ever.
So, it makes sense for Original Sin to ride that wave of success straight into your living room. But in bringing a crowdfunded fantasy RPG from PC to console, Larian Studios is navigating uncharted territory. With that in mind, we had an exclusive chat with Larian Studios chief Swen Vincke, to get his take on how Divinity: Original Sin is reaching out to the mainstream, and what Larian has done to make this PC-centric RPG a fit for home consoles.
Since the Kickstarter, fantasy projects have become really big on the site. Why do you think that is?
It was incredibly hard to get funding for fantasy projects for a long time. I would have meetings with publishers where they would tell me that no-one wants to play fantasy games. I don't know where the thinking came from, but when fantasy games appeared on Kickstarter, people clearly showed that they wanted to play them.
Is it a self-perpetuating thing? The more fantasy games succeed on crowdfunding sites, the more difficult it becomes for other genres to get a look in?
No, I don't think so. Genres are cyclical right? Something becomes popular, and people jump on the bandwagon. It becomes big, and then fades away and something else takes it's place.
Is the timing fortuitous in the sense that you owe some success to Game of Thrones and its success on TV?
I think that has something to do with it. But I really think it was an underserviced market. There are a lot of people that were into Dungeons & Dragons, and fantasy novels have always been a big thing – they just didn't capture the attention of mainstream. I think there's actually always been a lot of people who were interested in the genre as a whole. 
You said that you weren’t going to go back to Kickstarter because the crowdfunding pool is limited and should be fished in by those who really need it. That’s another quite unusual statement from a studio that’s turned to crowdfunding. Could you expand on that? I had a big discussion with some people, who convinced me that I might be wrong about that. There are some backers who have a bond with the game by having funded it, and want to have an impact on the making of the game from the very beginning. Kickstarter backing is more than just an investment, because there's the return element in the sense of goals and rewards – you get rewarded for backing a product at a very early stage and showing that you believe in the guys that are making it.
That said, the pool of people using Kickstarter might not be as large as we think it is, that's the big question mark. I don't know the largest figures on Kickstarter, but is it a growing group, or has it become stagnant? The argument that we had back in the day was that the more Kickstarter successes we had, the more money you dragged to the pool, and the more everybody benefitted. So that might be the correct argument, but whether or not that's true I don't know.
We’ve seen the other side of that argument put forward – if you have a certain number of people on Kickstarter who are going to back a number of projects, bigger games are going to take money from those that only need $10,000.
That was my original statement. For sure, we wouldn't have had Double Fine [development studio founded by Tim Schafer in 2000, and was the first studio to raise seven figures in crowdfunding on Kickstarter] for instance, and that pool would have been much smaller for games [because of the publicity], so there are games being made that wouldn't be possible without Kickstarter, but would they be able to be made if there wasn't the required amount of Kickstarter successes to track people in?
Imagine that we made another couple of RPGs on Kickstarter and they're very successful, and we advertise in our games that if you join us on Kickstarter for the next game, you'll get certain rewards. Then that person becomes a Kickstarter backer, and as a result he's going to see the other Kickstarter campaigns also because he's present on the portal.
That is actually somebody that we've brought from one Kickstarter backing to a Kickstarter pool, and then you essentially have the same thing that you have on Steam. Why is Steam successful and so good for so many independent developers? Because there's so many people on there. If they weren't all there then we wouldn't benefit from that enormous pool and it would be a very different world for video game developers.
In game with Divinity: Original Sin.
In game with Divinity: Original Sin.© Larian Studios
On the move to consoles, we saw in your latest blog post that you were concerned about whether there was a console audience for the game?
We looked and looked, but there's really nothing like this on console. That can mean two things: either we're the geniuses that made it first, or there's just no market. We're hoping there might be a third option too, which is that no one's decided to do it yet, because honestly, we don't think the first one is true, and we're quite scared of the second!
You must have had extensive talks with Sony and Microsoft before you announced the Enhanced Edition. They don’t have a history of doing these things, so how did they feel about this?
It was fantastic! We were done in about two minutes – we gave them the controller and then two minutes later they were like, 'Wow, this really works!' Ultimately, there's nothing stopping me from playing it like I would on PC. It controls really well, and it's actually much more relaxing to lie down on the sofa and to be able to play.
If you can do it this well though, why hasn’t it been done before?
I think because it wasn't immediately obvious that it could work. There's a lot of things that are solvable once you really start thinking about how to approach them. First of all, it's turn based turn, so it doesn't require fast reactions or constant attention. Secondly, it's co-op, and it's perfectly normal to play with your better half or a friend in front of the TV. And thirdly, there have been a lot of advances in how to control games. I guess nobody tried to apply all these advances to a turn-based RPG, because as it turns out, it feels really simple. Back on the PlayStation 2 when people tried to play Diablo, it wasn't that great. But now you have Diablo 3 on PS4 and lots of people actually prefer that version.
Are there any fundamental ways that this game will be different on consoles? If I’m already a Divinity player, can I just switch to PS4 or Xbox One and feel like this is the game that I really love?
It's a very different game. That's why we're giving a free version to everyone who already has it on PC. We didn't simplify or dumb down any game systems, but we added a lot of extra things and we revised pieces of the world and the story that we weren't happy with in the original version. One of the big additions is the voice acting. It brings the story and the world to life – you're much more into the story because everything is so well voiced. And because it was being voiced, we had a look at all of the dialogue and made it more fitting for voice too. We started recording at the beginning of January and we're only finishing next week, so there's a lot of recording going on.
There's changes in the main storyline too. In my opinion, the new ending is much better compared to what we had. Act 3 is much improved, and the beginning of the game has lot of good changes as well.
Divinity: Original Sin.
Divinity: Original Sin.© Larian Studios
You talk about the ending changing. If I’ve played this game on PC and I want the game on console, is the ending so different that it’ll be worth for me it to play through it again? I think so, there's a huge amount of effort gone into it. Some players were very disappointed with the original ending, it wasn't very satisfying. That was frustrating for us because it wasn't what we'd intended. We couldn't do the ending we wanted because of a lack of time and resources. But so many people bought the game, we figured the very least we can do is fix something that we wanted to put in the game in the first place. And then typically, we exaggerated and went back through the whole game and started changing things left and right.
Normally when people port a game to console, they might be fixing things that are broken, or maybe adding dialogue, not rewriting the whole thing. Why are you doing this and how are you able to afford to do this, rather than making paid DLC? I mean, the foundation is that we really care about what we're making, in the sense that we're trying to get better all the time and we're improving our craft. Also, we have big ambitions for our next RPG, and there are things in the Enhanced Edition that we're trying out with a view to using them in later releases. If you look at the history of our games, you'll find that in a game like the old Divinity, we were already exploring ideas for Original Sin. Some things will work, some won't, but eventually you'll see that some of the things we're doing now are going to be useful for our next game.
For instance, we learned a lot from doing all the voice recording from the Enhanced Edition, so we know how we can improve those processes and make them more efficient for next time. Likewise, our tools are getting better. You can see every single visual effect has been redone now, and they look a lot better thanks to some new technology, which will be used again in our next game. It's a continuous process, and rather than just waste it on prototypes, we might as well use all that effort on games we're making ourselves.
Divinity: Original Sin
Divinity: Original Sin© Larian Studios
You often talk about the stresses of the development cycle. Now you’re expanding the studio and working on three projects not one. Are you looking forward to doing these projects?
It's a double-edged sword. I live for my job, I wouldn't do it if I didn't, but I have to find a balance between work and life. That was the original purpose of my blog – to show people that there's two sides to things. Often people only see the side that comes from trying to start a product, but there's a lot more going on behind it that nobody ever sees.
Sometimes there are things being written that shouldn't be written. I think every developer has to deal with the negatives, from hate mail to passive aggressiveness on the internet, and that's part of the deal. If you can't deal with it then you shouldn't be doing it, or at least handling it publicly. But all that stuff does touch developers I think, and it does hurt from time to time.
Do you think your experience was more stressful because it was a Kickstarter project, or was it fairly typical?
I think from talking to others, we've all been through the same experiences. It's a lot of pressure, because you have your image to take care of, you have a game you want to be proud of and you want to deliver something to an audience that they're going to enjoy. If people are going to spend some money on your game, you want to make sure they're going to have a good time and get value for that – that's about 40–80 hours in our case, and then have the dialogue with them so you can improve the next game. I think most developers have that attitude.
Do you think you could make a game that’s not based on fantasy, or not an RPG, or are you THAT studio now?
We're not married to fantasy, that's for sure. It just happens to be that when we're accustomed to making these titles, and there's quite an audience for fantasy, it makes sense to do fantasy, right? I have many ideas for many different universes, any of which could be either successful or complete disasters. We're not in a position where we could finance a complete disaster yet, but hopefully we will be one day, because then we can start experimenting, like we did with Dragon Commander.
But from time to time we do need to have our successes, so that we can fund the disasters! To be honest, those experiments are probably the most fun to make, because then you’re going boldly where nobody has been before.
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