Larian Studios Developing Another RPG Alongside Dragon Commander

In addition to giving us a lesson in how best to go about funding a video game, Larian’s Swen Vincke latest blog update explains how everything the company has done up to this point has been in pursuit of “the very big RPG that will dwarf them all.” And that means, as he states, that they’re actively developing a role-playing game alongside the already-announced Dragon Commander. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s almost certainly another Divinity RPG, but since he doesn’t spell it out quite as definitively as I’d like him to, I’ll just leave it at that:

Our modus operandi was to make cash with kids games like for instance Monkey Tales or Adventure Rock, and then spend it on the RPG. This approach obviously worked since we managed to release the game, but in hindsight, I’m sure we could’ve done it for a lot less and with a lot less frustration.

Knowing what I know now, I think we could’ve brought down costs by 2M€, and had this game been made in another country (Belgium has notoriously high labor taxes), we could perhaps have made all of The Dragon Knight Saga for less than 4M€.

So part one of the plan is to try to use our financial resources in a more clever way, applying lessons learnt, allowing us to put more stuff in our future games.

Part two is that instead of spending a lot of effort on non-core games to earn money, we focus on making more core-games.

The reasoning there is quite simple we noticed that good sales on The Dragon Knight Saga are correlated to good sales of the other Divinities, with people in general enjoying the games. More good Divinity games should therefore make the entire series stronger, and an added advantage is that we are working on making more RPG technology, rather than non-RPG tech, which will help bring down costs in the future, and further accelerate our development cycle.

That’s why in addition to Dragon Commander, we’re also working on an unannounced RPG (which btw is closer on the release horizon than most people think 🙂 )

You don’t strengthen the sales of the other Divinities by releasing an unrelated RPG, right? Could it be that Divinity III is “on the release horizon”?