Larian’s Swen Vincke Talks Inspirations Behind Project E

While we already know that Project E is going to be the next Divinity title, Larian’s Swen Vincke still refers to it as such in his latest blog post about the inspirations behind the project. Ultima VII appears to be Swen’s reference point, which is hardly a bad thing in my book. Here’s an excerpt:

So why was I talking about Ultima VII so much ?

Well, for one, I was trying to explain that when making the first Divinity, my goal was to recreate the feeling I experienced when I played these Ultima games.

The Ultima games gave me a feeling I had never experienced before: that of totally being immersed in a world created by someone else. They were also the games that really got me into this business. I remember vividly the moment where I said to myself right, this is what I want to do.

Ever since I started making RPG’s, I’ve been looking to recreate for other people the same experience I had with Ultima VII it really is my drive. Now, in my mind I never succeeded in this but if I can believe the reviews and the fanmails, apparently Divine Divinity somehow struck the same chord for a lot of people. Which was quite motivating of course. The knowledge that even a subset of the original ambitions managed to satisfy players implied that if ever we succeeded in realizing the vision behind those ambitions, we might very well have a very big hit on our hands.

But as it happened, after the first Divinity, I lost track a bit Beyond Divinity definitely wasn’t as good as Divine Divinity, and I always regretted making that one, even if it got ok reviews. Then the second mistake was made the joys of console development steered Divinity II far away from the original idea, and so many compromises were made in that game that what shipped was but a shadow of what I had envisioned it to be.

While some of that was rectified it with the release of Divinity II: Dragon Knight Saga, in truth there are only a few gameplay moments in there that come close to the reason I set up this company.