Swen Vincke on Larian’s Future Plans, Working on Two New Titles

Now that the year is about to end, Larian CEO Swen Vincke has taken some time to blog about the future plans of the company. Not only is the company expanding with a new office in Quebec City, but they’re apparently already working on two new RPGs based on the same technology that powered up Divinity: Original Sin. Speaking of which, it sounds like the title is still going to get more updates in 2015:

Yes indeed, we’re fixing parts of the story, improving the UIs, revisiting the encounters, rebalancing the loot, rewriting certain dialogs, adding extra feedback, looking at what we can do to fix character progression, improving the companions etc.

Or what did you expect? 😉

But why are those issues in there in the first place? In one phrase: We started from scratch(except for a few systems) when making D:OS and we really had a very small team to do it with. So to avoid having to write another blog entry about what sucks after the release of our next game, we’re now putting a lot of effort and investment in addressing these two issues i.e. We’re increasing our development capacity and we’re ensuring hat we can construct on top of what we’ve already created.

Starting with the development capacity, in about 80% of the cases, bad things in D:OS are related to compromises made because of lack of time. To be honest, they frustrate the hell out of me because I can’t look at them without thinking of what it should’ve been. I hate development compromise but when you have a small team, and iteration is a big part of your development process, inevitably your run out of time and disasters happen when somebody falls sick or makes a mistake. Since you have to make mistakes if you want to be creative and you can’t help falling sick, there’s unfortunately only a few options: You can iterate less(bad idea), you can reduce scope significantly(bad idea for a RPG) or you can increase team size, with a focus on increasing redundancy and removing bottlenecks from your development process.

Luckily we can now take that last option and so we’ve been increasing headcount. There were 42 of us when we finished D:OS, there’s 53 of us now and the number is set to increase throughout 2015.

One of the cool things we’re doing to boost our team size is setting up a new office in Quebec City. Our purpose is straightforward: to get access to some of the experience and talent that’s running around there so that our combined craft gets better. I’ll have more to say about that in the near future but suffice it to say that for Larian, this is a very big step. (Should you be interested in working there, jobs@larian.com will be the place to apply and our job pages with open positions will be appearing soon.)

It’s a lot of growth for a small independent developer from Gent, Belgium and I’m quite apprehensive of the dangers that brings. However, the commercial success of D:OS has given us an opportunity to make true some of our bigger RPG ambitions and I’ll be damned if we don’t seize that chance. Going all in paid off in the past so we might as well try again. After all, making big epic RPGs is what this company was made for even if the route there hasn’t always been that straight.

Fixing things is not all we’re doing however, far from it. We’re not hiring all those people just to transform D:OS in a better experience, no, obviously we’re also working on our new RPGs.

Notice the ‘˜s’. It’s intentional and while I’d love to tell you more about them, I need to refrain for fear of losing whatever press momentum we’ll be able to muster when we’ll announce them. But there’s one I thing I can already tell you, and it fits well with the second big thing we’re doing to improve the quality of our future offerings both RPGs are being built on top of the D:OS engine.