Lessons learned from the development of Divinity: Original SinLessons learned from the development of Divinity: Original Sin

- Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke reflects on the studio's success launching Divinity: Original Sin. Larian Studios has managed to sell over half a million copies of its Kickstarted PC RPG Divinity: Original Sin; now that the game has been available at retail and on digital storefronts for a few months, Larian's founder has published a few select postmortem observations that offer some insight into the benefits of working without a publisher and the challenges of responding to backer feedback while still releasing your game in a timely manner. "I think we would’ve continued development even longer, but when I had to dash to a far away place where lived the one last bank director who still wanted to give us sufficient credit to pay a part of what we owed to another bank, it was clear that we needed to finish," writes Vincke. "We worked on [Divinity: Original Sin] until the very last day before release." He says that Larian had to crunch for long periods to address concerns raised by its Kickstarter and Early Access communities, but still encountered launch delays that caused problems for both the crunch-weary team and the studio's third-party investors. "It’s a good moment to be a developer, but you have to find a way of doing most of it yourself, without any third party being involved," writes Vincke, who goes on to warn that each third party added to your project exponentially increases its complexity. "We had a lot of third parties involved during development, and it was the root of half our problems." He goes on to shed light on how Larian wound up throwing away more than half of its work during the course of Original Sin's development, explains the studio's approach to managing community feedback, and more in a lengthy blog post that's well worth reading. He doesn't spend much time discussing the actual development process of Original Sin; for that, check out our interview with Vincke from earlier this year.