Larian Studios - Next Projects Update

Lar has penned an update at the Larian forums discussing their next projects - or at least, they are in planning and pre-production and presumably waiting for a publisher green-light or similar. Lar says he needs to be cryptic at this very early stage but, to be honest, it's fairly transparent all things considered:

Some months ago, in one of the status updates, I promised I wanted to be more open about the development of our next games. I'd like to start doing that, but out of necessity still need to be cryptic about certain things.

So currently we have 2 Divinity projects in pre-production - The first one, code named project E features a top-down camera whereas the other one, code named project D, has a camera similar to DKS but obviously with certain improvements.

They are both in pre-production meaning that would ordinarily mean that it's unsure that they'll make it to market, but I think there'll be an announcement in the next couple of weeks that guarantees at least one of the two will make it to production, and I'd actually be surprised if the second one doesn't make it either. I'm the most biased person on the planet when it comes to Divinity games, but I am under the impression that they're both uber-cool games and that I'd like to play them both. If past experience is anything to go by, that means that somehow we'll manage to get them made.

Talking about project E, the top-down thing has disadvantages when it comes to immersion, but it makes up in terms of some of the content things we can pull off with it. You can think of E as the original Divinity in a modern jacket augmented with many of the insights we gained over the course of they years and some new things we'd like to try out (with the caveat that those sometimes work, and sometimes don't). It certainly looks nice, and many of the ideas in there fit with what you've all been writing of things you want in our forums. Some don't however; ) I'd really like to show you some early screenshots, but since that would be a first announcement, it'd make it all over the web, and it might cause mis-interpretation which would take a long time to set right, so we'll refrain from that for the moment.

D, well, that one does *one* thing which I expect several in this industry will tell us is insane, for probably good reasons, but I can't help but thinking that it'll make for really cool gameplay so we'll try it out nonetheless - I'm being a bit cryptic about it because D's development has two roads it can follow, and I don't know which one it'll be yet. I do know which one I'd prefer, but that's the one that'll cost tons of cash and we still need to figure out if we can get someone crazy enough to share our belief that that's a game that should be made. To be fair, we haven't shown it to anybody yet, so I have no clue if it actually requires craziness, or instead people will jump on it, but the plan is to start showing it around at GDC, so we'll see what that gives.

What I can tell you about D is that it *should* take care of one of the frustrations I personally still had with DKS i.e. getting the dragon thing really right. Given the scope of DKS we never could focus sufficient development resources on that, and to avoid that from happening with D we started pre-production by focussing completely on the dragon thing. In my mind, there still hasn't been a game that got the feeling of being a powerful beast of destruction right (and fun), and that's going to be one of the core ambitions with D. Should it turn out that it doesn't work, it won't be for lack of trying

While I'm writing, I also wanted to thank you all for the feedback we're getting in here - I'm often amazed by how crystal accurate some of the analysis is, and for us it's like mana from heaven in terms of getting our design focused. Even Kein's continuous frontal assaults are a great source of inspiration

Thanks, Alrik!
More information.

Either one sounds good to me. The safer bet would be project E as the other one will cost more. Lars always said they would make another divinity as the story wasn't done yet.

I would be very interested in a top-down reboot of the original Divine Divinity. I thought that was a great rpg and can imagine how good it could be with todays tech and improvements.

I wouldn't be interested in the other project.

TOP DOWN PLEASE. Never get tired of them , they age nice and have a lot of replay ability.

+1
Top down please

If I had to choose I would say the top down true successor to one of the best RPGs ever Divine Divinity. Having said that, Divinity 2 is quite excellent and I would love to see what the follow on to that would be.

Top down is quite rare nowadays, so it's definitely the project that makes me more curious.

Last A WRPG top down I remember was Dungeon Siege 2 and expansion, well in a different genre much more action oriented and not the classical RPG approach but still last one. For sure there are more indie stuff that has been released in particular Eschalon Book but that's another scale of project. That DS3 gave up Top down (and party) was really a disappointment for me.

-1 to exploring more with the dragon. I could really care less about flying around in Dragon shape and Lars is missing the boat if he thought that was a selling point for Div2. There are a small handful of folks who loved it, but the vast majority saw it as "meh" or worse.

I'm totally indifferent to top-down too. How a game is shown isn't really all that important to me.

They should make both… use Divinity 2: Dragon Knight Saga's success to find a publisher for another big game like that and then also deliver a smaller, top-down action RPG for Steam, XBLA and PSN by themselves.

I'm always for the "crazy" option.

I don't quite care wht hey do, because I simply believe in them - no matter whether I will play or not play their actual games.

To me, it even doesn't matter whether my own preferred games are very different from what the actually do.

I just believe in the people of the studio - the more, since I could test there last year for a week.

I might not buy everything they do - I just believe in them. And that's all that is important to me and to them, I think.
Apart from the money they - like every developing studio - need from their customers.

You can call me a "fan" if you want to.

I'm not sure if i will like the games (hard to tell from the description) but I generally like this studio if that make sense. There are a handful of overseas studios I have a warm feeling for - rather than name the studios I'll name a few of the games:
divinity series; arx fatalis; king bounty/space ranger; witcher; and age of wonders series (though while I like the studio; overlord was not my thing).
[I would mention king arthur but the crashes still annoy me]

Anyways I wish them luck and i'll probably buy the games (heck who am I kidding I know I will) and I hope they did ok on DKS (never heard the numbers but I think it was not as popular in usa as it was overseas).

Originally Posted by DoctorNarrative
They should make both… use Divinity 2: Dragon Knight Saga's success to find a publisher for another big game like that and then also deliver a smaller, top-down action RPG for Steam, XBLA and PSN by themselves.

WHY does it have to be an ACTION RPG??????? I WANT a TB game thank you very much!!

Originally Posted by Corwin
WHY does it have to be an ACTION RPG??????? I WANT a TB game thank you very much!!

Well Larian make action RPGs.

It's time they took on a new challenge and something different!!

Project E! Why work on two?! just make double the Project E.

Assume that one of them will be lame like Beyond Divinity and will cost them cred. This will be the goofy dragon game. Hope and pray that the other will allow them to stay barely afloat, kinda like Div 2 did. Like 'em or hate 'em, Larian doesn't seem to pay attention to sales but to their minority forum fanatics. This has made for some pretty bad decisions in the past. Anyone remember the voice change for the demon companion in BD?

Regardless of what happens, nothing is on the horizon from Larian. They are very, very slow developers. I've liked two of their three games though, so I have some small hope that something decent will see the light of the day by 2016

Originally Posted by DoctorNarrative
Well Larian make action RPGs.

Somebody here doesn't remember the first divine divinity game. It was topdown and still holds up with the new games.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Somebody here doesn't remember the first divine divinity game. It was topdown and still holds up with the new games.

Yes, and it was also an action-RPG.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Yes, and it was also an action-RPG.

Yes but it played like a top down clone of baldurs gate. To bad they didn't allow you to have companions. It was more tactical than action.

You mean isometric? DD didn't use a top-down view.