BALD DECISIONS

How LARIAN broke out of the B-tier to master the Western RPG

- Jeremy Peel

DNA Tracing

When Larian boss Swen Vincke first heard that his debut RPG was going to be called Divine Divinity, he thought it was a joke. But his publisher in Germany, CDV, was all too serious. They’d had a hit with a game called Sudden Strike, and suspected that alliteration might be the key to long-term success. Reader, they were wrong.

Today, CDV is long dead. But the name ‘Divinity’ remains – attached to almost every Larian project of note since. It’s an artefact from a long and gruelling period in which the studio was subject to the whims of whoever held the purse strings. An inescapable reminder of the outside interference which the developer has now triumphantly expunged.

Of course, no Larian story begins with godhood. Getting there can be a slow, strategic, and sometimes bruising journey, and so it proved for the studio itself. Along the road to release, Divine Divinity was compromised not just by CDV, but the publisher before it, Atari. Larian should have been following in the wake of Baldur’s Gate, its spiritual kin; instead, the studio’s paymasters directed it to copy Diablo, the leading light in the adjacent action-RPG genre.

The result was an identity crisis viewed from an isometric perspective. On the one hand,