BALD DECISIONS

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

- Jeremy Peel

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 grueling 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, Divine Divinity boasted the intricacy and interactivity of Vincke's beloved Ultima VII. In its world, every crate and barrel could be shunted around with the mouse, and every kitchen table relieved of its cutlery. Yet outside the alluring density of civilization, the game devolved into long and testing dungeons, which leaned heavily on simplistic hack-and slash combat. The fact that the screens seemed to roll on forever-unfurling a near-continuous tapestry rather than the discrete patchwork of the Infinity Engine games-only contributed to the sense that Divine Divinity was stretched thin. To quote Bilbo Baggins, it was like butter scraped over too much bread.

DIVINE TRAGEDY