The next few months are set to be dominated by RPGs—both big, and big but with a smaller, crowdfunded budget. But whatever the future holds, the genre has already had one great success this year. Divinity: Original Sin was uncompromising in its old-school design, and in being so, provided exactly what many PC RPG fans were looking for. In a new blog post , Swen Vincke, the founder of developer Larian Studios, writes about the game's success, and hints at what will come next.
The post reveals that D:OS has now sold "well over half a million units". The majority of those sales have been through Steam, with only 10% coming from physical retail editions. Vincke explains that the game has paid off the debts incurred in its making, and is now in the "profitable zone". That's like the opposite of Kenny Loggins' Danger Zone.
Vincke goes on to talk about what the studio will be doing next. For the most part, it's more work on the game. "Our plan is to continue supporting D: OS for quite some time as this is the RPG framework on which we'll build our next games," he writes. "We're fooling around with controller support to see if a big screen version with cooperative play would work well, something I'm silently hoping for as I think it'll be a lot of fun, more so perhaps than playing coop in LAN with a friend sitting next to you. We're also improving the engine itself as well as adding a bunch of extra features that not only make D: OS more fun and more friendly to players, but that will also improve whatever our next offering will be. We're also adding extra content, like for instance the big companion patch, voiced et al, and I imagine that won't be the last of what we'll add."
Beyond that, Vincke talks about improving the studio's "RPG craft", and "creating dense game worlds with hopefully new and innovative gameplay systems based on old school values." In essence, their plan seems to be more of the same, using the success of Original Sin as a springboard for future projects.
One thing Larian won't be doing is crowdfunding their future games. "That's not because we're ungrateful of the support we received through our Kickstarter community or because all those rewards caused a bit of extra work, but because I think the crowdfunding pool is limited and it should be fished in by those who really need it. Since we now can, I think we should first invest ourselves and then see if we need extra funds to fuel our ambitions."
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