Akalaupdate: Sven Vincke has published a new and very candid blog post that is worth, I think, putting above all the rest of this week’s news.

Mr. Vincke, you see, has a dream not unlike that of Richard Garriott: to create “the very big RPG that will dwarf them all”. The problem, as he details in his blog post, is that pesky little thing called money. And he sheds some interesting light on just what sort of limitations the cost of making a game imposes on its development. He begins with an example, from the development of Divinity 2:

Here’s a break-down of what it cost us to make the Dragon Knight Saga

• 4M € employees
• 900K€ freelancers
• 270K€ outsourcing of artwork
• 200K€ hardware
• 700K€ software licenses
• 400K€ localisation

for a total of 6,5M€. That’s a lot of money and as the Dragon Knight Saga was released via co-publishing deals , it also meant that we needed to take care of the majority of this investment ourselves, since the publishers only contributed partially to the funding.

…

Knowing what I know now, I think we could’ve brought down costs by 2M€, and had this game been made in another country (Belgium has notoriously high labor taxes), we could perhaps have made all of The Dragon Knight Saga for less than 4M€.

RPG Watch fills in a few more details, quoting Vincke:

If you have a 40 man team, and the employer cost is say 6K€ [per month], then one year of development will cost you 2,88M€. Given that most games take a few years to make, this means you rapidly end up with a need of over 5M€ to fund one game. That means that if you want to fund your own game with work for hire, and your game needs 40 people for 2 years at 6K€/month, you need to earn 5M€ before you can afford to spend 2 years on your own game. So, if you do work for hire for 2 years for somebody else with your 40 man team, you need to earn 10M€ to actually earn the freedom needed to develop your own thing. In the current market, that’s actually a tough proposition and rare are the jobs in the games industry where you are paid double the employee rate, so the reality is that you probable need to do even more work for hire.

And here’s some closing thoughts from Vincke’s blog post again:

To be able to fulfill the ambition of the “very big RPG that will dwarf them all”, we need to cash-rich enough to disappear from the planet for a couple of years, and focus on doing only that. We need to enter that development with plenty of RPG experience and technology, and we need to know that upon release, we’ll be able to recoup our investment so we don’t go down immediately afterwards because some publisher tells us “so long and thank you for all the fish”.

The dig at 38 Studios and Big Huge Games was probably unintentional, but that is as concise a summation of what happened to Curt Schilling’s empire as can really be given, and Larian Studios is understandably anxious to avoid that fate.

And it’s worth noting that in his clinical discussion of costs, Vincke isn’t really talking about unreasonable costs at all. He wants to pay his people, keep his hardware modern and his software current and legal, and ensure that the game can reach a wide enough audience to make good on the up-front investment required to develop it. He talks about the cost of outsourced artwork in looking at Divinity 2’s costs, but the costs thereof were fractional when compared to the cost of just paying people to make the games in the first place, so that those same people can continue to go home, eat, sleep, and…you know…live to make the games another day.

Original Post: There’s not a lot of coverage related to Larian Studios and their two upcoming Divinity titles, Dragon Commander and Original Sin. However, what little has been published this week has been…interesting, to say the least.

There have been a few more previews of Dragon Commander, which have tended to focus less on the game’s mechanics (which, if I understand correctly, are quite a hefty cross-genre combination of things) and more on its content. The religious tension at the core of its plot, its apparently deft handling of a variety of social issues, and its…European, shall we say, approach to nudity all merit mention.

Meanwhile, Sven Vincke sat down for an interview about Original Sin and basically stuck his neck out as far as possible: he wants to match Ultima 7 for world interactivity and Fallout for combat. To that I say: good luck, and please succeed!

Kotaku also published a lengthy preview of Original Sin, which generally praises the game, and also reveals some interesting details about its implementation. For example, Original Sin features two fixed player-characters, a man and a woman (SYMBOLISM!!!!), and has been architected from the ground up for two-player co-op play. The obvious question: what about someone who wants to play it solo?

[Solo] Players have, basically, three options. One is to set an AI personality for the partner not being played. If the AI is, say, hostile or aggressive, then the partner will tend toward those lines and actions. Another is to turn off party interaction, and have only the player-controlled character make all the decisions solo. And the last is to have one player choose lines and reactions for both characters.

An AI- or human-controlled partner could make the game interesting in ways a player does not necessarily intend or expect. The two characters can disagree: about the tone to take, about an action, about whether or not to kill someone… when they disagree, the system basically conducts a behind-the-scenes roll to see whose opinion wins. In the scene we were shown, that had the effect of killing off a more-or-less innocent NPC who probably could have been quite helpful down the line.

The game’s toolkit — which Kotaku brands a “level editor” (though I hope it also features a scripting interface, among other things) — also gets some praise for its flexibility.

Also, there have been a few more previews of the game. Positive press coverage for the win; let it not be said that people aren’t craving old-school RPG goodness!