I haven’t published a Larian-related round-up in a while, so it’s nice to be able to do so this week. Much of the news focuses on the upcoming Ultima 7-inspired Divinity: Original Sin, which was previewed in PC Gamer UK this week. Sadly, not much new in the way of details came out, though the preview write-up begins (very promisingly) by noting the connection to Ultima.

Studio head Sven Vincke also penned a blog post entitled “Seeking the Golden Path” which seems to have touched off a fair bit of discussion around the gaming-focused part of the Internet. In it, he criticizes many of the business strategies at work in the gaming industry today, and muses on what Larian’s “golden path” toward an uber-RPG might be.

Here’s a taste (selected for no other reason that the brief critique of Canada):

Instead of turning our eyes to simpler things, we decided to go full monty and dived blindfolded into next-gen-console-development-hell, creating the monster that was Divinity II: Ego Draconis, and eventually polymorphed that into Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga. That we burned ourselves pretty badly in the process shouldn’t come as a surprise, but in hindsight, it wasn’t such a bad strategy.

I deduce this from observing the scarcity of survivors among my fellow independent developers whom I used to meet at such sad events as Game Connection. So something must have set Larian apart, and I think us not abandoning what at that time was considered the forefront of game development was an important factor in this. We certainly became better developers as a result of the entire thing, and the games we’re making now are only possible because of what we went through then.

But that’s the past, and the question our journalist friend had was about the immediate future — what indeed are we thinking, continuing to make games when there are such apparently fantastic games like Far Cry 3 and Watchdogs on horizon, paid for by the Canadian tax payers? Shouldn’t we crawl in a little corner and slowly fade away faced with such brilliance?

Oh, and apparently there is a Divinity: Dragon Commander board game that will be shown off at GamesCon later this month. That should be interesting.