Larian General Discussion Thread

[rusty_shackleford]

BG3 already sold millions of units and it isn't even released

 

[fantadomat]

BG3 already sold millions of units and it isn't even released

Why millions when it could be milliards?

 

[lycanwarrior]

Glassdoor review from last month.

"Good for beginners, bad for pros, awful for dreamers"
Former Employee - Anonymous Employee
Doesn't Recommend

I worked at Larian Studios full-time for more than a year

Pros

Working on large projects can boost your resume.

Cons

Don't fall into that hype made by Metacritic scores. The everyday reality is different.


If you are a beginner it is a good place to start. You can learn a lot working on complex projects. Though be prepared. Larian is not a cool indie family but rather a corporation with several studios around the world. Most of your time you will be working and communicating online with people you never met in person.

If you are a grown up professional this place is not for you. The custom engine is a headache and the development process is chaotic. Be prepared to be shocked by a level of professional incompetence of your superior, the company is filled with people who are in charge of things, because they are here from the beginning. Salaries are low compared to other studios. Benefits and bonuses for overtimes and crunches from successful releases are laughable and rather insulting. Working on large scale open world games is boring and exhausting.

And for those who are passionate enthusiasts who dreamed about groundbreaking open world games. Your expectations will be crushed here. Most of your time you will be doing the same routine job, over and over again, trying to fill another open world with countless assets, quests and bugs. You'll be doing it with hundreds of other coworkers whose names you don't even know. You will have to do that because the game has to be big to be praised by players and journalists. To earn more money.

No matter your experience and position in the company you are just a machine inside a big factory. But unlike a traditional factory where employees have fixed work hours, clear goals and established pipelines, you will be working in a chaos, often surrounded by unprofessional colleagues, crunching without deserved benefits.

Don't fall into that trap. AAA gamedev is dying and needs significant changes. But if you are curious and want to experience what it's like to work in a sick industry, Larian or CD Projekt are great places for that.

but I don't doubt that part about Larian having less-than-suitable leads because they happened to be the best of a bad bunch back when they made Divinity 2 and well, what can you do? "The custom engine is a headache" is also funny considering how better-feeling it is than Unity, though given how unpopular the mod tools are, I can believe it.

Interesting comment about open world games and why they tend to up being buggy and yet popular at the same time.

Otherwise, it sounds like another gaming fanboy with starry eyes about working in the industry and seeing the reality.

 

[Infinitron]

Larian Barcelona are apparently the development team of Blitworks, who did the Divinity: Original Sin 2 Switch port.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Larian Barcelona are apparently the development team of Blitworks, who did the Divinity: Original Sin 2 Switch port.

they also did the BG3 stadia port

 

[Shrimp]

They're probably already working on a PS5 port for the eventual enhanced/definitive/GOTY/younameit edition that'll be released a year or two after the main game's launch.

 

[Gyor]

OMG, Swen you madman, stahp

The Larian Empire continues to expand.

 

[fantadomat]

Larian Barcelona are apparently the development team of Blitworks, who did the Divinity: Original Sin 2 Switch port.

they also did the BG3 stadia port

Clearly a smart investment. Can't wait for all the games that larian will export to stadion.

 

[Shrimp]

Larian Barcelona are apparently the development team of Blitworks, who did the Divinity: Original Sin 2 Switch port.

they also did the BG3 stadia port

Clearly a smart investment. Can't wait for all the games that larian will export to stadion.

I'm sure they were paid a lucrative amount of money for it, so it probably was a profit for them even if the Stadia turned out to be a disaster.

 

[fantadomat]

Larian Barcelona are apparently the development team of Blitworks, who did the Divinity: Original Sin 2 Switch port.

they also did the BG3 stadia port

Clearly a smart investment. Can't wait for all the games that larian will export to stadion.

I'm sure they were paid a lucrative amount of money for it, so it probably was a profit for them even if the Stadia turned out to be a disaster.

Hmm doesn't make sense to buy a whole studio that specialize in porting shit when don't have a lot of games to port. It is better to just hire them when you have a game to port,when you make one game in 5 years.

 

[Shrimp]

Larian Barcelona are apparently the development team of Blitworks, who did the Divinity: Original Sin 2 Switch port.

they also did the BG3 stadia port

Clearly a smart investment. Can't wait for all the games that larian will export to stadion.

I'm sure they were paid a lucrative amount of money for it, so it probably was a profit for them even if the Stadia turned out to be a disaster.

Hmm doesn't make sense to buy a whole studio that specialize in porting shit when don't have a lot of games to port. It is better to just hire them when you have a game to port,when you make one game in 5 years.

Oh no, I meant that I assume Larian was paid money 2 or 3 (if not more) years ago to bring the game to Stadia, not that it was a recent transaction. If they actually make another office in some random city then it's probably either because they need to burn profit money to avoid taxes or some shit OR because they genuinely feel like it's a worthwhile investment. I don't know if the team that's been given an office in Barcelona is the same one that also has been responsible for all the different Original Sin 2 ports, because that game is starting to reach Skyrim levels of ports.
For all we know they could already be planning/working on porting games like DOS2/BG3 to more random platforms

 

[Roguey]

Yup,you must be really retarded to have 7 international studios when you are producing mediocre games for niche genre. One flop and he will be selling his grandma's furniture.

Swen's business strategy has been YOLO ever since Divinity: Original Sin. It'll work fine until it doesn't. BG3 won't be the end.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Most of the studios are tiny and specialized on a few tasks, it's not like they have 7 full studios with equal number of employees as their main studio.

 

[:Flash:]

Whatever you think of the current direction of Larian, Swen is the living proof that perseverance pays off.

Larian is the last remaining independent RPG studio from the 90s. I was a member of their forum back before the release of Divine Divinity, which was almost exclusively German, due to LMK being a Dark Eye license game. I even have a L.E.D. Wars CD with Swen and Kirill acting in FMV sequences, because every strategy game had to have FMV back then.
Anyway, they were basically bankrupt after the LMK debacle. They were basically bankrupt after the release of Divine Divinity (everyone was fired). They probably were almost bankrupt a few times after that. And Swen always struggled on and found a way to continue. They had to do work for hire more than once. The reason Beyond Divinity is so crappy is that they were earning money with work for hire while scraping that game together from the remains of Divine Divinity during the night.
Compare that to Troika, who just folded the company (which wasn't bankrupt) because "publishers just weren't interested in RPGs any more, so we couldn't get a new publishing deal".

And Swen always managed to retain the rights to all of their games. This was pretty forward thinking by Swen and something no other studio in their position managed to achieve. It came in quite handy when Steam and GoG got off the ground and old games suddenly become worth something again.
So I say, if anyone deserves the success he currently has, it's Swen.

 

[fantadomat]

Most of the studios are tiny and specialized on a few tasks, it's not like they have 7 full studios with equal number of employees as their main studio.

Still more than 200k a year lol. It may be a small shit but it adds up quickly.

 

[[UCHIHA]XxDarkSasuke420xX]

>>Don't mind me just your average Larian fan popping in

 

[PulsatingBrain]

Still more than 200k a year lol. It may be a small shit but it adds up quickly.

Don't you get bored with endlessly giving a fuck about every little thing?

 

[Grotesque]

Compare that to Troika, who just folded the company (which wasn't bankrupt) because "publishers just weren't interested in RPGs any more, so we couldn't get a new publishing deal".

And thank god they folded.
They died as heroes and didn't live enough for us to see them nowadays as villains.


And all this "perseverance" shit for what!? Money? More money to make more and more money to make the perfect RPG of their dreams while bathing in more money for that sports car, that 1 billion m^2 mansion, private jet, 7 other local studios on every continent?

Money will never bring artistic resonance and lost prime days.

Larian is the last remaining independent RPG studio from the 90s.

The name of a company means jack shit, as does how old it is.
People make a studio great, not the letters on a plaque at the entrance.

That's why is futile to be enthusiast and have high expectations for a game/any game, just because a "legacy" dev studio will make it, as if the letters forming its name is a guarantee for the game's ethos and quality.

A beloved classic game that will be forever etched in the minds of gamers, is like a perfect storm, where different beautiful mishaps coalesce into something beautiful and irrevocably unique.
Where even the janitor that swept the floor after hours had a part in it.

 

[fantadomat]

Still more than 200k a year lol. It may be a small shit but it adds up quickly.

Don't you get bored with endlessly giving a fuck about every little thing?

Ahh if i did,i wouldn't have ended in macro economics

 

[Infinitron]

Friendly banter among the former Kickstarter Big Three:

 

[vortex]

That dog named Pilar is black hound 'cause Swen always wanted to make BG3: The Black Hound but couldn't, only later Sawyer's The Black Hound was cancelled and he made Pilars of Eternity named after Swen's dog and now Swen is making BG3. I guess everything came in full circle.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Have any other major studio heads kept a blog like Swen Vincke did? I don't mean a whitewashed one, but one that was their actual thoughts.
http://www.lar.net/2012/03/02/thoughts-on-game-journalism/

Games journalism obviously is a sensitive topic for a game developer because it’s like a girlfriend asking – do you think there’s something wrong with how I cook? If you’re honest you’re doomed, if not, you can look forward to things like oversalted steak for the rest of your life

here’s a RPG that was released not that long ago and which I haven’t played yet, but the claims that were made about that game in certain reviews are so unbelievable, that I don’t believe a word of what the early day reviewers have been writing. There were even previews of the review, with some of the wording completely inconsistent with previous reviews from the same magazine when it came to RPGs.

As I said I still need to play it, so I’ll find out for myself – but despite having a high meta critic ratings, it has a 6 as a user rating, so that’s probably an indication I won’t like it. If this were booking.com actually, I wouldn’t book it, based on the user reviews.

Going to guess Dragon Age 2?

Big studios, big publishers: As a reviewer, do you dare go against big publisher X who might happen to be the company indirectly paying a large part of your paycheck through ads? A lot of reviewers say they do, but when you look at their scoring behavior, you can see that in a lot of cases – they don’t. There’s often a little scoring bonus I think.

 

[Heinrich]

Have any other major studio heads kept a blog like Swen Vincke did? I don't mean a whitewashed one, but one that was their actual thoughts.
http://www.lar.net/2012/03/02/thoughts-on-game-journalism/

Games journalism obviously is a sensitive topic for a game developer because it’s like a girlfriend asking – do you think there’s something wrong with how I cook? If you’re honest you’re doomed, if not, you can look forward to things like oversalted steak for the rest of your life

here’s a RPG that was released not that long ago and which I haven’t played yet, but the claims that were made about that game in certain reviews are so unbelievable, that I don’t believe a word of what the early day reviewers have been writing. There were even previews of the review, with some of the wording completely inconsistent with previous reviews from the same magazine when it came to RPGs.

As I said I still need to play it, so I’ll find out for myself – but despite having a high meta critic ratings, it has a 6 as a user rating, so that’s probably an indication I won’t like it. If this were booking.com actually, I wouldn’t book it, based on the user reviews.

Going to guess Dragon Age 2?

Big studios, big publishers: As a reviewer, do you dare go against big publisher X who might happen to be the company indirectly paying a large part of your paycheck through ads? A lot of reviewers say they do, but when you look at their scoring behavior, you can see that in a lot of cases – they don’t. There’s often a little scoring bonus I think.

Swen's blog dying is obviously a great shame. If I remember correctly a couple of years ago in an interview he said that he would stop doing regular blogs and and talks and update videos because it was time not spent developing and he thought that was irresponsible.

 

[Alienman]

Probably old hat for most, but I didn't know about it before casually reading stuff on the Steam forum... and that is that apparently Tencent own 30% of Larian Studios. Not sure how legit it is because I can't find much on it, but it seems real I guess?

One of the few sites that mention it: https://www.archyde.com/baldurs-gat...ported-to-be-owned-by-tencent-baldurs-gate-3/



If true, I do wonder if it has any effect on the game, going by censors and stuff. But not too fun regardless, another company semi-owned by CCP.

 

[Nano]

Is rusty_shackleford still going to fanboy over Larian when they officially become a Chinese company?