Larian Studios, the enormous team behind recent smash hits Divinity: Original Sin 2 and the GOTY-sweeping RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 have announced they’re opening a seventh studio, this one in Warsaw, Poland. The new recruits will be joining the efforts to work on at least two RPGs, which the studio (unsurprisingly) describes as “very ambitious.” Larian has been around for an extraordinary 28 years, made all the more impressive when you realize that it’s been the same company all the way through, not some hedge fund-managed ghoul wearing the flayed skin of a long-dead developer.
Founded by the man who’s still in charge, Swen Vincke, the Belgian company has expanded all around the world, with enough studios to warrant a bullet-pointed list. That’s the sort of spread you might expect from one of the major publishers, not a privately owned, independent company. (Shout-out to my home town of Guildford, the most mediocre place in all of England.
) It’s downright peculiar that Larian is only making two games, given its scale, but it hasn’t announced the two games it’s working on, (though one of them is obviously a new Divinity), so it’s not like there’s a reason to fudge that number. The company’s success is even more impressive when you remember that its earliest three games, the Divine Divinity series, were pretty average. Not many game studios can build an empire on 6s and 7s, but then in 2014, Larian blew everyone’s expectations out of the water with the su.
