Presentation
In many role-playing games, a closed door means finding the key or coming back later.
In a Larian game, the problem can quickly become different.
Can you pick the lock? Break the door? Go over the roof? Reach a window by stacking crates? Teleport someone behind? Or discover several hours later that this door ultimately had no importance?
This is probably the best way to understand Larian Studios.
Founded in 1996 in Ghent, Belgium, by Swen Vincke, the studio gradually specialized in RPGs. Its history took it from Divine Divinity to the Original Sin games, then to Baldur's Gate 3, without ever following a perfectly simple progression.
For a long time, Larian worked with different publishers and took on projects necessary for its survival. Then the studio progressively took back more control over its financing, distribution, and relationship with the public.
This autonomy allowed it to push much further an already old idea:
the world must not only contain choices; it must be built with enough rules for the player to invent their own solutions.
A surface can burn or conduct electricity.
A crate can serve as a step.
An ability can solve a problem for which it was not originally designed.
A character can receive different dialogue depending on his origin, class, information he knows, or decisions made several hours earlier.
Freedom therefore becomes a technical and narrative problem.
The more the player can intervene, the more the game must be able to remember, react, and sometimes accept that the situation goes in a direction the designer had not imagined as the main path.
Divinity: Original Sin formalizes this approach.
Original Sin 2 deepens it with origin characters, world reactions, and cooperation.
Baldur's Gate 3 transports it into Dungeons & Dragons, adds much more ambitious cinematic staging, and completely changes the studio's scale.
Larian now has several international offices while remaining independent.
The word therefore no longer means "small."
It means above all keeping control over what the studio wants to make and over the risks it accepts taking.
At Larian, the player's freedom and the studio's freedom ultimately tell the same story: getting more possibilities also means taking on more consequences.
History
1996-2009: create, survive, and search for a form
Larian Studios was founded in 1996 in Ghent by Swen Vincke.
The early years are far from the image of a large international studio.
The team made various games, applications, and consulting work to keep the company alive.
Its first published game was The LED Wars.
The real start of the line that would define Larian came with Divine Divinity in 2002.
The game gave the studio a universe, Rivellon, and already showed several obsessions: exploration, interactive objects, curiosity, and a willingness to give the player more space than the strict main path.
Beyond Divinity and then Divinity II continued the series, but Larian was still looking for the form that truly suited it.
The studio worked with different publishers and largely depended on external partners to finance and market its productions.
It therefore learned two things simultaneously:
make RPGs and survive long enough to keep making them.
2013-2014: independence and the Original Sin turning point
Divinity: Dragon Commander in 2013 still illustrated the studio's taste for mixing genres.
But the real turning point came with Divinity: Original Sin.
After about fifteen years of collaboration with different publishers, Larian sought to regain more control over its activity.
The studio directly took on more publishing functions and also used crowdfunding.
This evolution is not only economic.
It gave it more latitude to build the kind of RPG that really interested it.
Original Sin adopts turn-based combat, strongly develops cooperation, and makes the environment a system.
Water can conduct electricity.
Poison can burn.
Fire can produce steam.
Rules begin to meet.
The studio no longer needs to manually write every possible solution if the systems are coherent enough for the player to invent some of them.
Larian finally finds an RPG form directly matching its philosophy.
2017: Original Sin 2 adds identity and consequences
Divinity: Original Sin 2 was released in 2017.
The studio deepened almost every dimension of the first game: tactical combat, cooperation, systemic interactions, and especially world reactions to character identity.
A race, an origin, information, or a previous decision can modify a conversation.
Larian also developed the Origin Characters.
The principle seeks to bring together two usually separate models: the written hero and the customized character.
A character already has a past, relationships, and conflicts.
But the player can embody him and decide how he will live this story.
The world must therefore no longer only respond to what is done.
It must try to understand who does it.
This approach brings Larian close to certain sensations of tabletop role-playing.
Baldur's Gate 3: enter Dungeons & Dragons without disappearing
A small team began working on Baldur's Gate 3 at the end of 2016, before the official green light from Wizards of the Coast in January 2017.
The challenge is immense.
Baldur's Gate belongs to an essential CRPG history.
Behind the series lies Dungeons & Dragons, with several decades of rules and practices.
Larian therefore cannot simply apply its logo to this universe.
It must make two cultures coexist.
On one side, the foundations of the fifth edition of D&D.
On the other, the systemic philosophy built with the Original Sin games.
The result adapts the rules rather than mechanically reproducing them.
Classes, origins, skills, environment, physics, dialogue, and exploration must be able to interact while remaining recognizable as Dungeons & Dragons.
The project thus becomes D&D as seen by Larian, and not a simple simulator of rules.
Early Access as a laboratory
Baldur's Gate 3 went through a long Early Access period.
For Larian, this phase directly served design.
A studio that promises a lot of freedom has a particular problem: its own testers know the game's logic too well.
A large community brings thousands of unpredictable behaviors.
Players ignore an obvious route.
They combine systems in strange ways.
They find bugs or solutions no one had thought of.
This method fits perfectly with the studio's philosophy.
The more a game accepts the player's ideas, the more its development must observe what real players do when you stop telling them what they were supposed to do.
2023: Baldur's Gate 3 changes the scale
The PC version of Baldur's Gate 3 was released on August 3, 2023.
The success transformed Larian's cultural dimension.
The studio was already highly respected in the CRPG space.
It now reaches a much wider audience.
Larian above all succeeds in combining two ambitions that seemed hard to reconcile at this scale: great systemic freedom and very polished cinematic presentation.
The characters benefit from performance capture, facial animation, and much more detailed staging.
A systemic decision can therefore produce a consequence that remains emotionally readable on a companion's face.
The studio does not replace its systems with cinema.
It uses staging to make their consequences more human.
Growing without losing coherence
The production of Baldur's Gate 3 forced Larian to profoundly change its organization.
The studio now operates through seven international offices.
This growth brings more resources but creates another problem: how can several teams spread across different countries make a single game without giving the impression of assembling several separate productions?
Larian thus becomes a major studio while remaining independent.
This independence is above all about control.
The studio wants to decide which game to make, how much time to devote to certain problems, and what trade-offs it accepts.
Autonomy obviously has a flip side.
When decisions become more ambitious, Larian must also directly bear the financial and organizational risk.
After Baldur's Gate 3: return to Divinity
After its biggest success, Larian chose not to stay immediately locked into Baldur's Gate.
The studio turns again to its own universe with a new Divinity project.
This return is consistent with its history.
Original Sin allowed it to formalize systemic RPGs.
Original Sin 2 deepened identity, cooperation, and consequences.
Baldur's Gate 3 added a new scale and much more ambitious cinematic presentation.
The next Divinity can now absorb these learnings without having to be simply a copy of what came before.
The challenge is almost the opposite of that of the beginnings.
Larian no longer needs to prove that a complex RPG can find its audience.
It must now learn where to stop its ambition when many more ideas become technically and financially possible.
What Sets It Apart
Giving the player tools rather than just choices
Larian seeks to push back as far as possible the moment when the game must answer:
"Impossible."
The difference matters.
A choice planned in a dialogue already exists in the menu.
A systemic solution can be born directly in the player's mind.
Moving a crate, using teleportation, exploiting height, or transforming a surface sometimes allows approaching a situation in a way the quest did not explicitly propose.
The studio obviously cannot accept every idea.
But it builds enough rules for the player to regularly have the impression of having had one themselves.
Systems, consequences, and failure form the same chain
Freedom is of little interest if the world immediately forgets what the player just did.
Larian therefore builds its RPGs around a large number of states and reactions.
Origin, class, known information, people met, and past decisions can modify what follows.
Even failure can become a new branch.
A bad roll or a failed attempt does not necessarily force a restart.
It can produce another situation that must now be assumed.
The general principle then becomes:
act → produce a consequence → continue with that consequence.
This is what turns systemic freedom into a real role-playing game.
Turn-based leaves room for imagination
Since the Original Sin games, turn-based combat fits this philosophy particularly well.
Slowing the action gives the player time to observe.
They can look at height, surfaces, objects, enemy positions, and the possible order of actions.
Combat becomes almost an open puzzle.
The question is no longer just "which ability deals the most damage?"
It becomes:
"what does this space let me do?"
Turn-based thus gives enough time for systems to actually be explored.
Chaos can become content
This philosophy extends to cooperation.
Several players can separate, talk to different characters, and trigger events without consulting the rest of the group.
Human behavior then becomes an additional variable of the system.
This disorder can produce situations writers would never have written exactly in that form.
Larian therefore accepts a rather rare idea:
a good RPG story can sometimes come from someone doing something completely irresponsible while the others were looking elsewhere.
Chaos is not just tolerated.
It can become part of the memory.
Independence as freedom — and as responsibility
Larian is no longer a small studio.
Its international teams and the scale of Baldur's Gate 3 place it at the level of considerable AAA productions.
Its independence therefore means less absence of size than absence of an external owner directly controlling its creative decisions.
This autonomy allows taking risks, choosing atypical projects, and devoting significant resources to systems that are hard to produce.
It also forces the studio to bear the consequences of these choices itself.
The player's freedom and Larian's freedom ultimately have the same cost:
the more possibilities you want to allow, the more you must be able to support what they produce.
Good to Know
- Larian Studios was founded in 1996 in Ghent, Belgium, by Swen Vincke.
- The LED Wars is the first game published by the studio.
- Divine Divinity was released in 2002 and installed the Divinity / Rivellon universe in the studio's history.
- Divinity: Original Sin was released in 2014 and accompanied Larian's turn toward more independence and self-publishing.
- Divinity: Original Sin 2 was released in 2017 and notably deepened the Origin Characters, world reactions, and cooperation.
- Larian began working on Baldur's Gate 3 at the end of 2016 and got the green light from Wizards of the Coast in January 2017.
- Baldur's Gate 3 builds on Dungeons & Dragons and the rules of its fifth edition, adapted to Larian's systemic philosophy.
- Baldur's Gate 3 was released on PC on August 3, 2023 before later arriving on several other platforms.
- Larian now operates through seven international offices while remaining independent.
- After Baldur's Gate 3, the studio returns to its own universe with a new Divinity project.