Type Video game studio Number of employees 40 Headquarters Oudenaarde, Belgium Founded 1996, Oudenaarde, Belgium | Products Divinity series Website larian.com Founder Swen Vincke | |
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Industry Interactive entertainment Video games Divinity: Original Sin, Divinity: Original Sin II, Divinity II, Divine Divinity, Divinity: Original Sin Enha | ||
Divinity original sin larian studios e3 2012 developer presentation
Larian Studios is a Belgian game developer which was founded in 1996 by Swen Vincke. It currently focuses on developing role-playing video game and educational games, apart from LEDWars which is a hardcore strategy game and a number of casino games.
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Notable works
Larian's first project was called The Lady, the Mage and the Knight. However, they were unable to gain the recognition of any publishers as none believed they were capable of creating a game. In order to rectify this and to prove them wrong, they developed LED Wars, a strategy game that was developed within 5 months and published by Ionos in 1997. As a result, The Lady, the Mage and the Knight soon evolved into a collaborative project between Larian Studios and Attic Entertainment Software. Due to various problems between the two development studios and its publisher, the project was abandoned in 1999.
In 2002, Larian completed work on Divinity: Sword of Lies which was published under the name Divine Divinity by CDV. In 2004, Beyond Divinity, the expansion to Divine Divinity, was published in two editions: the standard version by Ubisoft Entertainment GmbH and the deluxe version by MediaMix Benelux which contained Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity and a novella by Rhianna Pratchett called "Son of Chaos".
Also in 2004, KetnetKick, an educational game, was developed for Ketnet and released by Transposia. In 2006, Beyond Divinity was re-released under Gold Games 9 by Ubisoft Entertainment which was a set of 10 games on 6 DVDs.
In March 2008, Adventure Rock, an online virtual world was completed and released. This was followed by the release of KetnetKick 2 in October 2008 by VRT, the national broadcaster in Belgium. In March 2009, GulliLand was published by Jeunesse TV, a French national broadcasting channel. In January 2010, Larian released Divinity II: Ego Draconis - the sequel to Divine Divinity - to the U.S. market on Xbox 360 and Windows simultaneously, after releases in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Russia and Benelux. Larian has also produced Divinity II: Flames of Vengeance, and built a Gold Deluxe version that holds all Divinity II episodes, called Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga.
In August 2013 Larian released Divinity: Dragon Commander, a game mixing strategy and role-playing elements in the Divinity universe, before the events of Divine Divinity. The game has received an overall positive reception and gained attention thanks to its novel approach to strategy.
Larian's latest game, Divinity: Original Sin has been released after several delays in June 2014. The game was funded partly thanks to a Kickstarter campaign raising over 1 million dollars, out of an estimated 4 million budget, upon its release the game has been the fastest selling game of Larian to date. The game is a turn-based role-playing game, and the events are set between Dragon Commander and Divine Divinity in the story.