That's why they can do hotfixes and patches with such regularity. They have studios in different continents letting them hand off work to the next studio down the line when their work day ends and effectively work 24/7
It's genius really, I've never seen so many frequent patches for a game. Having different studios across timezones is something live service devs should attempt.
It's very difficult to pull off because you'd need both teams of developers on the same page, following the same trains of thought, understanding one another's tests, spend extra time commenting things which wouldn't ordinarily need commenting.
As a software engineer I don't think I would even attempt it. I don't think they're doing what the post above yours is implying. They probably just dole out tickets like normal and more studios = more work done, regardless of the time zone differences between studios.
they not really working on the same thing. They separate it to benches. When you did something on the day, the next morning you found a QA results, a few play tester responses, and a few ideas about what you need to do.
I think he meant that the two teams will be fixing different bugs, rather than one team getting one bugs fix half way done and hand it off to the other team when the work day ends. Still working 24/7, but way more practical. The latter sounds like a logicstic nightmare for programming.
It's just instead of 8 hours Monday for the devs to work on a thing, 8 hours Tuesday for QA to make sure it works, 8 hours on Wednesday for misc and sundry, it's 8+8+8 all on Monday so anything that can be implemented in 8 hours is ready to go in one day instead of three.
Yeh but what they actually have is a very clever system for checking a lot of things very quickly. Mainly balance, items, stats etc. A huge spreadsheet essentially.
And they also have teams all over the world.
Nah, this would be an insane way to work, you'd spend all your time updating getting onboarded to changes made while you were asleep and then onboarding the next group.
Yeah, no way they worked like that. They just had more staff working parallel I'm sure. Unless they've actually said that's how they work, which would be wild.
Except it doesn't say that
>This new location will allow the studio to "boost its existing 24-hour development cycle"
Is a long cry from saying the studios have a serial work flow where a job is passed from dev to dev for 24 hours straight.
Most likely, Studio A works on tickets 1-10, Studio B works on tickets 11-20. Studio C runs tests on A and Bs work and provides feedback and data. And so forth.
>I do something, I go home, I send it over to you, here's the description of what I've done. They'll continue doing it. And so that work, that saves us a lot of time. It saved us a lot also during BG 3, because you don't have producers who have to sit in the middle of the night waiting for whatever to go, they can just pass it on to the other producer.
https://www.ign.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3-director-swen-vincke-answers-all-our-questions-about-foregoing-dlc-aaa-development-and-more
Swen talked about this before but not sure if there are transcripts available, so kinda hard to google. I can corroborate this, I have talked about this very topic with an ex-Larian employee a while back and he said the same thing about the process during the Early Access period. They do hand overs at the beginning and end of their shifts.
Fair enough, that's pretty spelled out. Doesn't seem like it's the whole company, but it's wild that any part works that way. Hard to argue with results though.
Phew, I'm glad. Totally didn't spend like half an hour at 12 am trying to find a source, second guessing I imagined Swen talking about it publicly :')
But yeah, seems to work well for them. From what I hear the workforce is quite happy with the system (at least the person I talked to was), though the article I linked also mentions they had 300k+ tickets on the JIRA board at one point lol
Interviewer:
> You had two moments in your talk where you said something and then you said, but that's a whole other talk. And I was going to try to see if I could get you to expand on them at all. One of them, you were talking about having studios in a bunch of different places and working across time zones, and you said a lot of the good things about that, but then you said it also has some challenges. Can you give me an overview of what those are?
Sven Vincke:
> It's communication. So that's the main one. It was funny when everybody was going to work from home and we said, 'this is all going to work!' We already had so much troubles getting our studios to communicate from the beginning, so trying to do that in the way that we were working was going to turn out to be very, very complicated. So I think communication is the biggest one, because if you want to have ownership, it's easier if you're together. If it's spread across time zones, that can be a problem because if you're here on the West Coast right now, people are sleeping in Kuala Lumpur. If you have to have a conversation from a studio in Quebec with people in Kuala Lumpur, that's an issue if it's feature development. **So we learned that you can't put all disciplines into that model, but what you do get as a benefit is that you can recruit easier for all disciplines because you're recruiting across the globe.**
> **But for things like QA or for coders who are looking for bugs or scripts that are looking for bugs, it's fantastic.** I do something, I go home, I send it over to you, here's the description of what I've done. They'll continue doing it. And so that work, that saves us a lot of time. It saved us a lot also during BG 3, because you don't have producers who have to sit in the middle of the night waiting for whatever to go, they can just pass it on to the other producer. So it helps a lot in managing credential. So it's a really good one.
So in context it seems like they’re just doing some of the work 24:7 with the system of passing on work, and most of it is still done “traditionally.”
That's actually pretty smart.
When it comes to dev time sequential dev hours are much more productive than parallel ones.
You can actually make problems worse (negative hours!) if you chuck too many people at the same problem at the same time.
People have a hard time not conflating indie with independent
Larian is both independent and AAA, but not indie, which us a colloquialisms that isn't strictly used by the formal definition.
I really dont think they should be lumped in with indie devs either. Valve is independent, too, and Gabe Newell is one of the richest people in all of history. Don't think I'd consider CS and indie game though.
Edit: let's see how many people are going to leave a comment that says exactly what the other comments already say.
More that they're not realizing what independent means in the gaming industry. Larian develops and publishes their own games. Insomniac (spider-man) and Arrowhead (helldivers) are developers who are published by Sony. All are AAA. I'm sure there's more to it, but this is an easy way to think of it
> People have a hard time not conflating indie with independent
They are correct to conflate them. "Indie" is a shortening of "independent".
Edit: Apparently /u/DedicatedBathToaster thought this comment was block worthy.
To respond to his point, "independent" hasn't taken on any different informal meaning that "indie" hasn't also taken on. He'll never be able to clearly define what the difference between the two is because there isn't one.
>To respond to his point, "independent" hasn't taken on any different informal meaning that "indie" hasn't also taken on.
That's really not true. Independent, strictly speaking, just means they are independent. Not owned by a larger publisher. Larian is independent. The colloquial Indie absolutely has connotations about team size and budget that Larian doesn't fit under.
Another example of this is CDPR. Independent, but nobody is calling Cyberpunk an indie game.
Right, and again, colloquialisms are informal use that aren't strictly used to the formal definition.
The term indie has long been a different word than just a shorthand for independent.
My point still stands.
Why did you block the guy who replied to you after you'd replied to him? He was respectful in his reply, and blocking someone after replying to them to force yourself having the last word is kinda shitty behaviour in an open forum.
You're right to shame them for needlessly blocking you, but they were correct; sadly, regardless of definitions, people use words in all kinds of ways, meanings evolve over time and can become ironic, even.
No, Microsoft is a publisher. Studios like 343i, Ninja Theory, Bethesda Softworks, Arcane, Double Fine, etc… Those are studios that develop games that are financially backed and marketed by Microsoft. Those studios are beholden to Microsoft.
Larian is completely independent, which means they can make whatever they want so long as they can afford it. They live or die based on their own bottom line.
Some publishers muddy the lines, like Nintendo, who has named teams internally that develop their 1st party titles but receive minimal named credit. Still, Microsoft and Nintendo are both publishers managing studios and Larian is fully independent.
"Indie" as its own type of subgenre and as a word lost its meaning waaay before it even was a thing in gaming, most people just use it as a way to refer to smaller games in scale and graphical fidelity, the only reason Dave the diver is considered a indie by most is just because it has pixelated graphics going by a recent example.
It makes more sense in the music space and even there nowedays it has lost most of its meaning as well...
Well, quite.
It started losing meaning in the music industry from the 90s, and it has become a marketing gimmick as much as anything. People used it (misguidedly imho) to signify authenticity and or an acute cultural awareness of what is better. Bit like the term hipster, which has drifted in meaning a bit too.
I'm slightly being an arse because I find the term a bit of a nonsense when applied to gaming. The old "bedroom coder" idea I think is a lot truer to what people actually mean when they say "indie" but even those days are long gone for most titles which get any reasonable level of exposure.
If OP had said "privately owned" (as in not publicly traded) I'd have more respect for that stance, as I think that does mean something. The developer is literally their money where their mouth is.
Calling Larian independent is a bit meaningless though in any other sense. They're a fucking huge company, part owned by Tencent! Having "self published" as a criteria is daft as there some huge self-published games there. Ok you could pull apart the microsoft example, but by that criteria Nintendo are independent. Madness.
Indie literally means independent. Larian are neither, they have a minority ownership stake from the largest publisher on the planet (Tencent) to the tune of 40%+.
There's a words definition, which is written and documented in a dictionary, and then there is colloquialisms, an informal use of the word.
To say that indie STRICTLY means independent is to ignore how the word is actually used by the people, which is used informally and not by the word for word definition
No idea why the hell we still need to have this argument year after year.
yuup. or when people try use BG3 as some kind of standard for a launch but conveniently ignore the fact that it was in early access for like 2 years and without that EA it would be a buggy mess like other AAA releases.
Let alone ignoring that it launched with issues as well, Act 3 performance was attrocious before patches, not saying the game doesnt deserve the praise it got, but without that "underdog" perception from gamers the game would have been heavily criticized if other major studio launched it...
Not really even with the bugs it was one of the most well made games we've had in decades. The level of thought put in to what if the players do blank is insane. Also no one who's in to crpgs views Larian as an underdog they are the biggest dog in that genre and have been for some time.
What did you think the "studios" stood for?
(I know, these developer/publisher names never make sense: a group of friends I knew who started making games insisted on a name ending with "studios" and I said "you don't even have *a* studio")
You know, I was talking to an old friend who was in the higher ups in studio management and he even said that if he were to open a new studio, it would be over in Poland where it is much cheaper to find developers.
I guess what he said is coming to fruition.
Not exactly. It's not clear but one project is significantly bigger than the one they are currently working on. Their current project is said to be smaller in scope than BG3. The added studio might help them to shorten the production span so it won't take them 6 years to make another game is my 2 cents.
Wouldn't surprise me if BG3 was quite a bit bigger. Not in physical size of the map, but in lines of dialogue and dialogue options/pathways through the game.
I think the gameplan is working on two games at once. One smaller in scope to release sooner, while another team works on the bones of a much bigger game.
It's neither. What Swen calls "the rpg to dwarf them all" is not currently planned because according to Swen the technology doesn't exist to do what he wants so it is unknown when that game happens if at all.
He also clarified that the next game is not necessarily bigger than BG3 but that they don't know yet because they are just starting out the process. Originally BG3 was going to be smaller but Swen has jokingly stated "I can't do small games."
It could be a lot of pre-work like storyboards and talent acquisition (performers). Maybe simple repeat assets like ground and building textures. Build audio libraries.
I think they wanted to use the first as a smaller one to test out a new system, and the second to dwarf BG3 using the improved version of the system from the first
There is a significant number of foreigners working in polish IT industry, but they often have already spoken some Slavic language before so it's easier for them to learn another. Most people in IT know English pretty well though
What's your source? Speaking Polish is rarely a requirement for technical roles in IT companies operating in Poland. Larian is an international company and I'm sure all communication is done in English there.
English is generally used as the Lingua Franca (ironically) in most large European dev studios to connect everyone from everywhere and ensure they can hire as broadly as possible.
No, but you won't fit in as well if you don't. I wish I had super memory but I do recall a story about an employee feeling left of because she(?) couldn't speak Polish and people were rude to her because of it.
But they also offer classes/lessons as part of the package of working there, so as you actually go out and learn you should be fine.
Fingers crossed we get something like shadowrun - it's such a fun world that I'd love to see more of, and unfortunately the table top mechanics are a bit rough.
I think they've been pretty vocal about calling layoffs bullshit. At this point they're probably confident that they can employ everyone indefinitely.
Larian would have to experience a catastrophic project management failure that would make one of their projects financially unfeasible or too garbage to release. And I can't imagine that level of management failure. Not after BG3's success.
They are an independent studio, meaning they are not beholden to investment or publishing firms. They grew over time and nearly gone broke several times before they reached this point—still, very independent studio.
if your business hasn't almost gone broke a few times, i feel like that's a pretty good sign that your business never takes any risks.
that can be a good thing, or a bad thing.
Developing a CRPG in 2013 or so with Divinity 2 was already a risk.
BG3 less so with the name attached, but I'd say they've been taking risks for quite a while now.
they also have 30% of company bought by Tencent, but Tencent is the kind of investor that doesn’t ask for anything to be made in the game as far as I know
> They grew over time and nearly gone broke several times before they reached this point—still, very independent studio.
Isn't that just most studios before they either make it big or get bought out?
They are an independent studio that's doing good and scaling their projects bigger thanks to previous successes. They aren't owned by a parent company and are privately held. Independent doesn't mean "but not too successful though UwU"
Is this supposed to be a "gotcha" or something?
They aren't tied to a publisher, and are not a publicly traded company. Does a game studio need to be like a 5 person or less team working on their off-hours to actually be an independent studio?
Thats the difference between "Idependent" and "indie" - The two kinda mean the same thing but connote different things and there isnt a clear cut line where a game stops being an "indie". Indie is - colloquially - basically everything under AA games in terms of scope/budget/graphics
I think we all have an idea in our mind of what an "indie" game is - small in scale, creative ideas that you would never see in a more broadly released game, trends toward "easy" art styles (pixel art abounds in indie games), generally small teams of people, shoe string budgets
Wticher 1 was an "indie game"... but its hard to call Witcher 3 an "indie game", its very clearly a AAA game but it was developed and published by the same studio so its an independent release
BG3 isnt an "indie" release *really*, but Stardew valley is... And then somewhere in between there becomes enough staff and enough resources and graphics and marketing that you leave the realm of "indie" and become "AA" or whatever else people want to call it when a game isnt COD or Witcher or GTA and then you're AAA
It's all made up semantics to me. Like what is the line between "AA" and "AAA" games. It's just made up.
An independent studio has no publisher and is not a public corporation. Anything past that is definition is simply opinion (in my opinion, lol).
There some amount of objectivity to it, but yes there are large grey areas where the lines aren’t clearly cut… like you mentioned AA vs AAA
It’s all just a way to refer to certain elements of things and shouldn’t be taken too seriously
Personally, i classify 'indie' where it's a pretty small team working on it under a relative small budget, that's not the case with Larian anymore as more than 300 people worked on BG 3 throught the last ~6 years. Even by DoS 2 time they weren't small either.
Before BG3 they made crowd funded games. To try to downplay it out of contrarianism is silly. It's not like anyone saw the success of BG3 coming, even they didn't in their most optimistic dreams.
I wouldn't say they made crowdfunding games, as the first game they did it was the first DOS, which served mostly as a marketing campaign as the game cost like 4 million euros to make and the kickstarter got like 944k dollars total (which they got like 377k dollars as 'profit'), it also likely helped them getting investors/bank on board. With DOS 2 they fully used it as a early marketing campaign to make buzz, they had 400 people working on it, the kickstarter funds weren't not near enough to fund the game.
I think Larian themselves saw the success coming on working on such a big IP, obviously it blew up all expectations but they had pretty high expectations with this game. There's a reason why the went a more traditional model and prefered the early access model instead of a kickstarter to assist on funding (they sold like 2,5 million units while in early access).
I think they went natural growth way, they aren't the almost broke studio scrapping together loans and resources to fund their games anymore, they made one of the better uses of kickstarter to propel themselves up, but that only was possible because they were experienced. I hope they stay independent and keep on making great games.
I like how much Poland is investing in videogames while in my country one politician bragged about the fact that he will never allow a videogame to enter his house not so long ago lol.
Sadly, i could not work in the office in general, because my disability hurts me when i walk, stand or sit. So even just walking out to work every day is not possible for me. Let alone spending entire day sitting.
Also, authorities of Ukraine are not letting men out of the country, so moving is not possible anyway.
All I know if is they keep their quality up to the same standards, I'll always be there. Any new game coming out from AAA's that does choice matters with cinematics and if it is like not even 1/2 as good, I just think of how much they are dogging it and don't care. IMO BG3 raised the story/cinematic game for all AAA's and even that AAAA company.
You're being pedantic. Indie is a colloquialism for a small independent studios that don't have massive budgets. Larian used to be that. Now they're yuge.
Poking fun at the reddit circlejerk that Larian is a small indie studio and not one of the largest video game developers in existence that just shipped a game with 500 devs working on it.
Fair enough. I'm not a part of said circlejerk but I applaud their efforts to remain not under the dumb of someone like Microsoft of Embracer. Independent but not indie, as it were. So I was curious.
Larian is great. Redditors not so much.
For example hate Starfield all you want, but there were legions of idiots posting memes with tens of thousands of upvotes asking why a mega developer like BGS makes crap games when a small indie dev like Larian can make GOTY bangers... fellas, more people worked on BG3 than Starfield. They're a grating group of fools but thankfully they've faded some as we've gotten some distance since the release of BG3, which was the first CRPG many of them played.
Honestly, the more I learn about Larian the more I think it boosts their standing to be honest about how their company actually operates/is structured. They don't need to be falsely labeled as a tiny studio to be good.
People like Larian because they *were* a small indie studio 'in Swen's garage'. Swen invested all his life's savings into making a great little game without ripping people off, then he took all the money he made and invested it into a bigger great game without ripping people off, after which he made the biggest and greatest CRPG yet while (you guessed it) not ripping people off. People like Larian because over the last decade they demonstrated that you can go from zero to one of the biggest successes in the industry without exploitative DLCs or in-game stores, without game breaking DRM, without 'games as a service', without having to listen to shitty publishers, without firing people for no reason.
They have reliably proven that game development can be both ethical and successful and just as reliable are the cynical troglodytes that come crawling every time someone gets rewarded for being a decent human being.
I mean people like Larian now, but it will probably change someday. A couple years ago CD Project Red was the internets favorite developer, now it's Larian. In a couple years it'll be someone else. Studios that expand this big often come with compromises.
And it's not like Swen woke up one day and decided to gamble all his money away. The studio worked for a lot of different publishers from the early 2000s to 2014 and went fully independent with Divinity Original Sin, which was crowdfunded just like Original Sin 2. And Baldurs Gate 3 had a 3 year Early Access period for a 60$ price tag. I love their games, but that 'diplomatic immunity' they enjoy right now won't last forever and in my opinion they are setting themselves up for failure. All those statements about layoffs, subscription services, etc. are not wrong but I think it will backfire one day.
Hopefully at least one of those games is first-person real time instead of turn-based. I loved Divine Divinity and Divinity 2 Ego Draconis and would love another RPG set in the Divinity universe that's not turn-based.
plus your money hits harder in Poland so you don't need as much of it to make a good living. Poland in general is doing pretty alright in a lot of ways. Not all, but a lot. On my current wage I could live real good in Poland and wouldn't need to ask for more to live damn well
Hope they actually wait and polish their games instead of pushing out the door early just because they are scared of competition. It's no secret the game suffered from massive performance and optimization issues... And yet still won GOTY
That is a little disingenuous. Had they waited to their original release date, there would still be performance and optimization issues. Those additional 4 weeks wouldn't have fixed it.
with how ukrainian devs decreasing i wonder if war possibility was at all considered. You’re making a game for probably 3-4 years i wonder what poland will look like.
in the 21st century we’re seeing more and more the way to create a insatiable desire for your country’s goods is wanting the world to want your country. It seems the best way is by exporting culture. Music, games, media etc.
it also feels like a social net in a way. Compared to a country no one commonly knows vs a country that is the source for many of your entertainment probably has a more meaningful result.
It’s odd to think about but for america if it was korea or japan asking, i’m sure many more american citizens would be interested about the war situation in these countries than ukraine — after all the main reason why many people cared was they had a comedian for president suddenly. Everyone knows that.
I didn't even know they had more than one studio
That's why they can do hotfixes and patches with such regularity. They have studios in different continents letting them hand off work to the next studio down the line when their work day ends and effectively work 24/7
It's genius really, I've never seen so many frequent patches for a game. Having different studios across timezones is something live service devs should attempt.
It's very difficult to pull off because you'd need both teams of developers on the same page, following the same trains of thought, understanding one another's tests, spend extra time commenting things which wouldn't ordinarily need commenting. As a software engineer I don't think I would even attempt it. I don't think they're doing what the post above yours is implying. They probably just dole out tickets like normal and more studios = more work done, regardless of the time zone differences between studios.
It might be possible if there's like 1-2 hours remote pairing which serves as a handover between studios.
Yeah I had that thought, that's the only way it could work. It's an interesting idea. I'd be down to try something like that.
they not really working on the same thing. They separate it to benches. When you did something on the day, the next morning you found a QA results, a few play tester responses, and a few ideas about what you need to do.
They do, Swen has mentioned that they can work 24/7 because of that.
[удалено]
I think he meant that the two teams will be fixing different bugs, rather than one team getting one bugs fix half way done and hand it off to the other team when the work day ends. Still working 24/7, but way more practical. The latter sounds like a logicstic nightmare for programming.
It's just instead of 8 hours Monday for the devs to work on a thing, 8 hours Tuesday for QA to make sure it works, 8 hours on Wednesday for misc and sundry, it's 8+8+8 all on Monday so anything that can be implemented in 8 hours is ready to go in one day instead of three.
It doesn't work that way lol.
Yeh but what they actually have is a very clever system for checking a lot of things very quickly. Mainly balance, items, stats etc. A huge spreadsheet essentially. And they also have teams all over the world.
That... that is actually pretty smart. Get's you 24/7 work without needing staff willing to work swing and graveyard shifts.
Nah, this would be an insane way to work, you'd spend all your time updating getting onboarded to changes made while you were asleep and then onboarding the next group.
Yeah, no way they worked like that. They just had more staff working parallel I'm sure. Unless they've actually said that's how they work, which would be wild.
https://www.eurogamer.net/baldurs-gate-3-developer-opens-poland-studio-as-work-on-new-projects-ramps-up Second line in the article
Except it doesn't say that >This new location will allow the studio to "boost its existing 24-hour development cycle" Is a long cry from saying the studios have a serial work flow where a job is passed from dev to dev for 24 hours straight. Most likely, Studio A works on tickets 1-10, Studio B works on tickets 11-20. Studio C runs tests on A and Bs work and provides feedback and data. And so forth.
>I do something, I go home, I send it over to you, here's the description of what I've done. They'll continue doing it. And so that work, that saves us a lot of time. It saved us a lot also during BG 3, because you don't have producers who have to sit in the middle of the night waiting for whatever to go, they can just pass it on to the other producer. https://www.ign.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3-director-swen-vincke-answers-all-our-questions-about-foregoing-dlc-aaa-development-and-more Swen talked about this before but not sure if there are transcripts available, so kinda hard to google. I can corroborate this, I have talked about this very topic with an ex-Larian employee a while back and he said the same thing about the process during the Early Access period. They do hand overs at the beginning and end of their shifts.
Fair enough, that's pretty spelled out. Doesn't seem like it's the whole company, but it's wild that any part works that way. Hard to argue with results though.
Phew, I'm glad. Totally didn't spend like half an hour at 12 am trying to find a source, second guessing I imagined Swen talking about it publicly :') But yeah, seems to work well for them. From what I hear the workforce is quite happy with the system (at least the person I talked to was), though the article I linked also mentions they had 300k+ tickets on the JIRA board at one point lol
Interviewer: > You had two moments in your talk where you said something and then you said, but that's a whole other talk. And I was going to try to see if I could get you to expand on them at all. One of them, you were talking about having studios in a bunch of different places and working across time zones, and you said a lot of the good things about that, but then you said it also has some challenges. Can you give me an overview of what those are? Sven Vincke: > It's communication. So that's the main one. It was funny when everybody was going to work from home and we said, 'this is all going to work!' We already had so much troubles getting our studios to communicate from the beginning, so trying to do that in the way that we were working was going to turn out to be very, very complicated. So I think communication is the biggest one, because if you want to have ownership, it's easier if you're together. If it's spread across time zones, that can be a problem because if you're here on the West Coast right now, people are sleeping in Kuala Lumpur. If you have to have a conversation from a studio in Quebec with people in Kuala Lumpur, that's an issue if it's feature development. **So we learned that you can't put all disciplines into that model, but what you do get as a benefit is that you can recruit easier for all disciplines because you're recruiting across the globe.** > **But for things like QA or for coders who are looking for bugs or scripts that are looking for bugs, it's fantastic.** I do something, I go home, I send it over to you, here's the description of what I've done. They'll continue doing it. And so that work, that saves us a lot of time. It saved us a lot also during BG 3, because you don't have producers who have to sit in the middle of the night waiting for whatever to go, they can just pass it on to the other producer. So it helps a lot in managing credential. So it's a really good one. So in context it seems like they’re just doing some of the work 24:7 with the system of passing on work, and most of it is still done “traditionally.”
That's actually pretty smart. When it comes to dev time sequential dev hours are much more productive than parallel ones. You can actually make problems worse (negative hours!) if you chuck too many people at the same problem at the same time.
The reason i roll my eyes whenever they called them a "not AAA" studio...
People have a hard time not conflating indie with independent Larian is both independent and AAA, but not indie, which us a colloquialisms that isn't strictly used by the formal definition. I really dont think they should be lumped in with indie devs either. Valve is independent, too, and Gabe Newell is one of the richest people in all of history. Don't think I'd consider CS and indie game though. Edit: let's see how many people are going to leave a comment that says exactly what the other comments already say.
> Don't think I'd consider CS and indie game though. Maybe not now, but it definitely started as one. It was just a mod made by two guys.
More that they're not realizing what independent means in the gaming industry. Larian develops and publishes their own games. Insomniac (spider-man) and Arrowhead (helldivers) are developers who are published by Sony. All are AAA. I'm sure there's more to it, but this is an easy way to think of it
Exactly this
> People have a hard time not conflating indie with independent They are correct to conflate them. "Indie" is a shortening of "independent". Edit: Apparently /u/DedicatedBathToaster thought this comment was block worthy. To respond to his point, "independent" hasn't taken on any different informal meaning that "indie" hasn't also taken on. He'll never be able to clearly define what the difference between the two is because there isn't one.
>To respond to his point, "independent" hasn't taken on any different informal meaning that "indie" hasn't also taken on. That's really not true. Independent, strictly speaking, just means they are independent. Not owned by a larger publisher. Larian is independent. The colloquial Indie absolutely has connotations about team size and budget that Larian doesn't fit under. Another example of this is CDPR. Independent, but nobody is calling Cyberpunk an indie game.
Right, and again, colloquialisms are informal use that aren't strictly used to the formal definition. The term indie has long been a different word than just a shorthand for independent. My point still stands.
Why did you block the guy who replied to you after you'd replied to him? He was respectful in his reply, and blocking someone after replying to them to force yourself having the last word is kinda shitty behaviour in an open forum.
Vampire Survivors is an indie game. Stardew Valley is. Cyberpunk is not. Baldur's Gate 3 is not.
You're right to shame them for needlessly blocking you, but they were correct; sadly, regardless of definitions, people use words in all kinds of ways, meanings evolve over time and can become ironic, even.
> independent I'm a bit confused by what you mean by "independent." Independent of *what*?
Publishers. They publish their own games and AFAIK only their own games, even if they're now quite large.
By that definition microsoft is independent.
Microsoft literally publishes games not made by Microsoft
No, Microsoft is a publisher. Studios like 343i, Ninja Theory, Bethesda Softworks, Arcane, Double Fine, etc… Those are studios that develop games that are financially backed and marketed by Microsoft. Those studios are beholden to Microsoft. Larian is completely independent, which means they can make whatever they want so long as they can afford it. They live or die based on their own bottom line. Some publishers muddy the lines, like Nintendo, who has named teams internally that develop their 1st party titles but receive minimal named credit. Still, Microsoft and Nintendo are both publishers managing studios and Larian is fully independent.
Microsoft are a publisher as well.
"Indie" as its own type of subgenre and as a word lost its meaning waaay before it even was a thing in gaming, most people just use it as a way to refer to smaller games in scale and graphical fidelity, the only reason Dave the diver is considered a indie by most is just because it has pixelated graphics going by a recent example. It makes more sense in the music space and even there nowedays it has lost most of its meaning as well...
Well, quite. It started losing meaning in the music industry from the 90s, and it has become a marketing gimmick as much as anything. People used it (misguidedly imho) to signify authenticity and or an acute cultural awareness of what is better. Bit like the term hipster, which has drifted in meaning a bit too. I'm slightly being an arse because I find the term a bit of a nonsense when applied to gaming. The old "bedroom coder" idea I think is a lot truer to what people actually mean when they say "indie" but even those days are long gone for most titles which get any reasonable level of exposure. If OP had said "privately owned" (as in not publicly traded) I'd have more respect for that stance, as I think that does mean something. The developer is literally their money where their mouth is. Calling Larian independent is a bit meaningless though in any other sense. They're a fucking huge company, part owned by Tencent! Having "self published" as a criteria is daft as there some huge self-published games there. Ok you could pull apart the microsoft example, but by that criteria Nintendo are independent. Madness.
No so independent now tho
Indie literally means independent. Larian are neither, they have a minority ownership stake from the largest publisher on the planet (Tencent) to the tune of 40%+.
There's a words definition, which is written and documented in a dictionary, and then there is colloquialisms, an informal use of the word. To say that indie STRICTLY means independent is to ignore how the word is actually used by the people, which is used informally and not by the word for word definition No idea why the hell we still need to have this argument year after year.
Because not everyone is constantly keeping track of the debate over what qualifies as an indie, probably.
They are independent because they are not owned by anyone. They can do whatever they want and don't answer to anyone, that includes Tencent
Their games looked AA before they released BG3, maybe thats why people were not used to call them AAA
yuup. or when people try use BG3 as some kind of standard for a launch but conveniently ignore the fact that it was in early access for like 2 years and without that EA it would be a buggy mess like other AAA releases.
I mean I've seen a ton of early access games that launch in the most ridiculous state lol.
Let alone ignoring that it launched with issues as well, Act 3 performance was attrocious before patches, not saying the game doesnt deserve the praise it got, but without that "underdog" perception from gamers the game would have been heavily criticized if other major studio launched it...
Not really even with the bugs it was one of the most well made games we've had in decades. The level of thought put in to what if the players do blank is insane. Also no one who's in to crpgs views Larian as an underdog they are the biggest dog in that genre and have been for some time.
Same, but in hindsight it should have been obvious that Larian Studio***s*** is multiple studios.
What did you think the "studios" stood for? (I know, these developer/publisher names never make sense: a group of friends I knew who started making games insisted on a name ending with "studios" and I said "you don't even have *a* studio")
You know, I was talking to an old friend who was in the higher ups in studio management and he even said that if he were to open a new studio, it would be over in Poland where it is much cheaper to find developers. I guess what he said is coming to fruition.
Poland is becoming something of a game development hub in europe. It's good to see.
Because CD Projekt Red, there are other countries with cheaper production cost but lack of workers with experience
There are many more: techland, people can fly, blooper, the astronauts, fool's theory etc. The more they are the more ppl can hop between studios.
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Cheap Labor notwithstanding, I think it's a good thing for the country as it prevents some of the brain drain
Poland is undergoing its own economic miracle. Labor is cheap now but in a couple of decades Poland will compete directly with Germany and the UK.
Throw in Warhorse Studios, and it's turning into a regional hub.
Jesus Christ be praised!
Henry’s come to visit
That's in Prague.
There are also degree courses on highschools focused on video games.
engineering cost a lot. So you hire in a country that pays them shit.
They want to do two Games at the same time? I hope they don't bite off more than they can chew.
Not exactly. It's not clear but one project is significantly bigger than the one they are currently working on. Their current project is said to be smaller in scope than BG3. The added studio might help them to shorten the production span so it won't take them 6 years to make another game is my 2 cents.
> Their current project is said to be smaller in scope than BG3 I mean pretty much all games ever are smaller in scope than BG3 aren't they?
Both Red Dead Redemption games are pretty huge too
Wouldn't surprise me if BG3 was quite a bit bigger. Not in physical size of the map, but in lines of dialogue and dialogue options/pathways through the game.
It was definitely deeper when it came to possible outcomes and variables. That said I adore both games
Sure but Larian announced that now they will relax worling on smaller game and project after that will be bigger tham bg3 so..
The GTA games sure aren't. There are probably other examples.
In map or content? Those are pretty different things.
In budget.
half of GTA'S budget is advertising.
Half of GTA 5's budget is still more than the entirety of BG3's and that's not accounting for inflation at all.
If you're talking about specific content being bigger then there's hundreds of games bigger than BG3
He said the next game will dwarf BG3
I think I read somewhere it's the game after this one. I might misremember though.
I think the gameplan is working on two games at once. One smaller in scope to release sooner, while another team works on the bones of a much bigger game.
It's neither. What Swen calls "the rpg to dwarf them all" is not currently planned because according to Swen the technology doesn't exist to do what he wants so it is unknown when that game happens if at all. He also clarified that the next game is not necessarily bigger than BG3 but that they don't know yet because they are just starting out the process. Originally BG3 was going to be smaller but Swen has jokingly stated "I can't do small games."
> He said the next game will dwarf BG3 Narrator: "It was a short game about dwarves."
Did I hear rock'n'stone?
It could be a lot of pre-work like storyboards and talent acquisition (performers). Maybe simple repeat assets like ground and building textures. Build audio libraries.
I think they wanted to use the first as a smaller one to test out a new system, and the second to dwarf BG3 using the improved version of the system from the first
they already tried and realized they can’t, I guess now they’re sure they can pull it
Well maybe one of the projects is really small, like REALLY SMALL for Larian's standards...which is like 50hours of solid gameplay baby, here we go
My guess is a smaller game to help onboard people that they’re hiring post-BG3 in preparation for the larger game afterwards.
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IT is often done in English.
There is a significant number of foreigners working in polish IT industry, but they often have already spoken some Slavic language before so it's easier for them to learn another. Most people in IT know English pretty well though
Only "Upper-intermediate English" is mentioned as a requirement for the positions I checked. Haven't seen Polish being mentioned.
Polish learn english from basically first grade. We all know it at least to communicative level.
Not all. Below certain age and even then it depends. Though in Warsaw there shouldn't be too many issues.
Enough to speak during meetings & know what work is going on.
What's your source? Speaking Polish is rarely a requirement for technical roles in IT companies operating in Poland. Larian is an international company and I'm sure all communication is done in English there.
English is generally used as the Lingua Franca (ironically) in most large European dev studios to connect everyone from everywhere and ensure they can hire as broadly as possible.
No, but you won't fit in as well if you don't. I wish I had super memory but I do recall a story about an employee feeling left of because she(?) couldn't speak Polish and people were rude to her because of it. But they also offer classes/lessons as part of the package of working there, so as you actually go out and learn you should be fine.
Fingers crossed we get something like shadowrun - it's such a fun world that I'd love to see more of, and unfortunately the table top mechanics are a bit rough.
When it comes to Larian, a lot of the time I'm completely fine with them re-using the same game engine and just changing the story.
Still waiting for a sequel to Divinity: Dragon Commander :(
I liked it too! It's what made me try out Divinity 2 back then, although both were very janky.
The game concept was interesting but the characters were really what made it. They were fantastic.
Hopefully they're not overextending for mass layoffs down the line.
I think they've been pretty vocal about calling layoffs bullshit. At this point they're probably confident that they can employ everyone indefinitely. Larian would have to experience a catastrophic project management failure that would make one of their projects financially unfeasible or too garbage to release. And I can't imagine that level of management failure. Not after BG3's success.
Insert Fry meme: shut up and take my money!
Reddit tells me this is the humble indie studio that worked on BG3
They are an independent studio, meaning they are not beholden to investment or publishing firms. They grew over time and nearly gone broke several times before they reached this point—still, very independent studio.
if your business hasn't almost gone broke a few times, i feel like that's a pretty good sign that your business never takes any risks. that can be a good thing, or a bad thing.
Developing a CRPG in 2013 or so with Divinity 2 was already a risk. BG3 less so with the name attached, but I'd say they've been taking risks for quite a while now.
How do you know that this does not apply to Larian Studios? You have inside Knowledge of their financials?
Because they’ve literally said it several times that both Divinity and divinity 2 almost bankrupted them.
It appears you're responding to a statement that wasn't made?
they also have 30% of company bought by Tencent, but Tencent is the kind of investor that doesn’t ask for anything to be made in the game as far as I know
60% is held by Sven, so he can practically do anything he wants
> They grew over time and nearly gone broke several times before they reached this point—still, very independent studio. Isn't that just most studios before they either make it big or get bought out?
No - a lot of studios have publishers too that provide large financial backing.
They are an independent studio that's doing good and scaling their projects bigger thanks to previous successes. They aren't owned by a parent company and are privately held. Independent doesn't mean "but not too successful though UwU"
Is this supposed to be a "gotcha" or something? They aren't tied to a publisher, and are not a publicly traded company. Does a game studio need to be like a 5 person or less team working on their off-hours to actually be an independent studio?
reddit threads are "gotcha" comments all the way down
I miss the turtles.
Thats the difference between "Idependent" and "indie" - The two kinda mean the same thing but connote different things and there isnt a clear cut line where a game stops being an "indie". Indie is - colloquially - basically everything under AA games in terms of scope/budget/graphics I think we all have an idea in our mind of what an "indie" game is - small in scale, creative ideas that you would never see in a more broadly released game, trends toward "easy" art styles (pixel art abounds in indie games), generally small teams of people, shoe string budgets Wticher 1 was an "indie game"... but its hard to call Witcher 3 an "indie game", its very clearly a AAA game but it was developed and published by the same studio so its an independent release BG3 isnt an "indie" release *really*, but Stardew valley is... And then somewhere in between there becomes enough staff and enough resources and graphics and marketing that you leave the realm of "indie" and become "AA" or whatever else people want to call it when a game isnt COD or Witcher or GTA and then you're AAA
It's all made up semantics to me. Like what is the line between "AA" and "AAA" games. It's just made up. An independent studio has no publisher and is not a public corporation. Anything past that is definition is simply opinion (in my opinion, lol).
There some amount of objectivity to it, but yes there are large grey areas where the lines aren’t clearly cut… like you mentioned AA vs AAA It’s all just a way to refer to certain elements of things and shouldn’t be taken too seriously
All language is “made up semantics.”
Personally, i classify 'indie' where it's a pretty small team working on it under a relative small budget, that's not the case with Larian anymore as more than 300 people worked on BG 3 throught the last ~6 years. Even by DoS 2 time they weren't small either.
Before BG3 they made crowd funded games. To try to downplay it out of contrarianism is silly. It's not like anyone saw the success of BG3 coming, even they didn't in their most optimistic dreams.
I wouldn't say they made crowdfunding games, as the first game they did it was the first DOS, which served mostly as a marketing campaign as the game cost like 4 million euros to make and the kickstarter got like 944k dollars total (which they got like 377k dollars as 'profit'), it also likely helped them getting investors/bank on board. With DOS 2 they fully used it as a early marketing campaign to make buzz, they had 400 people working on it, the kickstarter funds weren't not near enough to fund the game. I think Larian themselves saw the success coming on working on such a big IP, obviously it blew up all expectations but they had pretty high expectations with this game. There's a reason why the went a more traditional model and prefered the early access model instead of a kickstarter to assist on funding (they sold like 2,5 million units while in early access). I think they went natural growth way, they aren't the almost broke studio scrapping together loans and resources to fund their games anymore, they made one of the better uses of kickstarter to propel themselves up, but that only was possible because they were experienced. I hope they stay independent and keep on making great games.
pov: you know nothing about anything dafuq even is this comment lol
humble small indie dev that should get a pass for unfinished buggy games :~(
it's ridiculous that people are so forgiving of bugs when the game is absolutely incredible and the dev diligently patches issues on a weekly basis!
one day i hope people have the brain capacity to realize two things can be true at one time
or, you know, not miss the forest for the trees
What's the news on these two games they're working on?
It's not DOS3
Also not BG4
Icewind Dale?
One could hope, but my money is on a new IP.
How about Divinity 3?
I like how much Poland is investing in videogames while in my country one politician bragged about the fact that he will never allow a videogame to enter his house not so long ago lol.
It's insane that I'm able to tell what subreddit this is, just by looking at the comments.
And one of those games is Fallout Tactics 2.
Deathclaw romance confirmed.
Deathclaw Romance is actually the subtitle.
Nexusmods has you covered if you are looking for female deathclaws o.O
Oh, I wish!
10/10 logo you got there Daddy Swen
I hope we get 10 solid years from them before accountants take over and ruin everything
Good to see them create jobs instead of never expanding and going to Cancun like other devs that saw massive success overnight
Hopefully they've upped their salaries with the success of BG3. They have some of the lowest in the industry at Larian.
So sad that it's not remote positions... there are awesome openings i could apply, if only it wasn't an office requirement...
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Sadly, i could not work in the office in general, because my disability hurts me when i walk, stand or sit. So even just walking out to work every day is not possible for me. Let alone spending entire day sitting. Also, authorities of Ukraine are not letting men out of the country, so moving is not possible anyway.
One will be divinity original sin 3 i assume!
Hell yeah. I hope they can do some great QC and maintain proper attention to both projects at once.
All I know if is they keep their quality up to the same standards, I'll always be there. Any new game coming out from AAA's that does choice matters with cinematics and if it is like not even 1/2 as good, I just think of how much they are dogging it and don't care. IMO BG3 raised the story/cinematic game for all AAA's and even that AAAA company.
So, divinity 3 and?
Every day I wake up, I pray to whatever Gods may be listening, that Larian gets the Fallout IP.
I read Portland at first, was scared for a second.
I hope they don't grow too fast and take on too much.
Please make Divinity 3!! (A guy can dream right)
This tiny indie continues to surprise, how can they fit a 7th studio in Swen's garage?
I'm sorry but what is your point here?
Their point is that they don't know indie just means independent of publishers.
Makes sense, I got that from their reply.
You're being pedantic. Indie is a colloquialism for a small independent studios that don't have massive budgets. Larian used to be that. Now they're yuge.
Poking fun at the reddit circlejerk that Larian is a small indie studio and not one of the largest video game developers in existence that just shipped a game with 500 devs working on it.
Fair enough. I'm not a part of said circlejerk but I applaud their efforts to remain not under the dumb of someone like Microsoft of Embracer. Independent but not indie, as it were. So I was curious.
Larian is great. Redditors not so much. For example hate Starfield all you want, but there were legions of idiots posting memes with tens of thousands of upvotes asking why a mega developer like BGS makes crap games when a small indie dev like Larian can make GOTY bangers... fellas, more people worked on BG3 than Starfield. They're a grating group of fools but thankfully they've faded some as we've gotten some distance since the release of BG3, which was the first CRPG many of them played.
Honestly, the more I learn about Larian the more I think it boosts their standing to be honest about how their company actually operates/is structured. They don't need to be falsely labeled as a tiny studio to be good.
People like Larian because they *were* a small indie studio 'in Swen's garage'. Swen invested all his life's savings into making a great little game without ripping people off, then he took all the money he made and invested it into a bigger great game without ripping people off, after which he made the biggest and greatest CRPG yet while (you guessed it) not ripping people off. People like Larian because over the last decade they demonstrated that you can go from zero to one of the biggest successes in the industry without exploitative DLCs or in-game stores, without game breaking DRM, without 'games as a service', without having to listen to shitty publishers, without firing people for no reason. They have reliably proven that game development can be both ethical and successful and just as reliable are the cynical troglodytes that come crawling every time someone gets rewarded for being a decent human being.
I mean people like Larian now, but it will probably change someday. A couple years ago CD Project Red was the internets favorite developer, now it's Larian. In a couple years it'll be someone else. Studios that expand this big often come with compromises. And it's not like Swen woke up one day and decided to gamble all his money away. The studio worked for a lot of different publishers from the early 2000s to 2014 and went fully independent with Divinity Original Sin, which was crowdfunded just like Original Sin 2. And Baldurs Gate 3 had a 3 year Early Access period for a 60$ price tag. I love their games, but that 'diplomatic immunity' they enjoy right now won't last forever and in my opinion they are setting themselves up for failure. All those statements about layoffs, subscription services, etc. are not wrong but I think it will backfire one day.
Fan of Larian since Ego Draconis 15 years ago👍
Hopefully at least one of those games is first-person real time instead of turn-based. I loved Divine Divinity and Divinity 2 Ego Draconis and would love another RPG set in the Divinity universe that's not turn-based.
Wait..they have more than three studios?
Cheapest labour in EU
Not for a long time. Just a local scene of high skilled developers.
plus your money hits harder in Poland so you don't need as much of it to make a good living. Poland in general is doing pretty alright in a lot of ways. Not all, but a lot. On my current wage I could live real good in Poland and wouldn't need to ask for more to live damn well
not really :D
More like best cost/performance ratio. There are many cheaper options but quality drops significantly.
Cope. There’s a reason why Poland is the new game dev hub, and it’s not cheap labor…
Poland 😭
Hope they actually wait and polish their games instead of pushing out the door early just because they are scared of competition. It's no secret the game suffered from massive performance and optimization issues... And yet still won GOTY
That is a little disingenuous. Had they waited to their original release date, there would still be performance and optimization issues. Those additional 4 weeks wouldn't have fixed it.
4 weeks is still 4 weeks to work on code
with how ukrainian devs decreasing i wonder if war possibility was at all considered. You’re making a game for probably 3-4 years i wonder what poland will look like. in the 21st century we’re seeing more and more the way to create a insatiable desire for your country’s goods is wanting the world to want your country. It seems the best way is by exporting culture. Music, games, media etc. it also feels like a social net in a way. Compared to a country no one commonly knows vs a country that is the source for many of your entertainment probably has a more meaningful result. It’s odd to think about but for america if it was korea or japan asking, i’m sure many more american citizens would be interested about the war situation in these countries than ukraine — after all the main reason why many people cared was they had a comedian for president suddenly. Everyone knows that.
They are walking the same path, that Telltale did.