It's telling that, in his postmortem of Divinity: Original Sin, Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke spent just as much time, if not more, talking about the business of game development rather the development itself. He painted a sobering picture of the many hardships that await game developers, especially those working on the size and scope of Original Sin. In essence, development is an all-or-nothing game. You should never compromise and release an almost-finished, buggy game just to match some marketing person's release calendar, because in the end the only thing that will be remembered about your game is the quality of its content.
Larian Studios learned this the hard way with a previous title, Divinity 2: Ego Draconis, which Vincke admitted was a massive flop that put the future of Larian into jeopardy, due largely to the fact they released the game before it was ready. They vowed not to let this happen to Original Sin. This is a sweet sentiment, but in practice it ran the studio into massive debt and stretched almost every resource they had to the breaking point as they continued to iterate and polish their game.
Listening to Vincke talk about all this highlighted a key skill all great game developers need: persistence. I'm talking biblical levels of persistence; the sort of persistence that comes from a deep, fundamental belief you were put on this Earth to make this video game. If you don't have that clarity of focus, you will compromise, and compromises lead to Ego Draconis. While this was a pretty heavy talk, Vincke did end on a positive note by discussing everything the studio had learned from their hardships with Original Sin and how they would apply those lessons to make their next games less stressful. That's right, games. Vincke made a quick note at the end that Larian is preparing to announce two new RPGs, but offered no further details other than this announcement likely won't happen until next year - or beyond.
