Larian home movie @ E3 – the Thomas files

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These two funny guys are senior Larian producers, vets of many a game development horror story, armed to the teeth with producer weaponry and other unspeakable things. Right now they're trying to ensure that they can show 40 hrs of gameplay in 15 minutes and not fall asleep because of their jetag

[In which I discuss how the final preparations for E3 are going ]

After two months of preparations and I don’t know how many late nights, the moment of truth has finally arrived – Larian is in LA, ready to present its new games to a crowd of opinion makers, industry veterans, expert gamers and occasionally of course also a couple of idiots ;)

We’ve discussed what we’re going to show a zillion times, rehearsed the presentations intensively and in less than 24 hours we’re going to be doing those presentations every 15 minutes for 3 days in a row. Not that we’re complaining because we’re having a lot of fun, but it did cause a bit of stress from time to time.

We took Thomas with us, our inhouse video guy, so if you want to have a behind the scenes look, check out the footage that we’ll hopefully be posting each day. I say hopefully because we’re hopelessly jetlagged & have (contrary to popular opinion for the ones we left behind in Belgium) been working pretty hard ever since we arrived here last Friday. Also, Thomas is not very good at his job ;)

The first piece from Thomas details the preparation process we’ve been going through, and illustrates how we’re trying to deal with a schedule that has us trying to present two pretty complex games in presentations of two times 15 minutes (one slot being for Divinity Dragon Commander and another slot being for Divinity Original Sin). We ultimately got both demos down to 12 minutes or so, but we’re pretty sure that that timing is going to get us in a whole lot of trouble the moment one journalist arrives late , something that is inevitably going to happen. We’ll be filming the presentations during the show, so you’ll be able to see exactly how much trouble.

I’m not sure about the rest of the team but I actually had fun during the preparations these last days because I got to roleplay some of the more “interesting” characters in this industry, the goal of the exercise being that the presenting teams wouldn’t lose their cool when confronted with some of the quirks and eccentricities of these people. At this point, I think they’ve been drilled so hard that even if you drop them from a plane right above an excited volcano they’ll still be able to say “Hi my name is David & I’m going to present you…” ;)

Anyway, enjoy the movie. It’s a bit long but there’s  a small competition at the end of the video through which you can win a Divinity: Original Sin T-shirt. In case it’s not clear, you need to figure out how many Divinity: Original Sin concept arts there are on the wall and mail the answer to info@larian.com. The first one to get the right answer gets the T-shirt.

Also, we have some TV’s (the ones you see in the movie) that we want to give away to our US fans because we’re not going to take them back with us to Belgium. Anybody who wants one of four 46” inch Sony Bravia TVs and who can make it to Venice beach LA this Thursday evening, send a mail to info@larian.com and we’ll sort something out.

Here’ the link to the movie

  • Pall

    I wish you good luck at you presentations.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=750728593 Richie Donahou

    Video was awesome guys, never have I witnessed someone so excited to go to Best Buy.  Go kick some ass at the show.

  • Daniel

    Good luck with the presentations, can’t wait to see some of it myself :)
    And if someone’s late, why don’t you let him play all the time that is left, and then let him watch, just watch the next presentation?

  • Illusive Man

    What ? No Booth Babes ?!
    Epic Fail :D

  • Peter

    Was that video filmed at home? :)

  • http://www.facebook.com/katrien.cornelis Katrien Cornelis

    here’s hoping you guys blow ‘em of their socks

  • Lightinglockey

    Lar,

    I’d be more worried about the reporters asking too many questions instead of coming in late.  It also looks like in Dragon Commander we will see the exact layout of the continents. 

    You had too much fun shopping at BestBuy… I guess you don’t have BestBuy stores in Germany?

    • http://www.lar.net/ Swen Vincke

      The layout might still change TBH, but for the moment, it’s the map we’re going with.

      Actually, we’re based in Belgium ;) And no, we don’t have BestBuy stores. It was a sobering experience seeing how little PC games were in that store btw. 

  • AlexF

    Since the comments are disabled in your next entry I thought I’d write here. Dragon Commander looks amazing. After you’re done with E3 you should really make a trailer showing the gameplay. It seems like it has gone a long way since the last time you showed it on the internet.

    • http://www.lar.net/ Swen Vincke

      Sorry about that – comments weren’t disabled on purpose but the worst of it is that I don’t seem to find any button that allows me to switch them on again.

      We’re planning on releasing the actual presentations later this week so people can see first hand what we were showing.