Divinity 2: Ego Draconis Status Update

Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke has posted another “news from the front” update to the official Divinity 2 forums, this time discussing the game’s dialogue presentation, the PC and Xbox 360 user interfaces, and more.

My next appointment took the slow train from Brussels, so that gives me some much needed room to give you all a new update… We just finished a two week (get in early and play the game every morning ( review session and I think the general feeling among everybody present in those review meetings was bloody hell, this game is bigger than we thought. We were playing in god mode, using cheat keys without engaging in combat and it still took us a really long time to play through everything. I think I can safely say that we’ve reached at least one of our design goals and that was – make sure it’s dense enough with plenty of interesting stuff happening all the time, you know, the thing we call gameplay boosters. When you’ll finally get your hands in the game, there’s only one thing I can advise you and that’s to explore there are plenty of detail layers and secrets within the world of Rivellon and quite a few of them are worth it. Mindreading also springs to mind as something which is worthwhile doing, there’s some really cool ones in there, at least I thought so.

There’s a lot of things going on at our studio for the moment and everybody is pretty stressed, but in general there’s a feeling of if we manage to do this right, this could be a great game. Still plenty of opportunities for us to goof up, but somehow we managed to get something right. One thing which I think we’re getting pretty right is our dialog presentation. I’m talking about the entire voices/lip-synching/animations/cameras thing. An immense effort is being done to get all of that dialog presented to you in an entertaining way, and I’m really happy at how it turned out. Somewhere in the near future (how many times have I used that phrase already in the context of this project), you’ll be seeing video footage of those dialogs, and I hope you’ll agree with me that it’s been worth the effort.

The user interfaces are also getting more and more complete, and the difference between the PC and Xbox360 user interfaces is pretty sharp. I play games on both systems, and I was happy to see that some schizophrenic part of me could appreciate the nuances the UI guys put in for both audiences. You look at one UI and you say yep, most definitely PC RPG. You look at the other and you have this thing of, ok works well for an Xbox360 RPG. The underlying functionality is the same, but it’s surprising how much the look needs to fit the platform for there to be. well, call it gameplay. The same actions with a non-appealing UI on a particular platform feel a lot different than when it is appealing. Don’t ask me why, I tried explaining people in the team multiple times: (you watch, when the UI will look nice and fit, this will be fun) and they all looked at me in a disbelieving way, but now I feel vindicated. It’s a discovery we made when making Divinity – for a long time there was absolutely no item fever in the game, and then one day we got the presentation acceptable, and suddenly it was there. Magic.

And then I also saw something which I was looking forward to for a long time, but I can’t talk about it yet all I can say is they look cool and well done Tristan ! (and of course the legion of other guys involved )

Ok, I have to stop already it was a slow train, but it wasn’t that slow and my appointment will be arriving soon. I’ll try to give a longer update..errr. in the near future.