Divinity II: Flames of Vengeance Box Art, Status Update, Review, and More

Larian Studios’ Divinity II: Ego Draconis Facebook page has seen quite a few Flames of Vengeance updates this week, so I thought I’d recap all of the expansion’s latest coverage. First, head over to our game profile page for the official box art, then charge into another status update from Swen Vincke:

Warm feelings ensued and lasted for some time until cold reality knocked at the door when we started looking at the workload ahead of us 6 other language versions of Flames of Vengeance need to be created and tested, three spoken languages together with two subtitled languages need to be crammed on one Xbox360 DVD, 7 different language versions of the Dragon Knight’s Saga need to be created, the Dragon Knight’s Saga itself needs to be finished, and we also have 4 Monkey Labs titles coming out later this year. Or in the games industry lingo, we have 18 SKU’s to deliver between here and Christmas as well as some patches, as well as plenty of PR and marketing materials. Probably we’ll have to cram in some demos in there too.

To be honest, it’s the part we all hate it’s a lot of fun to work on creating a game during pre-production and production, it’s a lot less fun fixing the bugs in postproduction, and it’s downright hell taking care of all the various versions (I didn’t even mentioned all the digital distrubtion versions with their own installer/copy protection systems), especially if you know that a simple QA run through one set of quest solutions takes up to three weeks for one man to do, and there’s plenty of permutations, and you need to do this for all language versions, knowing that in general the first couple of passes most likely will yield too many bugs so you’ll have to redo it anyway.

Stuff like **** I forgot to put the right publisher logo in the latest build for that country so we’ll have to rebuild it, essentially meaning that the entire version is invalidated and in theory needs to be completely retested can make you do all kinds of things a normally sane person wouldn’t do. Still, it’s part of the job, but it’s also one of those phases where it really feels like a job. Luckily, you know that there’s a moment when all those versions will be out of the door, and you’ll be able to work on your next game.

Our target date for all of this is October 15th 2010, and undoubtedly small miracles will have to be performed to get everything out in good order, but I’m optimistic that we’ll manage, and I really hope I won’t have to eat those words.

Moving on, there’s a favorable preview on Gameswelt.de:

Major revisions were made to the combat system and the damage calculation. The sometimes quite rapidly increasing level of difficulty is thus adjusted slightly. In order to be less unfair fights and even in the fight against enemies, the two or three levels on you, you now have much better chances. In addition you can now finally dodge bullets accurately. The somewhat ailing dragon part is also enhanced and garnished with new skills. And finally, the inventory revised and improved.

Clearly visible, but are above all the graphical improvements, which extend also to the main game. The textures have been improved massively powerful and the level of detail increases, there are also a lot of new and revised effects.

And we finish things off at GameStar.de, where there’s an enthusiastic review that ends with a score of 86/100:

Flames of Vengeance, like the main game, is a beautiful, winking fun. The addon does not need electric story fault and mostly to the rapidly tiring Dragons existence, but packs the relatively small and manageable area of Aleroth fully accustomed with nutty characters and motivating jobs. Flames of Vengeance, as it were a compressed Divinity 2: Ego Draconis. Those who enjoyed the original title will enjoy this.