Divinity: Original Sin Beta Coming on April 1st, Day-Night Cycles Dropped

The Larian team is finally ready to make the big move and release the first beta build of Divinity: Original Sin on April 1st, we learn in the latest post-funding update for the title, and no, neither me nor Larian are joking. Here’s a little snippet on what the update will include:

Those of you who have been making careful rounds of the alpha world will be excited to find the following:

• New region unlocks
• Hugely expanded character creation options, including visuals and presets
• Tons of new talents
• A new cache of new skills and spells
• Better AI and new enemy tactics
• Hundreds of bugfixes
• New and upgraded visuals, special effects, and music
• Improved loading times and stability
• Improved cooperative dialog systems

Unfortunately, the update also contains another announcement: Larian has decided to drop day-night cycles, citing the amount of bugs the team still has to fix, and the additional stress it would put on the (relatively small) team as the bigger factors in this decision. In the words of the team:

Due to time and budgetary constraints, we have chosen not to implement day/night cycles for the launch of Divinity: Original Sin.

This was no easy decision, but in the end, resources had to be allocated toward stability and bugfixing in order to release a content-heavy, technically smooth game (almost) on time.

We realize our fans and backers will be understandably bummed by this news, but we hope to make it up to you with a game that we are proud to release and you will feel proud to have supported.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I am disappointed by the news, especially considering it was a stretch goal and some backers likely decided to support the project (rather than to buy the game later) because of it, but on the other hand, the title is already really rich in terms of gameplay and content based on my limited time with its alpha build, and hopefully this absence won’t be too noticeable when actually playing. This is the first time I see a Kickstarter (an RPG Kickstarter, at least) dropping a stretch goal, so it will be interesting to see whether there is any kind of backlash, and how Larian handles it. So far, we already have a few comments from Larian Swincke’s blog:

As I’m writing this, I don’t know how backers will react to our dropping day/night cycles. It unsettles me very much to possibly disappoint our backers because they made the extended development on Divinity: Original Sin possible. But there are limits to what time and budget permit and sometimes it’s necessary to make a choice when you discover something is more work than you anticipated. In this case we chose to go for stability, balancing and polish.

One alternative would’ve been to put in a day/night cycle without a lot of reactivity from the npcs, just for the sake of being able to say that we’ve done it, but that’s something we didn’t want to do. The vision driving Divinity:Original Sin has been that every feature which is in there has real gameplay value and isn’t a gimmick.

Perhaps those who are disappointed may take comfort from the engine & toolkit supporting pretty much everything that’s necessary for schedules, up to having NPCs sleep in their beds, so it’s not impossible that somewhere down the line a mod or a derivative game is released that uses these features.

Be sure to also check the video included in the update, which includes a 23-minute studio tour where most leads get the chance to talk about their progress on the title.