How Swen Vincke Tried to Save Divine Divinity

In his latest blog entry, Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke reveals how close Divine Divinity came to cancellation due to growing publisher concerns at the time, and even goes so far as to share an email that he sent to the producer at the time in order to help save it from becoming vaporware. I can’t help but quote a lot of this, as it’s a great historical read:

Hi,

As requested, I made an overview of what we think are the weak and strong points of Divine Divinity. It became quite a document, but I probably barely scraped the surface of our thoughts on the topic. I hope this helps you somewhat more than willing to give you more information on certain points.

One thing which will make your presentation a lot easier use the CTRL key for targeting npcs while hacking you’ll find life is a lot easier.

Current weak points

Dialogs

While many bugs are present in these and they are being fixed, that’s not the main problem with them. A large degree of gameplay is to be had in a role playing game from the options you get in a dialog. In the quest to mix hack & slash with regular role playing, we probably oversimplified the available options in certain dialogs. This is not really visible in the demo area, where we think the mix is right, but later on in the game this is definitely an issue. The fixes for this are often rather simple, but complicated severely by the fact that the localizations are almost ready, and we need to maintain synchronisation between the three dialog base files (i.e. German, French and English). We have quite some tools in place to facilitate that, but a tool is just a tool, and given the enormous complexity/size of the dialogs in game, operating the tools/maintaining synchronization takes time. We are not to the level of Baldur’s Gate when it comes to the dialogs, though we could’ve been. One example that is present in the demo is the scene with the resurrected necromancer. The dialog there does not contain the richness that you would find in similar AAA games.

Savegame : Thelyron, click on the lever just in front of you, go to where the mummy appears and talk to him. There are no real options in the dialog, which is not such a good thing, but still acceptable in this particular situation. The fact that they stand still is just a bug.

…

Current development status

First some numbers. There are currently 553 bugs flagged as open on our internal bugzilla server (coming from 1392 at start of internal QA). There are 132 bugs flagged open on CDV’s bugzilla out of 875 reported bugs. That gives a total of 685 bugs out of 2267 remaining open, meaning that in a period of two months and a half 1582 bugs were solved, or about 633 bugs per month. That’s not bad, but it could’ve been better with more detailed QA, since a lot of time was spent by the developers trying to reproduce several of these bugs. Our internal QA however is overloaded with work (4 full time testers, 5 externals a day), so they can’t perform any better than they already are.

As related in the document I gave you and Martin, the typical ratio of bugs for a RPG of this calibre is between 7000-10000 bugs (numbers taken from Diablo 2/Baldur’s Gate). Since QA for Divinity started up rather problematic and late, it is feasible to say that the amount of total bugs in the end will be lower than the average over BG/Diablo (by the time QA started, a lot were already fixed by developers doing their own testing) and when those 685 are solved, the game will probably be ready for release, but not as polished as we would want it to be. That’s not saying it will not be polished enough, it’s just saying that we would have preferred a higher degree of polishing.

Among the bugs that really count (except for blockers,crashes etc.), we are treating the gameplay ones as the most important. That means we give priority to something like (I don’t understand this quest) or (this area is boring). This latter type of bug is usually related to (player expectation mismatches) and (Dialog) issues which are mentioned in the beginning of this document. Those two together with the balancing, are what currently stand between Divinity and its release.

All time estimates we currently have are based on the bug-reports and at this stage given the amount of reported bugs, it looks like we will be ready by March 15th, but the problem of course is that we don’t know how much more bugs will be reported. If it wasn’t already, QA now really has become the dominant factor determining the release date.

For reference, I’ve included the bug reports from our internal bugzilla server as a text file.