Larian’s Swen Vincke on Deadlines and Showing Off Titles

The latest blog post from Larian’s prolific Swen Vincke concerns deadline and the recent Divinity: Dragon Command and Original Sin showings. The first one did well, the second… not so much. Here’s a snip:

The gist of the above list is, there’s not enough feedback on what’s happening to the player in Dragon Commander (as in, you die but you don’t necessarily know why) please fix it.

It’s the type of list you can have long arguments over in the office, but once you hear features like this requested from the mouths of plenty of players (and you observe the need), you know that not including them equals committing a developer crime. It’s one of the main reasons developers do tests like this, and for any studio hoping to bring out something non-trivial, it really should be part of their routine.

The list was compiled over the weekend so it was ready before my first presentation and lo and behold, what did the journalist tell me after playing . (I liked it, the only dark spot was that I didn’t know what was killing my dragon and why I died you really need to do something about that).

I was happy with the (I liked it) and let lose an inward sigh of relief, thinking of how much we had changed the game over the last months and even the days before making this build from a development director point of view it was pretty much insane and we took really big risks, but at least in this presentation, it looked like those risks paid off.

Furthermore, since the improvement list compiled from FOM was already there and it was actually already being implemented so that we’d have as much as possible of the requested things implemented even during the hands-on-tour, I proudly dragged the journalist to the desk of a developer asking said developer to show exactly what he was busy with. The journalist nodded and the little PR-manager in me glowed , seeing that at least on this count we were doing something right. This was going to be a good day.

After scoring this PR point, we then started the Divinity: Original Sin presentation, filled I should say, with confidence. Contrary to Dragon Commander (which has a lot of old ideas blended together into a new idea such that it requires getting used to,) Divinity: Original Sin is a game that immediately feels familiar to anybody who likes turn-based role playing games and it is has the advantage that it’s actually quite good so it in general doesn’t take a lot of effort to convince somebody of its potential.

Of course (of course!), having had some success with the Dragon Commander presentation, things needed to balance themselves out, so the Divinity: Original Sin presentation turned out to be probably the worst we’d ever given (I say we because it was shown in multiplayer) We started out strong, even if we had one crash, but then ran into a situation I certainly didn’t expect us to have at this stage in our collective careers.

To make a long story short (and because I’m thinking of grabbing some more sleep as baby boy seems to have relaxed a bit), this particular version of the build had a problem that ruined most of the scripting in the game, which for a RPG that wants to promote itself as being very interactive and reactive is a pretty much a no-no. On top of that, our cheat-presentation-gear wasn’t present in the game because we had taken the wrong build (or some other advanced version control branching excuse) meaning that we were dying continuously as we were trying to reach a higher-level area where we were hoping the script logic was working. And when we did eventually make it there, a blocker bug prevented us from even reaching the area because some piece of area-linking logic was missing from the game, so we should actually even have bothered getting there.