Swen Vincke Explains Divinity: Original Sin Delay and Risks

Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke has decided to offer some additional insight on Divinity: Original Sin’s delay on his personal blog, and informs us that the company is all hands on deck on the title until release, an opportunity offered by Divinity: Dragon Commander’s sales, among other things. Here’s a snip:

Here’s the thing We just announced that Divinity: Original Sin is going to be released this winter, in February 2014 to be precise, most likely at the end of February as our aim is to maximize the remaining development time. The relation between quote and announcement may not seem immediately clear, but implicit within the announcement is the message that we’re going to be investing much more in Divinity: Original Sin than we already invested, and thus increase our risk significantly. Releasing in February means we’re adding four to five months of extra development time, and the plan is to have pretty much our entire team work on it, together with a couple of outsourcers. Given that there are around 40 people in our team, that’s quite an increase for DOS’ final price tag.

The financial reasoning behind extending our development even more is that the better the game is, the better it’ll sell, and that it makes no sense releasing something that’s not good enough, within reason of course. It’s the kind of reasoning that keeps the accountant within me appeased, because he does freak out from time to time.

My dominant line of thought however is that I think we should continue to (tinker and toy, hammer and hew) up to the point that feel we have something in our hands strong enough to convince even our biggest skeptic, and that as long as we break even, releasing a strong RPG in today’s environment is something that’ll create a lot of value for ourselves as a studio. Now, as it happens, I know said skeptic personally, and because it’s such a misanthrope, we’ll never manage to please it, but a healthy dose of positive idealism never hurts 😉

Divinity: Original Sin is one of those games for which I have a lot of (we should put everything we can in this one) sentiment in me. I’m a big believer in both its game and sales potential, and it doesn’t take a lot to convince me that we need to do everything we can to let it grow at its own pace. If it tells us that that it needs five more months, it’s going to get its five more months, even if those are months in entire social lives will come to a standstill again, and this for the third time this year. There are good reasons to think that it’ll be worth it and I really hope I’m not making another big mistake, again 😉

In our official communication, we’re explaining the delay as the result of wanting to properly integrate our stretch goals. Thanks to Kickstarter these are becoming very integral to the game, so much in fact that parts of the game were completely re-engineered to make room for them.

That last statement can be read in two ways, and both happen to be right: A) Some stretch goals were incompatible with design decisions we had already taken e.g. our character development system wasn’t robust enough to accommodate for companions, and so we had to change things more than we expected. B) Some things in the pre-Kickstarter version sucked, and we took opportunity to fix them as we were re-engineering the game world anyway.

I don’t know what the reactions to the release date news will be at the time of writing this, but my guess is that there’ll be some disappointment about having to wait a bit longer. But I think we’re delaying for good reasons, so I hope there’ll be some understanding.