Divinity: Original Sin II - Evolves in Early Access

PC Gamer asked Swen Vincke how Divinity: Original Sin II will be improved with the help of Early Access players:

How Divinity: Original Sin 2 will evolve in Early Access

Combat balance and system tweaks galore, Game Master mode, and more are on the way.

Something always goes wrong when you launch a game, says Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke. You wouldn’t know it by looking at Divinity: Original Sin 2’s Steam page a week after it launched in Early Access, where it’s sitting at 96 percent positive reviews. But something did go wrong when Larian released Original Sin 2 on September 15: they all forgot to press the launch button.

“For some reason we forgot to push the button, literally,” Vincke said, laughing over Skype. “That’s no joke. In the past you had to ask Steam to release it and they’d release it for you at the appointed time. Now they have a system where you put in the date and time, and so we thought it would just release automatically. But apparently you have to still type in that you want to release. So we were waiting there, together with everybody, waiting for it to release, and nothing was happening. We felt really stupid. [laughs] Goes to show, you should always read the fucking manual!”

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How Larian collects feedback

PC Gamer: Let’s start with things that you already had in mind that might need to change, and the feedback that’s influencing you in one direction or another.

Swen Vincke: There’s two parts to the question: What feedback are we looking at, and what do we do with it?

We obviously have the channels like forums and Twitter that we’re reading. Everybody’s reading a lot of it. We’re filtering things that we think are useful out of that. On one side that’s bug reports. Things are going wrong, there’s so much you can do in the game. On the other side there’s opinions and suggestions. Lots of good suggestions. Those go in a database and we go through it and say, ‘that makes sense, that’s actually better than we were planning.’

At the same time we’re also doing qualitative analysis. We have a little tool that’s shipping with the game, so people that want to can send data back to us. The data contains, ‘Where did you go in the game, what skills did you pick, what tags did you select, which dialogue options did you do?’ So it gives us more analytical data about what people are doing in the game away from the subjectivity of an opinion. That is dominantly being used for balancing, so we can see that if nobody’s managing a certain fight, then we probably overdid it on that fight. But also, if nobody is using a certain skill, it means we probably should do something about that skill.

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