Divinity: Original Sin II - Swen Vincke Interview

Jarl Frank of the RPG Codex interviewed Swen Vincke about Divinity: Original Sin 2:

Jarl interviews Swen Vincke; Questions about Original Sin 2 and other things are answered.

The concept of plane tickets, bitch! has a long tradition on the Codex. In the good old days, it was often issued as a challenge when arguments between two posters got heated. Insults were traded, the other's taste in RPGs was derided, and finally one poster would challenge the other to a real-life duel, offering to pay for plane tickets to make it possible. Regrettably, none of these challenges were ever accepted. In the end, someone always pussied out - either the one being offered the tickets or the one offering.

While this time the context was different, we can finally claim that a plane tickets, bitch! challenge has been accepted and enacted, even though regrettably no physical violence has taken place. The challenge was issued by Larian, and since no-one else was available, I chose to represent the Codex and fly over to Dublin, where Swen would subject himself to a bunch of Codex Community Cwestions and I got to play a D&D adventure with some of the devs from Larian. Yes, a D&D adventure - using Divinity Original Sin 2's Gamemaster Mode as its platform.

Since the results of this were several hours of voice recordings, and I'm both a busy and a lazy man, it's going to take a while until all of those are transcribed. Also, these recordings offer enough material for multiple Codex Content posts that I decided to split this event into three articles: the interview with Swen, Edward's detailed explanation of how the Gamemaster Mode works, and a relation of the actual game that took place between me and the guys from Larian (which was loads of fun and played out pretty much exactly like a pen and paper session, except that we used screen and keyboard as our utensils).

First of these articles shall be the interview I conducted with Swen, where I made sure to ask most of the questions posted by the community in the forum thread - yes, even the embarrassing ones. It was quite a fruitful interview, even though I could've gone for more follow-up questions. Enjoy the inteview!

(Note: if you have posted a question in the thread and don't see it asked here, feel free to complain. I'll make sure to give your complaint the proper attention by not caring at all.)

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We got a whole bunch of community questions. Some of them are really stupid but I’m going to ask them all, anyway.

Sure, go ahead.

[...]

Felipepepe wants to know if you have changed anything about your design philosophy FUME that you have talked about five years ago.

I think it’s still there, because it’s based on my favourite game, Ultima. Freedom is the first letter of FUME, that’s still there, a universe in which you can develop your character is super important, so we spend a lot of time on developing it. When you see the lorebook that’s shipping with the collector’s edition you’ll find out exactly how much time and effort we’re putting in there. Then, giving you motivation to continue… we’ve spent a lot of effort on the narrative this time, much more than we did in the past. Hopefully we’re succeeding in that. And then we’re giving you interesting enemies, that’s everything related to our combat system, so that’s still all in there. Yeah, I think that’s still all there… you know, freedom also means systemics, right? Rather than scripting everything, like do this then do that, we’re giving you systemics and say here, there’s problems, now solve them. That’s still very much in line with what FUME was.

He also wants to know if things have become better audience-wise, because when you pitched Original Sin you said you had issues making people understand the game, as complex RPGs had been out of style for years. Has that changed now in your opinion after so many other RPGs have been released, that the audience is now ready for such complex games?

I don’t think Original Sin is a complex game. It certainly gives you lots of options and that makes it look complex because you see everything that you can do, but I don’t think it’s a complex game. I see that a lot, right? Original Sin has been very popular and we get a lot of people who never played an RPG before, and they pick it up and play and have fun with it. So in terms of audience acceptance, I think it’s actually harder – because there are so many types of RPGs coming out it’s hard to say to the audience, well I’m that type, and they might not necessarily know that, so that might be a bit of a problem. But in general, the biggest driver of sales is word of mouth. It’s not journalists, it’s not youtubers, it’s just what people tell each other, like hey, try this game out. If you have a game that’s fun regardless of what the genre is, and it’s something that interests you, then people are gonna pick it up. I think that’s the most important thing. You try to make your game good, and if it’s good and it’s fun then people are gonna talk about it and it’s going to sell.