Original Sin - Interview @ Venturebeat

In-case you missed out votes for GOTY Divinity: Original Sin was both our team members, any our sites pick for 2014. The reason why is Fan feedback helped shape the game.

Heather Newman of VentureBeat even has a new interview about ths topic.

Larian Studios developers didn’t start out expecting to use fan input for their fantasy role-playing game Divinity: Original Sin, which recently completed its journey from Kickstarter to retail.

After all, Divinity wasn’t designed as a massively multiplayer RPG, where developers could make lots of iterations down the road. They were making a traditional, write-once-and-release RPG.

But then the player suggestions poured in during the Kickstarter campaign, beta testing, early access, and digital release.

“We realized quickly that if we’d listen to these suggestions, we’d have a much better game, so the decision was easy to take,” Larian founder Swen Vincke said.

In the end, Larian incorporated more than 130 player suggestions Original Sin, contributing to its strong review scores and earning it a place on store shelves in December.

“Every day, we compiled all the feedback across communities and sat together deciding what we were going to do and what not,” Vincke said. The task list ended up holding 872 changes players wanted to see.

The result was a PC and Mac game that GamesBeat Managing Editor Jason Wilson called “the best role-playing experience of the year” for 2014.