Larian’s Swen Vincke on Development “End Game”, Part 1

Now that Divinity: Dragon Commander’s development slowly approaches its end, and that the game is planned to be available hands-on for the first time for both the press and the public (at Frag-o-Matic, a LAN party in Belgium), Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke has taken some time to blog on it, in his usual candid style. Here’s a snip:

Whichever it is, we are pretty much in an alea iacta est situation regarding the hands-on thing as the alea was already iacta’d the very day we decided that we were going to be showing Dragon Commander to an audience of a 1000 hardcore gamers at FOM, the biggest LAN party in Belgium, inviting them to come and play Dragon Commander and originally also Original Sin (we’re still deciding about the latter).

If you show it to 1000 hardcore gamers and give them the opportunity to play, you shouldn’t be afraid of letting people from the media play it, yet still, for some reason, that frightens me more than those 1000 players.

It was a mad plan we decided on a long time ago and in truth it should probably have been cancelled in light of the development tasklist but it wasn’t, meaning that impressively, we’re now indeed going to be standing at FOM with something playable, proving yet again that Larian indeed has the planning abilities normally only reserved for those professional companies we hear so much about and ensuring that yet again I will get many invitations from very reputed institutions to lecture on how to plan in a creative environment!

That we didn’t cancel our attendance at FOM is because we think we’ve finally cracked the gameplay of Dragon Commander,and so are ready to let people play it because we want to see if our thinking is right. The only catch is that up to this point the longest play session we’ve had in the office without encountering some blocking bug is something like 10 minutes, but well, we still have a bit of time. Panic will only come Friday evening or so. And if we’re in trouble now, it’s for the same old reason we want to do too much too well.Not a vice per se, but damned annoying from time to time. And anyway, based on past experience, I’m pretty sure that somehow, we’ll manage.

Parallel to that, we also had to take on a bit of extra work just because we’re self-publishing little devs. So we decided to launch a new trailer & website, pretty much on the same dates as FOM, the idea being that now that we’ve actually gone ahead and changed the mechanics of the game, we need to communicate what we did as well as we can. Obviously that we’d need to communicate such things also came as an afterthought, so it was all done in a bit of a rush (we’re going to make the trailer tomorrow), but we’re confident that that too is something we’ll manage.

And because of that confidence, we’ve also invited a whole bunch of press to Larian to show both games, hoping that yet again, people will be willing to write about it just because they think their audiences will be interested in what we’re creating. And just to ensure we get the highest reach possible (or to increase or chances of finding the single interested soul) we’ve organized a tour around both Europe & the US for all the press that will not come to our offices. And then afterwards we’ve invited even more journalists. All in the hope that they’ll write about us, and spread the word.(which tbh they damn well should both these games dangerously close to become very good games and yes, I know I shouldn’t be the one saying that, but still, damned fine games if you ask me. )