Larian’s Swen Vincke on Feedback Late in Development

Larian CEO Swen Vincke has penned a new post for his blog, this time focusing on how to handle feedback this late in development, with a concrete example from Divinity: Dragon Commander. Changing things based on it might cause a whole host of new issues to solve, but not addressing it means that those problems will pop up in reviews and annoy players around:

To make it concrete, the issue at hand has to do with the difficulty, pacing and tempo of the RTS part of Dragon Commander. Several journalists think it’s too fast and too hard. That would be a simple enough thing to solve if it weren’t for that other group who thinks it’s too easy. Go figure 😉

Unfortunately it’s not something we can easily fix by introducing a gamespeed slider or balancing multiplier, so we’re either going have to make a real choice for who our primary audience is or introduce completely different sets of balancing data from which players can choose.

That obviously will impact development, because suddenly we’ll have doubled our balancing work, so it’s not a trivial thing because it means not only extra design work, but also a shitload of extra QA work.

For the purpose of my blog and my arguments pro self-publishing, whatever our choice in this is doesn’t really matter. The cool thing is that we actually can choose and that we know things like this prior to release, so we have a chance to do something about it. If we didn’t self-publish and wouldn’t have been that closely in touch with the journalists, we would never even have had this opportunity.

For the purpose of the success of my game, it of course matters a lot.

Personally, I’m no big fan of things like difficulty and gamespeed sliders and I certainly don’t want to have to put a slider on easy when playing myself. If I have to do that, I consider it bad balancing on part of the developer. It’s up to the developer to ensure that my play experience is a perfect fit. But of course I also want it to be challenging, and I want the game to be challenging without me having to put the slider on nightmare levels. If I can read a book while playing, you’ll hear me screaming about the game being dumbed down and I’ll probably stop playing it. (Yes, there’s not that many games being released nowadays that I’m happy about and it’s not because I’m a game developer that I don’t have the same god-given right like other gamers to expect a game to be made for me only )

I’m pragmatic enough to realise that we’ll never be able to please everybody, so in all cases a certain amount of customisation needs to be present on the gameplay front. But that doesn’t remove our development responsibility of trying to come up with balancing values that feel (just right) to the majority of players who bought Dragon Commander, and in this particular case, it looks like that will not be an easy task. We might even have to revert of the horror of asking you what type of player you are when the game commences. Hmmm. TBD, that’s for sure.