Larian’s Swen Vincke on Last Minute Changes and Media

You might have heard the debate between advocates of scope control and polish and fans of “ambitious but buggy” games before, but it’s likely you hadn’t read Larian CEO Swen Vincke’s take on it yet. In short, he belongs to the second camp, and that’s informing some of his decisions for the development of Divinity: Dragon Commander:

All of the changes that we agreed on were implemented or being implemented, and a number of new crashes had been found and solved. If you’re wondering why we are still changing things, well, you needn’t look further than our forums, youtube, the steam community hub, facebook , twitter and what have you. There’s a continuous feedback loop going on there and we’re seeing some very well formed opinions appearing.

Our code of conduct is that whenever somebody posts a bright idea it gets on our list, and then put it in, as long as it remains feasible for us.

I can guarantee you that there’s a lot of people in the development trade (that actually includes guys in my office 😉 ) that will tell you that this is the way to ruin, but my experience has been such that you’re better of with a game that’s fun and maybe not polished than you are with a game that’s polished but not fun. Fixing the polish is an easy enough thing and almost always a matter of money. Fixing the fun otoh is still somewhat of an arcane art coveted by many but mastered by few and money will not necessarily make the difference. Because my interest and joy in making games comes from stumbling upon ways of making them fun, I tend to sin more than often against the rules of maintaining the outwards production values that are so important these days, preferring a message box if need be over not putting something in that clearly improves the game mechanics 🙂

I joke, but I really do believe that whenever you realize a certain change will make your game more fun, you should do it, no matter how late in the development process you are. You should actually count yourself lucky that you had the insight prior to release. The only reason I can see why you shouldn’t embark on making the change is when you can’t implement the change properly for whatever reason. But you shouldn’t let that be an excuse for not making the change. 😉

We’ve had quite a few of these types of insights ever since we started printing those boxes. A lot of them came from as a result of the closed beta we’ve been organising and we learnt a lot from seeing all those players in action. So I’m actually quite pleased that we decided to have a mandatory zero day patch. I guess there is still some discussion about these type of patches, but really, this is 2013 and the very reason why some games aren’t as good as they could’ve been is because developers couldn’t touch their games anymore once they went gold, or because they were allowed only one (free) patch which is what happened to us on the X360. (I know it’s changed now, but this particular stupid rule has been in place for many years)

Yours truly once even heard that his publisher’s games were perfect and that therefore they had a zero patch policy. Even showing said publisher a mantis database with over a 1000 flagged bugs in it didn’t make them change their opinion 😉

However, there is one nagging and very practical publishing problem with this modus operandi, and it’s one that needs to be solved by the self-publishing developer who wants to make his game as good as he can: when to send out review code.

If you send it out on the day you release the game, you risk not having enough hype and people thinking that you have something to hide. (I’m thinking of you Angry Joe) There’s also the risk that if it’s already old news, certain outlets won’t write about it. But, if you send it out to soon, the risk is that you have a game reviewed which is significantly different from what you are actually going to be shipping, because perhaps one of those last minute changes actually makes all the difference in the world. (I don’t remember if I ever explained here how there was 10% metacritic difference in Divine Divinity reviews because of one change, but if I didn’t, let me know)