Larian’s Swen Vincke Talks Crunch for Divinity: Dragon Commander

While it would be understandable if Swen Vincke decided to wait until the release of Divinity: Dragon Commander to update his blog, given that, in his words, he’s been working on the game from six in the morning to midnight every day, he still took some time to update us on what’s going on with the pre-release crunch on the title. Here’s a (generous) snip from the post:

We indeed went for different settings for the different difficulty levels, which in theory allows us to differentiate between hard-core and casual players. The plan is to try out different sets of balancing with all the players who are in the beta and see what works the best, subjectively (by reading their reactions on forums & co) and objectively( by analyzing het logs that are being sent). To be fair, right now we didn’t even get to the objective part because it was pretty clear that we’d paced things too fast to start with, but I have good hopes that our next beta update might fix things in that area. Then again, maybe it won’t and we’ll have to try something else.

I like this multiplayer beta thing. It’s the first time we did one like this and obviously we already made a couple of mistakes, but we’re learning a lot from it and I’ve faith that in the one month that seperates us from release, we’ll manage to implement a lot of improvements based on the feedback we’re getting.

Obviously, there’s quite a few things we should remember from the bad ideas department.

One particular gem was launching without a proper tutorial and giving players access to only one game mode i.e. the one they’d usually try once they finished the single player campaign because otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to them i.e. multiplayer skirmish with plenty of stuff unlocked that players have no clue what to do with because nobody explained it to them.

Another was not telling people that the beta would initially be multiplayer only. This obviously got us flak from those that thought it’d include the single player campaign (for the record: it should eventually include a small part of the single player campaign).

Yet another was thinking that this time around we’d avoid trying out all of the junk food in town. (we’re switching to catering now)

But inbetween all the curses at yet another blooper occurs, we are making progress, and the game is getting better by the minute. Using my high tech project management skills, I can predict that at the current rate, everything will be ready enough on August 7th, exactly one day after we release the game

Because we’re now a self-publishing studio, amidst all the development effort that’s taking place, we’re also doing a bit of a publishing effort. We’ve managed to get the game on Steam & gog.com without looking too much like idiots, although we certainly did manage our share of goof-ups there too. We also managed to meet for a couple of hours and have an actual marketing meeting. I’m not sure if it’s going to do us any good, but at least we’ll be able to say, well, we did do this and that.