[...talk about Kickstarter and console ports...]
You talk about the ending changing. If I’ve played this game on PC and I want the game on console, is the ending so different that it’ll be worth for me it to play through it again?
I think so, there's a huge amount of effort gone into it. Some players were very disappointed with the original ending, it wasn't very satisfying. That was frustrating for us because it wasn't what we'd intended. We couldn't do the ending we wanted because of a lack of time and resources. But so many people bought the game, we figured the very least we can do is fix something that we wanted to put in the game in the first place. And then typically, we exaggerated and went back through the whole game and started changing things left and right.
Normally when people port a game to console, they might be fixing things that are broken, or maybe adding dialogue, not rewriting the whole thing. Why are you doing this and how are you able to afford to do this, rather than making paid DLC?
I mean, the foundation is that we really care about what we're making, in the sense that we're trying to get better all the time and we're improving our craft. Also, we have big ambitions for our next RPG, and there are things in the Enhanced Edition that we're trying out with a view to using them in later releases. If you look at the history of our games, you'll find that in a game like the old Divinity, we were already exploring ideas for Original Sin. Some things will work, some won't, but eventually you'll see that some of the things we're doing now are going to be useful for our next game.
For instance, we learned a lot from doing all the voice recording from the Enhanced Edition, so we know how we can improve those processes and make them more efficient for next time. Likewise, our tools are getting better. You can see every single visual effect has been redone now, and they look a lot better thanks to some new technology, which will be used again in our next game. It's a continuous process, and rather than just waste it on prototypes, we might as well use all that effort on games we're making ourselves.
You often talk about the stresses of the development cycle. Now you’re expanding the studio and working on three projects not one. Are you looking forward to doing these projects?
It's a double-edged sword. I live for my job, I wouldn't do it if I didn't, but I have to find a balance between work and life. That was the original purpose of my blog – to show people that there's two sides to things. Often people only see the side that comes from trying to start a product, but there's a lot more going on behind it that nobody ever sees.
Sometimes there are things being written that shouldn't be written. I think every developer has to deal with the negatives, from hate mail to passive aggressiveness on the internet, and that's part of the deal. If you can't deal with it then you shouldn't be doing it, or at least handling it publicly. But all that stuff does touch developers I think, and it does hurt from time to time.
Do you think your experience was more stressful because it was a Kickstarter project, or was it fairly typical?
I think from talking to others, we've all been through the same experiences. It's a lot of pressure, because you have your image to take care of, you have a game you want to be proud of and you want to deliver something to an audience that they're going to enjoy. If people are going to spend some money on your game, you want to make sure they're going to have a good time and get value for that – that's about 40–80 hours in our case, and then have the dialogue with them so you can improve the next game. I think most developers have that attitude.
Do you think you could make a game that’s not based on fantasy, or not an RPG, or are you THAT studio now?
We're not married to fantasy, that's for sure. It just happens to be that when we're accustomed to making these titles, and there's quite an audience for fantasy, it makes sense to do fantasy, right? I have many ideas for many different universes, any of which could be either successful or complete disasters. We're not in a position where we could finance a complete disaster yet, but hopefully we will be one day, because then we can start experimenting, like we did with Dragon Commander.
But from time to time we do need to have our successes, so that we can fund the disasters! To be honest, those experiments are probably the most fun to make, because then you’re going boldly where nobody has been before.
