Pretty much every big dev nowadays gives free dlc. (EA, Ubisoft, R*, Activision, Capcom) They just have bad reputations because they've "wronged" games and continuously do microtransactions while giving free dlc.
Free, or not free, I'd prefer if small DLCs of horse armor variety didn't exist at all.
"There Was a Bit of Stress:" Swen Vincke Recounts Divinity: Original Sin 2's Painful Development
From testing problems to a constantly expanding word count, Divinity: Original Sin 2's development was anything but smooth sailing.
In another life, I was a curriculum developer in charge of writing English lessons. Our process early on was to have someone write a lesson, then have everyone make notes on the document, which would then be addressed by the writer. Lessons wound up taking forever to finalize, and we quickly moved on to another process.
I found myself flashing back to those days when Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke posted a screencap of a Google Doc containing notes on the story for Divinity: Original Sin 2. This massive story document was circulated between nine writers and various higher-ups for notes, all of which were subsequently addressed. It didn't go well.
"We were very polite people, and we answered every one of the comments," Vincke said a tad ruefully. Eventually, in order to get the project finished, politeness had to go out the window. But that was only the beginning of a grueling development process for Larian Studios.
It was all part of an attempt to build and improve upon the well-received Divinity: Original Sin, which had been released in 2014. Larian Studios had a cult following before Divinity: Original Sin, but its clever use of environmental combat, customization, and co-op play won it a new group of fans. It was good enough that I put Divinity: Original Sin at number 20 in our Top 25 RPGs of All Time list.
The Divinity: Original Sin 2 story document had a problem with too many tooks, Vincke said. | Kat Bailey / GDC 2019
The sequel brought with it further improvements to the combat, the story, and the customization. It included the ability to play as one of several character achetypes, all with their own backstories, as well as original customized characters. It further solidified Larian Studios as a rising studio in the RPG space. But as Vincke explained, it had its share of problems.
Over the course of his hour long talk at GDC, Vincke outlined the challenges that the Divinity: Original Sin 2 development team faced, many of which pertained to the story. Here are some general highlights.
All in all, it was a rough development cycle for Larian Studios. But it all worked out in the end. Divinity: Original Sin 2 received critical acclaim when it was released, including a perfect score from USG. Vincke called making a 120 hour game in two years a "huge accomplishment by the team."
- Larian Studio was absolutely terrified of Middle-earth: Shadow of War, which was set to be released at roughly the same time as Divinity: Original Sin 2. "We thought they would obliterate us," Vincke said. As it turned out, the opposite was true—Shadow of War struggled to gain traction and was quickly forgotten. But one consequence was that Larian Studios felt pressure to release on time lest it be overwhelmed by other triple-A releases. This meant that the team was still making changes to the script the week of Divinity: Original Sin 2's release.
- Out of the nine writers that Larian brought on to the project, only a few had experience writing dialogue trees. The rest were classical writers or TV writers. This brought a different flavor to Divinity: Original Sin 2, but it meant that Larian had to spend a lot of time training the writers to the point where they could handle complex dialogue trees. "Scripters would setup a situation, and writers were supposed to expand on that. And then the writers broke all the flags and conditions, and the scripters would complain... There was a bit of stress," Vincke said.
- Timezones were a huge problem. Larian Studios initially decided to develop every act in parallel, with each studio being responsible for a single act. But a huge bottleneck soon developed as Vincke struggled to review dialogue coming in from Ghent while he was in Quebec. Ultimately, Larian shifted its resources to developing one act at a time, which Vincke says "saved the project."
- The decision to voice record all of the dialogue was made in early 2017, about nine months from release. Larian Studios contracted out several voice recording studios and setup an automated pipeline to account for the roughly 600,000 lines of dialogue that needed to be recorded. By July, Vincke was making an emergency call to the contractors to tell them that the script had ballooned to more than a million words. Larian hadn't accounted for all the alternative dialogue that still needed to be added to fully flesh out the quests, which resulted in a massively expanded word ocunt.
- With changes coming in constantly, QA was quickly overwhelmed. "Imagine you're working in QA, and you have a test plan, but your test plan keeps changing because people keep flagging things as ready when it's not ready," Vincke said. Worse, Divinity: Original Sin 2 was incredibly long, with a single run taking up to two weeks to complete. Ultimately, automation saved much of the project, but journal bugs meant that one reviewer gave Divinity: Original Sin 2 a 7 out of 10, dragging it from a 94 on Metacritic to a 93. It was only one point ultimately, but for Vincke, it was a deduction that didn't need to happen.
- Divinity: Original Sin 2's massive word count caught up with it at launch when Larian failed to finish the Russian localization on time. This resulted in Divinity: Original Sin 2 being review bombed by angry Russians, driving its Steam approval rating down from 96 percent to 70 percent. The team found itself doing damage control on Twitch and elsewhere, finally releasing a beta version of the translation to appease Russian players. "It was our own fault because we changed so many things," Vincke admitted.
"My lesson is that not compromising on quality is a good thing, but you need to figure out how to make the production work with it or you're going to keep running into problems," Vincke said.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 is now available on PC, Xbox One, and PS4. You can find the rest of our GDC 2019 coverage here.
Writing Divinity: Original Sin 2’s story required coordination on a global scale
Creating a bigger, better story that showed off their game’s reactive world was one of the main goals for the developers of Divinity: Original Sin 2. Larian hired a team of nine writers to create it, thinking that would be plenty to tackle the task. But between writing and scripting, Original Sin 2’s main story wasn’t complete until just ten months before the game shipped.
Larian founder Swen Vincke talked about the making of Divinity: Original Sin 2 to an audience of developers at GDC today in San Francisco. He explained how the team expanded to four studios around the globe in the ramp up to production on the game, and how the monumental writing task they had set out for themselves created a host of knock-on problems for the rest of the development team.
In addition to the sprawling main story, Larian decided to create origin stories for each of the key characters you can play in the game. In Divinity: Original Sin 2, you can have four characters in your party, and each has an origin. If you don’t include one of these characters in your party, you’ll still encounter them in the world – and that means their stories and origins had to be told in both first- and third-person perspectives.
When work began on the story script, Larian relied on shared Google docs that gave everyone access to the text and the ability to make notes. Vincke said this, perhaps predictably, resulted in total chaos.
Not only that, he said, but most of the nine writers who were actually hired to create the story – while accomplished in fields like TV and traditional narrative – didn’t have experience in interactive dialogue writing. They wound up needing training in order to adapt to games writing.
Finally, since Divinity: Original Sin 2 wasn’t going to use any ‘story armour’ to protect important NPCs from death, the story had to continue to work even if players decided to kill quest-givers or other important characters. The story stayed in flux, causing headaches for everyone involved in the production.
“Every single time we changed the story, those changes had to propagate out into the documentation, and that caused a lot of problems,” Vincke said.
Even after finishing the main story, Larian’s writers were still making changes. One character, Sybel, still had changes being made to her origin story just a week before the game finally launched.
In the end, Vincke said, the highly iterative approach to creating Divinity: Original Sin 2 proved worth the efforts and heated discussions. The game scored well in reviews and sold well, even after a rough launch week.
“It’s a testament to the fact that all that iteration, and a refusal to compromise on quality, paid off,” Vincke said.
Divinity: Original Sin 2's locations were initially all part of one big map
Larian shows off some of Divinity's cut content. Fort Joy, Driftwood, and Arx were once connected.
A lot went wrong during the development of Divinity: Original Sin 2. In the end, it was hard to tell: Larian's RPG was our 2017 game of the year, and is one of the deepest, most enthralling RPGs in years. But in a GDC panel last week, Larian founder Swen Vincke went over the challenges his team faced during development. It turns out writing a massive and extremely open-ended RPG is pretty tough.
Vincke talked in detail about working out the writing process for Original Sin 2, issues with game balance, the controversial armor system, and other issues they ran into. The most interesting detail to me was the world Larian had initially planned for OS2's multi-act structure. In the finished game, Act 1 takes place on the prison island of Fort Joy. It's a huge sandbox, dense enough to last for 20 or more hours of adventuring, with multiple avenues to eventually win your freedom. Act 2 takes you to the mainland and another large area called Reaper's Coast. In Act 3 you travel to the Nameless Isle, and in Act 4 you're mainly in the city of Arx.
The original plan, though, called for all of these locations to be connected on a huge world map. Here's a picture of that map from Vincke's talk.
But that's not the really crazy part: This wasn't even going to be the only map in the game!
"Once we started realizing that we were in trouble and that we weren't going to be able to make everything that we planned on, we had to make cuts," Vincke said. "Originally Original Sin 2 had a map for the human lands, one for the dwarven lands, one for the undead, basically for each of the races present in the game. What you're looking at here is a map of the human lands, which contains the city of Arx, Driftwood, and Fort Joy, all on one map. Which is essentially the entire game. That gives you an idea of the level of cuts that we had to do."
Each of the major playable characters in Original Sin 2 has a lengthy origin story that ties into their questlines throughout the game. Those origin stories were originally going to be depicted in locations in those characters' homelands.
"Each of these maps had a lot of action going on, and when we cut it, we suddenly started cutting into what was supposed to be the real estate for the origin stories," Vincke said. "So that meant that we had to go and change our origin stories again. This constant ping-ponging between adapting to the fact that we were going to be late and having to make cuts had an impact on the story. The fact that it had an impact on the story meant that the rest of the production was going to be delayed. We struggled quite a lot with that, but eventually managed to have it under control."
Every game ends up with cut content during development, as the realities of what can be done in time and on budget rarely line up with early plans. Even without those other maps, Original Sin 2 is a massive game. It took me 104 hours to finish a single co-op playthrough, and I could easily play it two more times to see the many paths I didn't take.
But it is cool to think about how different the game would've been with a single unified map for the human lands, and how that would've impacted its multi-act structure. I think it ended up for the better—being able to go back to previous areas would be cool, but making them reactive to changes later in the story would've been an impractical amount of extra work.
Yeah, I thought they were hinting at that at first. I think the co-op design prevented this; the designers likely wanted the players to start learning the game together rather than meet up later on.
