[...]
TSA: It’s quite unusual for a developer to be able to go back to a game and overhaul it in such a comprehensive manner.
Swen: Yeah, but it’s been very successful for us and we’re very grateful to our players. When we decided to go on console, this gaves us the opportunity to make a different game, one that is better, and one that contains all the things we think we should have done in the original release. Every developer, when he releases a game, has this feeling like they have to release, but really they’d like to do this and this and this.
So it’s the Enhanced Edition because we were going to Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and we had that opportunity. Then it went completely out of control, as it usually does…
We had the same thing happen once before. It was different circumstances, but pretty much the same thing happen when we went from Divinity II: Ego Draconis to Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga. Suddenly everybody has a stake and this has to change, we can’t ship unless that hasn’t changed. It’s very emotional really.
Nobody has dared look at the exact budget for [Enhanced Edition], and we’re all fooling ourselves by saying that it’s all part of the work for Original Sin 2!
TSA: I guess as long as you don’t get a call from the bank manager, you’re OK. [laughs]
Swen: Yeah, but we do have a good idea of where we stand.
In a sense it’s true, though, because the engine is probably the thing that’s changed the most – it’s almost a new engine in that sense – although that’s invisible to most players, but if you put both versions of the game next to each other, then it becomes rapidly apparent.
[...]
TSA: Yeah, the Kickstarter really gives you extra time, which is the most important thing when you’re having to find your way.
Swen: A producer once told me, you can’t be creative if you can’t fail. So in development you have to accept that failure is part of the process as you’re searching for things. It’s painful for the people paying the bills, but you have to.
Richard Cobbett on Rock, Paper, Shotgun today, he did a piece on why dungeon master modes are failing. It was an interesting piece to read, because he’s probably right in a lot of aspects, and there hasn’t been one that’s really taken off so far. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be trying, because every time you try, something else is being discovered and eventually somebody’s going to put it all together and you’ll have a new game mode.
The great thing about Kickstarter is that it lets us explore that terrain. You get grilled when you fail, but that’s a different story.
TSA: With the consoles now having the Enhanced Edition, where do consoles fit in your plans for the future with Original Sin 2?
Swen: We said that with Original Sin 2 we’re going to focus on the PC version first, and we’re going to see if there’s a market for a game like Enhanced Edition on console. I think we did a decent job of bringing it to console and controller, but now we have to see if there’s people on PS4 and Xbox One that want to play it.
The reason why I say that is because when we were starting to make it for console, we were looking for similar games and there are none!
TSA: Well it’s been interesting to see the revival of the cRPG, and you’re in that first wave who went through Kickstarter and focussed on PC first. There’s also Wasteland 2 which has just come out on console as well, and both you and inXile are doing this as independent studios with the help of publishers, but the cRPG hasn’t really had that presence for the last decade, so there’s less chance of this kind of game appearing on console because of that!
Swen: But to be fair, that argument could be reversed! The reason why they weren’t coming out or you weren’t seeing them was because there was no market on console. Publishers only wanted to invest in multiplatform titles, and nobody really managed to do it well on consoles when there were experiments back in the days of PS2 which didn’t perform as expected, I presume.
So maybe they won’t work, maybe they’ll work, I don’t know. We’ll see!
