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Game News Divinity: Original Sin Kickstarter Update #67: Enhanced Edition Officially Announced

Infinitron

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Tags: Divinity: Original Sin; Larian Studios; Swen Vincke

We all knew this was coming, but now it's official. The latest Divinity: Original Sin Kickstarter update announces Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition, a comprehensive upgrade to Larian's 2014 hit that includes console/controller support, full voice acting, an improved ending, and more. I quote:

Today we are very excited to announce Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition for PS4 and Xbox One as well as PC, Mac, SteamOS and Linux. This isn't just some patch or minor content update to the game you all know and (hopefully) love; it's a whole new experience! With controller support, local co-op with split screen, fully voiced characters, a totally reworked story (with a brand new ending), and much more, we're very proud to finally be able to share what we've crafted here at Larian.

In the update video below, Swen reveals a little more about the fantastic new features you can look forward to in Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition.



We've also included controller support on PC, so now you can kick back and explore Rivellon from the comfort of your sofa with Steam's Big Picture. We've put a lot of effort into streamlining the experience and have designed a slick, new UI that makes playing with a controller just as intuitive and fun as playing with mouse and keyboard.

As well as local co-op, split screen and controller support, the Enhanced Edition also features:
  • All characters are now fully voiced by AAA-voice actors
  • New quests, new characters, and new content
  • Entirely new gameplay modes and character builds
  • A heavily rewritten story with a brand new ending
  • Massively reworked visuals and sound effects
  • And much more to be announced in the coming months!
A Gift For Our Fans

In appreciation of all the fans who helped make Divinity: Original Sin the success that it was, the Enhanced Edition will be completely free to everyone who owns Original Sin. This is a reflection of our immense gratitude to all of you. We deeply appreciate your support, and the feedback we received from you helped us create and polish this game into something that we're extremely proud of.

A Whole New Game

Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition is a completely separate game: not an update to Divinity: Original Sin. Both games will remain available on PC and Mac, and it is important to note that they are totally different entities, so if you've already bought Original Sin you'll see separate listings for Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition in your Steam Library. This means that saved games can't be transferred from Divinity: Original Sin to the Enhanced Edition. This is largely because of the technical changes we've made to how the game looks and feels, but the story has also been rewritten so heavily that most saved games would no longer be compatible with the plot. (After all, it wouldn't make sense to load a game in which you're halfway through a quest line that's been replaced with something different.)

From the very first day of production, we designed the Enhanced Edition to be optimized for DirectX 11 graphics. For our Windows players, this means that Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition will require a 64-bit system and a graphics card with DirectX 11 hardware support. However, both editions of the game will remain available to everyone on Steam, so Windows players with 32-bit systems and DirectX 9 will always be able to play Divinity: Original Sin.​


There's no release date for the Enhanced Edition yet, but perhaps we'll learn that at E3 next month. Note that the EE is not one of the two RPGs that Larian is known to be working on, so we're getting that and two additional Larian games. What a year!
 

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I'm more worried about the "new UI that makes playing with a controller just as intuitive and fun as playing with mouse and keyboard"
:hmmm:

Well, at worst, the original game will still be available. :smug:

inXile is promising two separate user interfaces for PC and console/controller for WL2 GOTY. Wonder how that'll work out.
 

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Reposting from D:OS thread:

Sadly, gaming companies have understood that in the age of digital sales and short attention spans, re-releasing the games as enhanced editions / director's cuts / definitive editions / etc. grants them additional notability and income for relatively small effort, so this trend will continue. And what is more, these are not always free upgrades (luckily this time it is free).

EDIT: Swen claims in his blog that this not a low-effort upgrade. I want to believe. :ufoposter:

what they say - what it actually means:

early access - first playable build
release - alpha
release + day 1 patch - beta
release + three months of patching - gold
enhanced edition - actual release
 
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Codex troll pined down at 0:07 :rpgcodex:

Btw whats with all these Enhanced, Reworked, GOTY editions of Kickstarted games lately?
 

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Three in a row. Didn't touch, this, Wasteland 2 or Dead State. I'm feeling the procrastination love.

I don't know how to feel about this though, this isn't just an update, it's practically a goddamn remake.
 

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I just....

D:OS was a game as strong as an ogre and about as intelligent. Gorgeous looking with fantastic combat. But the story was so boring, stupid and juvenile it was almost embarrassing. How are they gonna "totally rework" that?

Oh well. Let's at least hope they'll address the terrible itemization and utterly borked balance and difficulty curve too so we'll get something meaningful out of this actual full release.
 

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They aren't going to make it any less "stupid and juvenile," obviously (as well as hopefully and thankfully). Goofy writing is one of Larian's trademark thingies, and I hope it stays this way.

What the writing and story needed was not more seriousness, but better editing, pacing, etc., so my guess is that's what they're going to improve on.

On topic:
:yeah:
 

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as well as hopefully and thankfully. Goofy writing is one of Larian's trademark thingies, and I hope it stays this way.

:nocountryforshitposters:


No. Monkey Island 1 had a goofy writing hopefully and thankfully.

D:OS writing was just bad. Simply bad. There's absolutely nothing of value in it worth keeping. Goddamn CB, isn't the entire industry infantile enough? Shouldn't we demand a higher standard than this undergraduate level of fanfiction?
 

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Eurogamer's Robert Purchese seems to have spoken with Swen recently: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-05-15-divinity-original-sin-overhauled-for-ps4-and-xbox-one

Divinity: Original Sin, "hands down the best classic-style role-playing game in years", is coming to PS4 and Xbox One. What's more, it's been overhauled for the occasion, transformed into an Enhanced Edition that will launch at the end of the year.

So much has changed. A team of around 40 has been working on the Enhanced Edition for a year, Swen Vincke, head of developer Larian, told me. Everything from the graphics to story to the ending have been changed. And PC and Mac players won't miss out.

Any one who owns Divinity: Original Sin on PC or Mac - and there are now nearly a million such people, Vincke said - will be offered the Enhanced Edition for free. It will be a separate game to exist alongside the current one, because such are the changes the two games are incompatible. Saves, then, won't carry across.

Naturally, for console there is a new user interface and native pad control, as well as split-screen co-op - enabling you to walk off independently of each other - in addition to online co-op.

There are significant technical changes courtesy of the arrival of DirectX 11, and most of the visual effects have been redone. And the camera now rotates 360 degrees. As a result, the Enhanced Edition's minimum system requirements have been upped.

The game's story has been tightened up around its flabby middle and the ending given serious attention, with lots of new locations and quests tying into it. Vincke said all of the game's encounters have been redone.

The adventure is now fully voiced and the AI character interactions are tidied up. It is, Vincke said, "essentially a different experience."

Divinity: Original Sin came out of Kickstarter for PC and Mac last summer. It was a game Larian had made and pitched fruitlessly to publishers for years before. "I should make a collection of the rejection letters and publish those," Vincke snorted. "Nobody wanted to believe that that was going to be a thing, a turn-based RPG."

But Divinity: Original Sin became one of the most critically acclaimed and successful games to come out of Kickstarter. The PC and Mac audience lapped it up. And when the going is good, the phone rings.

"The very moment we released Original Sin [30th June 2014] we started getting calls for a console version," Vincke said. "That was almost instant.

jpg

That old 2011 image, a concept, from when I'm told the game had a different story and much smaller scope.

"There's an image in an old booklet we had that we presented in 2011 to publishers, as we were pitching to make Original Sin on console already. And that image consists of two people sitting together on a couch, holding a controller, playing it on a TV screen. So we've always wanted to put it in there."

But will it resonate with PS4 and Xbox One owners in the same way? "We're really nervous about the console version," he admitted. "We hope there's an audience for this! We don't know. And we really went overboard in what we put in there."

What's more, people now expect more from Larian, as success breeds expectation. "Whatever we do, if it's going to be less good in any way, we're going to be crucified," he said. But that, he added, is a nice problem to have.

Aside from Divinity: Original Sin on console (which is playable but needs testing - maybe there will be a beta of some kind), Larian has two other games in the works. One is in development at headquarters in Belgium, and one is in development at a second studio in Quebec, Canada.

Larian employs around 80 people, including contractors, so around half of the workforce is split across the two new games.

Both new games will be built on the Divinity: Original Sin engine, which now works on PS4 and Xbox One, and supports split-screen and online multiplayer. And both new games will be turn-based.

There's a good chance one of the new games will take to Kickstarter. "It's been the subject of lots of debate," Vincke said. "There's a strong tendency to go to Kickstarter with at least one of them, and probably in the not so distant future, but we're not so sure yet. If we do something it will probably be past the summer."

To say anything more would be to reveal too much, he apologised. "It's something people are going to easily fall in love with, I think, but you have to give me something to talk about!"
 

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Businessfag talk:

For months I’ve been wanting to talk about it, but I couldn’t because we were in the publisher pitching process. Publisher you say? Haven’t you been promoting independence all along? I have, and I do, but you need to pick your battles and this particular one is too big for us on our own, so we needed help.

A console release like the one we’re planning on has a big retail component (I’m told between 60% & 70% of sales are still being done in retail, probably less by the time we release) and that’s just the type of thing that’s inaccessible to a developer like us. The cost of goods on console can run up to something like 8 euros per unit meaning that if you want to sell say a million units, you’ll have to put in 8 million euros. And that’s just in cost of goods, you haven’t talked about the marketing yet that’s mandatory to make any kind of splash. Not only does it take quite some budget, you also need to have the staff to support it.

So how did we end up picking Focus and not one of the bigger boys who were in the running for this?

For starters, they know us & Divinity well and were the ones that gave us the break we needed back in 2010 when we transformed Divinity 2:Ego Draconis into Divinity 2: The Dragon Knight Saga, the game that essentially forged the path to our independence. That wouldn’t have been possible without their support and it’s something for which I’ll remain grateful to them. They also always were very correct in their dealings with us, a rare thing in an industry that’s full of sharks.

I was discussing the Enhanced Edition for Xbox One & PS4 with some of the aforementioned bigger boys when a chance meeting at GDC 2015 resulted in me visiting the Focus offices in Paris. There I was met with great enthousiasm and given an overview of everything they’d been doing in the last year, and more importantly, what their ambitions were. It also became very apparent that a lot of the boys & girls in the Focus team were big fans of D:OS and would put their heart and souls into it if they got the deal.

This was followed up within the day with an offer that was in line with what the bigger boys offered, all without anybody at Focus even checking if the game ran on console.

It was a major sign of trust & respect, and it didn’t miss its mark. I didn’t even bother negotiating with the other parties anymore as I wasn’t interested in scraping the last penny out of the barrel. Rather my interest lied in partnering up with somebody who could complement us in all the areas where we had no expertise because it was clear this was something we couldn’t do ourselves.

And here was a partner that I could trust, that believed in us and that loved our game. What more do you want in a publisher?

Luckily for them, the game also happens to run well on console;)
 
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Goddamn CB, isn't the entire industry infantile enough? Shouldn't we demand a higher standard than this undergraduate level of fanfiction?

What we need is more goofiness and "infantilism," not less. Grimdark serious business RPGs with "good" and "mature" story can go fuck themselves. I'll take D:OS' writing over Witcher 2 or Dragon Age, which both left me absolutely bored, any day.

Also, even if you take D:OS writing to be "just bad," DKS' and Dragon Commander's writing prove that all Larian need is more editing, not less goofiness. If the new D:OS writing (or Larian next game's writing) is at the level of DKS, then it'll be pretty great.
 

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Looks like they weren't originally planning to do an EE, but things eventually turned out that way:

But I deviate. This piece is titled “The why of our third secret project” with good reason. When we shipped D:OS my initial feeling was – that’s it, I never want to see D:OS again after having risked pretty much everything for it and having woken up with the monster it is for years. But then the feedback came in together with criticism I thought was correct, and I started wondering what it’d take to fix it. And I wasn’t alone. Most in our team had the same feeling and wanted to improve things further.

And so we started, first with small things intended to be included in the N-th patch, but soon with more drastic things that couldn’t be included that easily. Then, even more drastic things made it to our tasklist that conflicted with the “patch protocol”, a series of rules that ensure story changes don’t break savegame compatibility and would therefore only be present in new games.

When the UI, controller and split-screen experiments looked like they were going to be succesful, it almost became a no-brainer that we’d apply our re-engineering skills to the entire game. And so we did.

This caused a stream of new problems of course but what would life be without problems
icon_wink.gif


One of our biggest issues was that we suddenly had two games to maintain on PC. One was singlethreaded, the other multithreaded. One was based on DirectX 11, the other on DirectX 9. One had limited camera rotation allowing for certain pieces of level design to be incomplete, the other a 360 degree camera. One was live, the other wasn’t etc…

It quickly became impossible to do things on both games simultanously as the changes become bigger and bigger, and so at some point we had to make a choice. We decided to do only the really necessary things on D:OS and focus all of our creative energy on the Enhanced Edition.

This had big implications for certain things that were in the pipeline like for instance the Linux version. Our decision essentially meant we could start over again and that obviously got some in the Linux community quite angry at us, but we reasoned that over the long term, it ‘s better the Enhanced Edition has Linux support instead of the original D:OS. It improves the chances of our future games having Linux support too, though I don’t want to commit to that just yet.

Another thing we needed to deal with was that because the Enhanced Edition has a lot better of everything, it has higher system specs (even if it has better performance) and doesn’t support 32bit versions of Windows or DX9. That means that some people who were able to play D:OS won’t be able to play the Enhanced Edition which is a pity as we put a lot of effort in supporting them. But for them D:OS will remain available and if ever they upgrade their machines, they’ll have a free version of the Enhanced Edition waiting for them in their libraries

In case you’re wondering about the latter, yes, we are going to give everybody who owns D:OS on PC (and on Mac if you bought it through Steam or Gog. And if we ever figure out a way of having a real communication line with the people running the App Store, then there too) an Enhanced Edition for free. It’s another way of saying thank you. That means that if you own D:OS now, you’ll soon see an extra entry in your Steam or GOG library for the Enhanced Edition. You’ll still be able to play the original D:OS too.

Finally, the last big reason I didn’t mention yet about the why of the Enhanced Edition is the strategic one.

We’re putting a lot of effort in getting the Enhanced Edition to run really well on Xbox One & PS4 with controller support, with multiplayer and with split-screen support because from now on those features will be basic features of our engine.

That means that if we decide to go multi-platform in the future, we’ll be able to. This without–dumbing down- or –simplifying- things because a lot of the hard work will already have been done. It makes us a lot stronger as a company and will allow us to do much bigger things in the future. I’m quite excited by that prospect.
 

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what they say - what it actually means:

early access - first playable build
release - alpha
release + day 1 patch - beta
release + three months of patching - gold
enhanced edition - actual release

I don't think this applies to D:OS. I finished it on release and it was pretty polished and feature-complete. The second half of the game's content and balance (though I didn't mind the overpoweredness personally) wasn't as good as the first half, but it's a problem in most RPGs ever, which doesn't mean they all were released in the alpha state.

It is definitely the case for Dead State, but I'd say not for D:OS or even W2 (though this one was more buggy on release).
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Oh geez, there's an RPS interview as well. Larian media blitz! http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/05/15/interview-divinity-original-sin-enhanced-edition/

RPS: We only know the basics of what you’re announcing and that it involves a console version. But I hear that it’s more than that and therefore relevant to our interests!

Vincke: Yes. We’re doing the console version but it’s more than that – it’s called Divinity Original Sin: Enhanced Edition and it’s probably more enhanced than probably all the other enhanced editions you’ve ever played. We’ve gone a little bit overboard with what we’ve done.

It’ll be released as a new game, so Divinity: Original Sin as it was launched will still exist, and then there will be this new version. Everybody who has Original Sin will get the Enhanced Edition for free but there won’t be any compatibility between the two versions because, as I said, we went overboard. There’s a drastic rewrite of the story, with a lot of new story moments and a much more satisfactory ending, with big new things there. We fully voiced everything, which meant we had to touch up all of the dialogue. We’ve been recording since the end of December and we’re still recording.

And we added a lot of extra stuff in terms of new styles of playing, new modes, new quests that have been added, old ones modified. Anything we could find that was worth doing, we did it. There’s also everything that we did with the controller for the console version – that is supported on PC as well, which means you can now play on a couch with splitscreen, through Steam Big Picture for instance.

divinityparty.jpg


RPS: The fact that you can do this for free for PC owners presumably has something to do with how successful the game has been in its original form?

Vincke: Yeah, we’re nearly at a million players now. There were a lot of publishers that wanted to pay for the console version, which helps. But it’s a straightforward decision to give it away for free. We could have charged, given all that we’ve done, made it a DLC or something, but you know my stance on DLC. I’m not really crazy about that.

It made sense to do it this way. From an economic point of view, it does mean there’s a new reason to play Original Sin for new players, but people who have already played will be in for a treat when they go back. There’s a lot of extra stuff and a lot of it is different as well.

RPS: So you would say it’s worth going back to if I’ve already played the original for almost a hundred hours. I feel ready to go back but haven’t really had a reason.

Vincke: Yes, absolutely. There were things that were off in the original release and I don’t like having anything off in one of our releases. We could improve it, and therefore we should, and therefore we did.

There’s an image of the game as we pitched it back in 2011 that I think I showed to you, of people playing on a couch with a controller. We started trying out controller support once the game had been released and we’ve been working on all of this for a year with almost forty people.

The controller implementation was surprisingly smooth and the splitscreen worked also, so we decided we had to do the console version. And we figured if we were doing that, we should improve some of the other things and before you know it, we’re recording all of these voices and all of the rest. It’s a huge undertaking. The guy who organised the recording deserves a medal.

I was reviewing it the other day and it’s a really different experience. I think it’s much better than Original Sin.

doshead.jpg


RPS: When you say that you wanted to go back to fix the things you weren’t happy with – when we’ve spoken before you’ve mentioned that there were things you had to cut because of time and money. Is this now the game you wanted it to be?

Vincke: We always want more. I don’t think we’ll go back again. Maybe to fix whatever bugs are still in there or portability issues, but I’m quite content now. I finished right up to the ending and it felt complete. The holes that were there and that were visible have been closed. The middle part, which was one of the weaker parts I felt together with the ending – so basically two-thirds of the game (laughs). We are always very harsh about our own work.

We’ve done everything we can to make it more fun. The economy has been completely revamped. There’s a lot of stuff in there that you might not have noticed was missing but you feel its presence when you play it now. It goes to the very first encounter – that’s very different now and that’s a signal from the game to you, to tell you that somebody has been thinking about every detail and has consistently worked to improve them.

RPS: I know you can’t tell me exactly what else you’re working on just now but presumably it’s been quite a task balancing this Enhanced Edition and the rest of your workload? Does this reworking feed into the work on the next game in any way?

Vincke: It’s a bit of both. We have been postponing the new things because of the Enhanced Edition because as we got ourselves into it, we dedicated ourselves to finishing it off properly. It’s always more work than you expect, even when you’ve done it several times before. It’s always more.

But for us, strategically it was important because we now have an engine that as a basic feature runs on Xbox One, PS4, PC, Mac, Linux, SteamOS. It supports multiplayer and local co-op with splitscreen. Has mouse, keyboard and controller support, and has all of these RPG features. It’s a very cool thing to build on.

RPS: When we first spoke about Original Sin, which was a long while before it came out, the computer RPG scene seemed very different. Do you think that has had an impact on Original Sin’s position or appeal at all?

Vincke: I understand what you’re asking but I have to be honest, I haven’t played many of my competitors yet. We set out a path that we were going to take and we were on that path a year ago – I’m talking about production on our other games. I don’t know if you agree, but I think that Original Sin did new things, not just old things, and we’re heavily into new things with what we’re doing now. We want to keep some of the old but always to build on it.

We’re experimenting with something that nobody’s done before. Our Enhanced Edition itself is something that nobody has done before because nobody has done splitscreen co-op locally on one screen, on console, for this kind of RPG before. It’s something I always wanted to play myself, ever since I first played Spy Vs Spy of all games.

It’s just another thing that fits in with what we do as a studio. We’re continuing in the same vein.

RPS: It makes sense that you’re giving people more ways to enjoy the multiplayer because that’s one of the things that Original Sin does that nobody else seems to be doing. It makes the game feel half-way between a single-player single character RPG and a broader party-based RPG. It’s in an interesting middle ground.

Vincke: The multiplayer is right at the core of the game’s being and it has a huge impact on the singleplayer experience as well. It’s the essence of pen and paper RPGs, right? You don’t play them on your own.

RPS: I hear a lot more talk about the influence and potential lessons from pen and paper RPGs right now than I was hearing even a couple of years ago.

Vincke: Multiplayer forces you to play in a certain manner that is very similar to what you get in a pen and paper RPG. It’s almost like a trick, including the multiplayer, that forces us to put the freedom in there.

I just walked out of a meeting about that other game, right? Somebody was saying, well if you do this one thing in the design, it’s not fair to the other player. I answered them by saying “look, you have to focus on the 95% of cases where the system works, not the 5% where it doesn’t. Otherwise you lose an interesting way of thinking because of a few fringe cases.”

That can mean you completely change the way you organise your quests and worldbuilding. We’ve learned a lot while making Original Sin so we’re much more advanced in our way of thinking about these things. If you maintain the freedom of design throughout, you feel it in singleplayer and multiplayer. We end up doing things that wouldn’t necessarily make sense in a traditional singleplayer game because the multiplayer requires them, and it improves the singleplayer as well.

I’ll give you one example in Original Sin. That rule that you should be able to kill everybody and still be able to finish the game is still very much a thing. I have to fight with designers all the time to keep it but it’s at the very core of how you make a multiplayer RPG the way we’re doing it. But that very rule means that freedom is present. You might not use that freedom, and 99% of players never will, but you know that you can. The fact that you know that makes you feel that your actions matter much more.

dos6.jpg


RPS: It strikes me that one of the ways Larian design works is that you have these central ideas and rules, and you build from there. Does the Enhanced Edition expand on that? Or was the implementation of your core philosophy already in place throughout?

Vincke: We haven’t added much in that sense, no. Character development is broader, so you can make more types of character, but expanding on those big ideas is very much the focus of the next game. You see, now you’re starting to touch on the systemics that are driving this entire world.

What I’ve seen of Pillars of Eternity – and I’ve only played it very briefly so far – it seems to be very story-focused. On the other hand you have something like Oblivion or Skyrim, which is very systemics-focused. The place that we’re trying to occupy is somewhere in between, with story and systemics working together to create freedom without bottlenecks.

That’s a classic way that stories are told – bottlenecks. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but Original Sin doesn’t feature a single moment where the camera is taken away from you and it’s very hard to tell a story that way, but we do it. And because you can never be sure that an NPC is alive, the only time they can tell you something crucial to the storyline is the moment you meet them. And even then you might have killed them from a distance while you were invisible.

We have to take all of that into account and we’re learning a lot, and evolving in that direction. Some of the things we’re doing now are very innovative and they aid that narrative construction, making you more involved in the narrative while still having all of those systemics. That’s what a dungeon master does!

RPS: Speaking to Josh Sawyer about Pillars of Eternity, he said that part of the design of that game was to simulate the existence of a good dungeon master. It’s a completely different approach but toward the same end. Do you think of Original Sin as a first step toward a new idea or is it just another step along the route you were already taking with the earlier games?

Vincke: There was no game like Original Sin, thanks to the multiplayer angle if nothing else. The combat was also mixing and borrowing from other games, which worked very well and attracted peoples’ attention, and then they spotted the other things. I don’t think we would have sold an RPG as well as we did if we’d try to point at all the interactive items and the freedom to kill everyone – that’s not what people recognise as a USP. But the combat system being fun and attracting people helped and then people realise that they can fool around with the world and enjoy all of that other stuff.

We were also one of the first of the new wave of turn-based RPGs. Well, I think we were the first it’s just that we took longer than the other guys to finish our game off (laughs). Together with the wave of nostalgia – although we dressed our nostalgia in a new jacket – also helped.

dos7.jpg


RPS: Does the nostalgia talk ever irritate you a little? You said you were doing new things in Original Sin and I absolutely agree but I think there is a tendency to talk about a lot of RPGs and Kickstarter games as being driven by nostalgia.

Vincke: One rule that we have in games – which is very different to other media – is that people want something different from game to game. At least that’s the case for me and probably for most people. Whereas in movies, if people see the same formula a hundred times they keep watching.

I think if you were just to do rehashes of old formulas it wouldn’t be successful for a very long time. People want something new and different.

RPS: Do you think there’s an extent to which some of the games that inspired Original Sin – and I’ll always talk about Ultima VII, you know that – never really received follow-ups or had their intricacies carried forward. They became dead-ends to an extent so people want to revisit them, which feels like looking back – but it’s actually a form of looking forward.

Vincke: Yeah. We think alike there. Back in the nineties, certain parts of the tree that are game development weren’t explored anymore and were killed off for no good reason. There’s something very strong about some of those leaves. I’m pretty sure that if somebody made a real modern Ultima VII with all of the schedules and day/night cycles and stuff, that would work well. That’s a no-brainer to me. To that extent, I never understood what they’ve done to the Ultimas. I mean…well, don’t get me started (laughs).

dos5.jpg


RPS: Do you ever think that what you’re doing is too complicated. Are there corners you could cut with some of these core rules and systemic complexities without actually making the game less enjoyable?

Vincke: Sometimes I get frustrated when I see games where you have no interaction and people are amazed by them. All the corners have been cut! You can’t innovate in that way.

If you want to go further, in the quest to make a pen and paper RPG, then you have to ensure that you don’t cut those corners. Because cutting corners means that you’re cutting away freedom. It does make development much more complicated but the more we do it, the better we are able to do it, and that means we’re closer to taking the next step in terms of innovating around player freedom. That’s very much what we’re trying to do. It does give you a rewarding sense as a player because there will be a moment where you try something weird and it works. That’s cool. That’s the greatest reward, realising that what you do matters.

RPS: That’s something that naturally fits with RPGs as a genre. How difficult is it to blend that systemic freedom with a strong narrative though? When I talk to people about Original Sin, we spend more time discussing the mechanics than the characters and events. That’s pretty much the opposite of a Dragon Age conversation.

Vincke: I think that is something we can definitely improve. In Enhanced Edition you’ll find that it’s already better – that was one of the focal points of the work we did there. To strengthen story, put more lore in the background, improve motivation for some characters, including player characters. These are things we could maybe have applied originally but didn’t manage to. Now we have.

There’s still a long road that we can take there and that’s where we’ll be concentrating for the next game. We had two writers for Original Sin and we have seven now. There’s probably an eighth writer coming in which shows where our focus has shifted. A lot of the hires have been made to strengthen our storytelling and worldbuilding.

RPS: The next thing isn’t going to be an MMO, is it?

Vincke: (laughs) No, no, no. Free to play! No. It’s going to be fairly boring, the type of game we’re going to be making. It’s two RPGs and the Enhanced Edition on top of that is a lot on our plate.

RPS: Do you have any interest in working with a license? I’m digging now.

Vincke: Maybe you’ve seen me sitting with people in certain places (laughs). We have talked about licenses but the two things we’re working on now are our own stuff. There are a couple of licenses – one you’ve already mentioned – that I’d work on with my eyes shut. But nothing concrete.

RPS: We’ll talk more about this at Gamescom. When is release for the Enhanced Edition?

Vincke: Definitely this year. We have to go through all of the details for the console releases but it shouldn’t be too long.

RPS: Thanks for your time.

So the EE is coming this year.
 
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Anthedon

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VO for all characters seems like a huge expense, considering all the text in the game. Unless they "streamlined" that. Who would listen to all that instead of just clicking through it?
 

Crooked Bee

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Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
VO for all characters seems like a huge expense, considering all the text in the game. Unless they "streamlined" that. Who would listen to all that instead of just clicking through it?

I don't even remember the last time I listened to full dialogue in an RPG instead of reading it and skipping most of the VO.

It is a waste of money but also I guess a marketing thing to appeal to the kind of people who go "no voice acting, no buy" - a scarily large amount, I must say.
 

Roguey

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Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition is a completely separate game: not an update to Divinity: Original Sin.

My disc is now completely useless. Thanks Larian.
 
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I was already thinking of replaying it, after failing to get into POE and W2. Of course now I'll be waiting for EE all hyped as fuck.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Larian also produced a short "reveal trailer" for the EE:

 

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