While talking about Ultima VII, it unfortunately dawned on me again that I’m really not that young anymore. Apparently half the journalists had never played any of the Ultima games, and several of them had never even heard about them.

I was a bit shocked by this, because to me that was like a fantasy book reviewer saying that he’d never heard about Tolkien. Of course, if you think about it, it does makes sense.  Most of these guys were still trying to figure out if Optimus Prime really existed when it was first released, yet for some reason that hadn’t occurred to me.

That didn’t dissuade me from talking about it though.  I consider Ultima VII: The black gate and Ultima VII: Serpent Isle to be among the best RPGs ever made, and in my mind there’s not been a single RPG since 1992 that surpassed them, including those now considered to be the industry benchmarks.

So why was I talking about Ultima VII so much ?

Well, for one, I was trying to explain that when making the first Divinity, my goal was to recreate the feeling I experienced when I played these Ultima games.

The Ultima games gave me a feeling I had never experienced before: that of totally being immersed in a world created by someone else. They were also the games that really got me into this business. I remember vividly the moment where I said to myself – right, this is what I want to do.

Ever since I started making RPG’s, I’ve been looking to recreate for other people the same experience I had with Ultima VII – it really is my drive. Now, in my mind I never succeeded in this but if I can believe the reviews and the fanmails, apparently Divine Divinity somehow struck the same chord for a lot of people. Which was quite motivating of course. The knowledge that even a subset of the original ambitions managed to satisfy players implied that if ever we succeeded in realizing the vision behind those ambitions, we might very well have a very big hit on our hands.

But as it happened, after the first Divinity, I lost track a bit – Beyond Divinity definitely wasn’t as good as Divine Divinity, and I always regretted making that one, even if it got ok reviews. Then the second mistake was made – the joys of console development steered Divinity II far away from the original idea, and so many compromises were made in that game that what shipped was but a shadow of what I had envisioned it to be.

While some of that was rectified it with the release of Divinity II: Dragon Knight Saga, in truth there are only a few gameplay moments in there that come close to the reason I set up this company.

So I explained to the journalists that with project E, I wanted to rectify that. When I’ll be playing the final version of project E, I hope that I’m going to get my Ultima VII vibe back, the method being recreating all of the values present in these masterpieces, and then taking it one step further.

Exactly how we intend to this you’ll discover soon enough, that means latest within a couple of weeks though I expect the news will break sooner. I’m quite nervous about how you all will react,because you’ll see we’re taking some risks, but you’ll also notice that we’ll be on very familiar ground. And you’ll also discover that project E really was a misnomer, it should be project D, but we had that one already

What are we doing ? Preparing for a horde of journalists invading our offices to check out our new games.

It’s not going well – Dragon Commander has been crashing randomly throughout the rehearsal presentations, and one of main features of project E game doesn’t seem to be doing what it should be doing.

I'm going to fire the cleaning crew - really, I am. that's what this blog entry is about

We’ve been ambitious in what we wanted to put in this demonstration, an now we’re paying the price.

One of the youngsters in the office asks me – are we going to make it? I smile reassuringly, and treat him to one of my warstories from past PR events. He walks away, slightly confused. Not sure I was that inspirational.

Speakers scream – “Project E – Yet another succesful build”.  We look up, hopefully, maybe this will be the one that miraculously fixes the problems.

Five minutes in our hopes are shattered. The game locks up when trying one of the more advanced things.

We agree that we’ll work until 2 am and then come back the next day – it happens to be a holiday.  We’ve been at it for a few weeks now, so we’re tired. I’m also proud, because a resilient core team refuses to admit defeat in the face imminent disaster.  As long as they struggle on, there’s hope.

Plan B’s & C’s are being formulated. If we can’t get this to work in time, we need to fake it. Can we ?

We’re long past thinking about the ethics of faking things in presentations – it’s accepted in our industry, everybody does it, even if nobody, including the developers themselves, like it. It’s a waste of work after all.

We agree to follow two tracks – one team tries to get the real thing working again, the other rapidly develops a plan B implementation that looks like the real thing. If first team fails, we’ll go with B. We also cut a couple of things from the presentation. We nod in agreement and go home.

It’s raining. I drive a designer home, get stuck in a traffic jam caused by a series of cars window-shopping the local prostitutes and curse – I’m really feeling sick and want to hit my bed asap.

Arriving home, my newborn son, two weeks old, decides it’s concert time. My girlfriend is trying to appease him.  She looks at me, smiles but I can see she’s tired.

I feel too sick to help her and hit the bed, coughing to the rythm of my baby boy’s cramps. I drug myself with painkillers, and try to get some sleep.

The next day I can hardly talk and everything hurts. A useful feature to have at this time I think. I arrive in the office later than agreed – I feel bad about that, but thankfully the emergency team is already hard at work, and they don’t seem to mind.

They’re making progress. I look at the games, cough & smile – they do look good.  It’ll be worth it.

I start writing out the notes about the things we definitely want to communicate. Vision, story, main features, nice to knows, history of development, where the games fit in the Divinity universe etc…

Next I start wondering about what questions they might ask us. We don’t have all the answers yet, we’re still developing, but it’s better to know up front what you’re going to say instead of improvising.

On my desk there’s a whole bunch of print outs dropped there by one of our producers– it’s reviews written by all the journalists coming, some of them are google translates. I start reading so I know who’l l be sitting in front of me, and what to watch out for. No use trying to pitch fancy dialogue options to a guy who hates dialogues in games. Luckily it looks like those aren’t part of the mix.

I make a mental note to congratulate our publishing team – they managed to bring over key press from almost each country we want to target – US, UK, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, Italy, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Benelux, etc… even the most important games site from Romania.Not bad for a small independent developer. We should get some coverage out of this.

The cleaning crew didn’t pass by. We need to fire them, this is the third or fourth time in a month’s time and the office is a mess. I start cleaning up, waiting for the team to tell me that they’re done. Not much I can do now except wait.

I reflect on the games we’re making. So many decisions were made to bring us to this point. Were they the right ones ? Will players get it ? I don’t know –no use in second guessing ourselves now. I really hope there’s not going to be one over-obvious thing we’ve overlooked that’s going to kill. It happens.

I read a preview of the Games of Thrones RPG– journalists are being tough on it. Eurogamer is complaining that Cyanide shouldn’t have been the one making this game – I think of the similar scenes they must have had in their office when preparing for their big presentation, and find the writers comment unfair. That’s no thing to say. That’s too personal.  He should stick to comments about the game. If this were a book preview, you wouldn’t attack the writer either, at least I hope you wouldn’t. It’s too easy.

Probably not the right time to criticize journalists either I say to myself.

Then I realize that I really shouldn’t care. We’ll be showing Larian games and as long as we believe in them, I really shouldn’t worry. The past has proven that whenever we believed in what we were making, our players had fun, and luckily for us, there’s a whole lot of these players. This despite some occasional very harsh criticism, typically from reviewers not in our target audience.

So I throw away the journalists profile, go to the meeting room where we’ll be doing the presentations, look at the screens and dream away thinking of the final results.

It seems my receptors are accepting the medecine I’ve been sending their way.

Today I learnt why I shouldn’t blush when spending ten of thousands of US$ when it comes to E3.

What happened was that I was checking our budget, and went slightly white at the expenses we were making for the announcement of project E.  Bluntly put, I was looking at numbers that made me think the company was hemorrhaging cash in an uncontrolled manner.

What frightened me the most was probably the sheer amount of transactions going on, and what they added up to.

Yep, it' that's time of the year again - Larian will show project E at E3 and it turns out setting up a booth there is an interesting financial adventure

You see, when you’re a developer, and you spend 10000KUS$ on something, you usually know what you pay for. More than likely when you make an expense, you debate if there is any way of doing it cheaper, and think sufficiently long and hard about it.

Not so much in the publishing world. In addition to your regular expenses, there’s a veritable shitload of little expenses that are made ad hoc, and when you add them up, they make for scary numbers. Especially if you didn’t plan for them, but find yourself confronted with them out of necessity.

It’s something I need to get used to it, or I’ll have serious cardiovascular problems by the time these games come out.

Anyway, here’s the story.

Some time ago, we decided that it’d be a good idea to have a small closed booth at E3 to show project E. When I say small, I mean really small, as in as small as it gets. Now the smallness is nothing to be ashamed of, as the floorplan indicates that a lot of our more famous colleagues decided on the same booth size, but … well, it’s still small.

For this smallness, we pay 12000US$, but we do get 4 chairs & a table for free !

That’s not all of course. We obviously also need to man the booth, and since we have two games to show plus out-of-booth meetings to attend, we need quite some staff, even if the booth is small.

Cost – approximately 8000US$ in planes, cars and housing (We’re flying in from Belgium)

Because we are showing two games, we figured it’d be a good idea to have a wall in the middle of the booth so that we actually have two booths for the price of 1. Yes sir, we are clever little devils at Larian !

Because we also want to make it a bit cosy, we figured that instead of the ugly grey these standard closed booths come in, it’d be cool if we’d have our walls in black with a red carpet, just to set us apart a bit.

Cost – 7607US$

Well, clearly we’re not going to pay that much black walls and a red carpet, so we figured we might as well bring our own paint and carpet.

Unfortunately, it turns out you can’t because only union workers are allowed to do anything on the show-floor, and I really mean anything. Needless to say that with such a monopoly, the prices of these workers aren’t exactly competitive.

So given that red and black are out, we thought we at least should have the dividing wall, or our clever little plan would fall apart.

Cost – 2752US$

I don’t know about you, but I thought that was too much for something as stupid as a dividing wall, hence the decision was made to scratch the wall and do something so infinitely clever and cunning that I can’t write about it here. (Spoiler: Essentially it boils down to stealing Crytek’s wall)

Anyway, as hardware is also required to show the games on, and because it turns out the price of renting hardware is as high as buying it, we figured we might as well buy the hardware and give it away to some friendly soul instead of filling somebody’s pockets, because flying it back to Belgium would probably add up to doubling the price. Perhaps we’ll even organize a giveaway contest on our facebook pages or on this blog

Cost – 8000US$ (+whatever it’s going to cost to pay the union workers to carry the hardware in and out because you’re not allowed to carry stuff inside either, at least not if it can’t be done by one person without any assistance from a device – yes, it’s a good monopoly)

Now, the intention of going to E3 is to make sure people write about us, but obviously if we show the game to the magazines only at E3, they won’t write a lot about us because online press will  have released all the details already i.e. we won’t help selling magazines, and if we don’t help them, in generaly they don’t help us

So we therefore decided that we were probably be better off inviting some of them to our offices ahead of E3 so they get to see the game, have time to write their article and publish it, just in time for the announcement.

Now, there’s a whole bunch of markets where the game will be in stores, and at minimum we want coverage in at least 1 magazine per territory. As we’re the ones doing the inviting, that means we need to buy them a ticket, house them and feed them, or otherwise they won’t come.

Cost – 10000US$

But when the journalists come, we’ll probably have to give them something to remember us by. That seems to be the norm. So cost …

I guess I can stop now because I you probably get the general idea – just covering the basics got me to 45KUS$, and that’s not counting the unforeseens.

To some in this industry, that’s peanuts, to others, that could be a significant portion of their development budget. To us, as developers, it represents money we could spend on getting an extra programmer or artist to help out with our overfull schedules.

So the natural question is – is it really necessary ?

Because I’m the caveman, and couldn’t figure out the answer, I called our publishing guru, Sergei and asked him to explain to me again why we’re spending 45KUS$ on E3.

Without a hitch, he started lecturing me:

“Look, I just talked to a good friend of ours who is publishing a game of a good friend of ours which is being published now, and he just sent 560 copies to journalists, in Germany alone.

When we go to E3, we get in touch with hundreds of journalists that we don’t know and who we otherwise wouldn’t reach. Call them unidentified PR if you want.

Every day we’ll have back to back meetings with up to 6 journalists per session. Perhaps they are not from the most important magazines in the world, but it’s the only chance we have of showing them our game and telling them what our vision is.

We did the same thing at Gamescom. We showed the same presentation of the game to anybody who cared to stop by, and we didn’t even ask them from which publication they were, because we just want to get the word out. Remember how pleasantly surprised we were when it turned out that that young guy was in fact an incredibly influential writer ?”

At which point I said I got the message (he has a tendency to rant) and ended the conversation. He’d given me what I need which is something that allowed me to quantify the investment. IF I divided the 45K by the number of journalists we were going to see, which at best will be something around 300 (2 meetings with 6 journalists thanks to Crytek’s wall for 30 minutes times 3 days), that gave me the nice round number of about 150US$/journalist.

Converted in euros, that’s not that bad. If what that journalist writes leads to at least 10 people buying the game, it’s even pretty good.

So I became a caveman who discovered fire.

This one for sure is no RPG

Just so you know, I’m writing this in an effort to move you to click on the link and download the game to your Iphone if you have one. It’s free, so your basic cost is going to be your bandwidth

In case you missed the link – here it is again, and again, and again

Anyway, on to the story of Easter Egg Invaders.

Last year, a guy who used to work for me and who I was rather fond of but hadn’t seen in several years, suddenly called me and said he urgently needed to see me. I agreed to meet him, and listened to a story I had heard already a few times before.

Inspired by games like Angry Birds & co, he figured he too could become incredibly rich by developing an Iphone game, so he took all of his savings, contracted a freelance artist and a programmer, and set to work making the next killer Iphone game. Several months later, he ran out of cash, with nothing else but a working prototype, a 2D level editor and basic gameplay.

He felt it would only take a couple of extra weeks to finish the game and fulfill his dream, so he wanted to know if I could help him. I assumed my game developer mogul posture, told him that in my opinion the entire Iphone game market was one big red ocean, red with the blood of competition and price erosion, and that I didn’t really see how Larian could manage to do something in that area. Our speciality was the games that retail at 49,99 or 39,99 and we knew nothing about games that are sold at 0,79 or god forbid, were free to play.

But he kept on insisting, and figuring I hadn’t done my humanitarian deed of the year yet, I finally budged and said, ok, we’ll do it. In the back of my mind of course I also thought, you never know, and I also thought it was a good opportunity for us to learn how the Apple submission pipeline works, something we had heard already a few horror stories about. Besides, it had been a long time since we’d done a small game like this, so the idea kind of appealed to me. Made me feel young again

It was clear to me that he was far away from having a finished game, but I thought it would only take a couple of a guys a few months to complete the game, so our investment wasn’t going to be that big. The game at that point was  known as Jungle Fever, involving a tank and many guys that needed to be killed, and the only thing I liked about it was that you could play it with one finger

We changed the entire concept, put in eggs instead of tanks, a construction worker & a bulldozer, alien chickens and added a light strategy mode in an effort to put in some gameplay. I won’t even try to explain our thought process here

After several months of work, we had something that looked like a game, but I really had no clue who we made this game for. In typical fashion, we’d spent more work on it than originally thought,  and now that it was finally finished, we somehow needed to market this game.

Because I really had no clue, this thought process took quite a lot of time, so much time in fact that one day the producer for that game came to me and told me – we cannot submit it anymore. Apparently, once you create an entry on the app store for a game, you need to submit it within 45 days or so, and after that you can’t submit it under the same name anymore. Great I told myself, that means that at least we learnt something about the Apple process. But not great, because now we need to change all the artwork in the game to accommodate for new name.

We changed the name, and I kept on wondering how to market the game. Then, the guy who had come up with the original idea started working at a firm who was doing a lot of Iphone games, and he called me in panic. Look, he said, I’m looking at the sales figures of really well known brands on Iphone and one of them didn’t even sell a 100K units at 0,79 cents. And this really is a very well known brand (which it indeed was) !!! The only thing that works is if you release it for free, and put in some micro-transaction mode. We need to change everything !!!

I grumbled on the other side of the phone, but I realized that he was right, so I asked the programmer responsible if he thought he could make the changes without it interfering too much in his other work, which was a key piece of Project E. Since the programmer is a cool guy (and in need of a girlfriend, so if anybody wants to hang out with a cool programmer, leave a message), he took the game home with him, and made all of the required changes to introduce a garage into the game, which is basically a glorified in-game shop.

But that still didn’t solve the problem of how to market it. So in the end I resorted to the cheapest trick I could think of – tie it to an event, hope that Apple likes it enough to put it on its front page during that event, and pray. Not much in terms of marketing strategy, but by then I wanted to be done with it, because my initial assessment, that’s this market is so crowded that you need to invest a lot into the marketing of the game and be lucky, still held.

We made sure that everything was in place to get it ready for Easter, submitted it in time to Apple, and lo and behold, it appeared yesterday on the App store, just in time for Easter ! We even came up with the most cheesy slogan ever – “this Easter the eggs will hunt you”

Of course, in the process of submitting, we forgot to click on a button which activates the in-game transactions, so the initial release happened without the one thing that actually could help us generate back a bit of the investment we made in it, so that was another thing learnt. We obviously immediately did an update, but you can’t do that just like that, so we have to wait for Apple to accept the update, which I think is probably the most important lesson. It needs to be right, right away, because contrary to other digital platforms, changing something on the app store is a long process.

Anyway, that’s the story, so now that it’s done and out there,  do I think it was worth doing this game ?

Well, my kids like the game, and my little boy is really proud when he manages to kill the alien super chicken invader, so I’m happy our little Iphone game makes him smile from time to time.

From the point of view of added value for our studio, I don’t think we’ll make some money with this, but then again, I knew that up front.

We learnt a couple of important lessons about how to deal with submitting something to Apple, which is going to very important for us when we’ll eventually release our RPGs on their platforms. A lot of things went wrong that I wouldn’t want to go wrong on a big release, so in doing this trial run, we probably saved ourselves a lot of future money.

And I also realized once again that it’s key to identify who you’re making a game for prior to actually making the game. The fact that it was very hard to identify the target audience for this game was paralyzing. I’ll make sure sure not to make that mistake again. Positioning is important.

As a final take away, I cannot repeat enough how careful you need to be before you commit all of our savings on trying to enter a market that wrongfully advertises itself as super-accessible. The original designer of this game was lucky that it got made in the end, but I’m sure there’s plenty of stories out there where there was no such luck.

Happy Easter, and don’t forget to click on this  link !!! Because otherwise, this Easter the eggs will come to hunt you !!!

The problem we needed a solution for was that because Dragon Commander features tons of choices & consequences, it also features a veritable avalanche of dialogue that somehow needs to be presented to our players.

In our dream scenario, all of this dialogue is fully animated and voiced, but because we’re dealing with several hours of dialogue in multiple languages, the cost of doing this is quite high and it’d actually be insane to animate it all.

So after long discussions and deliberations, we decided to do the insane thing.

Here’s a video of something that transpired in the Larian offices a month ago. I suggest you have a look at it and then read on…

As you can see, we bought a facial capture system – I guess it’s obvious from the video that some in our team were quite excited about this momentous event

Our plan of approach is to put those cameras you see in the video in the voice recording booth, and then use this captured data to put emotion in the faces of our 3D protagonists and antagonists.

This facial capture data will then be overlaid on top of motion captured body animations (we also have a motion capture system in the office), and the end result should be believable dialogues when talking to all of the characters in Dragon Commander.

At least that’s the plan.

The decision to do it this way came after checking plenty of other solutions, ranging from trying to set something up oursevles with Kinect devices (cheapest) to hiring simultanous body & facial capture studios (most expensive).

The latter had prices in the range of $1000 to $2000 per minute which would cost us between 0,5M US$ to 1M US$. I actually contemplated this for some time, but then decided against it. I figured that in the end we’d be best served if we could come up with a homebrewn solution, even if that causes a bit more pain and might in the short term not give us the highest quality solution.

My thinking was that for whatever game we do, we’ll always need to hire voice actors, so in all cases that’s a cost we’ll have to carry. Now, while they are acting, they are actually generating the data we need – we just need the ability to extract that data and project it on 3D characters.

The equipment we bought allows us to record the facial marker data at 100 frames per second from seven directions. Should we discover for some reason that that’s not enough, we can always add extra cameras, but from the looks of it, the raw data looks to be good enough to work with.

So if we organize ourselves such that for every future recording session, we record the facial expressions of the actors in addition to their voice, we should have sufficient base material to work from. Obviously, this does cause extra complications in the recording booth as we’re increasing actor/studio time and thus recording cost, but from the tests we’ve done, it looks like it should be manageable.

The real problem is mapping this data to our 3D characters, preferably in an automated fashion, and if that’s not possible, at least in a semi-automated manner. The software solutions we have for the moment give us reasonable results, but it’s clear that the current off the shelf solutions don’t allow us to use all of the rich detail that’s present within raw data. Or in other words – when you look at the markers that were tracked, and then at how this translates into animations, you see there’s a significant loss of data.

Additionally, you also see that manual labor is required to fix wrong interpretations of the data. This is probably going to be the most expensive part of the entire operation, but it’s also the area that presents us with the largest opportunity to reduce costs, if we can be clever about it.

To be honest, I have no clue exactly how much we’ll be spending in the end on this, but I do know a couple of things already:

a)    Whatever result we get, it’s going to be better than what we did in Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga

b)    If we invest sufficient time into working on the mapping process, it can only get better which will benifit not only Dragon Commander, but also our future games

Before concluding, there’s one question I need to answer still: Why did we decide to do the insane thing after all ?

Some people commented that we shouldn’t be doing this, and instead focus on the gameplay. From the gut I would say they are right, but gameplay is something you create from many layers, and visualisation is definitely an important aspect. Specifically, in this particular game, I really think it’s vital that we provide you with believable characters, and we should invest sufficient resources to try achieving that.

This game is about you living the life of a Dragon Commander who’s forging an empire. That means that in addition to giving you the the experience of dealing with your troops and deciding on what strategy/ tactics you use, we also want you to deal with politics, the media and whatever social life you have left.

To do that convincingly, we need characters that look lifelike enough. Hence, facial expressions, motion capture, full voice recordings, truckloads of cash

Whether or not it’ll be worth it, I’ll only know when the results are in, but I have good hopes.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. If all goes well, the E3 footage should show you how it turned out, because in addition to showing off project E there, we’re also planning on showing the multiplayer of Dragon Commander, together with more details on everything you can do in the game.

Have a great weekend !

The quick and dirty of it is that ever since we decided we were going completely independent on this, we’ve had to build up our own publishing team, which admittedly, and tbh also typically, I underestimated a bit.

This impacted our magnificant buzz plans, because we decided early on that we weren’t going to let the publishing affect the development.

This also meant that as long as the publishing team wasn’t assembled, who needs to do the buzz work and create all the required assets,  we were a bit impaired in our ability to talk as much as we’d like to about the game.

But we’re getting there, really

What the hell have we been doing since we've announced Dragon Commander ?

Additionally, we’ve also been experimenting with the gameplay of Dragon Commander, a lot. At GDC, one of the best pieces of advice we received, came from Max and Erich Shaefer, who told us that with a game that blends so many things like this, there’s a high chance of success if we take our time, and only release it when it’s done, as in, really done.

Since that’s the very reason we went independent, it sounded like music in our ears, but it was also a good reminder that we may not screw up on this one. Which is why we continued experimenting with the gameplay, way beyond what would be allowed in a typical production.

So, where do we stand today ?

On the publishing side, our set-up is pretty much complete. If you’re interested what we think you need to publish, here’s an overview:

We’ve hired Thomas a.k.a. the movie guy, who’ll be creating plenty of videos that we’ll be releasing throughout the year, with several of them actually ready.

We’ve hired Thomas (we have a few Thomas’ over here), a.k.a. the website guy, who’ll take care of all of our websites (we used to do them between soup and potatoes), starting of with the Dragon Commander website.

If you read some my previous post, you also know we’ve got Sergei Klimov as a director of publishing, who brought with him years of experience and is ensuring that the game will be for sale pretty much anywhere in the world, on pretty much any channel you can think of.

We also engaged the services of Katya, our head of legal, who’s protecting us against all the wolves out there and ensuring that when we make a sale, we actually get paid for it.

We’ve got Tom & his team at Evolve PR, probably the indie PR guy, taking care of preparing all of the PR and ensuring that we get the coverage we deserve

We’ve also hired Raze, who helped countless of Divinity players in our forums with solid advice over the last couple of years, to take care of moderating the forums as well as spreading the word to other players.

Together they form the team that will be running things from within Larian in close cooperation with distribution partners all over the world. Over the last months, we’ve been showing them the game, collecting their offers, and now it looks like we’re getting in the phase to decide who our partners will be.

Our major focus right now is closing these deals now so that we can ensure all PR & marketing efforts are coordinated. Once that is done, we’re basically ready to release an avalanche of news re: Dragon Commander.

On the development side, we’ve been experimenting, heavily.

As a quick recap, Dragon Commander is a game that is played in several turns. Each turn, you make decisions in a RPG fashion that affect the flow of the game. You research and invest in magic & tech, upgrade your dragon & fleet, and decide how to run your growing empire and what territories you want to attack. Then, you engage in combat, using your dragon & fleet side by side to defeat your enemy.

At this point, we’re pretty much done with how the RPG part will work, are in the middle of dealing with the strategy part & have changed the combat gameplay drastically so that it has much more depth.

The big problem we had with the combat was how to ensure that controlling both your dragon and your fleet at the same time was fun. It took a lot of iterations and try outs to get that balance right, but I think we finally cracked it.

I played the latest version of the combat phase last night, and as I was playing my phone rang. I glance at the number, realized I had to pick up the phone, but felt angry that I couldn’t pause nor save the game yet, meaning that I was going to be slaughtered by the AI. I took that to be a good sign.

Mind  you, its’s not finished yet and I needed to imagine several other things that needed to be in place to make it really fun experience, but I found that at this point it was easy to see what was missing, meaning that I think we’re well on our way to make something cool. But if it turns out it’s not, I guess we’ll probably backtrack again, and try something different. As I said, the best piece of advice we received was that we need to make sure it’s done well, and it’s our intention to live up to that.

We’ve also switched game engines. Were the previous build of DC that we’ve shown to you at Gamescom was still running on the DKS engine, we  were so happy about the engine tech used in project E, that we decided to switch Dragon Commander to project E’s engine. That took some time, but it’s now concluded, and I’m quite happy with the results of that move, considering it one of the best decisions taken on the dev side in the last year.

This obviously all sounds abstract without any video supporting it, but we want to make sure that when we release footage, it’s seen by as many people as possible, which is why we’re pushing on the brake until our publishing team is ready with their preparations i.e. all videos are in place, the website is done and our local distributors are lined up.

The big date for us will be E3. For the first time ever in Larian’s  history, we’ll have our own booth there (a small one ) and in addition to showing off Dragon Commander, it’s the also the place where we’ll finally be announcing project E. Probably need to put one of those countdown timers online, they seem to be popular again

An interview Sean Ridgeley from Neoseeker did with me went online today. The topic is games journalism and we agreed that once the interview was live I’d post some extra thoughts here, basically the notes I made for myself prior to the interview.

Games journalism obviously is a sensitive topic for a game developer because it’s like a girlfriend asking – do you think there’s something wrong with how I cook? If you’re honest you’re doomed, if not, you can look forward to things like oversalted steak for the rest of your life

Before delving into this, I ‘d like to say that the best thing players can to do when it comes to judging which game they should buy, is to find reviewers that like the games they like, and stay aways as far as they can from sites like Metacritic. I say this because the list of factors that can affect a review is enormous.

One of the investments we made in trying to sway journalists to write well about our games

First off, you should be extremely wary about day 1 reviews – the probability that something stinks about those reviews is rather high.  Just go to metacritic if you’re into the scoring game, look at the critic scores and then look at user scores. Also look at the quantity of reviews on metacritic and check out the dates of the review. For bad games with initially high metacritic ratings, you’ll see a pattern emerging.

There’s a RPG that was released not that long ago and which I haven’t played yet, but the claims that were made about that game in certain reviews are so unbelievable, that I don’t believe a word of what  the early day reviewers have been writing. There were even previews of the review, with some of the wording completely inconsistent with previous reviews from the same magazine when it came to RPGs.

As I said I still need to play it, so I’ll find out for myself – but despite having a high meta critic ratings, it has a 6 as a user rating, so that’s probably an indication I won’t like it. If this were booking.com actually, I wouldn’t book it, based on the user reviews.

It was the PR management around that game that got me thinking again about what affects a review. Here’s a few observations:

Big studios, big publishers: As a reviewer, do you dare go against big publisher X who might happen to be the company indirectly paying a large part of your paycheck through ads? A lot of reviewers say they do, but when you look at their scoring behavior, you can see that in a lot of cases – they don’t. There’s often a little scoring bonus I think.

Not that that should surprise you, the recording industry has been doing this for ages. Money just matters, as does size. I got reminded of this the other day when after doing an interview, we got called by the the advertising manager with the question– so how much pages will you book ?

Another problem is that a lot of journalists are working in a stressed environment, typically understaffed or underpaid, with too many games to review and not enough time to review a game. I don’t think that helps them to write a reasonable review, especially if their part of a publication that wants to cover everything.

Then there’s the feeling that’s created around a game. If a big publisher takes you to 5 star hotel , organizes insanely cool things for you to do, shows you the game for a day and then lets you spend their money as you enjoy whatever exotic location for the next 3 days  – it’s hard not to feel benevolent.

Personally, I think that if you participated in this it should be mentioned at the start of your review. Environmental conditions always affect how you think about something, just like first impressions.

Another problem is that because a lot of publications are often under financial stress, even the metacritic ones, a lot of reviews for lesser-known games are written by the interns or volunteers. These obviously aren’t used to being bombarded with great proposals, and it’s easy to see that they might be easily impressed.

They also might not be aware of their responsibility. If you’re the unlucky developer who crosses a game reviewer who has opinions that don’t necessarily correspond with the target audience of your game, nor your own for that matter, you might be  doomed.  I’ve heard of one RPG reviewer who gives a -15% penalty to a RPG that doesn’t have a trade system that fits his taste..

Trends are also a dangerous thing. Early reviews are sometimes completely desynchronized with how the players perceive a game, because a big publication set the tone. This can have a disasterous impact on the developers.  If reviewers are stressed for time, it’s imaginable that they might have a look at what others think, and this could lead to an unfair review. Or if the early reviews are part of a well-organized campaign with limited access given to the code, the trend might lead to inflated scores.

The region in which the game was developed and where it’s being reviewed also matters. Games that are overhyped in the US sometimes get smashed to pieces in the Germany,  and vice versa. Yet, the taste in games is not that different when it comes to RPGs for instance. Why is that?

I also think that reviewers that really want to be developers shouldn’t review a game – at least not if they’re on metacritic. But that’s just me

I also get very frustrated by the lack of consistency in some of these publications. We actually used to listen to reviewers to adjust our designs, but we gave up, because there’s no consistency. Even not within a specific publication.– they are measuring creativity on a scale, used by everybody in the magazine. That doesn’t mingle well with the subjectivity of a reviewer

I can rant on, but I’ll stop now and perhaps continue in a follow up post.

Here’s one last thought though. Perhaps somebody should do a metacritic of the reviewers individually. After all, a review is always going to be subjective, nothing to be done about that. But people should know of each reviewer how different his opinion is from the rest, and preferably according to target audience.

Anyway, that’s part of what I think on the subject. I’m not against game journalism, on the contrary. I discovered many games because of positive reviews, but I do have a dislike for how the playing field is organized nowadays, and would prefer that particular part of my industry to be extremely objective. It has an enormous influence on the types of games that get played and made. I realize that that’s a futile dream, but I’m an idealist

As part of my preperation for yet another retail distribution presentation of our games, I was thinking this morning about how Dragon Commander and Project E came tor be, so I browsed through my notes from when both projects started.

I was quite surprised by what I found, because somehow I got it in my head that it was all about vision etc…, but the reality of it is that both games came into existence by accident.

This was in the summer of 2010, and we didn’t know yet that Dragon Knight Saga was going to be pretty succesful , so as usual, I was trying to think of how we could bring in enough money to keep the  studio going and one day manage to make that very big RPG I keep on talking about.

I had just met a couple of the larger publishers who kept on telling me that a) fantasy RPGs were never going to sell, and b) the future for me with Divinity was in making an XBLA & PSN version. Yes, I told you already that you shouldn’t always listen to them, but anyway, at that time it was a remarkably consistent message so I wouldn’t do my job if I didn’t at least think about what they were telling me.

Heading back to the office, I started scribbling down some thoughts. It was more a stream of consciousness than anything else, but I was surprised nontheless in reading them again this morning. Within those notes, lay the seeds of what by now have become two mature games, even if those random thoughts were still far away from what the games ultimately became.

As a background, you need to know that the agency we were working with had been telling me over and over that we could get a very large budget for an original vampire RPG. Being a diligent developer that always listens carefully to what more experienced people tell me,  and out of curiosity, I had quickly put something together which I planned to pitch as our new next shiny RPG.

Other than the three pages of text, the game didn’t exist, but my thoughts were that the idea was a good match with what the larger publishers were looking for. If I noticed sufficient  interest, I figured we might as well make a prototype and see where that got us. This of course was all before the epiphany came of going solo.

Summarized the pitch boiled down to

“Victorian Vampire is a new mature-audience steam-punk RPG set in 1861 in which you take on the role of a young brilliant archaeologist who becomes a vampire against his/her will, and travel the world of the American civil war, Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin and Louis Pasteur in a mad race against somebody who should not have been woken.”

I ran around pitching this to the usual suspects, and remarkably, my agents were right and there indeed was some interest for an original vampire RPG. So heading back to the office, I made my notes – here’s what I found back in my archive, dated  August 12th 2010, just after Gamescom:

Ok – what can you do ?

Vampire idea seems to be working. You need to work it out now, but you might actually make a smaller game out of it, the idea being that you generate quicker revenu out of it, the risk being lower. They’ll only fund if risk is gone, if at all.

Alternative: Self-publish an  item-fever focussed  action RPG baded on Div 2? Boring, so abandon that thought train. What about going back to the roots ?  Top-down, everything that made Divinity 1 cool + all the things you wanted to do but didn’t ? Think about that.

Whatever it is, you’ll need to do this on console too, or it’s not going to work. If on console, you need to put multiplay/coop in.  High risk.

Art deco, art nouveaux is cool though.

And you need to put the dilemma system in. That works.

Don’t do linear, even if you’re tempted to cut costs.

Maybe – Go top-down, go ga-ga on the amounts of enemies you are dealing with , massive damage, including environmental options and make the killing visceral enough (as in explosive rather than ragdolls). Put dopamine releasing X minute reward moments in it on the item fever part.  Power is felt by the amount of enemies you can destroy in one go –victorian setting will really shine here.

Do the guy with the hat and the gun/stick (so he has ranged and melee at the same time, allow him to upgrade those and do cool moves with it) – give him charles babbage/inventor technology for the specials (molotov cocktails, tesla electrical effect…)

Develop it as an IP that can go downloadable but can be extended if publishers show interest. I.e. you develop the base, the stuff that goes on in there, and you come up with a backstory that works for the limited case. On failure to sell, at least you can put it out as DLC.

Detective story ?

So think, can you do a cinemaware style DLC ? Use the victorian vampire setting ? Put that in multiplay, mix in the new choice system ?

Get team to make a victorian street (jack the ripper, foggy street) in which our character (with the hat) deals death and destruction to hordes of foes together with lady other player. Put in new interactive dialogue system, take one very cool situation. Should be sexy. If anything, it’ll look good on collective portfolios

Talk to designers, see what victorian gives, have a look at what we could do top-down. Need new engine though.

Now, fast forward to february 2012 – we’re spending millions again, doing a Cinemaware style full fledged game, Steampunk style, with dragons (that idea came  a bit later) with plenty of choices, and strategy on top of that (that one came even later). We’re also doing the top down RPG.

The list of things that happened between those notes and now is enormous, but the original seeds were planted there, on the train and in those big publisher meetings, so I guess I need to thank them for that.

My retail distributors are now telling me that Dragon Commander has great potential, but because it has so many new elements, we will need time to explain it to players, so if we don’t that well, it’ll be a catastrophe.They’re also telling me that our top down RPG is exactly what players want, and that the mix between innovation and core shows great strategy on our part.

If only they’d know how this thing got started I didn’t remember anything from those notes and had all forgotten about victorian vampire because it only lived for a couple of weeks.  I’m happy that some of the key phrases written down there are becoming reality, but it also got me reflecting about how games come to be.

In our case, it’s clear it was very organic. But I’m sure there are others out there that do it very systematically, and if we’d have to stand next to one another at some convention explaining how we came to make our games, I’d probably look like an idiot.

Being quite the idealist in those days, I made what I thought was a fair assessment of our own game, not realizing that it’d actually be used against us afterwards.

I figured it might be interesting to share the mail I sent to the producer with you.

This game really was a lot of work - really a lot

It’s quite long, but it reflects a lot of the hopes and aspirations we had at Larian in those days. Re-reading it, I recognize the idealism that drove us, as well as the hope that the publisher was going to forgive us for being late and give us the extra fuel we needed to finish the game the way we wanted to finish it.

For the record, it didn’t work out that well – several months later, just after the release, I had to downsize my team to 3 people from the original 30, because I refused to accept that I had no budget anymore, and spent everything on trying to finish the game as good as we could . My thoughts were that if the game was good,  money would find us somehow. It didn’t of course. I caused quite some traumas with that attitude, and to this date I have regrets of how I handled the situation back then, but that’s another story.

Here’s the mail:

Hi, 

As requested, I made an overview of what we think are the weak and strong points of Divine Divinity. It became quite a document, but I probably barely scraped the surface of our thoughts on the topic. I hope this helps you somewhat – more than willing to give you more information on certain points.

One thing which will make your presentation a lot easier – use the CTRL key for targeting npcs while hacking – you’ll find life is a lot easier.

Current weak points

Dialogs

While many bugs are present in these and they are being fixed, that’s not the main problem with them. A large degree of gameplay is to be had in a role playing game from the options you get in a dialog. In the quest to mix hack & slash with regular role playing, we probably oversimplified the available options in certain dialogs. This is not really visible in the demo area, where we think the mix is right, but later on in the game this is definitely an issue. The fixes for this are often rather simple, but complicated severely by the fact that the localizations are almost ready, and we need to maintain synchronisation between the three dialog base files (i.e. German, French and English). We have quite some tools in place to facilitate that, but a tool is just a tool, and given the enormous complexity/size of the dialogs in game, operating the tools/maintaining synchronization takes time. We are not to the level of Baldur’s Gate when it comes to the dialogs, though we could’ve been. One example that is present in the demo is the scene with the resurrected necromancer. The dialog there does not contain the richness that you would find in similar AAA games.

Savegame : Thelyron, click on the lever just in front of you, go to where the mummy appears and talk to him. There are no real options in the dialog, which is not such a good thing, but still acceptable in this particular situation. The fact that they stand still is just a bug.

Player expectation mismatches

Player expectation mismatches means that the designer of a certain quest/story scene designed something in a certain way, and that completing it in the way the designer intended it, feels “wrong” to the player. In general you want the player to “think” he’s smart while always making sure that whatever he tries, he’ll stumble into it. There are areas in the game where this is currently not the case, and this breaks the players gaming tempo, and causes unnecessary frustration. Another aspect of the same problem is that there are things in the game which don’t offer the gameplay value a player would expect from something. That’s a hard concept to describe, but an example should make that clear :

There is a small village on the first map which is quarantined because a mysterious plague broke out there. Upon coming closer to the area, the player sees a small scene where a certain Doctor Elrath chats with the guards. The guards ask him if he found the cause of the plague and he responds that he hasn’t yet. Control of the game jumps back to the player then. What is wrong with this scene is that the gates do not close, so the player can just walk in in the quarantined village. This is wrong, because if it is under quarantine, it should really be under quarantine. A player would subconsciously expect that he has to find a way to break in. At present this is not the case (though it is scheduled for fixing).

The next thing that is wrong in this particular quest is that when the player eventually finds a way in the quarantined village, there is no real reward for him. What he encounters is several people who are sick, and one meagre hint in the direction that it is strange that Doctor Elrath can just walk in without being sick. (The quest for which this is the setup has it that Doctor Elrath is actually poisoning the villagers). There is a well somewhere in that village through which the doctor distributes his poison, but nothing happens when the player gets near the well. Later on the player will discover that the well was the cause of them all getting sick, but what’s wrong here, is that figuring out that there’s something wrong about the well should be the “reward” for breaking into the village. Right now the player gains no real visible new knowledge by breaking into the quarantined village, though he would have expected something to be gained by the fact that he broke in. Not gaining that knowledge subconsciously decreases the immersion of the player.

I hope this makes some sense, as I realize it might sound a bit vague, but it definitely is a weak point. We became aware of this type of problem somewhat too late due to delayed QA feedback, and are fixing instances of this wherever we can. It is not the kind of thing a reviewer or player will spot as being a problem, but what he’ll say is “mmm…this was rather boring”, and that obviously is not a good thing. Actually, this type of problem is probably the thing we are currently spending the most time on, since the fixes are sometimes very simple, and can have a very big impact on the player’s gaming satisfaction.

No savegame available for the demo as this type of problem does not really appear in the demo.

Balancing

 Currently not good, but getting better every day. This is by definition a task where plenty of QA is necessary, as the only way to get valid feedback is by checking over a large enough sample of gamers for comments like “Too hard, too easy”. The problem with Divinity is that it’s so large, and that you can do so many things, that there really are a lot of parameters affecting the balancing. Over the past few months we have made quite some radical changes to the engine to facilitate the balancing effort, and this has paid of tremendously, but the basic fact does remain that the more QA is available for balancing, the better the balancing is. We’re pretty confident that by march 15^th we’ll have a good balance in the game, but I doubt it will be excellent (cfr. Diablo II)

Monster AI/Variation

This is a real pity. The game engine is capable of amazing feats of AI, but most of these have been deactivated for the time being, for the very simple reason that there were always more pressing issues. For the same reason, the thing which was always planned didn’t really happen – i.e. giving each monster a different behavior so that every encounter is more fun for the player. It’s not like there is no variation, but the engine is equipped with much more behavior features than are currently visible on screen. An example of this is the orcs. They are currently using the same AI routines as the skeletons. Given the capabilities of the engine, it is about 1 day of work to give them a drastically improved AI, and we do hope to be able to do so, but they are lower on the priority list because it’s not like the hack & slash isn’t fun. It just could be so much more fun and kick the @#|{ out of Diablo 2’s AI.

Savegame “Orcs”: Just hack at them, they come straight for you, don’t really show intelligent behavior. You are artificially boosted.

Roofs

While you don’t even think about it after 5 minutes of playing the game (at least we never had a negative test report from the external testers), they would be cool. But we did put them lower on the priority list (cfr. Other mail) because of the problems they could cause, and the fact that other issues are more pressing.

Item generation

This actually falls under balancing, but right now the variation of generated items is not large enough (compared to Diablo II).

Skills

They are both a strong and weak point. Because of prioritisation, some of the visuals aren’t as nice as we would’ve liked and planned. But comparing to the competition, we don’t really have to blush. The main advantage you have in Divinity because of the hack and slash content is that at some point you get so much action going on on screen, that it just looks impressive, even if some of the skill effects are “subtle”.

Polishing

Prioritization and cutting features were necessary because of the development delay incurred. Since we got into that road we will probably not be able to do what we really wanted to do – i.e. “USA-ize“ the game. In our observations it is usually the case that US games feature a much higher degree of polishing than their European counterparts. That means that in general European games ship with bugs which were categorized as minor, whereas AAA games from US  houses don’t have these. Diablo 2 is the best example of this. The main reason for this is financial constraints, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a pity. If you look at most reviews of Diablo 2, the word “polished” is something that is going to keep on popping up. We are doing our utter best to get rid of all the imperfections, but it’s clear that we will not manage to get rid of all of them in time.

Not enough voice

Given budget and scope, it’s impossible to have voice on every single dialog in the game, but it would definitely add a lot if this had been possible.

Game strong points

User interface

So far we’ve had over 100 external testers of all kinds (meaning it’s a mix between experienced players and people who’ve never touched a RPG) come by to test the game. To this point, we’ve not had to explain a single time how to operate the game. Given the complexity of the things you can do in Divine Divinity, we are rather proud of that aspect. There are still bugs in the interface, and some improvements we are adding, but in general the accessibility of the game can be considered to be a very strong point of the game.

Action

If we get the balancing right, and fix the remaining bugs, then we think the hack & slash portion of the game is at least of the same level of Diablo 2, which is a very high standard to reach. While it might look simple on the surface, serving a decent portion of hack & slash is an incredible complex task, but we feel we’ve reached that design goal. As said, the only the thing that can stand in it’s way now is an issue of balancing.

Savegame “Thelyron 2”: Just right click like a madman to execute your special move, and drink lots of stamina potions (Note : You are artificially boosted to make things easier)

Interactivity and NPC reactions

I don’t think anybody will complain about the level of interactivity in Divinity. It’s usually the first thing people talk about after having played the game for several hours. The best example in the demo is the dwarf Otho, but there are plenty more.

Savegame “Otho”:

 Take the herbs(Drudanai), Otho comes to complain and query you about what you are doing. Now follow him to his house. Click on the bones of his ancestor, Otho complains. Take one of the mugs of beer, drag it over the barrel. You just tapped a pint of beer. Open your statistics window, watch your intelligence and your strength, click on the pint of beer. Close the statistics plate, equip a weapon, walk outside, kill one of Otho’s pigs. Otho complains. Kill his second pig. While doing all of this, check the attitude meter for Otho.

Graphics

Opinions might differ, and while graphics are not “stunning”, we keep on getting reports from the testers that the game is so nice to look at. The same in the press – PC Zone UK for instance saying “It’s all very pretty”, or Power Unlimited (Dutch), “The gfx are gorgeous”. We strongly believe that when it comes to 2D RPG’s Divinity is one of the best looking games. An observation I’d like to make is that with probably the exception of the upcoming Dungeon Siege, I can’t think of a recent PC 3D RPG that was a hit. I’m rather convinced that if you were to release Diablo 2 or Baldur’s Gate 2 today, they would sell the same numbers. While the comment “It’s not 3D” is a very easy one to make, judging from the gamers feedback, they don’t care whatsoever. I believe the release of the demo will set a lot straight there.

Sound

If we are getting positive feedback on the gfx, we are getting amazing feedback on the sound. While there are still bugs in the sound engine that we are fixing, having two sound engineers and one musician on the project since day one of development is paying off. Not everything is working 100% yet on the sound system, but when it will, the sound image will be very complete.

Skills and character development

One of the things testers like the most is the fact that they get total freedom in the way they develop their character. If this will be balanced 100% correctly, this will in the end probably be the thing that players like the most about Divinity.

Mix between hack and slash and role playing

This was from day one a big gamble, but seeing how everything is coming together, we believe this is working out very well. The demo on its own actually tells that entire tale. In the village, you have traditional exploration and role playing elements. Going into the catacombs, you get more than your share of hack and slash.

Humor

This is something a lot of testers mark as something they like a lot.

Savegame “Confused”: Just walk south.

Exploration and size

If there is one thing you can do in Divinity, then it is exploring. There are plenty of things for you to discover, and you usually get well rewarded for your exploration efforts. And while it has been the biggest development problem, the size of the world is something we believe will be well appreciated by gamers. If the last remaining problems are solved, then people who buy the game will be playing it for a long time. That should help with word of mouth.

Weak point/Good point summary

The game’s weak points are mainly caused by time/budget constraints, too aggressive cutting only to find out that some things shouldn’t have been cut in the first play and starting with QA too late. Dialogs, player expectation mismatches and balancing we consider the most important weak points, and are what we are spending the most time on. Frankly put – these must be fixed. If they are not fixed, the game risks missing its potential. The other weak points would be nice to see totally fixed, but given the situation and the close master date, that’s not feasible.

On the bright side, we’re now more than ever convinced that Divinity is very close to the point of being an AAA RPG which will be liked by many players. There might be a positive bias among the testers we are inviting, but to this point we have managed to convince the most sceptic of them just by letting them play the game and not saying a word. Already word of mouth is flooding our mailboxes with requests for being allowed to come and test, and if we can get Divinity the attention it deserves in the press, we think this game could do really good. We think that we can get the most important parts of the mentioned weak points fixed in time, but admittedly it’s going to be a close call.

Current development status

First some numbers. There are currently 553 bugs flagged as open on our internal bugzilla server (coming from 1392 at start of internal QA). There are 132 bugs flagged open on CDV’s bugzilla – out of 875 reported bugs. That gives a total of 685 bugs out of 2267 remaining open, meaning that in a period of two months and a half 1582 bugs were solved, or about 633 bugs per month. That’s not bad, but it could’ve been better with more detailed QA, since a lot of time was spent by the developers trying to reproduce several of these bugs. Our internal QA however is overloaded with work (4 full time testers, 5 externals a day), so they can’t perform any better than they already are.

As related in the document I gave you and Martin, the typical ratio of bugs for a RPG of this calibre is between 7000-10000 bugs (numbers taken from Diablo 2/Baldur’s Gate). Since QA for Divinity started up rather problematic and late, it is feasible to say that the amount of total bugs in the end will be lower than the average over BG/Diablo (by the time QA started, a lot were already fixed by developers doing their own testing) – and when those 685 are solved, the game will probably be ready for release, but not as polished as we would want it to be. That’s not saying it will not be polished enough, it’s just saying that we would have preferred a higher degree of polishing.

Among the bugs that really count (except for blockers,crashes etc…), we are treating the gameplay ones as the most important. That means we give priority to something like “I don’t understand this quest” or “this area is boring”. This latter type of bug is usually related to “player expectation mismatches” and “Dialog” issues which are mentioned in the beginning of this document. Those two together with the balancing, are what currently stand between Divinity and its release.

All time estimates we currently have are based on the bug-reports – and at this stage given the amount of reported bugs, it looks like we will be ready by March 15^th, but the problem of course is that we don’t know how much more bugs will be reported. If it wasn’t already, QA now really has become the dominant factor determining the release date.

For reference, I’ve included the bug reports from our internal bugzilla server as a text file.

Look, I know you don't believe a word I'm telling you, but really, that's what I'm trying to do - lots of choice and consequence, really, lots of it !

So, today, choice & consequence.

They are two words that’ve become must-haves on the back of the box for any modern RPG that wants to matter. If you look at the advertising done for some of the biggest RPGs of the moment, you can easily be fooled into thinking that here are games  that allow you to do anything you can think of.

The reality of course is quite different. When it comes to crafting stories, branching storylines, coupled to simple systemic gameplay elements, are still the state of the art for RPG developers. Essentially we use the same mechanic the “choose your own adventure” books used, with the nuance that the turning of the page can be accomplished by different means.

For instance, in a modern RPG, to turn to page 20, you’d engage in some stealth gameplay, whereas to turn to page 130, you’d kill everybody.  It makes the turning of the page more interesting, but in the end, it’s still, turn to page 20 or turn to page 130, meaning that the amount of true choices, those that cause real bifurcations in the story tree, necessarily needs to be very limited.

Some time ago I asked Octaaf, our lead QA to give me a rapid overview of the state of the art in choice and consequence gameplay, the idea behind my request being that I wanted to compare what we had planned for project E and Dragon Commander to what our competition was doing. Here’s what he told me:

• Skyrim –244 quests, 300 points of interests, with about 150 dungeons. Most quests are of the “go do this” type and while there are different methods of doing things, the end result is usually the same. The game is divided in two major factions and your opening quest opens one faction tree and closes the other.
• Dragon Age 2 – 49 main quests spread over 3 acts, 110 side quests categorized according to importance (secondary quests, side quests and companion quests). Companion mechanic allows for some non-linearity. Branching quest trees. When you finish an act, most quests of the previous act aren’t available anymore.
• The Witcher 2 – 8 possible endings, subdivided in 2 main categories depending on whether or not a main character survivives, with further variation achieved via the survival or death of two lesser characters. 54 steps in main quest spread over three chapters. 42 side quests. Most quests are linear, with quest failure not having significant impact.

I don’t know how he got the numbers, nor did I check if they’re 100% accurate, but they were sufficient for me to do the comparison I wanted to do and more importantly, it told me the one thing I really needed to know – nihil novi sub sole, nothing newer under the sun.

The numbers of quests for these three games are low enough that you can immediately see that it’s impossible for them to have real choice and consequence in them, and that any claim to the contrary is just marketing.

That doesn’t demean them, because it’d be productionally insane to offer real branching storylines for every single choice you encounter in a game. Including just ten choices like that would lead to 1024 different endings, which in addition to be very expensive to make, would also be nearly impossible to QA.

So what to do if, like me, you want to make a game that presents you with plenty of real choices ? The answer of course is to make them indepedent of one another. After all, the branching problem only occurs if the option of making one particular choice is dependent on a previous decision being made.

Now if you make all of them independent of one another, that’s a bit lame. Because then you have a lot of choice, but you don’t get a lot of consequence, which kind of ruins the party.

So the trick is to present you with plenty of choice and somehow manage to limit the branching that causes. A way of doing this is the introduction of variable conditions in the branching story tree. Put simply, if a certain variable reaches a certain value, the story progresses in one direction, otherwise it progresses in the other direction.

This is a powerful mechanic, because it allows you put in a number of choice/consequence situations where the consequence is just the changing of the value of that variable, and the number of bifurcations is actually the number of points where a variable reaching a certain threshold really matters to the storyline.

That’s very theoretical so here’s an example. If the variable is, how angry is the girl at you, then you can put in several situations in which you can make her angry. If you made her angry enough, then the plot develops along the lines of her leaving you. Otherwise, it progresses along the track of you still being in a relation with her.

To make matters more interesting, you then make it so that the girl being angry at you is also used to drive forward another plotline, e.g. your relation with her father. This relation can also be affected by e.g. how much money you are making for him. If she leaves you, but you make tons of money for him, he’ll still be happy about you, progressing along his “I’m happy with you” track. But if you don’t make enough money for him and you leave his daughter, then you might go down the other track. Etc… etc… etc…

Needless to say, you end up with enormously complex story graphs when doing these kind of stunts, but it’s quite a powerful method for giving the player the illusion of there being really a lot of choice and consequence in a game.

You can hear this one come from miles in the distance, but it’s what we’re fooling around with in our next games, Dragon Commander and the mysterious project E.

The infamous undead princess. This screenshot is really old, and I promise that this is the month in which we'll show new stuff. Bear with us, we've really been making a lot of progress, but we only want to show something when it all fits together.

Our idea is to market Dragon Commander as a game that gives you over 300 choice & consequence situations, with plenty of examples that clearly differentiate it from the rest of the pack. Of course we’re cheating a bit, because we’ve created the entire gameplay around this choice & consequence mechanic, but nonetheless, I’ll consider it quite a feat when we succeed in this.

In Dragon Commander the entire concept is built around a bunch of possible protagonists/antagonists, each having their own story trees that impact the story trees of the the other main characters, with the player being the one that decides in which direction the plot navigates by making a series of decisions. Several of these decisions affect relationship parameters, and once these go over a certain value, the story branches.

What’s really interesting about it all is how the different story trees for the characters interact with one another. It’s made the architecture for this a very complex mess and just the paper design took our design team over a year to complete, but I have good hopes that’ll give us a very rewarding result when the final game comes together. The thing I like the most is that each branch is guaranteed very different from the other branch.

To make it more concrete – take our infamous undead princess as an example. She has has 5 possible endings, but the path towards those endings is not only dependent on your interactions with her, but also on your interactions with the other characters, which themselves again have multiple endings, with the same complex dependency trees.

I’ll leave it to your imagination just how complex this all is, but in theory we have over 2,4 million possible endings using this mechanic, expressed as the combinations of possible end-situations our main characters can find themselves in. And because it’s a game of large-scale dragon warfare, you can multiply that by 2, because you also either win or lose the war.

We’ve never done it like this, so it’s a bit of an experiment for us, but as I mentioned, it sounds good on paper and I think we’ve been clever enough in our approach that we’ll actually manage to accomplish it decently, but of course, the verdict as always will come at the end.

If anybody can give me examples of other games that really exploit the mechanic described, I’d be very interested to hear about them. It’ll help me in convincing people that yes, we’re really doing this, and yes, it really can be pulled off. Right now my biggest problem with pitching Dragon Commander is that people think we’ve gone completely bananas