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

Is it really that stupid to make sure your games can be seen by anybody who enters a shop ?

Here’s what happened:

Wednesday evening I get a mail from Tom @ Evolve PR telling me

“Ehhh… this little post from RPS has a lot of comments from people going, “what the hell?” — obviously I would also agree that digital is probably the best way for indies to get big numbers these days, but yeah… might be worth hopping in and commenting a little bit?”

So I go look, expecting the interview to be online but to my surprise it’s a teaser with the header “retail important to indie PC studios”. My initial reaction is something along the lines of – yeah, so what – that’s not particularly interesting – but then I check the comments section, and to my surprise people are actually debating the very point.

Next, in an email discussion with a fellow friendly developer, Sergei, our enigmatic publishing director, proposes hooking up said developer with an excellent local distributor. To our surprise, the developer’s reaction is lukewarm, saying that he prefers his German publisher to deal with all aspects of retail distribution in Europe. When we tell him, but your German publisher doesn’t have any retail presence outside of Germany, he tells us, yeah, but he’ll make a deal with others and then he’ll pay me royalties – it’s a lot of easier for us that way.

We obviously go silent at that – why would he prefer a cut from a cut instead of going direct? It’s not like the German publisher could force him to accept a European deal in return for financing the game – he’s self-funded, and made plenty of money from his previous game.

Then I do an interview with Gamesindustry.biz  and again, the interviewer expresses surprise at the fact that we’re trying to get our game in retail, and we spend quite some time discussing that particular bit.

So I started wondering, am I missing something here?

Larian’s distribution strategy can be summarized as follows, sorted by how we prefer a sale to be made.

• 1. Direct Sales – Via Larian Vault & forums. Full control, largest margin, allows direct contact with our players.
• 2. Steam – Reliable, report on time, pay on time and regularly, are very developer friendly
• 3. Other digital sales – Easier than retail, monthly payments, you occasionally ned to yell a bit to get your money.
• 4. Retail in key markets – It’s possible to work with civilized companies that are ok, even if they are stressing for the moment.
• 5. Retail sales in non-key markets – Need to work with either finished goods deals, so sales/messaging can be controlled – be damned sure about who you are dealing with.

It’s true that points 4 & 5 can be interesting from time to time, so we have some key rules in place to avoid future frustration

• Work with publishers/distributors that have direct access to retail in their territory.
• Ensure that numbers we expect are feasible within their market,
• Make sure there’s incentive for them to push our games.
• Make sure sell-through can be controlled and offer reasonable return/price protection policies.
• Make sure PR & Marketing are cooperative efforts with the option of taking the lead if necessary

It’s no rocket science, and I can’t figure out why you wouldn’t want to do retail, even if you prefer direct or digital sales.

The only real reason I can think of is the fear that the margins might be lower. So I did some calculations.

The numbers I’ve seen from my own games but also other games show that 70% of digital sales are made via promotions where reductions between 30% to 75% or even more are offered to players. That clearly impacts the average revenue per unit in digital (though for players it’s great )

Retail has the same thing, they call it price protection and obviously you also have to deal with returns, but all in all it’s a lot less elastic than digital.

Comparing the two, I ultimately arrived at the conclusion that in today’s market you end up with a net per unit in retail being approximately 70% of net per unit digitally. Or in other words, you need to sell 3 units in retail to get the same money you’d get from 2 units digitally. That’s clearly a difference, but it’s not that significant that you can say, retail isn’t worth it.

Unless, that is, the retail audience is the same as the digital audience.

Now, I don’t have numbers on that, but anecdotic evidence, together with the observation that even Valve still puts a lot of effort in their retail presence, leads me to believe that the overlap is not as great as press headlines would lead you to believe.

Besides there still being many other players out there that don’t like buying something digitally, you also need to factor in that broadband isn’t omnipresent yet, especially in Eastern Europe. And if you’re not in a store, you can’t reach those players. On top of that, being present in stores is also a form of marketing.

So my take is that if you’re not doing points 1 to 5 as an independent developer, you are most definitely losing revenue, revenue you can use to make better games and increase your independence. Of course, the retail margin starts eroding rapidly if your business model for being in retail is one in which you get a cut of a cut (and in some cases, of a cut)

But, given that so many people are questioning my reasoning, please take this post as an open invitation to correct me. If our strategy has a fatal flaw, I’d like to know now rather than later

P.S.

Never in my career did I expect I was going to be defending retail as a model And for clarity’s sake, I’m not saying retail is the future, but it’s here now and you should use it for what it is.

Update: The full interview is online now here.

The topic is digital vs retail, and my position on it is that if you’re an independent developer, and you’re doing digital only, you’re missing out on a lot of revenue. I wrote a bit in the comments section to clarify the point.

So I browsed through my picture library and found some pictures from PR & marketing events I participated in.

Here’s three that should illustrate my point, so I’m not going to write a wall of text here.

The message to fellow developers – require detail in your contracts, lots of detail. And don’t accept the message that the administrative overhead is too much. It’s the oldest trick in the book, and even if the person you are signing your contract with might be sincere , that doesn’t mean that all other people in his or her organization will be as sincere.

It’s extremely hard to argue whether or not marketing costs are allowed. So make sure that they are capped, that there is a detailed plan that’s updated continuously (which requires your approval) and work with continuous reports, preferably monthly. If it sounds too much to ask, it’s not. It’s what publishers put in their contracts when dealing with one another, because they know how things work.

Otherwise you’ll encounter situations like - ”Sure I went to a casino, but it was with the editor in chief of magazine X. We want to be in magazine X, right ? And the guy indeed likes strippers. But you got the article right ? Nobody wanted to write about your game otherwise” might be one of the arguments you hear.

On one particular night, I helped a marketing director earn back the money he wasted in a casino, not realizing that it was actually part of my marketing budget.

Ring side seats - yes, it was cool, but really, a deductible cost ?

This I can understand - it makes sense. But a large suite in the SLS in Beverly Hills associated with this trip ? A normal hotel would've sufficed.

I used to think the first Divinity was only going to be a 20 hour game

It’s becoming pretty hard for me to keep up with my own story, and unfortunately my kids have excellent memories, so occassionaly I need to carefully query them about some of the well-known facts of the little dragon universe. I even started taking notes.

The thing they like the most I think is that it’s a neverending story. Whenever I try to bring some closure, they want to know what happens next . Running out of inspiration and hoplessly caught in a spiderweb of plotlines, I tried finishing the story once, but a young boy crying and a wife giving me the evil eye, forced me to add yet another plot-twist, meaning that Little Green Dragon still has a very long journey ahead of him.

My personal equivalent of listening to Little Green Dragon stories is playing RPGs & reading books, so I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. I too like my RPGs to be very big, and I rarely read a fantasy book if it’s not at least a trilogy. If it’s not big enough, then I don’t feel it’s worthwhile investing myself in the protagonist, because what I’m looking for are grand epic adventures, Lord of the Rings like.

So recently the discussion of size versus quality popped up again at Larian Studios,the topic being where to spend our efforts, and as typical in that conversation, I once again found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The gist of the argument is very simple – given a fixed budget, the smaller the world in which the RPG takes place, the higher the quality and polish of that world. The corrolary of that is, the larger the gameworld, the more generic the mechanics that drive it.

We started working on something called Project E in 2010 at the same time as Dragon Commander. While Dragon Commander breaks new grounds for us, project E is very much what people expect from us, a big RPG with all the stuff that goes with it.

At some point during development I asked the guys in the team to put the concept art for the entire world on a wall, and chalk out the pieces that belonged together. Given that the brief was that I wanted it to be a grand adventure with continous changes in environment, I wasn’t surprised that what I was looking at was very varied, and also very large. Definitely Little Green Dragon worthy and of a scope I would invest myself in as a player.

But then the next thing I did was asking one of the designers to estimate how long it was going to take to traverse one zone of the world. On the face of it, he thought it was going to take half an hour, but obviously it might take a bit longer. So we sat down with a chronometer and role played a walkthrough of  a zone. Turned out that the half hour became at least one hour, without any way of really knowing because we didn’t factor in interface operations such as deciding which skills to get, what items to trade etc… things we couldn’t try because the game’s still in development.

Enthousiastically the designer told me – yeah cool, it’s going to be really epic, really really epic. Sadly this was quickly followed by him being disappointed because I told him –we should cut. This didn’t go down well and he argued quite strongly and well against it, but in my mind the decision was already taken – every single alarm bell ringing very loud inside of me. Looking at that very long and high wall,   I knew that without intervention this game was going to be way over budget and really late.

So I told him, cut about one third, rewrite the story in such a way that we can still add the one third (for  the unlikely event that we’ll be ready with it ahead of time) and then we’ll see.

I broke his heart, and I also broke mine, because the small boy in me actually wanted the world to even be larger. But the big boy said, you can’t do this. Probably one third isn’t even enough, you might have to cut half.

Sean R. in a comment on “The route to the very big RPG that will dwarf them all” wrote that one should prefer quality and uniqueness over quantity. He hit a note that doesn’t really feel right to me, given that I’m the one who likes both quality & uniqueness but also quantity when it comes to a RPG. However, there’s some evidence to suggest that he’s more right than I am, and that if forced to choose, you should always reduce the quantity.

Two important supporting arguments for this are experience with reviewers, and actually time spent on RPGs by players.

Having read a lot of RPG reviews, we learnt that a lot of meta-critic reviewers in general only play a game for a couple of hours or so before making their final judgment, especially if the game doesn’t have a huge advertising budget. They also rarely reduce the score for a game being too short, which is actually one of the few consistent traits we observed Since their rating is ultra-important for the sales of a RPG, this is quite an important observation.

You can’t even blame them, because statistics obtained by monitoring how many achievements are unlocked in Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga on Xbox360, tell us that 40% of players finished the first part of the game, 18% the second part and a mere 7,5% the entire game. So in this sense, reviewers represent the audience, which in the end I guess is their job.

If we project this in gameplay time, it means that the large majority of our audience is more than served with 20-30 hours, and you can’t help but wonder if it’s worth the effort to put in more than that.

So this time around I decided to see if anecdotal evidence, xbox statistics and what agents, publishers and friendly journalists tell me, really makes sense. The policy of the day has become the ruthless guarding of polish and quality at the expense of quantity, with the silent hope that the team progresses fast enough so we can still appease my inner yearning for the grand-scale adventures of Little Green Dragon.

That, and the knowledge that even if I reduced the scope of project E by 30%, it’s probably still going to be large enough( if not too large) by the reasoning I outlined above. I say that because when we finalized on the scope of Divine Divinity back 2001, I thought we were making a a 20 hours game, and suffered from a mild depression  until I discovered that 20 hours in my book meant around 60 hours when observing players playing  ;)

Me selling some of my games - every little bit helps

What happened was that in the early 2000’s, I could get away with me being in charge of most things. But as productions scaled up and teams became larger, I was forced to (very reluctantly) release several of my roles as I was doing more damage than good. My main job became that of being the one outlining the general vision, and overcoming any obstacles encountered during executing that vision.

Since it turned out that financing topped the obstacle list, I ended up focussing a lot of time on the cash aspect of the business.  But to be honest, I hate this part of the job,  it’s not the reason I founded this studio. There really are days when I say, the hell with it, I want to program again, I’m not dealing with this stuff any longer (today is one of those days )

But then I remember the ultimate goal, the making of “the very big RPG that will dwarf them all”, and I get on with it, realizing that the side-quest of finding of what Hollywood calls “Fuck-you money” is realy becoming urgent.

The problem is, every time I think we’re close to achieving that point, costs go up, and we need to find more cash, which doesn’t really help.

So, a plan was formed…

Here’s a break-down of what it cost us to make the Dragon Knight Saga

• 4M € employees
• 900K€ freelancers
• 270K€ outsourcing of artwork
• 200K€ hardware
• 700K€ software licenses
• 400K€ localisation

for a total of 6,5M€. That’s a lot of money and as the Dragon Knight Saga was released via co-publishing deals , it also meant that we needed to take care of the majority of this investment ourselves, since the publishers only contributed partially to the funding.

Our modus operandi was to make cash with kids games like for instance Monkey Tales or Adventure Rock, and then spend it on the RPG. This approach obviously worked since we managed to release the game, but in hindsight, I’m sure we could’ve done it for a lot less and with a lot less frustration.

Knowing what I know now, I think we could’ve brought down costs by 2M€, and had this game been made in another country (Belgium has notoriously high labor taxes), we could perhaps have made all of The Dragon Knight Saga for less than 4M€.

So part one of the plan is to try to use our financial resources in a more clever way, applying lessons learnt, allowing us to put more stuff in our future games.

Part two is that instead of spending a lot of effort on non-core games to earn money, we focus on making more core-games.

The reasoning there is quite simple – we noticed that good sales on The Dragon Knight Saga are correlated to good sales of the other Divinities, with people in general enjoying the games. More good Divinity games should therefore make the entire series stronger, and an added advantage is that we are working on making more RPG technology, rather than non-RPG tech, which will help bring down costs in the future, and further accelerate our development cycle.

That’s why in addition to Dragon Commander, we’re also working on an unannounced RPG (which btw is closer on the release horizon than most people think J )

Part three is to earn more revenue per game sold. That’s why we’re going the self-publishing route, cutting out the middle-men, as outlined in a previous blog post. Here too there are extra advantages, because not only do we make more money to fuel our future ambitions, but we also have more control of how our game is released, something we’ve had quite a lot of issues with in the past.

Now if you read of all that, have you noticed what I’ve become ?

I’m a guy that started a game development company because he was inspired by Ultima VII to make huge RPGs, with a vision of a free systemic game-world coupled to a strong storyline and powerful character development mechanics. But all I talked about here was more cost-efficiency, more company focus and higher margins.

Still, I don’t think there’s any other route. To be able  to fulfill the ambition of the “very big RPG that will dwarf them all”, we need to cash-rich enough to disappear from the planet for a couple of years, and focus on doing only that. We need to enter that development with plenty of RPG experience and technology, and we need to know that upon release, we’ll be able to recoup our investment so we don’t go down immediately afterwards because some publisher tells us “so long and thank you for all the fish”.

So we’ll try to make two very good games that will be released in 2012-2013, do this as cost-effective as possible, ensure that what we build will help us in the future, and fight to maximize our revenue from these games, so that perhaps in 2015 you might see the game this company was created for.

At least, that’s the plan. Between that goal ofcourse and where we are today, there’s a huge obstacle course, which brings me back to my current job-definition a.k.a. acting as either a bulldozer or a kangoroo.

How much do you think this retailer gets when he sells one of my games?

I’ve seen some debate about some of my posts on the publishing side of the business and I noticed that a lot of people don’t understand the economics behind a game. Sadly, that includes a lot of developers too.

I’ll keep the overview very short but I think it might be helpful to have some numbers in place for future reference when I’ll discuss some of the finer aspects of royalty report manipulation I’ve seen.

So if you want to know how much you pay to who when buying a game, read on.

On a 39,95 game in Germany, this is a typical breakdown found in royalty reports (numbers rounded)

• The state (VAT 19%): -7,5€
• Retail: -10€
• Inflated publisher costs: -5€ (Logistics, sales and payment conditions)
• Cost of goods: -1,5€
• Net revenue: 15,95€

So now you know

Figuring this was the perfect opportunity for me to take on my papa smurf look, I tried to calm their fears by lecturing them about our grand going independent strategy, and how it’s rooted in years of experience of talking to the “big publishers”. Read on If you want to figure out how I came to became a rebel, with plenty of reasons to shun the official prostration that goes on twice a year at events like Game Connection.

An image I used when trying to pitch the idea of a Steampunk dragon game - are you bananas was one of the friendlier reactions I got. Yes, it was called Dragon Armada back then

For most publishers the business model is tweaked to make large profits on hit titles, with sufficient margin to cover all of their costs and the losses caused by flopped titles. The strategy they use to find hit-titles is that a gate-keeper, typically somebody with the role  ”business development director” on his card, searches the world and his inbox for new hot game pitches.

Preferably these pitches are for games that are already well under way, have a solid team behind them with a good track record and sufficient finances. The game’s topic should also fit whatever marketing fancies is a good idea.

If the bizdev guy can check all those boxes to a sufficient degree, he presents whatever material is available to a green-light committee, people who are rumored to have incredible insights in what we want to play. Normally you find people from sales & marketing in such committees as well as some guys that actually play games like a producer or somebody from quality assurance.

Looking at Larian I always thought we were ok on the checkboxes – my team is solid, we’re in the business for 15 years with several games having a metacritic above 80% and we’re self-sufficient. Our games also have the habbit of selling for a long time.The only thing that could stop us from making it to the walhalla of the green-light committee  therefore would be that committee members just don’t like our games (or me/my studio).

We actually did make it to several green-light committees of top 10 publishers, I even sat in on a few of them to present my games,  but we never managed to sign with any of them, so obviously something went wrong. Other than occasionally having to deal with idiots, the biggest common hurdle I found has always been the marketing department. I’ve learnt that in general these people don’t like RPGs. They just don’t get it.

In general marketeers want a simple USP (unique selling proposition) that differentiates your game from the competition. That’s not rocket science, but it’s  obviously something that’s very hard to define in a game where it’s all about the whole being larger than the sum of the individual features. That a lot of these individual smaller features are different doesn’t matter to them, they want something big, preferably something not done before. They also want stunning visuals & animation, which is again very hard, if only for the freedom and wealth of options you need to offer players in a RPG. One of the consequences of that is that is that you can’t use a whole bunch of the tricks available to FPS developers, and obviously the RPG suffers in visual comparison.

The reason marketeers want a strong USP and plenty of visual polish is obviously that they think that that’s what’s required to make good sales, and unfortunately (or actually fortunately) their imaginations weren’t triggered by the visions I tried to communicate to them.

I’ve tried everything I could think of that by telling them that in a good RPG it’s the detail and the heart that’s put in that counts, and that if they were to sign on, we’d have the budget to put the polish in there that they were looking for, but to no avail. I tried the sales angle, showing them figures for Bioware & Bethesda RPGs, arguing that with our unique take on the genre and the same budgets we could give them stellar sales, but it just didn’t work.

I’m pretty sure I convinced at least some guys around those tables, the guys that got me in those meeting rooms in the first place, but my language, style of communication or just the assets I brought weren’t strong enough to convince marketing. And at most publishers, if you can’t convince marketing, you don’t have a deal.

So after having sat through several of those defining first-impression moments where I saw the marketing guys pick up their blackberries after seeing a couple of minutes of footage of the games we were working on, I came to the conclusion that if the game wouldn’t look and move like a first person shooter at the same stage of development, and didn’t feature a big hook that could be communicated in one phrase, it would never work. The only thing that would work would be if I showed a powerpoint where I say – dude, the previous game sold 3 million units – so even if you don’t get it, there’s a market.

Somewhere in between one of those meetings I made the decision that the only way we could break through would be by doing it ourselves, without the involvement of a large publisher. Given an environment in which record sales require massive polish which in turn requires massive investments, I needed to find a way to get access to that investment, without the shortcut of getting it from a publisher.

So I asked myself, why do you need these people anyway ? Seriously ?

The roles of a publisher are typically banking, pr/marketing and sales/distribution. They usually also offer localization & quality assurance services. On one occasion, I asked an executive producer that had worked on some top titles how many people it would actually take if I wanted to take care of those roles myself,  and his surprising answer was, not that many, if you can manage the funding. Which got me thinking.

My personal experiences with mid-sized publishers had shown me that all the pr/marketing tasks on a game were usually done by only a few people who then hired a whole bunch of services from dedicated firms. The same went for localization and quality assurance. If you have the funding, it was clear that you don’t need to care about the banking, which publishers are anyway bad at, so that left sales and distribution.

Crack that, I told myself, and you don’t need them.

Followed some very interesting times in which I managed to guide the studio to actually make money from its games. The games were inherently not the way I wanted them to be because I lacked the budget, and the money collected wasn’t as much as it could’ve been since I still went through publishers , but it was good enough to set us up for the next stage of the plan.

That stage is the self-publishing adventure we now find ourselves in.  We recently started staffing up our in-house publishing team to the extent that we’ll be able to offer more publishing attention to our games than they would actually get at most publishers, and we’re now happily making our games without anybody interfering.

All I need to do now is get the games in the stores, because even if digital sales make up for a lot of revenue, retail still matters very much. And that’s the one thing we can’t do ourselves. We can make the boxes, we can ship them, but we don’t have the sales network required to put it in the stores.

That means I still need to go through publishers, which is what concerns my team

I’m way over my self-imposed word-count limit here, so I’ll leave the “getting it to retail” thoughts for another time, but the final point I wanted to make is that the above story is not unique to Larian, a lot of developers that can are going the same route, and eventually it’s going to be the thing that will shake up the games industry as we know it significantly.

There’s a lot talk about the indie thing, but typically that’s about smaller garage teams looking for the big break. Larian is a larger established team, with all the stuff that comes with that, but we’re making a move that if copied by other similar-sized developers, will shake up the publishing world by its roots.

The creativity of independent teams together with access to the revenue their games generate, and the ability to bring their own games to market, will forcefully put publishers in a position where they need to question their reasons for being.

But obviously, we first need to learn how to publish our games, which isn’t that simple either