Original Sin - Inteview @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun interviews Swen Vincke to talk about the near-closure of his studio, Divinity:Original Sin's future, and gender parity.

RPS: Conventional wisdom used to say that no one wanted these sorts of games anymore. And you’ve gone from making Ego Draconis, which was much more an RPG fused with an action game to Original Sin. But this is like, by many standards, a niche within a niche. You’re making a very specific type of game. Are you at all worried about a worst case scenario? A small crowd buys it and loves it, and everyone else says, “eh, not my thing”?

Vincke: Yeah. But you know, they’ve always said that about every single game I’ve made. From Divinity 1 onward. They went on to sell really a lot of units. We’ve calculated Divinity II sales at, what, 1.3 million units? That’s not a small crowd anymore. Divinity 1 must be over a million units now if you take the entire life cycle into account. That’s a lot of people already. I refuse to believe that our players currently are the only ones who want to have an evolution of the RPG genre as it existed and that was cut off. It was cut off because it turned out that the action-RPGs sold easier and were easier to make.

I personally think that, in the early 2000s, RPGs were cut off, because there were a number of production values that went up, and it was impossible to… Well, it was possible, but it was decided not to do it by the powers that be. So the genre stopped evolving. This was the case for a lot of genres. Now we have the resurgence of the indies. We have Steam Early Access and Kickstarter. Suddenly we have games that nobody would have ever invested in. Like Wasteland 2, for instance. Do you really think a publisher would have put a dollar into that? No. Look at it, how it’s soaring up the charts. That’s conventional wisdom for you.

The guys that have the conventional wisdom, I’m sorry, but I never agreed with them back then and I still don’t agree with them nowadays. It’s easy to go along the beaten path, but then you’re not going to have any evolution in games. You’ll have rehashes of the same thing over and over. There’s a lot of gamers out there, more gamers than ever, and they’re looking for a little bit more intelligent content. That’s where we want to be with this one
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"That’s all the result of following threads on the Larian forums, or on forums like RPG Codex and RPG Watch, where we’re watching what people are writing, what their problems are, and saying, okay, we can fix it that way."

From now on, I'll buy every game this man makes. No wait, I already do.
 
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*applause*

I'm so glad I backed this one. <3
 
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It would be really hard not to like this guy. I really hope this game makes them a ton of money and they make a ton of expansions and other similar games in different settings (sci-fi, post-apocalypse, etc.) And I hope I like this game as much as I think I am going to like it.

I usually get bored with interviews in a second or two but I like reading this guy’s blog too. I wish the people I like would all start a company and just stick it to the man, kind of like Image comics tried to do.
 
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Who's their community guy around here? I know Inexile have BN and some of the indies post themselves but I can't remember a larian guy.
 
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Swen Vincke > Willy Wonka

SO TRUE. And you gotta love the way Swen pronounces the word "idea" ("ai-dee") :D

Honestly, I have been supporting these guys since I got my grubby hands on Divine Divinity and I'm not going to stop anytime soon.
 
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Pfft, I don't even like chocolate that much, RPGs are very low on calories and everyone knows they are good for you ;)

We all like Swen, let us hope that we will indeed love his latest brainchild :)
 
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I don't think one has to be 'greater than' the other. Willy Wonka was about chocolates and candies and just seeing the 'Wonka' brand you knew you were in for a treat.

Same with Sven, but with videogames.
 
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It depends which Wonka we're talking about. If it's Gene Wilder's Wonka, then yeah. Johnny Depp's Wonka was just weird and a little disturbing. :)
 
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Who's their community guy around here? I know Inexile have BN and some of the indies post themselves but I can't remember a larian guy.

Raze, I think.

SO TRUE. And you gotta love the way Swen pronounces the word "idea" ("ai-dee") :D

Haha, that is typically us Flemish speakers that do that. My girlfriend's American, and she has remarked the same thing. :)
 
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It depends which Wonka we're talking about. If it's Gene Wilder's Wonka, then yeah. Johnny Depp's Wonka was just weird and a little disturbing. :)

Of course it's Gene Wilder. C'mon man... :p
 
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Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/03/05/larian-on-near-closure-divinitys-future-gender-parity/

RPS: You’ve delayed the game a couple times, and you’ve chalked this most recent one up to implementing player feedback. How so? And are the changes really that substantial? For some Early Access/Kickstarter devs, the whole “user feedback” line kind of just feels like lip service.

Vincke: So let me prove it to you. There’s a couple of forums that I follow very closely, on which they discuss our games extensively. A lot of very good ideas are coming from there, so we’re implementing them. We’re getting a lot of feedback as well.

[Pulls up a gameplay segment in Divinity: Original Sin]

So, all of this, all of these rules that you’re seeing, that are determining, for instance, strength and what it does, and this entire system with the action points, where you can stack them and put points into this stuff to get turn action points… It’s really cool gameplay. All of that was not there when we went on Early Access. That’s all the result of following threads on the Larian forums, or on forums like RPG Codex and RPG Watch, where we’re watching what people are writing, what their problems are, and saying, okay, we can fix it that way.
 
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Could be. At least he is an Forum Moderator.

Totally deserved,. if you ask me, considerin the amount of work he had already put into the forum before he became the Moderator there.


@Sven, if you read this : I'd like to be able to turn the quest markers off. I'd like to experience a single game without them again - I'm already kind of sick of almost every game having quest markers nowadays. I'd like to be able to explore again, like in Divinity 1.
 
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@Alrik

I hope you are going to play Pillars of Eternity, it is confirmed the game will not have quest markers...
 
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@Sven, if you read this : I'd like to be able to turn the quest markers off. I'd like to experience a single game without them again - I'm already kind of sick of almost every game having quest markers nowadays. I'd like to be able to explore again, like in Divinity 1.

But there aren't any quest markers, only map markers

Swen said:
I didn’t want to do any quest markers, because I didn’t want to do that kind of hand-holding. They’ve been very vocal about that, though, so now we have map markers in there, which will show you a little. We have more map markers than we originally intended.
 
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Swen also confirmed this on twitter:

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In Swen, we trust! :)
 
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