Destructoid talked to Swen Vincke about Baldur's Gate 3 and how development is going.
A modern method
More information.What's helping Vincke and the team at Larian track everything is not just vocal player feedback, but the data it's collecting from playtime. An upside of Early Access is that you have a lot of players engaging with your content, and while that can help for ferreting out bugs, there are deeper problems you can root out with enough data.
It might sound strange, but story has been one area where the data has been a boon. At one point during our talk, Vincke pulls up an image to show me what's essentially a graph of the paths players have taken through a specific story dialogue, and what outcomes they received. Vincke estimated it covered about 30,000 dialogues' worth of data, with some results being clear majority and others, ones that might require use of certain mechanics or knowledge, having fewer players reach that conclusion.
Vincke describes these analytics tools, which the studio built up after the success of Divinity: Original Sin 2, as a "gold mine." It helps the studio identify what players are doing and make inferences, and potentially adapt if they're seeing a choice being taken too often or not often enough; or even, if the choice is one they want to feel special and earned, keep it that way.
"I call it a very modern way of doing game development, because you finally have the data processing to be able to do these kinds of things," Vincke says. "And it's, it improves it, literally, I mean, there's nothing to be done about it. It makes the games better. They just need time, they need to cook."
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