Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Alpha access Nov 2013?

As one of the major backers at RPGWatch, I won the alpha and beta access. Haven't heard a peep from Myrthos about it, so I thought I'd ask here. Is the alpha access delayed, and if so by how long? I don't want to start another crpg if my alpha access is days away.....

Swen Vincke ‏@LarAtLarian 15 Nov
And just like that, we're getting Divinity:Original Sin prepped to be played by the outside world - soon, so very soon

Copied from https://twitter.com/LarAtLarian so i think maybe this weekend. (november still has 10 days)

Same as the nut here, can't wait to see the Alpha =) Hopefully things are still on track.

Same, I've been anticipating the alpha for the last couple of weeks now. However, they've still got another week to release it. Hopefully we'll be able to play it soon.

Still waiting. And tired of seeing the "triple A" press girls & boys doing the "teasing" all the time. Generally, not only with Original Sin.

So Larian don't forget from where the money came and do something for your backers soon...

What are you talking about with triple AAA press teasing? As far as I know, there are no new previews yet, and the only press people who are playing the game are a couple youtube stars.

I imagine that Larian is working quite hard to get the last bits of the alpha nailed down.

Crowd funding unfortunately creates a pretty heavy sense of entitlement for some people. Its understandable why it happens, and it isn't entirely wrong. This has caused trouble for quite a few projects with their backers.

I think though the majority of us would rather have Larian take whatever time they need and release the game they really want to make. In any case, I'm not really worried =)

With that said, I'm still anxious to get my hands on it and see it for myself!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not tired of waiting and I'm not impatient. I prefer a best-bug-free product at the end at most, no matter how long it will take them to do it. I'm "kinda" familar with Larian's history and I really think, this time they will be really, really successful with the final product (fans AND press AND commercially).

What I don't like is how Larian currently seem to priorise their work and involving their backers. Example: for me, from the outside, it looks like they spend much mantime and power into showing/presenting the current (alpha?) state of the game to individuals (like streamers/youtubers) instead on focusing on their backers (like other successful kickstarters do it).

I think a really early alpha release won't hurt the final product, contrary, it will hugely improve it, because the backers can report bugs and give feedback. If they release it too late (like 1 month before final release), it will be utterly useless imho and might eventually have a negative impact on the final version aswell. Currently, it looks like for me, that something is holding them back to release it. Maybe security or technical distribution reasons?

It could be that the thing delaying the Alpha release is getting the error-reporting system to work properly. There's no point in releasing an Alpha to try and polish and fix bugs if it's more work to track them down than fix them.

Also, Larian "officially" doesn't work on weekends, so launching an alpha on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday is probably out of the question.

Work on the alpha doesn't have to stop to show the current state to a couple people, and it takes very little attention, if any, away from the game itself.

The alpha will be released "soon", presumably this week. What makes you think the alpha is done, and there is some other reason it hasn't been released yet? Have you followed any other Larian releases? Games in general are more likely to be released mid/late in a given time frame (or sometimes after) than at the beginning, and Larian tends to be a little ambitious when setting goals.

What makes me think that the alpha is done? Well, individuals are "good" enough to test/play it? So I assume that we backers should be aswell.

And yes, I have followed every Larian release (since Divine Divinity) and am familiar with the company. Never the less, I wanted to express my concerns. If I would bother, I hadn't posted.

I'm still hoping for an official comment/udpate regarding this topic by Swen/Larian.

If the game currently crashes every hour on the hour, that is lots of time to show a couple people the game, but I don't think many backers would want to actually play it in that state. Similarly, there could be unfinished cutscenes or quests that would cause problems if you explored in a certain direction or talked to a certain NPC, which would be easily avoidable with someone there to give a warning, but less avoidable for all the people who don't read release notes.

More likely the finishing touches are being done, or there is a release candidate going through QA to make sure there are no obvious / serious issues remaining. And of course as Stabbey said, even if the alpha itself was ready to go it wouldn't make sense to release it to get feedback if the mechanism for receiving that feedback isn't done.

Nemisis_Dragon
Pretty sure it will be out in Dec, nothing to worry about.
I'm just hoping there will be... "unofficial" release as well >_>

I finished The Witcher in that state (but that was supposedly a release version...) and there are many games that never make it past that stage, so yeah, the occasional memory leak and related crashes wouldn't bother me all that much in an *alpha* version.



Iirc not the entire game (content-wise) would be available, so assuming they focused their attention foremost on the part they want to show us (likely the bit they've also shown in various videos and to various reporters) this shouldn't be too much of an issue.



Meh, it's an alpha, it's gonna be buggy in various ways. I'd be dissapointed if it weren't (because then they perfectionisted (yes, I just made that word up) too long before releasing an alpha (and it won't really be an alpha but more of a bete imo)



Now that's a reason I can get behind

Foremost the best way to get good feedback is to have people break your product. Users are incomprehensibly great at finding the weak spots in your software and then pushing them until the thing comes toppling down. (I'm a developer; the amount of "That can't possibly happen!"s I've seen happen... )

But really, if it doesn't happen this month it doesn't. There won't be tar and pitchforks or anything. I'm pretty sure most of us here are pretty RPG-starved by now and are starting to have the shakes due to withdrawal

Yeah, I certainly wouldn't be disappointed if the alpha didn't come out in November. In fact, as long as it doesn't strain their budget too much they can take all the time they need to complete and polish the game.

It's just that it would be fun to have something to try out right now, of course.

So, the upcoming alpha is essentially beta?

I understand that companies define these things differently - so I wonder what the deal is here.

According to Swen's blog this game has an unavoidable deadline of the 28th February due to pre-existing contracts (distributers I assume), so there's not a huge amount of time to release both alpha & beta, and also account for all the feedback. The only reason I'm not worried is that it appears development is reaching the polishing stage anyway and that the alpha/beta release is going to be in a relatively highly polished state already. Which is a smart move I think when releasing to 'the crowd' rather than a select group of testers.

Am I mistaken in this assessment? Is there only going to be one pre-release version? It would be interesting and accountable of Larian to inform us backers a bit better about their release schedule. I know Swen promised in the last update that it's all on track. I'd just like to know more about what that track is.

I think, that instead of clearly separated alpha and beta there will rather be a "continuous" beta version such as for Dragon Commander. That means that every few days we will get a new patch of the beta version on Steam which incorporates the feedback which they will have received by then.

Yes, with all backers having access, there doesn't seem like much reason to have separate alpha/beta phases.

When oh when does it become availalbe (alpha/beta) ? Will it be Nov, Dec, Jan or .... tick tock tick tock the clock is ticking

Dragon Commander had less than a month of beta testing, if I'm not mistaken. And their latest goal is to get it out before winter break.