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So I was watching a video by I believe TotalBiscuit, during the kickstarter, and I was only half paying attention but I wanted a new RPG, as its a Genre I am in love with, so I backed it, just enough to get the finished game.
well recently I got Divinity Dragon Commander and was like Damn this is a good, not originally putting 2 and 2 together to realize it was the same people.
Then Dodger and Jesse went to Larian studios and they were talking about all they did and I was like...wait this is the game I kickstarted??
It had sounded good originally but I had not paid much attention, and when i started really looking into it finding all the details my mind was blown, thank god I kickstarted this because I dont think I have been as excited for a game in a very very long time now that I know the full extent of what it was and watched the interviews and seen some of the game... this is going to be amazing, part of me is so happy its coming, and the other part of me is pissed that things like this cant come out from major publishers because its too risky or whatever. It is sad that something so beautiful as this game is something people think is a risk
I can not wait for tuesday for some Alpha action, and thank you for including all of us. I will be giving a lot of feedback

Larian staff do read the forums especially for feedbacks from my experience during the dragon commander Beta.

I think it is not due to the risk, but on the management level (http://www.cracked.com/article_20727_5-reasons-video-game-industry-about-to-crash.html). Management from big gaming industries are more business oriented than being a gamer. I believe that swen is more of a gamer than a business man.

To be fair, it only took Larian $10M+ to make (one of swen's blog said Divinity: Dragon Knight Saga cost them 6M+ euros and they reached break even on its development cost, so 10m should suffice for original sin) as compared with AAA titles (bioshock infinite with $200m budget *100m development cost, 100m marketing*). Look at the remakes of first person shooter games, the game play is somewhat similar in each sequel, the story line is somewhat recycled but still sold well due to its brand recognition although the User ratings are very very low.

You should read Swen's blog. You will learn a lot from it from a game developer's perspective.

I'm not sure how much bioshock really cost (the studio has denied the 200Million rumour) and I think the market is very saturated. I do agree with you that 'big' business seem out of touch with how to produce 'good' games efficiently and spend way too much (its not so much the raw dollars but the efficiency of those dollars; there seems to be an attitude that if you throw enough money it will be good game). However good games do sell well (perhaps just not well enough for eample tomb raider (which I personally did not think was that good but they sold a lot of units with very high reviews) to cover extremely high cost.
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I really liked DKS - easily the game I enjoyed the most that year but I am less warm about DC (imho the rts portion is very poor and not very much fun). I will not prejudge D:OS (and a host of other games that will become available in 2014 - too many to play). I have high hopes for several games but it is premature for me to comment on any of them till I play them. For me personally 2013 was a bit of a let down (esp in rpg arena) but I did enjoy bioshock far more than I expected; still I think dishonored was probably my favorite (and perhaps that should not surprise me as the developer was arkane studio (developer of Arx Fatalis)) but I would not call it game of year because it was fairly short.
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So yea like you I have high hopes for D:OS but I cannot say it will be the best of 2014 and I cannot even say it will be fun to play (but I hope it is fun ) and I have concern that Square E and EA are going to drive good studios out of business (due to their own ineffective usage of dollars)
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Hum. That was a pretty good article you linked. Probably should have read it prior to posting

You're not the only one with shallow experience with DC. The review of Total Biscuit covers most of my impressions on it. The experience is all over the place. It is better if they focused on one portion at a time (create one RTS game, then create another to focus on RPG elements, then combine them all). Although, I liked the idea of experiencing being on a battlefield and at the same time commanding units, it is just not executed well/not engaging.

Anyhow, enough of DC rants, my expectations of D:OS is high. High due to:

1.) editor = like warcraft III frozen throne editor on how they are introducing it.

2.) Interactions to environment = you could interact with everything?

3.) Terrain advantages/disadvantages = I asked swen during twitch if terrain gives bonuses penalties, he said it does (IE height advantage gives bonus projectile damage etc). If someone made a strategy game from the editor, it is less redundant for them to script terrain bonuses/penalties.

4.) use of elements as a strategy

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I'm expecting a delay from the february 2014 though, but I'm happy that I could play the game even on alpha access. If you watched the stream on twitch, the schedules are not in it yet because they were having difficulties implementing it. There is a need to test it too.

Hope they could open up pre-orders soon so they could fund the game just in case there is a delay.