These games are so complex now, that finding all of those nasty bugs is almost impossible until the fan-base gets ahold of the game. Seems like every company is going through a pulling-their-hair-out phase after release. Maybe a new tactic is possible.
My suggestion is that, just before the game goes gold, an offer to pre-purchase the game is made. People who buy the game under this pre-release offer will know that they are getting the game early as a kind of Beta test. The people selected in this phase will be charged for the game of course, and will have a week or so to extensively play the game and report all problems to a Tester-Only page on the forum. This group of people should have a forum page where they can discuss the issues with each other and share information to get to the end of the game. I think many of the die-hard Divinity fans would welcome the idea to participate in this Beta test. All that this group would have to do after the game is released is download a final patch.
The game might be delayed a couple of weeks for general release, but the vast majority of problems should be gone by the time the release is made. I understand that there would be a fear about piracy, but either having the game downloadable only to the purchasers IP address, or encoding a CD with their IP address might eliminate that fear.
This is a common and necessary phase in On-line games, and seems like it is time to expand it to all PC games.
