Larian Studios Forums Beyond Divinity (English) General Well, that was that.

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There's no doubt that you're exactly right about the tremendous difficulty facing smaller developers trying to compete in a market where the big players have resources of money and experience that the small devs simply cannot match. Larian did an amazing job to break into the market with a game as good as Divine Divinity.

But the customer - whose money eventually pays the wages (or doesn't....) - pays a similar price for a game from the big guys like Bioware or Blizzard. So they feel entitled to compare them. I don't know how much people paid in other countries but we paid about 10% less for BD here than we did for most full price titles. And as far as the content and production went it certainly didn't deliver 90% of our expectations of a front line game.

I've spent a fair bit of my life running small businesses (including a partnership in a graphic design and photography business, and several small craft/manufacturing type enterprises where the quality of the creativity was the key ingredient). There is simply no way you can compete head on with the big players. You have to compete in a 'niche' way by providing something different. Words like 'individuality' 'charm' 'style' and 'character' come to mind.

Eventually, if things go well, you can expand and try and get a toehold further up the ladder. But the middle ground is incredibly tough territory. You lose a lot of the advantages of being small, flexible, and in more direct control of the detail, but you haven't yet got the advantages of the big horsepower.

Beyond Divinity came across as a pretty wobbly step, and one that tried too many different things too quickly, with very patchy results.

I really hope that they are taking some of the fans' disappointment to heart, and not just brushing off the comments.

I think that Bioware would have been a little taken aback by some very strong criticism of the first NWN release. Many fans thought that the campaign was rubbish, and a lot of BG fans didn't like the Aurora engine either. Comments like "generic fantasy drivel" appeared in some independent reviews, and on the forums the visuals were compared with chipboard veneer furniture and "Barbie Goes Fantasy", etc. But Bioware could have easily just dismissed it as whining, pointed to a lot of good reviews and huge sales, and ignored it.

Instead they tried very hard to gauge the mood of their fans and provide a positive response where possible. For instance, after initially saying that the camera angles were 'unchangeable' they relented and allowed the angles fans were asking for (and which one fan had quickly proved possible with a home made hack). The expansion packs improved many aspects that buyers had been disappointed with. They also worked on additional tile-sets, and put a lot of effort into promoting and supporting fan made content and general 'community' involvement.

The results speak for themselves. The hundreds of fan made add ons have now grown to thousands and the community that they've put time and PR effort into building has apparently now grown to over 2 million signed on members.

But more importantly, in my opinion, when they made KoToR they stayed true to the values and styles that made their early games so popular, and didn't drift off down some new lighter shooter type path. KoToR is widely praised, on these forums and elsewhere, as being a great game that delivers the style and story strength that many RPG fans look for.

I hope that Larian can also accurately gauge what we liked so much about DD1 and move forward without losing the charm and style that won us over in the first place. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />