Hi all,
I can understand the frustrations, and it wasn't the easiest decision to make, but then again, we didn't choose the easiest path for this either - Let me give you some more background and then offer a potential solution for those of you who want to play the DKS content and already own ED:
The obvious thing to do would've been to ship FOV, and then just bundle that with ED together with those patches that never got released. When we initially informed publishing partners that we actually wanted to do more than that, make some kind of Divinity 2.5 and actually invest quite a lot into it, they had a very hard time understanding why we'd even contemplate doing something like that. Nobody we talked to at the time wanted to fund it, and in general it was considered a strange thing to want to do. Our ratio however was pretty simple -
got a wide range of ratings, going from very good to not enough - in most cases the not enough ones isolated specific issues which given the means we could fix, whereas the good ones didn't mind those issues and focussed on the good parts.
That left us with the feeling that the job was incomplete and often heard statement was "if only". So, we figured rather than saying "if only" we should just do it, and we spent the year between the original release of
in Germany and now on upgrading/fixing/cutting/polishing as much as possible.
At some point we'd gone as far as we could without starting to change the content, and there were some parts in there which we really wanted to tackle - especially the entire hack & slash & item fever part as well as those flying fortresses which didn't materialize as originally envisioned. The biggest stumbling block was save-game compatibility where no realy good decision could be taken. Either we ditched it, either we didn't do the changes. We opted for doing the changes, and aim DKS at players who didn't buy ED, which would be in any case the same target audience as a bundle pack of ED and FOV.
Leaves us of course with all of you who already bought ED. FOV includes all engine optimizations and also upgrades the artwork and of course includes every fix that we've made ever since the last patch was released. It also modifies the gameplay as much as can be done by changing the engine and installing additional content, but what it can't do is replace content on which the existing savegames are dependent, which is something unique to DKS, because one of the features of FOV is that you can continue playing with your existing character from ED.
FOV really is for those who want to continue the story without having to restart from scratch. If we'd remove the feature that you can continue to play, then we could include the DKS content within FOV, but when we had to decide what to do, it was felt that that that would've been a big problem for a lot of people.
So, what we could do is the following - we can provide a FOVTODKS patch which will transform ED+FOV into DKS, though if you apply it, you will not be able to load any of your old savegames. If that's what you'd like to have, knowing that your ED savegames will not work anymore, we can try to figure something out to make that a reality. It's also going to be a pretty big patch because really a lot of assets change.
