The level of freedom we're giving mixed with the amount of narrative we are doing mixed with multiplayer is indeed a recipe for bugs, but I think that we're doing pretty good on that front. There are literally close to a hundred bugs dying every day.
A bug free game doesn't exist as the code is written by humans and humans make mistakes. That's why the usual approach is to prioritise bugs and then get cracking until bugs of a certain priority are solved. The frequency of occurrence and the impact on the player are two major criteria to decide on the priority of a bug.
In Divinity:Original Sin's case, we are now at the stage where we are solving a truckload of minor bugs, far more than we've ever done. That alone already makes it much more polished than anything we've ever done. In this past we shipped with several major bugs still in there and that won't be the case here.
The source of bugs we are still dealing with are typically either scripting errors or systemic errors. 80% of all bugs are systemic and a surprising low amount of them are scripting or dialog flag specific, even if they are visible. Solve them once and you've solved them anywhere.
I think it's also important to say that there's a difference between bugs and opinions.
We don't necessarily agree with opinions that are being posted - and that's a good thing. Otherwise you might find yourselves with a hack & slash game already. Opinions are opinions and we're sticking to one particular course which can be influenced to a certain extent by the feedback we get here, but not changed radically.
That's important because otherwise the game would never be finished. Also a lot of opinions are also conflicting and on that topic I think it's worth mentioning that it's not because somebody repeats his opinion more than another, that that gives his opinion more weight. On the contrary, strong arguments usually resonate through the first time an opinion is posted.
Regarding the balancing, everything we have in our system is balanced relatively to each other. That means that whenever a rule changes, everything changes with it. That's why we can afford to make systemic changes like the one we just did. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing it. We learnt a lot from the latest experiment and an upgraded version is already implemented.
On the topic of releasing the mid & endgame content, there are arguments pro & arguments against. We decided against it and there certainly are risks with that. We are doing closed betas on the other parts and that is currently giving us sufficient feedback. The advantage for everybody else is that you won't have to deal with the bugs that we're solving now. We are deeply appreciative of all the feedback you've given us here, but we'd like you to have some fun too without having to focus on work
Anyway,it's a very interesting debate and one I'd love to talk about more here but I need to get back to work. Maybe we'll still surprise you all
