Here is the quote.
Originally Posted by Wireframe, Dec 2020
Wireframe : You’ve opted for Early Access, which has served you well in the past – what’s EA’s appeal?
David Walgrave (Larian Studios) : [...] we also get a lot of anonymous data – it tells us where people are dying, or where they’re levelling up, or what weapon they picked up and equipped, and so on, so we gain a lot of insight into what people are experiencing, and we learn from that and change the game, the rules, the balancing. It allows us to make the game a lot better by the time it releases because you have thousands of people playing it, and that gives you a lot statistics to work with.
This also goes back to when we first worked on Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity – we had a very active forum on Larian.com, and we had a small, vocal fan base. They were constantly giving us feedback and ideas, and when I think back on those days, what we’re now doing in Early Access is similar, only a thousand times bigger. We’re getting a lot of feedback and a lot of ideas now. One thing that we learned from the statistics is that people are completely uninterested in a lot of buffing and debuffing spells – we have stats where you can see how many people are using what spell and how often they’re using it, and that made us realise every magic spell that we put in an RPG needs to have this ‘oomph’ factor. You have to want to click it, or you’ll never click it. You cannot sell a bless spell to people. It’s boring. They don’t care – they want to see fireworks, they want to see damage. If you talk to someone about balancing in the Original Sin games, they’ll say the buffing and debuffing is overpowered, but we make it overpowered on purpose because otherwise people are not going to click it. We make them want to click it. We keep on changing the description and the balance until we see in the statistics that usage of that particular spell is going up. So yeah, we really learn a lot of our own game by putting it in Early Access.
Thanks to Drath for his analysis.
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=756000#Post756000very interesting, thanks for reposting that quote.
I actually think there is possible value to be had in a statistical based balancing system, IF you have a group of people that understand the reason behind why people are making certain decisions. the beat to dead example is "you guys are horny!". Okay, so the statistics showed that a lot of the players chose to pursue sexual relationships with the characters. A proper statistical analysis would have looked into whether or not the players are choosing these decisions because they're horny, because it's an EA game, because they want any positive interaction with our companions at all, or simply because it was an option, so they were curious to see what the content was. To say "see? That's why we're focusing so much on sex!" is way overkill imo.
With bless, I can very much see how non DND players wouldn't be interested in it when they see something like "You bless up to three creatures of your choice within range. Whenever a target makes an Attack roll or a saving throw before the spell ends, the target can roll a d4 and add the number rolled to the Attack roll or saving throw." it doesn't exactly sound sexy that's for sure. I'm sure part of the reason is it's hard to tell how much of a difference it's making because you don't physically see a dice roll and see just how many times bless would make the difference between a hit or a miss. Also, I do believe that with the ambush nature of most combat in Larian's games, it's much harder to justify using buff and debuff spells when the enemy is spending all their time hitting you with everything they have damage wise.
I'm not sure what a middle ground would be. With Larian's current design, it's become sort of a self-fulling prophecy, they design things to be exciting, so the things that don't look as exciting aren't used as much, and they're "justified" in their decision to make things more exciting.
