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.
Wow. This is missing the point so hard, I am somewhat willing to believe it is an intentional mis-representation of the problem... Of course, if you make attacks unlikely to miss, then buffs that are meant to help you land those hits will be less useful.
I will give them, that it is hard to make buffs like bless feel impactful, if you hide underlying mechanic (that's why I like that Solasta shows dice rolls and modifiers for each attack). But even so, that's a consequnce of them messing up the balance, not original design.
Larian is designing for a surface engagement - first glance impressions. They make a goblinclicker, not an RPG with tactical combat.
