Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta When the game actually release?

Oh, right. My bad.

I actually (strongly) disagree. While I do agree that the impact on early access players is negative; I can see that there might be periods when the developers want to rework certain mechanics of the game so they might need several weeks of internal ITERATIVE changes to try different ideas in code and once they decide on an approprach it might still take them a couple of more weeks to rework the idea into the game. From their perspective it is only worth making the update available when they *think* they have a working solution reworked across the entire game - if they know that they haven't finished yet provide the update to the players then the players will spend a large amount of time pointing out the obvious (things they already know are not complete). What they need is for the non-obvious issues (and 'obuse') to be found. Depending on the scope/nature of the change this can take a lot of time. Furthermore what 'we' the players might see as the final result might actually have been a very long internal iterative process in which several different ideas were attempted/tested and then thrown away.

Yeah, things can take time and require several iterations.

However, is it really the case that literally every single thing that will be in the next patch took four weeks to do? I kinda doubt that. Even if it was only bug-fixes, I'm sure that SOMETHING had to have been finished and tested within two weeks.

Every additional few weeks between updates are additional weeks that users can't give feedback, and the clock is ticking.

Yes. Especially if they decided to nix certain aspects of game play as a LOT of players (including yourself) have been suggesting. That much of a change would definitely require some time. Time in which I'm gladly giving them.

Will the drastic changes be there? Who knows for sure. What I do know is that they're definitely cooking up something nice for us and it's going to be awesome.

Take a deep breath and relax. All will be right in the world shortly.

Probably not, but some may depend on things that will take the 4 weeks. For those that don't, if they diverted resources into releasing a couple smaller updates, that would likely further delay the large update.
Also, while some people have no problem replaying the alpha with only minor changes, significant additions are more likely to get more people playing. That should at least partly compensate for less feedback in the interim (possibly even more than compensate).

That's a clever point I didn't think of Raze, indeed. You can bring people back en masse with a promising big feature all at once rather than bits and pieces, given the proper hype email from kickstarter or whatever. At least, I buy that argument.

I don't mind waiting an extra 6 months for the final game to come out if that is what it takes for polished bug free(relatively speaking) game. Having said that I don't think it's unreasonable to get an updated alpha/beta every 2-3 weeks, unless they run into a major headache. If they do run into a problem that prevents a timely update just let us know. I would like to believe we understand that making a content rich game is not an easy process. I also welcome added content, because doing the same quests over & over gets old.

2-3 weeks has actually more or less been the rate of updates so far. I don't really mind if it takes longer this one time. Plus, I think people are forgetting that significant updates make savegames incompatible, and finishing the alpha takes more than ten hours even if you know what you're doing. If they want to get as many people as possible (and not just the freaks like us) providing feedback about every part of the game, they need to leave some time between major updates.

That said, I'd appreciate the occasional game development update in between updates. Communication about the patches themselves has been good other than a temporary lapse in February, but I'd also like to get a glimpse at what Larian is working on and what their thoughts are on the development process. It would help to keep people interested and to keep the buzz going.

I'd be happy if I got emails from Larian at all! But alas, it seems paypal supporters do not get emails from Larian.. which to be honest, sucks. To know when they do a new update I have to literally read it somewhere else first. And not many news site mention every single kickstarter update or blog-post by Larian.....

This is a very crass difference compared to say, Pillars of Eternity or Star Citizen, which do proper email updates to their backers.

Something that I just wanted to mention Larian has very lacking communication when it comes to communication that just "gets" to you. Nothing Larian releases gets to me without me actively looking for it. Something I find very annoying, as D:OS is not the only KS project I follow....

hmm, regarding adding content in later patches I have the only fear that it will make the work of the devs much more hard, because of the savegames. Ok, now it is not too bad to start the game again, but after release it is not the best to find corrupted files after a big patch.

Once features stop changing significantly, it will be much less likely that any updates will break saved game compatibility. Also, for any post release patches, if the save format is changed Larian would be able check the save version when loading and make adjustments if required; during the alpha it is not practical to maintain filters for previous save formats, which would need to deal with things like Abilities being changed or removed, equipment requirements being changed, etc.

Hate to burst your bubble, but I backed both those games from their prospective websites and have yet to receive updates on either. Only reason I know Pillars gets updated is I'm subscribed to Obsidian's YouTube channel. Other than that, no emails at all.

Then there is a problem; as I get updates from pillars about once the month. The last one was a week ago or so.

Who knows? Not really worried about it. It'll make getting the final products in the mail (I donated enough for physical copies) that much more of a surprise. I was just pointing out the flaw in his statement.

From reading your post I'd assume Larian just doesn't realize paypal supporters aren't in the mailing list. I've backed both D:OS and Project (Pillars of) Eternity and the only updates I've gotten from both were from KickStarter. If it matters to you, point it out to them, simple as that.

Indeed. If something is not working, they have to know about that.
Actually I supported Project Eternity on Paypal and I get the updates properly, so I think this issue can be corrected quickly.

Where would I point that out to them (I mean Larian ,p) I don't read here often enough to know who to talk to and who is in charge of what sadly.

Anyway, yes.. it seems paypal supporters are not in ANY mailing lists. Even though Larian knows my email, as I have registered my pledge on Larian vault, so it ought to be a very simple fix. Problem is how to get this noticed?

For PoE I backed via Paypal and got the updates since day 1, all 74 of them so yes, if you have problems with *that* go to forums.obsidian.net and tell them your problem, they will fix it. ^^

You can email kickstarter@larian.com, or support@larian.com.

Thank you Raze, sent one relating to this to support@larian.com

Let's hope I get email updates too ^^