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#460646 01/02/13 04:22 PM
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So i just found out from this german article that Larian is planning Kickstarter for D:OS.

Can somebody from dev team confirm this? And why kickstarter? Does that mean that you got don't have enough money to finish this game?


pall #460647 01/02/13 05:26 PM
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Has Kickstarter changed their policy to let non-American businesses use it?

If it's true, I wouldn't say that it's bad news, they already have some parts of a product to show off, and extra money would just improve the quality of the final thing.

P.S. Larian, I'm still waiting for ANY NEWS AT ALL about Dragon Commander. Weren't you going to update the DC website "soon" two months ago?

pall #460648 01/02/13 05:44 PM
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Thank you Florian for spreading the word like this – suddenly my mailbox is overflowing with questions wink

Well, the truth of it is that we are thinking seriously about it but we're not 100% sure yet if we'll actually go ahead and do it. We are very tempted though.

IF we go to Kickstarter, the reason wouldn’t be to fund our current development (that’s already funded) but rather to increase the team we put on this so that we can add more skills, levels, monsters, quests, choices, consequences and obviously ideas such as for instance a “large two-handed sword inhabited by a malevolent spirit that could summon forth demonic powers upon request” (Kenneth Paul Kully) or “X% chance for a free turn after a kill.” (Stabbey) – or a big fiery seven-headed dragon that swallows zombies for lunch and regurgitates them (Swen) or a zeppelin which you can assemble and use to travel around the world , Ultima VII style (Swen) or all the weapon types David put on an enormously long list (David) or… well you get the idea I guess.

i.e. if we do it, we’d do it to make the game bigger and denser, everything you'd expect from a budget increase.

I personally think that if ever a Larian game deserved such a budget increase, then this would be the one, but I'm obviously biased wink

So imagine that a Kickstarter campaign were the thing necessary to put the above into the game, would you back it ? (Obviously that’s a tough question because you don’t know what’s in there already, but the Buffed.de article should give you an idea of what’s there– I think - my German isn’t as good as I sometimes think it is and Google definitely had a hard time with this one). And what would be your advise in how we approach it ?


Stabbey #460649 01/02/13 05:52 PM
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@Stabbey: I swear, I literally swear that this is the month for Dragon Commander, really ! New website, new trailer, new everything. We're even going to have it tested in multiplayer at Fragomatic in exactly two weeks. It's taken a lot of time, but we want it to be good, so bear with us. February 15th is the date we are working with here to kickstart the entire campaign for Dragon Commander.

As to your other question, we recently started operating an office in the US to handle our distribution there so I think that would allow us to apply for Kickstarter.

Lar_q #460650 01/02/13 06:07 PM
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Mhm.

Protip, get TotalBiscuit to notice the kickstarter when it goes up :P He practically saved the funding for Sui Generis by simply liking one of their videos. (well for the last 10.000 pounds he certainly had)

I'll probably back it. Especially if a certain board game is included in the special tier rewards wink wink.


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Lar_q #460651 01/02/13 07:20 PM
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Originally Posted by Lar_q
@Stabbey: I swear, I literally swear that this is the month for Dragon Commander, really ! New website, new trailer, new everything.


Great news! Looking forward to it!

Lotrotk #460652 01/02/13 09:08 PM
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That's good to hear, I'm looking forward to seeing the new Dragon Commander stuff in action.

Lar_q #460653 01/02/13 10:58 PM
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Originally Posted by Lar_q
@Stabbey: I swear, I literally swear that this is the month for Dragon Commander, really ! New website, new trailer, new everything.

That, on the very first day of the month. Thankfully it's February.

melianos #460656 02/02/13 04:35 AM
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Good luck

What I hope for D OS is a large community continuously pumping out user created content years down the road. Of course, the game will have to perform "decently" in the market to reach that goal. More players, more potential modders, probably a longer lifespan.

My actual plan is to wait about four to five months after D: OS release to see how much of the gamers it manages to capture.

p.s. okay I think my reply seems a bit skewed, anyway for clarification
Originally Posted by Lar_q
So imagine that a Kickstarter campaign were the thing necessary to put the above into the game, would you back it ?

Actually, I'm not worried about items or spells making it into the game. If you have a powerful editor (Big IF), modders will find ways to model and create anything they fancy. Getting those dedicated modders is another issue though which puts me back to square one in implementing all of those to attract a large audience.

%*@#@ this I'm thinking in circles.

Last edited by J747L; 02/02/13 06:04 AM.
J747L #460657 02/02/13 12:26 PM
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but the Buffed.de article should give you an idea of what’s there


Not really, it is on german. I have no idea what they are talking about.

As for the project funding I honestly don't know. More that that I still know nothing about actual game besides some pr/interview articles and videos. But again, the projects with less info were successfully funded on KS.

Also, the KS addition (be it successful or not) will delay release date yet again.

Kein #460659 02/02/13 12:49 PM
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"yet again"? Did I mess a few release date announcements?

Raze #460660 02/02/13 03:55 PM
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I'm mixed on the idea; but to be honest I intend to buy the game near release given the previous games Larian has released and the support. I hate the drm crap but to be honest Larian has been very good about removing it later on and even supporting later hardware.

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Originally Posted by Rod Lightning

I'll probably back it. Especially if a certain board game is included in the special tier rewards wink wink.


yeah yeah yeah !!!
but I thought this found rising was for D:OS. Of course I will support Larian, the question is "how much?" it will depend on the rewards, just get us dreaming laugh


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Chaotica #460684 05/02/13 07:48 AM
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I posted the following text on my blog yesterday to clarify things a bit because people were starting to get the wrong impression.

A couple of days ago, an extensive article appeared on buffed.de (a German RPG magazine & website) about Divinity: Original Sin. It was a pretty cool article for us because we showed the game for hours to the journalist and despite all the bugs that were apparent, he considered the presentation to be sufficiently convincing to write “shut up and take my money” in his conclusion.

It’s always cool to get quotes that we can rip totally out of context

At the same time, Jean-Marie Prival, a French independent journalist who visited Larian for jeuxvideo.com, wrote on his newly launched blog about his press trip to our offices and the words he used in his entry are actually quite flattering for Larian, something we’re obviously grateful for too.

But If both these things made me smile as I drove home, the thing that really made my weekend was getting the message that we were voted runner up for most anticipated RPG of 2013 at RPGWatch, receiving 22% of the votes. Major whistling because this is a site I visit daily to keep up to date on the antics of our fellow RPG developers. Being in their lists makes me feel pretty good, and tbh, even a bit smug because I had been dealing with quite some naysayers in the past about this game.

But because I learnt the hard way that “Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall” I figured over the weekend that it was important to find a counterbalance and therefore decided to visit another site this morning…(insert doomy music)

THE RPGCODEX !!!

Specifically, the RpgCodex forums, your daily antidote to thinking you’re getting anywhere in the world of CRPGs, unless your name happens to be Chris Avellone.

And lo and behold, they didn’t disappoint

For those not familiar with the RPGCodex, it’s where you go if you’re looking for a hefty dose of RPG critical analysis wrapped in imaginative language (often involving gastrointestinal issues). Now despite the occasionally interesting wording and tendency to rant about what makes a true RPG, I think that more than often the posters there represent the unvented opinion of a lot of players, and if you’re into making RPG’s, you can learn a lot by reading between the lines. In the same breath I have to add that you’ll also need a very thick hide, preferably made of dinosaur scales, especially if you already dared release a RPG that they played. But together with the RPGWatch forums, you can get a lot of “market research” done by just spending some time there.

So the Buffed.de article referred to how Larian is financing its game projects, citing that the funding comes from a mix of our own money, investor money and Kickstarter money. Obviously somebody jumped on the Kickstarter part, and suddenly it started popping up on forums everywhere, including the RPGCodex where the phrase “partially funded through Kickstarter” was quickly translated into “Larian ran out of money”.

Now admittedly, the original article was in German, but clearly the guy who wrote that has another version of Google translate than me. Still, I have to say that the original quote in the article is actually not telling the entire story either, and it could do with a bit of nuance, so here goes.

Basically, Divinity:Original Sin is already funded. Larian, together with two minority investors, one for each game (Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Dragon Commander), put sufficient amounts of cash in both games to guarantee that they get done. We’re even reasonably assured that the games won’t be a financial disaster because we managed to get sufficient guarantees from our retail distributors to earn back large parts of our money and, we only need to sell a fraction of our previous sales to be in the black.

The reason we received these guarantees is that the concepts are solid, our previous games sold well enough and to talk about Divinity: Original Sin specifically, if you see Divinity:Original Sin in action and love RPGs, any doubts you may have will disappear on the spot. This game is just cool. Because words are but words and some posters on the Codex are rightfully wary of any rhetoric, I’ll happily extend an invitation to one of them to come to our offices so we can show the game. I’m serious btw guys , but you’ll have to agree on who you send as an emissary, the emissary obviously being the person who knows a real CRPG from a a mutated adventure (evil grin )

So, the “Larian is out of money” story won’t fly on this one, though as I said, it’s true that we’re walking a tight line and that we’re burning a lot to ensure that what we release as good as we can get it. However,for over a decade we’ve been working with tight cash flows and publishers (not all, I’ve been getting complaints ) that don’t pay us or pay late, so it’s not like we’re not used to this, and I actually think that we’ve proven in the past that we can do a lot with a constrained budget. I’m certainly not afraid to compare the budget of our productions to that of other RPGs of the same scope and age, anticipating to come out lower than most.

And yes, we are so passionate about what we do that if we can fund a budget increase via Kickstarter, we’ll happily do so. If we indeed go to Kickstarter, it’ll be because the game deserves to get the maximum funding we can find, even if financially that’s not necessarily in our best interest (you’re essentially pre-selling a lot of games at a significant discount if you sell on Kickstarter, partially compensated because Amazon and Kickstarter take a lower cut than other digital distribution platforms).

Which may bring the question why we’re actually interested in increasing the budget at all ?

In short, it’s because it’ll allow us to put more things in, prevent us from having to take shortcuts because of some development mistakes we made, and in general give us a better chance of making that great RPG we know we can make if we can marshal the resources. It’ll also allow us to accommodate for some of the suggestions we received during development, not only from people who saw the game live but also from our fans. And it’ll allow us to put more stuff in the editor, which we expect great things of. How long has it been since somebody released a decent commercial level single– and multi-player RPG editor anyway?

So in a nutshell, that’s why we’re contemplating going to Kickstarter. All those things would increase the fun for our players and it won’t necessarily mean that the game will come out later because the things we’d like to do are all things that could be done next to what we’re doing already. We’ve been working on this game long enough now to want to see it released , but we are sufficiently in love to want to do all the extras we can while development is ongoing.

Anyway, now that the cat is out of the bag – how about it. Do you think it makes sense for us to go to Kickstarter, having read all of the above? Or should we just focus on finishing the game with the budget we have and reserve all the things we think should be added for some future game? I personally think that if ever a Larian game deserved a budget increase, then this is the one. I’d very much like to to see multiplayer and cooperative dialogs and turn based combat as a new standard in party-based RPGs and this game becoming successful will certainly help that cause smile


Lar_q #460685 05/02/13 08:29 AM
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I personally think that if ever a Larian game deserved a budget increase, then this is the one.

That's good enough for me to throw money at my monitor (not coins, unlike some people (video for the GOG Divinity PWYW promo) ). I have not really followed any Kickstarter campaigns in any detail, though...

Raze #460686 05/02/13 09:50 AM
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As long as it doesn't delay it for too long, I'm all for it.

Dazbog #460688 05/02/13 12:00 PM
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Judging by the already released video material, you guys shouldn't have any problems with funding it via kickstarter. Original Sin already looks 50 times better than preety much every funded kickstarter project. No sweat.

Last edited by Estrogen; 05/02/13 12:02 PM.
Estrogen #460690 05/02/13 01:11 PM
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You know one advantage if you do a kickstart is you could make a sufficiently high stretch goal be an expansion. I.e, you could use a very modest target to 'complete' the game and effecitvely use the kickstart to fund the expansion/addon (or next game in the series). Mind you I hate the concept of DLC but I like the concept of true 40-60 hour expansion. I haven't played this game yet (nor have i yet played beyond divinity) but I very much did enjoy divine divinity and divnity 2. My biggest fear of this game is that the co-op is the right way to play with maximum enjoyment but as a single player I will not be able to experience the true co-op experience.

Estrogen #460691 05/02/13 01:21 PM
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I don't see, and I'd like to, why there's such a need for kickstarter? I assumed that the dos designer would be the key to the extra content you want your fans to provide with. Is there a reason why these enhancements you'd like to deploy should be done before the game's release? Backward compatibility problems perhaps? But then, if you're not willing to sacrifice the budget for "the rpg that will dwarf them all" that would demand either a higher selling price or non-free-to-play dlcs, which you want to avoid, so kickstarter'd make sense then yes. I guess no one'd be interested in kickstarter after the game's release right? If on the other hand those dlcs would be free-to-play that would be good publishing for a few months to come, so there's benefit in that as well.

I'm not telling do or don't, but you might be going to have to reveal lots more stuff on dos if you're truly gonna have a ks. And would someone be willing to answer whether it's feasible or not to have these extentions as dlc? Thanks

meme #460692 05/02/13 01:26 PM
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Originally Posted by meme
nor have i yet played beyond divinity


That reminds me, I was affraid to hurt your feelings at first, but well, here it comes: I tried the Anthology version of Beyond Divinity and it's STILL too buggy to do so. Not that I feel guilty about it (in fact that should be the porting team) as it's well known to be the least interesting of those released yet.

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