In any production, there are always things that can go wrong and once you're close to release, the only tools left to get everything ready are removing or postponing. Normally you don't see this but because our development has been fairly open, this is now more visible.
Regardless of what makes it or not, we've never released a game that contained so much of the planned features as Divinity:Original Sin, including plenty of features that weren't planned as a result of Steam Early Access. Just to give you an example of how much stuff gets cut sometimes - check out the Div II documentary, hatching the dragon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Nq9_X68os . Contrast this with D:OS where I think more than 95% of what was planned is in.
It's of course a human trait to focus on loss instead of gain, so it's natural that everybody will quickly forget all the extras we added and focus on whatever may be missing. But this is already our biggest and most polished game ever, so it's better to consider anything that comes after release a bonus, not as something that has to be there to be able to play, because it's not. We're releasing a full game, not a part of a game, even if there may be additional things we might have wanted to add. If there are for instance only 3 Ai personalities instead of 5, and you never knew there were going to be 5, for all practical purposes, there always were 3 AI personalities.
We're hoping Divinity:Original Sin is going to be a big success and if it is, we'll add *a lot* of extras. My hope is that we can make this a live game that is continuously improved and expanded upon, with plenty of mods appearing, and we're setting ourselves up for that. Of course we'll only know if this is feasible after it releases, because the sales will determine how much resources we can put into this. But I wanted to mention it here so you know that we're not planning on having a *definite* version. If you do start playing, there will always be a chance that we'll add something while you're playing, but what you are playing will be a complete experience, and whatever we may or may not add will not make that much of a difference for that experience.
All of that said, you can rest assured that what will be there on day 1 will be already more than enough to keep you very busy as there's a very big adventure to be had. There's certainly a lot more there than I ever expected when we started developing D:OS.
Back to my cave.