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Divinity: Original Sin II -- Announcement, Upcoming Kickstarter

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Lord Panda said:
Not quite sure the opposition against studios revisiting Kickstarter, especially if said studios have made good on their promises previously.
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You can ask that question from the opposite perspective:

If the fans have already made good on their promise of supporting high quality games in this genre when they hit the market, then why does Larian need to take their money now?

The concern I have over using Kickstarter when it's not actually necessary is that KS reduces the correlation between game quality and sales revenue, and I think that can create a moral hazard for developers. Even if you happen to think that Larian in particular is immune to such a moral hazard, they are norming this type of behavior for others.
 
OS had a poor story and to be honest, the whole Divinity "universe" is very derivative and not interesting at all. I loved the game mechanics, but the rest left much to be desired. A new IP would have been much welcome.
 
Original Sin literally shot straight into my top 10 of all time, and I've been playing games since the 80s. I will push the pledge button so hard on this.
 
IAmRandom31 said:
I strongly disagree with them using KS for this. Public funding was needed for the first one as they had no previous projects to use profits from to make their game. Now? They had a successful project. The KS worked. They got public funds, made a game, made money from that game.

Instead of using their profits from the first project to fund their 2nd, like a normal company, they are looking for handouts again. So yeah, don't agree with the KS whatsoever.

Will still buy the game in the end, but don't like using KS for a sequel of a successful game.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/09/12/divinity-original-sin-sells-over-500k-units
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Tbh they sat on the brink for a decade plus trying to make D:OS, not shocked they don't want to deal with risk. It's not like it will adversely affect their sales.

That being said, I doubt I'll buy this sequel. I didn't particularly enjoy the first. Feel like people played the game for a few hours then way overhyped it because combat felt good. Playing til the end was a slog and not that enjoyable. People defend its bad mechanics as old school when I would rather just go play an actual old school game.
 
I will probably back this like I did with the first one .
With OS they already proved they can make a good crpg.

But I was not expecting another Kick Starter , I thought the money with OS would be enough for a sequel since they already have the engine ? Or at least I hope they won't ask for 2 millions and will instead ask for something reasonable like Original Sin.
 
Lord Panda said:
I wasn't aware that Larian dropped the ball with the Linux version. Do you know if they're still working on it?
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They aren't going to bring the vanilla version to Linux, so they have no intention of making good on that part of the promise. They have announced the Enhanced Edition for Linux, and they claim it'll be a same-day release. I'll believe it when I can actually play the game on my PC. And I am actually looking forward to playing it, I'm just trying not to get my hopes up.
I know Linux users are vastly outnumbered, so no one really cares about this (except the people who use Linux). But that it's a minority doesn't make it OK to rip them off.
I'm just glad I didn't back this, and I won't be backing the second one.
 
Odd that they are having another kickstarter, would have thought they made a good chunk of change and have more interest from publisher to help publish now?
 
Welp, the word is out there now. We were anticipating a bit of Kickstarter controverse so I'm curious how the campaign will pan out. It's going to be really exciting though!
 
Banjo-Kazooie said:
Odd that they are having another kickstarter, would have thought they made a good chunk of change and have more interest from publisher to help publish now?
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I'm assuming it's similar to the Shadowrun HK one, KS money for additional features rather than the base game. I guess we will see.
 
I'm very interested, but still waiting (and excited) to play the original on PS4. Not going to back a kickstarter until I get some time into that.
 
Seems like they're doing another Kickstarter because they enjoy and appreciate the community involvement in development. I do too and really enjoyed the first one so I'm definitely in. Obviously I understand why others will just wait for it to release and buy it then as well.

The user voting for KS tiers should be interesting for sure.
 
It seems Swen didn't want to use Kickstarter again at first.
As I mentioned in this interview, the current thinking is that we shouldn’t go back to Kickstarter. That’s not because we’re ungrateful of the support we received through our Kickstarter community or because all those rewards caused a bit of extra work, but because I think the crowdfunding pool is limited and it should be fished in by those who really need it. Since we now can, I think we should first invest ourselves and then see if we need extra funds to fuel our ambitions. Only then it makes sense to look at crowd funding.
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Not so long ago, in fact, just a few weeks ago when I posted my last blog entry, I said thatKickstarter might not be the right route for our future projects. I argued that it’s a limited pool and that it would be wrong for us to fish in it if our games are earning sufficient money for us to invest in our future projects.

I immediately received a few strong reactions, both publicly but also privately about how I got it all wrong, and that in fact I should steer Larian back to Kickstarter. The reasoning is that successful crowdfunding projects send more people to the crowdfunding scene and that benefits the smaller projects. This is referred to as the “halo effect” and one particular bright person compared it to “a restaurant sitting alone or on a block with many others. They all do better with more traffic”.
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zer0das said:
Feel like people played the game for a few hours then way overhyped it because combat felt good.
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I played the game for 78 hours and loved it. My second-most-favourite game in 2014, and that's in a year which was more packed for my particular tastes in games than any other in the past decade.

Labadal said:
It seems Swen didn't want to use Kickstarter again at first.
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Yes, I remember reading both of these posts in his blog. That's why I expected a KS -- he was convinced to go back to it by external feedback.
 
Yes. Awesome.
I completely ignored the first game on KS because I didn't really care for the other Divinity games - what a mistake. What a fantastic game OS was. I will back the shit out of this.
Probably the best combat system in any turn-based RPG I've ever play (and I play a lot of them)
 
Rezae said:
Excited, but Kickstarter shouldn't become the "norm" for pre-ordering..
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Ya. In this case we are talking about a game that has sold close to 1 million copies (around 850k on Steam alone). Most of those copies sold for over $25 (a lot of copies sold for $40), so we are talking $15M+ in revenue after Valve's cut for a game that had a budget around $5-6M if I remember correctly.

In this case, it's not so much a matter of people getting ripped off. The game will surely be great, and there is no danger of it not releasing. To me, what this does do is take a few million Kickstarter dollars away from other projects that might be depending on the funds to get their project off the ground.
 
Any idea on how much they will be asking?

I understand why they want to do another KS, but 'player involvement' isn't really a good reason. You can put-up pre-orders on your site that come with beta\EA access. You don't need to hinge your project on the KS being successful if you want fan feedback.
 
Great news. I'm just not fond of them doing a kickstarter but if there's a good reason behind, I'm ok with it.

Hendrick's said:
OS had a poor story and to be honest, the whole Divinity "universe" is very derivative and not interesting at all. I loved the game mechanics, but the rest left much to be desired. A new IP would have been much welcome.
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Agree on the sentiment, but I rather have them correct the flaws than start a new IP.
 
Backed so hard! Original Sin is one of my favorite PC RPG experiences ever so naturally I will be there for them this time as well.

*anxiously awaits the Original Sin console release and PC update*
 
Still have to dig into the original. It's been sitting in my backlog for at least a year now. I played the first hour of it back when I bought it just to check it out and it felt pretty generic but it did have some cool things about it. I expect it gets much better. It better with all the GAF praise. :P
 
I hope they keep the engine and just create hundreds of hours of content and several interactive cities like the first one in the first game.
 
Saty said:
Any idea on how much they will be asking?

I understand why they want to do another KS, but 'player involvement' isn't really a good reason. You can put-up pre-orders on your site that come with betaEA access. You don't need to hinge your project on the KS being successful if you want fan feedback.
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Well the last one was for 400k.
 
This is probably like a Hong Kong situation where the main game is pretty much gonna happen regardless. I get a good laugh out of all the "concern" whatever a company goes back to kickstarter, especially moral concerns.
 
zer0das said:
Feel like people played the game for a few hours then way overhyped it because combat felt good. Playing til the end was a slog and not that enjoyable. People defend its bad mechanics as old school when I would rather just go play an actual old school game.
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My first playthrough took 90 hours, loved every second of it and plan on doing another when I get my hands on the Enhanced Edition. Game was charming, environments beautiful, and gameplay top notch. It was my GOTY.
My exact reaction to seeing this announcement was to send the link to my co-op buddy and the words "yes yes yes yes!".
 
Labadal said:
Higher tiers got more than 1 copy. I backed for $40 and got two copies. One can't every Steam copy as full priced.
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The Kickstarter only had 20k backers, and less than half of them got more than 1 copy. negligible at this point.

Russian, Brazilian, etc copies were of course cheaper than $25, but several hundred thousand copies were sold at full price before the game went on sale. I'd be surprised if the average sale price was much less than $25, even counting cheaper kickstarter and developing region copies.
 
Labadal said:
Higher tiers got more than 1 copy. I backed for $40 and got two copies. One can't every Steam copy as full priced.
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It's also been a top seller at GoG on a number of occasions. Rpg fans are pretty strong there. I'm confident they've made 900k+ in actual sales.

OT: I respect a lot of people aren't really okay with Kickstarter being used in this manner... but I'm not one of them and will definitely be hopping on board. I didn't kickstart the d:os one since the only game of theirs I had played was Divinity 2 (and that was kinda crap, tbh). I did however buy in early access and I loved it.
 
MisterShine said:
It's also been a top seller at GoG on a number of occasions. Rpg fans are pretty strong there. I'm confident they've made 900k+ in actual sales.

OT: I respect a lot of people aren't really okay with Kickstarter being used in this manner... but I'm not one of them and will definitely be hopping on board. I didn't kickstart the d:os one since the only game of theirs I had played was Divinity 2 (and that was kinda crap, tbh). I did however buy in early access and I loved it.
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While I don't really think this is the type of game that should be kickstarted, as the original game will likely be a million seller by the end of the year (and without resorting to bundles/$5 copies), I will probably go in for the lowest tier if the price is less than $30.

I am cheap and therefore like cheap pre-orders. I just think that this could have been done through their website.
 
Crazy_maniac said:
Welp, the word is out there now. We were anticipating a bit of Kickstarter controverse so I'm curious how the campaign will pan out. It's going to be really exciting though!
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I'm betting the reaction will be overwhelmingly positive based on your track record and the results of your last KS. There will always be a few vocal dissenters but I am thinking they will be in the vast minority.
 
Alastor3 said:
By the way guys

Just to be clear, they ARE working on another project beside the Divinity OS 2

Check the end of the video

https://youtu.be/cugQ4pS_zOQ?t=4m8s
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Nah they are just sitting on that sweet cash so they can milk more from fans.
invoker-laugh.gif
 
HK-47 said:
Nah they are just sitting on that sweet cash so they can milk more from fans.
invoker-laugh.gif
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lol, you know that Original Sin almost bankrupt them, right ? For them, it's just safer and more logical to go back to the kickstarter AND they also talk to their fans and make the game better.
 
Awesome, will back them again - D:OS was fantastic. Swen always does fantastic kickstarter updates throughout the process, it's almost worth backing it just for that. I'd definitely like to see slightly more refined modding tools and for them to push that angle a bit more for D:OS 2.
 
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