![]() ![]() “A couple of souls really put a lot of effort into that. “We redesigned the entire journal for the Definitive Edition,” says Vincke. There’s a huge document detailing all the changes, if you’ve got the patience to go through it all. While Larian’s writers and voice actors worked on the story and dialogue, tweaks were being made to fights and visual effects, balance was being revisited, a new tutorial was being designed and the arena was getting a hotseat mode, along with new levels. ![]() “Fundamentally the content is the same.” Taking notes It’s a chunky update, but it's not an overhaul. “For some people it will be pretty much the experience they had before, but for some people it will be dramatically different,” explains Vincke. Yet the nature of Divinity means that a lot of these improvements might be less noticeable, depending on the path you take. More generally, says Vincke, the goal was to add an additional layer of polish and clarity to the narrative. The final act’s antagonist has been beefed up narrative-wise and the epilogue provides more closure. With Original Sin 2 out in the wild, there were legions of players taking all sorts of routes with different characters and party combinations, revealing the places where Larian felt it could shore up some gaps. They bifurcate, and we have ways of dealing with that, but actually having someone playing through all these lines? It’s mathematically impossible.” Has QA seen every single line that’s possible? It’s impossible to do so. ![]() It's an issue because we put so many choices in our games, and in the end they all have to come through. I was talking to BioWare about Dragon Age and asked them how they tested their endings and all the permutations. “It’s the classic problem: the part that gets played the most in QA sessions is the beginning,” says Vincke. There were so many ways that players could reach it, so many potential paths to keep track of, that blind spots were inevitable. One of the challenges Larian had encountered when it designed Act 3 initially was just testing it. It’s the classic problem: the part that gets played the most in QA sessions is the beginning. ![]()
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