"[With Early Access] you put it out there and you don't even have to wait a day, you know right away what's wrong. This type of feedback can be very hard to get, unless you have a large community playing.”
While releasing and developing a game as an Early Access title comes with its own set of challenges, Divinity: Original Sin 2 Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke says that the process has its own way of making game development both easier and harder at the same time.
Speaking to PCGamer, Vincke explored how both the good and bad sides of the open development process manifested during the creation of Divinity: Original Sin 2. On one hand, Vincke explains that having a community closely watching your development process puts a lot of pressure on developers and can make it difficult to make big changes after something has already been publically revealed.
However, the process can also provide useful feedback that might have been otherwise obscured by what he describes as “very vocal minority screaming how badly something is done.”
“At the same time, things become easier because you instantly know what's wrong. You put it out there and you don't even have to wait a day, you know right away what's wrong,” explains Vincke. “This type of feedback can be very hard to get, unless you have a large community playing. Another thing that's easier with a large community is that there's a large amount of them and can, in turn, let statistics speak for you.”
Vincke offers some more interesting game development insights over in the full PC Gamer interview, including how the team added a failsafe just in case a player killed the NPCs needed to finish the game.