I think it's supposed to be "On" instead of "Of", but whatever. I asked him about his opinion about Kickstarter once, in a pm on the official forums (which contained other questions too), but he didn't say anything about this matter since he had his inbox full of messages. So I'm glad he finally did a post about this.
While it is a shame that LMK got cancelled, it at least turned out well in the end for Larian as they went on to release the godly Divine Divinity What really shocked me though is that DKS only cost €6.5m to make!? WHAT?? That can't be right, surely?
He talks about Greenlight, Greenlight merging with Kickstarter and a bit about Inquisitor in this one.
Quote:
A few days ago I received a mail from the friendly bunch behind the recently released Inquisitor, an old school RPG with a lot of heart & depth, but dated visuals & usability. I promised them that I was going to have a look at it, and if I liked it, do what little I can to help them spread the word about their Steam Greenlight campaign.
What happened however is that for some reason, people started looking at this like some sort of Kickstarter (this was the very first time something like this was done on GOG), and in the very first hours of the campaign, we saw the average pricing go to heights we never expected. Somebody even paid a 1000US$ for one of the games!!! (Thanks again Alquist for ruining our plans btw)
Quote:
What does this mean ? Well, it means that LMK, the game that started my RPG career (for real) is finally going to get an audience, after 15 years in the freezer. How cool is that ? Ok, it’s perhaps just a tech demo, but it was pretty advanced for its time. Remember, this is what this game looked like in 1998, at a time Diablo 2 wasn’t even out! It should unlock somewhere by tonight if my calculations are correct, once the tier lowering has been executed, and I’m really curious what the reactions are going to be.
At 20k copies sold they'll unlock "Hatching the Dragon", an inside look at the making of the Divinity series.
At 25k copies sold they'll unlock "Dream of the Dragon", a look at Dragon Commander with never-before-seen footage of the upcoming title's gameplay!
And at 50k copies sold they'll unlock a special announcement where Larian Studios will reveal their next, super-secret upcoming project early, just for you guys!
I'll leave this here and consider this thread as the Larian thread for stuff that doesn't concern a game of theirs in particular. The video is the reward for that 20k copies sold goal from the GOG campaign.
Edit: Guys, you have to watch this one... some awesome stuff in that video! Divinity II was supposed to be quite different, a lot bigger and more complex and they show that!
Lol at 11:30 and onwards..."We were pretty wasted when doing that video (footage for publisher)...oooohhh, rocks...that's beautiful....oh look ,a crosshair....what does that crosshair do?"
This one is mostly about Dragon Commander. Apparently they had some problems with the combat and the fix was right in their faces: add ground and sea units.
Back then I also forsaw project E’s announcement, and that one indeed happened, even if in the end it was called Divinity: Original Sin instead of Eyes of a Child (which is where the E in project E came from). In case you are wondering (and you didn’t read the memo), Divinity: Orginal Sin was initially also scheduled to be released in 2012. Nobody believed us, but that didn’t really matter – we (well I) believed it until… well until we all fell in love with our own RPG and then went completely berserk on its features, leading to a big scale increase with all the inevitable delays as a consequence. Not that I’m worrying – the game really is turning out to be a gem and if we can manage to keep on finding the funds to support its development, so we don’t have to scale down again, we could have a hit on our hands. Obviously, we should aim to release it in 2013.
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
I really hope that Dragon Commander will be first good cross-genre game. Games that try to mix RTS and RPG were mostly messy and didn't work well. They never exceed in any area. Can't say I am excited with dragons with jet packs and this vivid fantasy mess that I saw from preview but I really hope for them to succeed.
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What really shocked me though is that DKS only cost €6.5m to make!? WHAT?? That can't be right, surely? 
I might be able to get it next month, so I hope that goes well...
Another thing they managed to fix without spending too much money.
