Hello again everybody,
I found some time to give you a new update on what's been keeping us busy. No big thoughts, well perhaps one, but first the build overview as I know at least a couple of you are eager to get their hands on our next releases:
The Dragon Knight Saga (PC, German) - Gold and being manufactured as we speak. I think there's a chance you can start seeing it appear in shops in the week of October 25th already.
The Dragon Knight Saga (PC - English, French, German, Italian, Spanish) - Ready, we're doing some last things on the installer, and it should head off to the manufacturing plant today (so basically, you can consider it gold).
The Dragon Knight Saga (Xbox 360 - English, French, Italian, Spanish version) - We've just received word that it's passed certification so printing should commence soon enough, in time for a November 5th release
The Dragon Knight Saga (Xbox 360 - German+French) - In the last stages of certification
Flames Of Vengeance (English, French, Italian, Spanish) - English/French are ready except for the installers, Italian/Spanish are in final QA.
We still have some work on the Polish and Russian versions.
While I'm in the business of giving build overviews, two Monkey Tales adventures will also be launching next week (dutch version only). We expect international versions to be released early next year.
Monkey Tales will be available for download through The Larian Vault, our own online shop, which will launch simultaneously.
And the cool thing is that Monkey Tales won't be the only thing that'll be available there - The Dragon Knight Saga, Flames Of Vengeance and the previous Divinities will also be available for download there. So if you feel like supporting us directly and you're in to digital distribution, come have a look in a week or two and check it out for yourself. It's part of our making ourselves even more independent strategy, and if the Larian Vault turns out to be successful, we'll probably do more through that in the future. As an experiment, we've made the Monkey Tales games exclusive to the Larian Vault whereas all the Divinities will remain available through all kinds of other digital and retail channels.
Also, for those of you in Belgium, TMF has a show called Gametown which is aired 4 times a week, and we've been told The Dragon Knight Saga features in the 20-10-10 show. And check out the newspapers somewhere next week when Monkey Tales will launch - there should be quite some coverage.
Now in case you're wondering, despite the crazy list of releases we have this month, the stuff that keeps me the most busy for the moment is our next RPG (on which work has started) and a speech I have to give in a month or so. More about the speech in a second as I could use some input, but first a little bit about the next RPG coming from Larian. No third parties are involved yet so I can pretty much say whatever I want about it, but the concepts are still converging, so I won't give too many details yet. What I can say is that it's quite different from our previous work, should still feel very familiar to Divinity fans and contains an idea I'm pretty fond of, so I hope it'll work out well (read, I don't think it's been done by anybody else yet)
Undoubtedly I'll talk about it in more detail later on and actually I'm hoping that we can make the development of this one very open so you can see what's happening as we develop it, and take a more active role in making suggestions, a bit like when we made the first Divinity. I'll keep you posted if we find a way of making that work without having to throw our unique selling points into the open too soon, but I've seen so many intelligent things written down in these forums, that I think it'd be stupid as a developer not to take take more advantage of it (that probably came out wrong, but I hope you get what I mean).
Our ability to do that will be pretty much dependent on the level of publisher involvement, and that'll depend on how good this vault thing works (shameless pitch intended ;-) ), the better it works, the less involvement there'll be. Personally, I much preferred developing on Divinity 1, where we were lucky enough that the publisher didn't really bother about what we were doing, and I could just react with changes in the game immediately on what I saw happening in this forum (yes for those new here, it's been around for quite some time and it's a pity that it crashed once and we lost all the old posts - if you see a white cat in Divinity games, he was born in these forums - as a matter of fact, many of the features in the original Divinity were born in this forum )
Anyways, I'm talking prematurely, and things can still change, but I just wanted to share what I'd like to do - business being business, it doesn't mean it's going to be like that, but it's what I'd like.
That said, the speech thing. I do quite a few of these and usually manage ok I guess, but this time I find that I might have accepted to speak at this particular conference a bit to soon - you see, the topic is nothing less than "tell us what the future of the interactive industry" will be like. I said yes because I thought I had a pretty good idea, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that I actually don't know, can't know most likely.
So I figured I'd ask the question here - where do you think the games industry will be in say 20-30 years ? Will we have virtual reality ? Will it be far away ? Will we all have 3D display contact lenses and mind-control interfaces ? Or will we be playing on a Playstation 6 in a similar way than we do today ? Will there even be such a thing as a Playstation 6 ? Perhaps everything will happen in our browsers ? Will we still have browsers ? Will they look like the Minority Report interfaces ? And so forth... I really could use some helpful insights as I only have a couple of weeks left before the thing needs to be ready ;-)
Lar
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