It would appear that Sven Vincke, in addition to having a new baby boy in his home, had both good and less-than-good luck when showing off demos of Larian’s two upcoming games to a journalist, recently. The Divinity: Dragon Commander demo went rather well and received some constructive feedback. The Divinity: Original Sin demo, on the other hand…

…the Divinity: Original Sin presentation turned out to be probably the worst we’d ever given (I say we because it was shown in multiplayer) We started out strong, even if we had one crash, but then ran into a situation I certainly didn’t expect us to have at this stage in our collective careers.

To make a long story short (and because I’m thinking of grabbing some more sleep as baby boy seems to have relaxed a bit), this particular version of the build had a problem that ruined most of the scripting in the game, which for a RPG that wants to promote itself as being very interactive and reactive is a pretty much a no-no. On top of that, our cheat-presentation-gear wasn’t present in the game because we had taken the wrong build (or some other advanced version control branching excuse) meaning that we were dying continuously as we were trying to reach a higher-level area where we were hoping the script logic was working. And when we did eventually make it there, a blocker bug prevented us from even reaching the area because some piece of area-linking logic was missing from the game, so we should actually even have bothered getting there.

In short, it was a catastrophe.

It sounds like the journalist was sympathetic overall, but still…not the best showing. Hopefully the next one will go much more smoothly. Vincke, in his usual fashion, ends by morphing both experiences into an insightful commentary on the state and nature of the games industry today, and is an entertaining read (as always). So do click on through and check out the rest of the piece.