Hello all,

To my shame, I once again realize that the pressures of everyday life at Larian stopped me from posting more regular status updates, something I had decided to do some time ago. Quick update about what's keeping us busy:

Submission of the Xbox360 version of The Dragon Knight Saga: Honestly, you won't recognize the game if you played it previously on Xbox360. It's much much smoother, the user interfaces have changed significantly, the camera has changed completely, it's been balanced specifically for the X360 this time and above all it's much more fun. It's also very very big, as the content of Flames of Vengeance together with the revised Ego Draconis content make for a very big game. I'm too biased to make an objective judgement, but I hope that when you get it in your hands, you'll have as much fun with it as the testers seem to have.

Polish, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, English, German versions: We love localization, yes we do ! My god, what a job - with the FOV content now added to it, just verifying if a language integration worked out well has become a huge logistical operation.

Monkey Labs 2 & 3: Lots of commotion here in Belgium about educational games with the start of the new school year, and our Monkey Labs games are getting quite some attention, especially now that the government seems to take an interest. We've got two more slated for release end of September, and then there's another two coming a bit later, so those too are keeping me busy.

Next games: In the midst of the rush of releasing the 18 versions, there's still our next projects to take care of too, as more and more team members are ready with their jobs on our current productions. Up to now we've been fooling around with ideas and concepts, but pretty soon decisions will need to be taken about how these will materialize, though I fear it will take some time before we'll be able to talk about them.

Demos: Lots of pressure on our shoulders to come up with demos for The Dragon Knight Saga so that's probably going to take some of our time too very soon.

Patches: When all versions will finally be finished, we'll be able to lift the existing released content to the level of the latest builds, which will be about time. I regret tremendously that we couldn't release any patches before, but it was out of our hands, something we'll not allow to happen again.

That's all I have time for now, I'll try to give a longer one next time round.

Cheers

Lar

Tah.
Any chance of Xbox Shots.
To back your claim :P

Also when you say balanced for Xbox.
Do you mean the difficulty's been toned down?

-Screenshots - I think they'll be released soon enough by Focus and I expect videos will pop up soon too.
-Balancing: Most monster placements, loot and reward tables have been redone/remade. It's also important to realize that the way the new camera controls are implemented allow for much better avatar control - specifically, it's now much more feasible to evade incoming missiles.

Yes, the difficulty (I read) is adapted

Thanks Lar for the update! I really appreciate all your status updates
It sounds also very great all you say about the Xbox version ! You make me very curious and I'm happy I have until today fun with DD, otherwise I can not wait for the Dragon Knight Saga on Xbox

A big fan of all the Larian's games, especially Divine Divinity !!!

Lar_q, thanks for this info.
I can't wait when FoV will go to stores. If it is really better than D2:EG, it means it is worth to wait - but I hope it will not last too long.

Being able to avoid missiles is excellent news.

I look forward to it. Seems like it has changed much.

Even though i already own Div2, if the Dragon Knight Saga is realy all that much better i might end up buying it and gift-wrap my old div2 copy to a friend.

I just can't live in peace knowing there's a better version out there (when it comes out) than mine.

So 2011 for North America, I assume?

Yes.
Just like with Div2 on 2010 for NA :P

But while Divinity II had a Jan. 5th launch, Gamestop's had it in at the end of December.

PLEASE RELEASE FoV in the United States on 360 in some format!!! I don't care if I have to buy the game again, I will do so gladly, I NEED FOV!!! Thank you!! And yes, I am the Dragon Knight sweepstakes winner, thank you again Larian Studios, you ROCK!!!!!

FoV will be available on the Xbox as part of DKS. It is too large for DLC, and Larian could not get the add-on published alone.

I hope Larian has found a publisher for DKS in the US. I also hope it's not South Peak.

Quests, Areas, Enemies, and Leveling Questions
1.If areas and enemies are still hard-corded in DKS - is there any way for the player to know exactly what areas and what quests are actually within the player's Level?

2. If "yes" to #1 - Is it written in the Journal? On the Map? Where?

3. If "yes" to #1 - Is there a warning of some kind on-screen to the player when they are almost entering an area way ABOVE or BELOW their level?

4. If "no" to #1 - Are all the areas and quests all scaled to the player now?


Camera Questions
1. What's the changes w/ the camera, exactly?

2. Is the camera still unlocked always?

3. If "yes" to #2 - is there a key to reset the camera exactly behind the player in 3rd person?

4. If "No" to #2 - is camera now locked in 3rd person always behind the player?

5. Is there a toggle switch for the player to switch b/t locking and unlocking the camera?

All those questions make no sense to me except the 1st one for camera. There was a changes with this aspect in DKS? Would be nice.

At least for the Xbox version of DKS they changed most of the interface, as well as the camera system and controls. See Lar's second post above, or in the topic D2:ED + FoV vs DKS?.

As you can notice from our limited presence here, we're in the rush to complete all versions. Many a late night have been spent on finalizing everything but it looks like we're getting there. So a quick update:

Yesterday we finished the English, French, German, Italian and Spanish Xbox360 versions and they are now at Microsoft for certification. That basically means that we can't find anything else anymore that needs to be fixed and Microsoft will now check if we overlooked something.

This weekend the hopefully final PC versions of DKS are being built and if final QA works out, we should be ready in time for a November 5th release. We've sorted out Pan-European distribution including Canada and Australia, but US distribution is still up in the air, so unfortunately we can't give you a US street date yet, but we'll make sure you can at least get the PC version via digital means.

Once we've built the DKS versions, we'll make all the FOV versions and then it will finally be done ! And we can take a break

To answer the X360 questions above - yesterday we did a presentation to a number of journalists switching between PC & X360 - one of the things we did was showing side by side comparisons of Ego Draconis and The Dragon Knight Saga. It's really quite a big difference. It's not only the camera, the textures, the shading and the lighting, it's also the gameplay and the UI that make for a big improvement. We're really pretty curious what you all will think of it when it comes out.

So, the consoles are first and the PC version is under big question (as usual).
:<

Yes, wouldn't it be horrible if people in the US who wanted a physical version of the game right away ended up needing to order it from somewhere far away, like Canada.

Of course Microsoft is very fast and efficient, so a week's head start with the Xbox version before the PC release candidate is done testing is obviously going to translate into an earlier release date.