GameSpot may receive revenue from affiliate and advertising partnerships for sharing this content and from purchases through links.

Beyond Divinity delayed

Larian Studios delays the release of its upcoming role-playing game to address issues raised by players of its recent demo.

Comments

Larian Studios today announced that it has delayed the release of Beyond Divinity until the end of April to address a number of issues raised by players of its recent demo. The quality of the voice acting and the lack of combat options in the game are the two main areas being addressed during the additional weeks now available to Larian, although the developer will also be looking to accept other feedback from its official forums (ahead of the game's release).

"We are very sensitive about what our community thinks about our games, and when we saw they were all but pleased by the voice recordings, the decision to go back to the recording studio was easily made," said Swen "Lar" Vincke, project leader at Larian Studios. "With the support of Hip Games, whom I really want to thank, and a crew of sound engineers and actors who were willing to burn the midnight oil on this, we'll manage to set straight something that could've gone very wrong. Voice recording all the dialogues in an RPG as extensive as Beyond Divinity was a very ambitious task, and we didn't get it right the first time. I'm happy we've been given the opportunity to rectify that."

The voice acting for Beyond Divinity is currently being rerecorded by improvisational actors in Toronto, while the development team is hard at work implementing additional types of combat in the game.

"One of the design goals of Beyond Divinity was to introduce more tactical combat to the mix. We thought everybody was going to prefer this over the typical hack-and-slash gameplay you found in the original game," continued Vincke. "To our surprise, it turned out that a part of the community didn't want that at all, so we introduced different combat modes. The game now offers you the choice between action, tactical, or hardcore combat, each leading to very different gameplay experiences. I think this is exactly what our audience was looking for."

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

Join the conversation
There are no comments about this story