Here, drink this potion. It’s called the Electronic Wireless Show and it’s a podcast. Yes, you drink it via your ears, unusual I know, but you’ll feel much better afterwards. This week, we’re talking about roguelikes, roguelites, roguefites and roguelifes. What do words even mean anymore? Also, Pip has been enjoying the blocky spellcasting of Rogue Islands, while Adam is killing innocent young men in the fantasy caves of Divinity: Original Sin 2. Absolutely unnecessary behaviour. To make matters even more unbearable, it’s the last podcast with Pip! I shall sum up how I feel about this using the ASCII language of the roguelike.
:(>
Divinity: Original Sin 2 [official site] left Early Access less than a week ago and sales figures have been very good. Those are the kind of figures, Larian CEO Swen Vincke tells me, that he’d been hoping for “by Christmas”. The game is only available for Windows at the moment and during the Early Access period, the studio stated that, “A decision on other platforms will not be made until after the full release.” With that full release now behind us, I asked if the strong sales made support for new platforms more likely. Short answer: “yes”. Longer answers on that and other matters below.
Despite an unlucky launch day, Larian's latest RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 came roaring out of the gate last week, enjoying both critical acclaim and remarkably strong sales for what is, let's be honest here, a pretty niche genre. Yesterday it broke the 75,000 concurrent user mark on Steam, today it's even higher—a little over 85,000, according to Steam Spy—and even more impressive than that, Larian boss Swen Vincke told Eurogamer that it has already sold nearly a half-million copies.
"It is fantastic, but it is also way beyond what we expected. We're close to hitting 500,000 units sold which is a number I believe it took us two or three months with Divinity: Original Sin 1," Vincke said. That's actually pretty close to the mark: The original Original Sin came out on June 30, 2014, and Vincke said in a mid-September blog post that it had achieved a half-million sales somewhere prior to that.
That success presumably makes a console release of Divinity: Original Sin 2 very likely, but Larian's priority right now is the PC release. "We're now focused on delivering our first patch for the PC version, something that is scheduled for this week," Vincke said. "Lots of players means lots of support issues coming in and we're trying to service them as fast as we can. After that, it'll be a long, well-deserved break for the team and then we'll boot up our machines again to work on the next things."
Larian rolled out a hotfix yesterday that should take care of problems that players have encountered when saving games, and Vincke said that the studio is also working on issues with its servers, which have apparently struggled under the unexpected load. But the problems clearly aren't putting off RPG fans: Original Sin 2 remains atop the Steam Top Sellers chart and holds fourth place on the Game Stats list, behind only PUBG, CS:GO, and Dota 2.
We're still working on our full Divinity: Original Sin 2 review—while you wait, here's a good list of ten things you should know about the game before you get started on your adventures.
This week we finally learn who the killer is, but will the answer provide more questions than solutions? Read on for this week’s hair-raising installment of… The Steam Charts. (more…)