Swen Vincke, founder and CEO of Larian Studios, recently spoke on the Dungeons & Dragons official channel about how the team has been turning around patch fixes so quickly, particularly in response to community criticism.
"We set up our studio to work 24 hours [a day], so we have studios in Malaysia, Europe, and Canada—so we can basically pass on work... that means if someone in Europe made a feature, they'll know if it worked or not the next day because it went through QA, or vice versa."
Vincke also emphasized the automated testing programs that Larian has been developing in tandem with its games: "We have systems that tell you,
even before you make the change, 'You broke it!' Go fix it again', which also helps... This enables us to be very responsive to what we see in the community."
I won't go into spoilers, but it felt genuinely underwritten, wrapping up the threads of my favorite characters without even saying goodbye.
I was pleased with the changes to her ending, especially since I didn't expect a completely new scene to be written, voiced, animated, and released in less than a month.
The actress Samantha Béart was called back a week later. The scene was written first, but it went quickly, then it was recorded using the pipeline, then it went to the cinematics team, who spent two weeks putting everything in, and it just rolled into the next patch or hotfix."