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Comprehensive descriptions of each of the areas in the games, including the NPCs, enemy types, traps and magic items in that area;

Strategies for fighting each of the major encounters;

Descriptions and locations of all of the magic items in the game, including Cespenar's recipes for the most powerful items;

Tons of additional information that'll be of interest to hardcore fans of the series -- curious about how the Wish spells work and the possible results you can obtain? How about the possible cards you can draw from the Deck of Many things? How do you operate Lum's Machine. All explained in the guide.

More serious problems are evident in the closing stages of your quest. The developers seem to have run out of steam near the conclusion, which is staged in a six-level dungeon. Exploration is meaningless here; all you need to do is buff up and proceed along the forced-path trail that leads you to the final confrontation with the Luremaster. Mindless combat is everywhere, and it's not even properly set up. Most of the time you'll simply be jumped by one group of enemies after another as soon as you pass a cell door. Few of these enemies are very interesting, either, unless you've really got a hankering to square off against a Minotaur or a Neo-Orog. It's plainly evident that these encounters are present just to stretch the game out.

You're all right - it's been really too long since we gave you a last update, and while we do have some good reasons for it (i.e. time), I can imagine that it must be frustrating. So therefore, without any further delay, here's a complete overview of what's currently going on at our studio, and more importantly, what's going on with the game.

By now, you've figured there's some delay on the game. Currently the official figure is that the game will come out in Q4, end of 2001. Internally we figure that we'll have the game ready by november, but as always, things can take more time than expected, or things can go wrong. In any case, I'm really glad that CDV gave us the extra time to complete the game, because we had been considering cutting in the game, and that would've been so sad. As it is, we're still doing some cuts, but I doubt anybody will ever notice it, as the plain truth is that this game is really incredibly big. To give you an example, there's this village called Aleroth where the game starts, and to this day, I'm still figuring out new things to do there. (If there is one thing for sure, then it's that I do know Aleroth ;-) ) And Aleroth together with the dungeons under it is maybe only 5% of the world.

The size of the world coupled with the non-linearity, the sheer amount of options a player gets, and the large amount of skills you can learn are the main reasons for the delays. We've got somewhat of an internal testing departement here (the real testing is done over at CDV), and it's really incredible to see the amount of different approaches people take when they play the game. That obviously was always the intention, but actually seeing it happening gives a rather satisfactory feeling. Unfortunately it also causes a lot of extra headaches, because we have to make sure that every approach really works, and that is really no trivial thing to do.

The funny thing is that we have a part of the team at the ready, or almost ready point, and then some poor sods (me included) who still have a huge tasklist. Naturally this created some frustration within our team, but if you think about it, it's only natural. Those who aren't ready yet are the ones involved in the content implementation, and a lot of that content could only be put in when all the things on which the content depended were ready.

I mentioned non-linearity as one of the main reasons for the delays, but it definitely deserves special credits ;-). You see, non-linearity makes testing a major pain in the butt, which in turn makes the bug-fixing incredibly hard. Programmer schedules have been completely overturned by writing function after function to tame that beast, leading to delays in different areas (e.g. skill implementations). Story implementations had to be redone and redone until every single case was covered. Our game-editors have been extended with extra capability after extra capability just to be able to cope with the complexity of it all and... Well, you get the picture.

Additionally, to make life even harder, because of its size and the amount of options the player has, Divinity contains hundreds of thousands of data fields which have to be filled in, checked, cross checked, balanced etc... While we had several systems in place to make that job easier, it turned out that we had to refine those systems over and over in order to make the data-entry process more manageable.

All of these things, together with a large reluctance against sacrificing quality, lead up the delay we are facing now. But honestly, we're really happy about it, as it means we can do the game almost the way it was intended. I say almost, because realistically we had to do some cuts.

Enough about the delays, let's talk about an event I'm really looking forward to, i.e. the intro. As some of you might now, the intro for Divinity is being created by a company called ex-machina. They are a team based in France with very high credentials, and the previews we got from them really rock. Normally, if everything goes right, we should have the final renders this week, and if I'm not mistaking, somewhere in the next couple of months parts of it are going to be made public. I think you won't be disappointed.

Onto marketing and PR then. You might have noticed already, but press awareness of Divinity is on the rise. Just last week there was a press tour in Germany where a preview copy was given to the following magazines : Computerbild Spiele,Gamestar,PC-Games,Pc-Action,Game On and Bravo Screenfun. This week we're going to be showing it to 4 leading UK magazines,4 leading french magazine and PC Gamer US. Press in the Benelux is slowly getting up to speed also, with several online previews, newspaper coverage and previews in this months magazines. This indeed means that the PR/Marketing for Divinity has finally kicked of, and for what it's worth, the tour in Germany seems to have made an impression on the journalists. You should see the results in the September issues of the magazines I mentioned. The additional time gained by the delay also gives the marketing and PR people extra time to prepare everybody for Divinity, which is a good thing in my eyes. Next two major things that I know of is that we'll be at ECTS, and that there is a public demo planned, somewhere in Q4, before the game gets released. Actually, I know the date, but I'm not going to tell you here, because I might fall flat on my face (as most of my date estimations in this forum ;-) )

The public demo is Aleroth, i.e. the beginning of the game, and you should be sweet with it for quite some time, as there's really a lot you can do in it. (Yes Risini, it's what you played, but then without the bugs ;-) ) The biggest problem we have with the public demo is getting its size small enough so that I can be distributed to everyone. I hope we'll be able to do an online version, but be prepared, it'll be big. (Right now we're trying to think on how to cram it on a CD ;-) )

There's also a trailer coming your way which will be prior to the public demo, and I think it might be around the time of ECTS, but that's not sure yet. Haven't seen it myself yet, but Sickboy keeps on telling me how cool it will be ;-).

From the game point of view, we're still heavily editing story and world, as you might have gathered from www.divinityswelt.de. On the engine implementation front we're adding all the main interface screens like character selection, startup etc... and there's still the little matter of the warrior skills which need to implemented. Other than that, it's basically ready, except of course for the plethora of bugs we're fixing. And, the roofs of course ;-) The extra time that's become available will allow us to put those in which is obviously way cool ;-)

All in all, it's coming along nicely, and for those who wonder, yes, I'm still in love with this game, and I'd happily keep on adding new features to it. I think that for now though, I'm finally satisfied with the amount of things we put in and it's time to finish it completely so that all of you can see what we've been talking about for so long.

Black Isle Studios' title, TORN, has been canceled. In conjunction with the cancellation, five of the 56 member Black Isle Studios staff were laid off. All of the remaining members of the TORN team are now working on other internal Black Isle Studios RPG products.

I hated to drop that point there down from 95, but the incredible difficulty encountered in the expansion is simply a bit much, and the need to constantly reload, wait for timestops, or other annoyances really adds to the frustration rating of the gameplay rather quickly. It's still fun simply because it's building on what is D&D, and all D&D games are fun, but I think it could have been toned down a bit here.

As for a preview version, we're actually touring next week in Germany with it, and handing it out to a select few. I hope that'll get rid of the Diablo thing once and for all.

And as far as a public demo is concerned - that one will be out before the game hits the stores.