Divinity Original Sin 2 Exits Xbox Game Preview – Is This The End of Feedback Billy?

We’re closing in on the launch of Divinity: Original Sin 2 – Definitive Edition on Xbox One, and we wouldn’t be in such a good state without your support. The Xbox Game Preview program afforded us time to iterate and bug-fix as you played the first act of the game and provided feedback about your experience. With this feedback, we made the game even better!

You may remember last time we talked about feedback, we introduced Feedback Billy. Billy is Larian’s way to gather feedback as you play. To save you having to type things out, we created Billy who is an NPC that lives in Rivellon. If you’ve played already, you’ll have bumped into Billy throughout your travels and answered periodic questions about your gameplay experience.

Billy’s research helped us to visualize feedback in a pie-chart showing us how things are going down with the players, such as yourself. This is literally on a tap called “Billy’s Pies”. Questions such as “are you satisfied with the camera and character movement?”, and “do you understand what your objective is” and so forth really gave us insight as to if we’d done our jobs properly. Overwhelmingly, the responses were positive, but we tweaked elements here and there to close up some of those fewer positive responses.

Behind the game itself lies a document, and inside that document is all your written feedback. Next to each piece of feedback is an input, where our QA can examine, investigate, and close any issues. These range from bugs to ergonomics.

Some of your comments have been hilarious, but I can’t show them (lawyer standing behind me). Thank you for making us smile. You guys also often sent us notes of encouragement, and we sincerely thank you for those.

85.4% of you claimed to be either “very comfortable”, or “comfortable” with “various game elements”, which is great to see because DOS2 is a very complex RPG. It’s warming to see that the overwhelming majority of players think that this type of game works great on the Xbox One.

Since launching Xbox Game Preview, 55.2% of you stated that you found Billy ‘very helpful’ and that it enhanced your experience, out of 5 possible responses. This made Billy very happy. Unfortunately, it’s time for Billy to die.

As a thank you to Billy, and an homage to our fans, enjoy the Death of Feedback Billy, which is what happens when I say “yes” to my video guy without listening in a hurry because I need to go on a trip.

See you August 31!