Cavalary (11445) on 12/2/2012 10:14 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

Heh, plucked this from the Dev Diary coming with the anthology (and the dev cut of D2 I gather):

"It should be noted that the title Divinity: Sword of Lies was to be the title of the game as well, until it was discovered in the contract that CDV had changed it to Divine Divinity. When Swen announced the signing of the deal at an office party, he said he had good news and bad news: the good news was that we had signed with a publisher, the bad news was that we had to change the name to Divine Divinity. Everyone thought he was joking, including himself, thinking this silly alliteration was a typo. It turned out it wasn't a joke and despite many attempts to change their minds, the people at CDV didn't budge, having in mind the success of a game called Sudden Strike. That is how we ended up with a title that the team felt sounded like a cheap adult movie. Such are the joys sometimes of working with publishers."

And that they included fixes secretly for the English version of the game (while working day and night to manually fix save games from angry buyers), knowing that CDV wouldn't allow them to make changes otherwise. And that was proven true when they approached them with a request to release the patch they had written for the German version as well and were refused because "CDV products have no bugs and therefore do not require patches".

Either way, they got no more funding after release and nearly everyone was fired, only 3 people remained, desperate to make another simpler game quickly to just earn themselves some money (hence Beyond Divinity...).

[Assume this should be a trivia, but if it says edit oldest entry... currently can't do that because there's an edit pending it says. Maybe somebody making a single entry from them all? Or maybe somebody else submitting this before me :p]