Divinity Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition

[frajaq]

Victory is sweeter when it is earned. Giving it away denies the players any kind of psychological attachment (be it intellectual or emotional), trivializing the experience and making you forget it. That's one of the things modern devs don't seem to get, it's counter-intuitive for lasting appeal to make the game easier. Yes, grognards will play on the hardest difficulty, but most players won't.

do we have hard stats on stuff like this or what

most of gamers I know start on normal and try to switch to hard later if they can

 

[LESS T_T]

Interview with Kieron Kelly, on porting to consoles, some details of the story changes: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018...-divinity-original-sin-2s-definitive-edition/

Interview: What went into making Divinity: Original Sin 2’s definitive edition
The first title's remaster was a game changer. Is Original Sin 2's the same?

LOS ANGELES—Larian Studios had been making OK-to-pretty-good PC RPGs for years. The company had its dedicated fans, but it was hardly mainstream. So 2014's Kickstarter-driven Divinity: Original Sin surprised many by being not just the studio's best game, but maybe one of the best PC-style RPGs ever made.

You could argue that Original Sin didn't quite reach that state until the Enhanced Edition, though. That launched alongside console ports for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2015. The update added full voice acting, greatly improved the multiplayer experience, added couch co-op and a 360-degree camera, and made significant changes to content.

Last year, critics and fans seemed mostly to agree that the sequel, Divinity: Original Sin 2, was even better than the first game's Enhanced Edition. It included all the enhanced features from that title and more. So with the Definitive Edition of Original Sin 2 coming August 31, what is there left to add?

Console support, for one. The game will launch on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One—and for the first time, Larian is adding PS4 Pro and Xbox One X enhancements (PC players who already bought the first release of Original Sin 2 will get everything console players get for free in August.) But Larian says that the game's story has also seen dramatic changes, especially in its later segments.

Ars sat down with Larian Studios Product Manager Kieron Kelly at E3 last week to go over what's new in the game, how the developers tried to make the Definitive Edition as appealing as the first game's Enhanced Edition, and what it took to port both PC-style RPGs to consoles and gamepads.

A primer on Divinity: Original Sin 2

Both Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2 are top-down role-playing games influenced by both the Baldur's Gate series and the Ultima franchise. The studio approached its games with the objective of emulating the freedom of choice in table-top RPG sessions as closely as possible. Larian got closer than most people expected.

Yes, Original Sin 2's PC version has mod support and a game master's mode for creating custom campaigns, and that's part of its appeal. (Though Kelly told us that game master mode won't make it to consoles—the verdict is still out on mods). But the main ingredient is what Kelly describes as Larian's "N + 1" philosophy for game design:

"There must be N + 1 ways of solving the quest, which means that if you create a quest with only one or two ways of doing it, it is not going to get past QA in terms of—our design team is simply not going to allow it. So, we make sure that there [are] always multiple ways of solving the quest... So, we always have fallback; usually it ends up being something like a journal or another way of communicating a part of the story, but I mean, we've always told our players that you can walk into the world and kill almost everybody, and you'll still be able to complete the main quests."

Divinity plays similarly to a classic Black Isle CRPG and can be played with up to four players simultaneously, but they can wander apart from each other, work together, work against each other, help each other, kill each other, or whatever else. And with so many options for finishing quests, the possibilities aren't endless, but they feel close enough to it that they remind players of tabletop experiences.

For that reason, the Divinity franchise is a natural fit for consoles, despite its old-school PC default interface. Couch co-op with a game like Original Sin 2 is reminiscent like playing Dungeons & Dragons.

A CRPG on console

Original Sin launched on consoles some months after the PC release, and the timeline for the sequel is similar. Larian was mostly silent about its plans for the console versions when Original Sin 2 first came out, but Kelly says they were always in the plan:

"We know that we have a dedicated fan base that are on console and that they are waiting for that day. In fact, the day we launched Original Sin 2 on PC a year ago, our community manager had a list of names of people who are like, "PS4? When is it coming to Xbox?" We have dedicated fan base there that we know to reach out to, so it was always a goal to come out to console with the definitive edition. Evidently, when we go back to something, we don't just rest with a port. What would have been a three-to-six-month port ended up being 12 months because we went back and changed a lot of stuff."

Porting this kind of computer RPG to consoles is mainly a challenge in terms of the interface and menus. There's a lot of text to display; that's not a challenge if the player is six feet away from a 65-inch television, but it is if they're playing 12 feet away from a 43-inch one. The environment is stocked with numerous interactable objects like books, barrels, junk lying on a table, and so on. That more or less demands a mouse pointer or touch controls, and the PS4 and Xbox editions have neither.

"When you think of say, the shooter, the first-person shooter really took a leap forward with Bungie and Halo," Kelly recalled. "There's been an evolution of using a controller for certain genres. And maybe our RPG—the traditional RPG that we like—hasn't really been on enough maybe to see that evolution."

Here's how he said Larian tried to tackle this:

"First of all, we don't want to dilute the system in any way. We don't want to dilute the experience. But we know that we have to completely rework the UI because, first of all, you're going to be sitting back. You're not as close to the screen, so dialogue and reading is not as easy to do if the fonts are different... so it's about making sure that we equip you, and in as intuitively a way as possible, to do all of the different things."

And mostly it's to do with the wheel. So when you hold R2, you can do the various things—that is returning from the last one. And then little tools like the virtual mouse and being able to hold A down for instance to scan the area so that you can interact with various objects. Our team is just consistently going back and forth.

I've played both games on consoles, and I think the company did a solid enough job. Like Kelly said, you can press down a button to bring up a scrollable list of all the items in reach and use the D-Pad or thumbstick to select which one to use. On the other hand, targeting spells to a spot on the ground with the "virtual mouse" isn't done in the most optimal way. Is it the most efficient way to play Original Sin 2? No, not really. But it's arguably worth it for the couch co-op experience.

As for Xbox One X and PS4 enhancements, Kelly says that Larian is doing its best to make sure it's "using the absolute limits" of both platforms. "We've definitely upped our resolution somewhat," he said, "and HDR is there."

And what about a Switch port? After all, a similar game—Wasteland 2—was recently announced for the platform. Kelly says not yet:

"I think every developer is probably thinking about Nintendo Switch. It’s obviously a very exciting platform. Unfortunately, right now we are focused on the Xbox and PlayStation versions. If we do, there will be news about it, but right now it is just the Xbox and PlayStation."

Aside from console support, most of the changes in the new release are story-related.

Story changes

Kelly told us that the team found themselves in a conundrum with this release: they'd added major enhancements in Original Sin's re-release, so how could they do the same when all the enhancements they'd added then were in the first version of Original Sin 2? "What we did this time," he told us, "it was more to do with the changing and improving on the existing game."

More specifically, that involved plenty of rewriting—and thus, re-recording. "So it was a million words voice-acted in the last game, when we launched—we’ve re-written at least 100,000 words that have been re-recorded and voice-acted," he said.

The team made significant changes to the inventory and quest UIs, too. Kelly started by describing narrative changes to Act 3 (don't worry, it's spoiler-light):

"There's a large city called Arx, and a huge part of the Act 3 happens in that area. So a huge amount of that area was redone completely—new situations, new dialogues, new pieces of information for you. And the main reason for that is actually because we didn't feel like all the threads tied together or ended as well as we wanted to."

There were changes to a story in Act 2, and to character storylines:

"There's a situation where you run in to a child who has been possessed in Act 2 and we've actually added a new situation to tie off her story. We’ve re-worked a big chunk of Beast’s storyline, our origin storyline."

Most importantly, Larian elevated the antagonist to help drive the narrative forward, based on feedback from players:

"One of the main antagonists at the end of the game is Chem… a lot of our players were struggling to figure out why he was so important, and in typical Larian Style we'd put lots of bits of information everywhere but it obviously wasn't gelling right, so we re-wrote some of that. We also added some new situations where you can really realize why this guy’s a big deal and he's a problem in the beginning. We've re-written the epilogue so that's a more satisfying ending as well."

Much of this was possible because Larian had a much larger writing team this time around. "We had only one-and-a-half writers for Original Sin," he said. "I say half, because one of the guys had to go on a very extended holiday for whatever reason. But on Original Sin 2, we have nine writers." The tone has changed a bit from the first game. If you're coming from Original Sin, you might notice that the sequel's not quite as goofy. I loved the silly humor of the first game, but it's a little bit less pervasive this time around.

"It was actually heavy criticism that we had to bear with Original Sin," Kelly explained. "A lot of people were like, it's too goofy."

The team sought a better balance in Original Sin 2:

"We wanted to have more gravitas with your actions with the world you were living in—that it wasn't so whimsical. But we knew that humor was a part of our DNA; we didn't want to get rid of it. I think we've got a much better balance that works. It's a little bit more serious, but we're still not afraid to drop in that humor where it matters."

Personally, I have mixed feelings about these kinds of changes. On one hand, I appreciate that the company is this attentive to its games after launch and that it's this focused on adding value for a re-release. It's also good that all these changes will be available free to PC players who'd bought the initial version of the game. But on the other hand, Original Sin 2 is a gigantic, long game, and it's unfortunate that the first people to dive in didn't get the complete experience until a later release.

If you played Original Sin 2 previously, you'll have to decide if these changes sound worth another trip to Rivellon. If you haven't, this is as good a time as any to jump in. Just note that Original Sin 2 is not for everyone; it's a hardcore game that will stress some players out with its myriad choices, high combat difficulty, and sprawling length.

But to fans of classic '90s PC RPGs, that probably sounds awesome.

 

[Lacrymas]

do we have hard stats on stuff like this or what

Hard stats on what exactly? We know that only 10% of people complete games (in this case, PoE1) and only 0.5% of players completed PoE1 on PotD. That doesn't scream "moving on to a higher difficulty" to me. And everything below PotD is trivial. If you mean hard stats about difficulty creating psychological bonds, well, I think that's self-evident to anyone, life experience in general teaches us that, but I can certainly find some 'sources' for that if it isn't.

 

[frajaq]

You're using PoE 1 stats while I dont think the PoE and D:OS audiences overlap that much. Something we can see just by looking at how their sequels performed sales-wise

 

[Cyberarmy]

I don't see how that Story mode stuff is decline, it's not like the game is forcing you to play that way

Game already had an easy option (explorer? )Adding an easier one is just ridiculous...

 

[Lacrymas]

You're using PoE 1 stats while I dont think the PoE and D:OS audiences overlap that much. Something we can see just by looking at how their sequels performed sales-wise

It's generally the same thing with other games, I just had the PoE1 stats in front of me. D:OS EE achievements say only 7% completed the game and only 2% completed it on tactician.

 

[frajaq]

I don't see how that Story mode stuff is decline, it's not like the game is forcing you to play that way

Game already had an easy option (explorer? )Adding an easier one is just ridiculous...

It literally doesn't affect you. All It does is make the game a bit more acessible.

 

[Roguey]

Victory is sweeter when it is earned. Giving it away denies the players any kind of psychological attachment (be it intellectual or emotional), trivializing the experience and making you forget it. That's one of the things modern devs don't seem to get, it's counter-intuitive for lasting appeal to make the game easier. Yes, grognards will play on the hardest difficulty, but most players won't.

When I was a young one, I cheated through a lot of games that were interesting to go through but whose bullshit I did not want to deal with.

 

[Alienman]

The more I watch this game, like the new announcements and stuff like that the more I start to despise the whole franchise and the style of RPGs they are making. It's all just too fucking whimsical and weird... and kinda cheap to be honest. A squirrel looking for the great acorn or something, yeah wow, come on now. It's like they are trying to make some kind of old timer Disney (that actually had some shocking scenes) but it just feels so easy and trashy. They just stack strange and whimsical stuff on each other with a lot of "funny random shit" at the absolute top as icing on the cake.

I was okay with Original Sin one since the combat was fun, but even back then going through the game just felt off. The humor, the story, it's like a theme park of Swens weird ideas (and fetishes?), the more random the better it seems and nothing that really connects it all and holds it together. It's like a game made for children but adults playing and praising it, a game for reddit. I don't know, rant over.

 

[Theldaran]

You're using PoE 1 stats while I dont think the PoE and D:OS audiences overlap that much. Something we can see just by looking at how their sequels performed sales-wise

It's generally the same thing with other games, I just had the PoE1 stats in front of me. D:OS EE achievements say only 7% completed the game and only 2% completed it on tactician.

Well on Steam there's more noobs than on GOG... GOG is

 

[ScrotumBroth]

Game started really hard, but I'm finding it rather easy now that I have more than rags and spoons to fight with. It was more fun when it was hard.

 

[ScrotumBroth]

And it went back to a good difficulty. I dunno, I'm enjoying it heaps more than any other Kickstarter RPG I've played. They're doing a lot of things right to forgive MMO character looks.

 

[Lacrymas]

When does it go back to a good difficulty? Everything after Cyseal is a grindy and slow joke.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I don't see how that Story mode stuff is decline, it's not like the game is forcing you to play that way

Victory is sweeter when it is earned. Giving it away denies the players any kind of psychological attachment (be it intellectual or emotional), trivializing the experience and making you forget it. That's one of the things modern devs don't seem to get, it's counter-intuitive for lasting appeal to make the game easier. Yes, grognards will play on the hardest difficulty, but most players won't.

imagine being upset because other people can see the content in a game

 

[Lacrymas]

Nobody is upset, the player is the one who misses out on sweet, sweet victory. The player is denied satisfaction by design and that's bad, no wonder nobody is talking about D:OS1 and 2 anymore, with the exception of some stragglers here and there.

 

[Sacred82]

Victory is sweeter when it is earned. Giving it away denies the players any kind of psychological attachment (be it intellectual or emotional), trivializing the experience and making you forget it. That's one of the things modern devs don't seem to get, it's counter-intuitive for lasting appeal to make the game easier. Yes, grognards will play on the hardest difficulty, but most players won't.

When I was a young one, I cheated through a lot of games that were interesting to go through but whose bullshit I did not want to deal with.

funny, isn't it. How you'd nowadays just say fuck it, the game these clowns produced is not even worth my time. Not even with cheats/ sitting through story mode.

I can't actually remember the last time I used console cheats or anything like that. OTOH all the information about the game you'd possibly want is available anyways. You have way more ways of ascertaining wether a game is worth your continued time investment or not. Instead of advancing storylines it has become much more about mechanics for me and refining approaches, even if I get bored with a party or character halfway through and start over.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Victory is sweeter when it is earned. Giving it away denies the players any kind of psychological attachment (be it intellectual or emotional), trivializing the experience and making you forget it. That's one of the things modern devs don't seem to get, it's counter-intuitive for lasting appeal to make the game easier. Yes, grognards will play on the hardest difficulty, but most players won't.

When I was a young one, I cheated through a lot of games that were interesting to go through but whose bullshit I did not want to deal with.

funny, isn't it. How you'd nowadays just say fuck it, the game these clowns produced is not even worth my time. Not even with cheats/ sitting through story mode.

I can't actually remember the last time I used console cheats or anything like that. OTOH all the information about the game you'd possibly want is available anyways. You have way more ways of ascertaining wether a game is worth your continued time investment or not. Instead of advancing storylines it has become much more about mechanics for me and refining approaches, even if I get bored with a party or character halfway through and start over.

It's probably because you've gotten older.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Imagine mistaking having to drain a bloated health pool protected behind two extra health pools for TB combat tactics.

 

[Sacred82]

Victory is sweeter when it is earned. Giving it away denies the players any kind of psychological attachment (be it intellectual or emotional), trivializing the experience and making you forget it. That's one of the things modern devs don't seem to get, it's counter-intuitive for lasting appeal to make the game easier. Yes, grognards will play on the hardest difficulty, but most players won't.

When I was a young one, I cheated through a lot of games that were interesting to go through but whose bullshit I did not want to deal with.

funny, isn't it. How you'd nowadays just say fuck it, the game these clowns produced is not even worth my time. Not even with cheats/ sitting through story mode.

I can't actually remember the last time I used console cheats or anything like that. OTOH all the information about the game you'd possibly want is available anyways. You have way more ways of ascertaining wether a game is worth your continued time investment or not. Instead of advancing storylines it has become much more about mechanics for me and refining approaches, even if I get bored with a party or character halfway through and start over.

It's probably because you've gotten older.

Possibly. But being able to draw on other people's experience with the game also plays a role I guess. It's like single player games can be both nowadays; a solitary thing, and something that you share with a community. Before, if you got stuck or fed up, I would cheat past certain things in a game just to feel like I got my money's worth out of it. The whole preparation aspect that is so much autistic fun wasn't so important.

 

[ScrotumBroth]

When does it go back to a good difficulty? Everything after Cyseal is a grindy and slow joke.

I'm currently clearing the Reaper's Coast, and every new area I go to adjusts to my level. Some places have high level bosses, so I really can't complain.

I'm a bit tired of getting silly stat combos on epic and legendary gear from merchants, so have resorted to save scumming until something actually useful generates. Otherwise I'd have nothing to spend money on.

But really enjoying the game, never played Larian games before, so this is a pleasant surprise.

 

[LESS T_T]

Interview with some good questions: https://www.rpgsite.net/interview/7...erview-bringing-2017-s-co-op-crpg-to-consoles

RPG Site: So visually it looks the same?

Micheal Douse: Right. One of the other ones we wanted to fix was the Journal system. We have a completely remade journal. On PC, let's call the journal a mess, there were a lot of words and a lot of text and it was very difficult to follow. So we rewrote the entire journal. We wanted to make it a lot easier to understand.

RPG Site: So is it more task-oriented, or bulleted? The current journal oftentimes gives you hints or implies what needs to be done, without telling you what exactly needs to be done.

Michael Douse: It's the same style of writing, but mainly we've made it shorter. So you don't have to read reams of text for the same amount of information.

RPG Site: On PC will I be able to swap back to the old version of the journal, or is it a switchover?

Michael Douse: On PC you can actually toggle between the two versions of the game completely, journal and all.

RPG Site: But not on Console?

Michael Douse: Correct. Unless we get a lot of feedback through tools like Game Preview, which is a great tool to have for something like this.

RPG Site: I did run into Feedback Billy (an NPC) when I was playing through the game on the show floor, that's an interesting thing that I hadn't seen before. How useful has that been?

Michael Douse: Well, that's because we invented it! And people engage with that more because it's fun and funny, you know?

RPG Site: What was the most positive piece of feedback you've received from Feedback Billy so far?

Michael Douse: The most positive feedback we've found is that people seem to enjoy the quality of the content, and feel like whatever they find in Divinity, nothing feels like filler.

RPG Site: And the most negative?

Michael Douse: We had a lot of players mention that they felt that Act II of the game had too many enemies with both physical and magical armor, and found that really frustrating so in the Definitive Edition, we've made a concentrated effort to rebalance things like that.

RPG Site: One of my few personal hangups was that I felt that game, especially later on, had so many overlapping spell effects and battlefields would end up 'swampy' with fields and fire and smoke here and ice there. Is this something that's been addressed at all?

Michael Douse: We didn't specifically target that issue, but we did go through every encounter in the game to try to rebalance the fights based on how players actually played each of the game's battles. We have a 'heat map' of sorts that shows us how players ended up playing the maps, and we made tweaks to every encounter to adjust for this instead of the assumptions we made about how the battles would be played.

RPG Site: Original Sin I eventually saw the inclusion of new party members and the like, but in II, the party works a little bit differently. Will the Definitive Edition have any sort of content-like additions in a similar manner?

Michael Douse: Not characters, but the major changes are things like Arx (a location found late in the game) which has been completely remade. We've also recorded 40,000 words of new story moments for different arcs late in the game. For instance, we didn't add new characters, but existing characters like Beast will have new story arcs, and we also have a brand new Epilogue to help wrap up everything at the end of the game.

A bit weird interview with Kieron Kelly:

 

[ScrotumBroth]

Michael Douse: We had a lot of players mention that they felt that Act II of the game had too many enemies with both physical and magical armor, and found that really frustrating

Wut? I'm in Act II now, it's totally not frustrating. You just choose the armour type with less points for stun lock purposes. Glad I chose to play the game pre nerf.

 

[Infinitron]

Meet Sir Lora, a squirrel fleeing the Knights of Drey - an apocalyptic order of furry knights who believe in the coming of the Great Acorn. He’ll join you in Fort Joy (along with Quercus - his undead cat mount) and follow you through your adventure, sharing his wit, wisdom, apocalyptic warnings, and even some skill-crafting secrets.

 

[Bohr]

I'm sure they won't mind if we respond using Codex 'emojis'

 

[unfairlight]

:shit emoji: