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Divinity Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition

Strange Fellow

Peculiar
Patron
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Jun 21, 2018
Messages
4,013
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
an apocalyptic order of furry knights
rating_agenda.png
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
37287448_251399398988429_8454346769432576000_n.jpg

It looks wrong somehow. Too much space devoted to consoles and 4K HDR. And the new difficulty settingS is actually a setting, the story mode one, at least I don't think we've heard of anything more. Quest tracking is obviously decline of the highest caliber.
 
Self-Ejected

aweigh

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Aug 23, 2005
Messages
17,978
Location
Florida
turn-based games are prime candidates for a console port, especially ones where the battles take place in squares. (think FFT).

also p. sure they're (probably) motivated more by Switch sales than anything else in terms of wanting to port the sequel; Nintendo fans suffered for years thru the Wii and Wii U era without any third-party games, or RPGs either, and now the Switch is their reward. everything on Switch is selling like hot-cakes.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
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Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


https://www.pcgamer.com/divinity-original-sin-2-speedrunner-sets-a-ridiculous-new-record/

Divinity: Original Sin 2 speedrunner sets a ridiculous new record
AlmostPi completed an 'Any%' run through Larian's epic RPG in less than 24 minutes.

According to Steam, I have sunk 114 hours into Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition, on top of 61 hours spent in the "Classic" edition. A lot of that is probably AFK time but there is no doubt that I strolled slowly and stopped to smell the roses. Divinity: Original Sin 2 speedrunner AlmostPi, on the other hand, did not.

AlmostPi was credited by Larian earlier today with blowing through the game in 24 minutes, 58 seconds under the "Any%, Old Patch" rules. That means the only consideration is getting from start to finish as quickly as possible, without worrying about achieving any particular in-game goals or having to use the latest update, which would presumably patch out at least some of the exploits that speedrunners take advantage of when they do their thing.

You can see quite a bit of that in the video of the speedrun: He drops crates and barrels from his inventory to reach otherwise inaccessible locations, for instance, and bypasses just about everything on the map, including ostensibly-mandatory combat. I've said it before and I'll no doubt say it again the next time the topic of speedrunning comes up: It's a terrible way to play a game. But it also speaks to an impressive familiarity with Original Sin 2 (imagine the amount of time a person would have to sink into a game to learn and memorize those angles) and how to bend it in ways that Larian never intended.

Amusingly, Larian's tweet about the new record did not stand for long: Speedrunner Semanari beat it later in the day with a run of 23m26s, but AlmostPi quickly reclaimed the title with a time of 23m16s. You can watch that run in all its glory (and in less time than it takes me to create a single RPG character) below.
 
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unfairlight

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Messages
4,092
Looking back at this game, it just breaks my heart how disappointed I was with it and how good it could have been. I don't know what Larian will make next but since they can't design competent turn based systems, I can only hope that Divinity 3 won't just be Skyrim with their 'quirky' humor.
 

Terra

Cipher
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Sep 4, 2016
Messages
896
I thought it was a fantastic game aside from the phys/magic armour system. It's trickier for a dev to fuck up a franchise when it's turn-based, as opposed to the absolute fuckery we often witness with RTWP (see dragon age "sequels" once console became the focus). Once we see simultaneous development for a sequel the vision will be compromised.
 
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unfairlight

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Aug 20, 2017
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I thought the writing was bad and I didn't really enjoy the combat because EVERYTHING will be covered by cursed fire oil blood of death after 2 turns. I also didn't like that basically every fight is just whittling down the enemy's armor and applying AOE stuns to stunlock them until they are dead. I really enjoyed the Fort Joy section but after that I felt like everything about the game just got worse and worse. I quit at act 3 and just uninstalled the game.
 
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unfairlight

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Messages
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"Mods will fix it" is an excuse for Bethesda games. How about instead of leaving shitty systems up to be fixed by the community, you just don't make shitty systems to begin with.
 

Ivan

Arcane
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Jun 22, 2013
Messages
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Location
California
typical codexian hyperbole? only one way to find it...waiting for Directors Cut for my virginal playthrough
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
"Mods will fix it" is an excuse for Bethesda games. How about instead of leaving shitty systems up to be fixed by the community, you just don't make shitty systems to begin with.

One of the reasons I game on PC is for mods. If I can tailor all the games to my particular tastes, I don't see why that's a bad thing. I'd think on this forum especially people should be extra sensitive to the fact devs don't cater to us, so being able to change their retarded design is not only a plus, but mandatory in some cases.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Interesting interview with Michael Douse: https://metro.co.uk/2018/07/20/divi...nterview-make-sandbox-rpg-accessible-7739933/

"the CRPG renaissance is over", and he thinks their games are less about it than people think they are:

"It’s really funny, I think about that a lot, because I think the CRPG renaissance is over. You can see that in the sales figures for some recent CRPGs."

[...] "But one of the things that really separates us from CRPGs generally is the fact that we have split-screen co-op. It’s a game that’s designed to be played… I mean our creative director, Swen [Vincke], he designed the game because he wanted a game to play with his girlfriend. And that’s really a true story. If you ever meet him you’ll realise how true that is, the company’s run by the two of them.

And this idea of making something tangible that you can sit down and play with friends, it’s really based on a tabletop philosophy more than it is traditional CRPG roots. It just so happens that they’re quite hand-in-hand in most cases. But there are a lot of things in our games that separates them as well. So I think some of it is coincidence, but we can’t deny that we were also part of that renaissance as well."

Market cap, and they have more overlap with XCOM than PoE:

"We’ve done a lot of data crunching, so we know what our market cap is on each console and PC. I think we’re about halfway through our market cap on PC, we can get another one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half million players I think on PC. But it’s true. And these kind of challenges, on how to communicate the game on many, many different levels, and dealing with the fact that people think it’s a CRPG when it’s really a co-op board game. All of these kind of things are a challenge."

[...] "An interesting point about XCOM compared to CRPGs is we actually have more people who are XCOM players than we do that are Pillars Of Eternity players. So those parallels are really there, the data shows us that those parallels are there."


GameCentral talks to the creators of one of the best RPGs ever made, as the award-winning game comes to consoles.

Divinity: Original Sin II is the best game you’ve, probably, never heard of. 2017 is lauded as one of the best years ever for quality video games, and while many years can go by without us awarding a 10/10 score last year saw three: Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, and… Divinity: Original Sin II.

We were far from the only ones to feel that way about the game, but despite its critical response and strong sales the fact that it was PC-only meant that it was never lauded in quite the same way as Nintendo’s titles. But hopefully that will change when the Definitive Edition is released on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 next month.

We played it very briefly at E3 and it seems that not only does the game do everything the PC version did it actually improves on several elements. So we conducted a phone interview with director of publishing Michael Douse at Larian Studios (who also aren’t nearly as famous as they should be) about the game’s success and how such a relatively obscure company could end up making such an incredible game.

Formats: Xbox One and PlayStation 4
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Developer: Larian Studios
Release Date: 31st August 2018


GC: I was all prepared with some World Cup banter [Larian Studios are headquarted in Belgium], but it turns out you’re English?

MD: [laughs] We have four offices all over the world, so I’m from St Albans but based in the Dublin office.

GC: I have to admit I don’t really know anything about Larian or who they are. But Wikipedia tells me you’ve got over a hundred staff… and now you say four studios?

MD: We’re actually 150 people, soon to be 160. But we don’t really have a lot of corporate PR. We’re just happy swanning around doing our thing. But yeah, four studios: one in Saint Petersburg; one in Ghent, which is the head office; one in Dublin; and one in Quebec, Canada.

GC: I understand you’ve been with them for a year, so what do you know of the company’s history?

MD: I think they started in 1992, a small Belgian team working with a lot of German publishers on hardcore, niche RPGs in that era. And from there it grew, with the support of some publishers and the support of the community. The original game, Divine Divinity, had a very, very strong cult following in Germany and in Europe. And at some point, with 2014’s Divinity: Original Sin, it kind of broke out of that Eurocentric niche and into the global market.

And from there we’ve just been spreading out globally. We’ve created sort of a 22-hour-a-day pipeline, almost covering 24 hours a day. Because in each studio the work is not distributed… we don’t have artists in Quebec and programmers in St Petersburg, there’s a bit of everyone in each office. So when you go to sleep someone in the next office picks up that same work.

GC: So it’s the empire on which the sun never sets?

MD: Yeah, it’s almost to that stage.

GC: So it’s kind of like some indie developers who don’t have a central office and they all work remotely, just a little more centralised?

MD: There is some of that trust and dynamism. It’s true, there are a lot of studios working from home and this kind of thing and there are parallels with that still. But we have a very, very strong organisational process. We’re working on Slack, which is a project management application, as well doing a hell of a lot of travelling – I’m travelling all the time to all of the different offices.

And we have our leadership in the company, although it’s quite creatively horizontal there are leads through which people can communicate. So there is a lot of organisation. I mean, the game sold close to 1.6 million copies now on PC, so it’s quite successful. And with that comes a lot of responsibility to make sure those development and publishing pipelines are actually sensible amongst all the chaos. And there still is chaos, but it is a creative industry so that’s how it goes.

GC: Well, I’m glad to hear it’s been commercially successful, but it was also a huge critical hit.

MD: Yeah, so we have a 93 Metacritic rating, we won a BAFTA for multiplayer, it was one of only 15 games in the history of GameSpot to get a 10/10. So the critical acclaim is there, and the reason it’s there is because we’ve got a few words that fly round the office.

One of them is ‘player empathy’, which basically means that whatever you’re doing or whatever you put out you have to make sure that you’re conscious of how players will be receptive of that. No matter how big or small the feature is it’s really about the players.

And the second one is ‘content is king’. Quality of content, quantity of content – everything about the content is king. And everything else kind of comes second to those two concepts.

GC: The first Original Sin hit when there was a general CRPG [computer role-playing game, i.e. games like Baldur’s Gate] renaissance, but would you call that just a coincidence? Was that good luck for you or more or less irrelevant?

MD: It’s really funny, I think about that a lot, because I think the CRPG renaissance is over. You can see that in the sales figures for some recent CRPGs.

GC: Oh, well that didn’t last long.

MD: [laughs] But one of the things that really separates us from CRPGs generally is the fact that we have split-screen co-op. It’s a game that’s designed to be played… I mean our creative director, Swen [Vincke], he designed the game because he wanted a game to play with his girlfriend. And that’s really a true story. If you ever meet him you’ll realise how true that is, the company’s run by the two of them.

And this idea of making something tangible that you can sit down and play with friends, it’s really based on a tabletop philosophy more than it is traditional CRPG roots. It just so happens that they’re quite hand-in-hand in most cases. But there are a lot of things in our games that separates them as well. So I think some of it is coincidence, but we can’t deny that we were also part of that renaissance as well.

GC: What seemed obvious when playing the game is that it was trying to play the role of a human Dungeon Master, to try and make almost any eventuality possible. There was so much in the game that was incidental, talking to ghosts and so on, even though it was really involved. You seemed to almost revel in the fact that these significant parts of the game were optional, even hidden.

MD: Yeah, that’s the idea. As you say, it’s pen and paper rules. The idea that you can walk into any situation and interact in any way you want and have a reaction from that. Fundamentally, that’s the whole point. But the interesting thing about all that is traditionally in video games this is what a publisher would call ‘junk content’ – expensive content that nobody sees.

So you’re not going to see 99% of the content. But 100% of people will see 100% of the content, spread out amongst them all. And then they’ll talk to each other, and then they’ll sort of talk about the things they saw but their friend didn’t see. So even though one player won’t see all of the content, all the players together can talk about all of the content in the game. Because somebody, even if it’s not them, has seen all of it.

And that’s what makes a pen and paper experience really interesting. Because you have these rules and this lore and this rich world. And it’s just this idea that maybe there’s a taste of something else there, or maybe I can take another route over here, or this dialogue option can take me in a completely different way. You don’t need to experience all those different ways to know that they’re there, and therefore enjoy them. And I think that’s really part of what makes CRPGs so interesting.

GC: I think the trick to any open-ended game is that you always want exploration to be rewarded. You want to feel that you’re discovering things that nobody else has seen, that you’re almost tricking the game to find them.

MD: Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re going for. We made a game that we almost challenged people, in a tongue-in-cheek way, to go and break. It’s one of those games where you genuinely cannot tell if something is a feature or a bug. [laughs]

Which is another reason why we do early access and these kind of things. So you can use your combat skills to solve quests in ways that we can’t even possibly predict. There’s no way to predict all of the permutations all of the millions of players will play throughout the game. Which makes the result of that very interesting and very fresh.

The game is a sandbox that’s been designed so that you can play with all the tools we give to make really interesting kind of results.

GC: I’m a big fan of branching narrative, games like Life Is Strange, and also being able to talk your way of combat. Which is something your game allows and seems not only more realistic but often more… cinematic.

MD: It’s immensely important. We have over 1 million fully-voiced, narrated words in our game. We’ve got six origin characters that each have their own story, and so branching narrative for us is sort of a given. What we did on top of that is that we have conflicting narratives, so if you’re in a party with two origin characters, and they both have two different objectives, at times your objectives will conflict with one another.

So for example, at Fort Joy, if you’re playing as Red Prince he needs to find somebody who’s a Dreamer and he has to talk to this Dreamer because he needs to bond with him and talk with him. But if you’re playing Sebille her personal story says that she has to kill the Dreamer, so even when you’re playing together not only do we have branching narratives we actually have conflicting narratives which adds a whole new layer to how they can branch. Which is not something I think another game is doing right now.

GC: Well, I…. no, we can’t mention the ending can we?

MD: [laughs]

GC: The other thing is the writing is surprisingly good, for what I originally assumed was a fairly small Belgian team. So who writes the script?

MD: It’s funny you say that because the writers are about 50 feet away from me right now.

GC: Oh, the writing is awful tell them.

MD: [laughs] They get that all the time. [laughs] I think we have six writers now, we’re hiring more. So we’ve got some writers, we’ve got our lead writers – our writing director is based in Ghent, our lead writer’s based in Dublin with most of our other writers. We have a big team of writers writing each of the individual characters, we even had somebody who was in charge of writing all the animals in the game.

GC: So they’re not any particular nationality? You didn’t go out and say we must have American writers, for example?

MD: No, no. The only thing is naturalised English as much as possible, but we’ve got some Belgian writers, we’ve got some American writers – which are similar in English to Belgian… I kid! And we have Irish writers too. And now we have an English writer.

GC: The script is great but the one issue I took with the storytelling, and this is a problem I have with a lot of fantasy games, like Elder Scrolls, is that the top level lore of the world is disappointingly generic. And the cover art was the same – just super generic. Presumably you’re doing that to attract fantasy fans but isn’t that putting off even more people?

MD: Now this depends on which cover art you mean, are you talking about the original?

GC: Errr… yes. With the sexy elf woman and the dwarf and all that. Is it different for the Definitive Edition?

MD: If it’s the new one then that’s a shame because we’ve changed it.

GC: [quickly googles cover art] Oh, well that’s much better. Wow, that was a quick resolution to my complaint.

MD: [laughs] Well that’s good, because when I came to Larian the first thing I did was change the key art. Because I share the concerns, it is a bit generic and it does focus a bit too much on what we take for granted for fantasy universes and it’s quite derivative. So we created new art that’s more indicative of the journey. They’re more in action poses, they have faces, they have more emotion in the poses.

And in terms of the world-building of the game it’s a very system-focused game. It’s a very gameplay-driven design philosophy at Larian. So all of these things such as world-building and overarching narratives are being improved. And a lot of the improvements are coming through the Definitive Edition, where we fix some of the explanation and the carry-through of the story – especially in the third act. And the epilogue has been completely remade to give you better narrative closure.

So you see, these points that you’re making are really the backbone of what makes the Definitive Edition. Because if you’ve said that you don’t like the key art somebody at Larian has said that too. And that means multiply that by a thousand or ten-thousand and therefore that needs to be fixed. So we fixed it.

GC: Good, well done to you. Because in terms of gameplay I think the only real complaint, about the journal and inventory, has also been addressed?

MD: Yeah, we fixed that too. So basically the problem was it was too text heavy, it didn’t really milestone what you were doing. If you came back to the game after not playing it for a week you didn’t really know where you were. So we completely rewrote and re-scripted the journal to make it much more concise and much more bullet-pointed, to give you all of the information you need about your quest much, much more quickly. As well as the opportunity to add map makers so you can really get a sense of where you are in the world and where to go.

GC: I did play 10 minutes or so at E3 and it seemed to work great. But I’m surprised you didn’t have any problem getting this to work on even the PS4 Pro or Xbox One X, the split-screen in particular.

MD: The split-screen wasn’t a problem. It’s our engine, and the engine was always developed with consoles in mind. It’s essentially the same engine we used for Divinity II, the 3D one that was on Xbox 360, it’s just been developed and iterated over years and years and years. So all of those features have always been designed with consoles in mind.

Of course, when we’re building for consoles we are having to spec to very specific architecture. And that’s been a challenge, but it’s a challenge that just takes a number of people a number of months to complete. Which obviously translates into money, but essentially it’s just putting good people onto the job and waiting for it to happen.

The biggest issue we had was HDR, and the reason we had that is because nobody at Larian understood what HDR was or why it was important. [laughs] But now we have it and they looked at it and they were like, ‘Oh wow! Okay, now I get’. So it was these kind of nice-to-have features that I was pushing for and they finally understood them and saw them and implemented them.

GC: And so the co-op works just like the PC? Both characters can go anywhere they want in the world and there’s no rubber-banding?

MD: No, no. Not at all. We’re still looking into whether this is true, but you’re a journalist so you can tell me…. but essentially it is the only RPG on console that has split-screen. It just is. From what I can see.

GC: Hmm… probably this gen. Diablo III was co-op but not split-screen, and it’s more of an action game anyway. The closest thing almost seems like the Lego games, which is very much on the other end of the scale when it comes to gameplay complexity! But they are great fun, so thinking about it: why wouldn’t someone come along and make something with the same social appeal but a much deeper game? It’s a mystery to me why so many seemingly obvious ideas are just left on the table.

MD: It’s a mystery to me too but I think a part of it is that CRPGs, if you’re really thinking from a fundamentalist point of view, are played in single-player, and they just are. And the amount of R&D you need to put into developing a split-screen RPG of this depth is crazy, to get that working. You can’t do it on Unreal 4 or Unity or something like that.

The technology to do it is a big investment, but it’s an investment that I think is worth it because… it’s like board games, right? It’s a very tangible, tactile experience. The level of interaction you have with your friends and the characters inside of the game, and how that translates outside of the game. It really adds another layer of social depth.

GC: It frustrates me that local multiplayer is so rare nowadays, considering how intrinsically more entertaining it is than online. If you can’t knock the controller out of someone’s hand when you’re playing you’re losing so much…

MD: Yeah, in our game we have in-game versions of that. So for example, you can take a vial of poison, dye it red, give it your friend who thinks it a health potion and he’ll drink it and he’ll die. So when you’re doing that on the couch it’s a much more kind of…

GC: The other person can retaliate by hitting you!

MD: Exactly!

GC: Was the original successful on consoles?

MD: The original?

GC: Err… Divinity: Original Sin I. But that’s the other problem… it’s not just the old artwork, the games are lumbered with such terrible, forgettable names.

MD: We’ve been having discussions about that internally. I mean, the root cause is essentially German publishers. [laughs] Because when you’re creating a game like this you create the branding from scratch many, many, many years ago and it’s Germans that are dictating what it sounds like in their language. So we’re having discussions about what we do in the future about the name and stuff. But it’s definitely one of those concerns that we wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, that’s not true!’

GC: [laughs] It sounds like a trivial complaint but I’m always berating indie developers in particular for the terrible names they give their games, which must put off so many people.

MD: You’re preaching to the choir! I’m a publisher guy, but I definitely see that a lot.

GC: It is always about the marketing. I’m a big fan of turn-based strategy games, especially XCOM – which your combat has something in common with, and I foolishly imagined it was going to be a big mainstream hit when they got it working so well on consoles. But of course it was a mild hit at best. But it seems with your games they should be much more successful than they are too, much better known…

MD: We’ve done a lot of data crunching, so we know what our market cap is on each console and PC. I think we’re about halfway through our market cap on PC, we can get another one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half million players I think on PC. But it’s true. And these kind of challenges, on how to communicate the game on many, many different levels, and dealing with the fact that people think it’s a CRPG when it’s really a co-op board game. All of these kind of things are a challenge.

And we’re growing, we’re successful, we’re not desperate. So working these things out with this kind of safe level of iteration, and growing as a publishing team and growing as a developer, it’s really a privileged place to be in. Because we’re not scrambling, we’re just listening and we’re watching and sort of growing. So I completely agree.

An interesting point about XCOM compared to CRPGs is we actually have more people who are XCOM players than we do that are Pillars Of Eternity players. So those parallels are really there, the data shows us that those parallels are there. But the most difficult thing, and I’ll tell you this, is trying to explain to publishing people why the game is such a success. It’s not the players.

The players, if you put it in their hands they have a great time, but people who look at this and go, ‘Well, why is this a success?’ They can’t work it out, and they don’t realise that it’s closer to a game like XCOM than it is Pillars and all of these kinds of things. So these are the greatest challenges. It’s more on the business side than it is on the community side.

The community really have our back. It’s really, really fun to work with everyone on that.
 

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