Divinity: Original Sin 2 Early Access Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Aenra]

Swen himself is against explicit quest markers ...
Even Divinity 2 didn't have quest markers.

ahem..

 

[LESS T_T]

Oh right, WOW marker

 

[LESS T_T]

Look At Him Go!

Good times in the office working on a creature's movements! Be sure to turn on the sound ;-)

 

[Lurker King]

Yeah, but that's a very crude summary of some of the problems of writing, they're also not the only aspects of it, there's also form, stylistic and thematic coherence, poetics, world-building, sleight of hand tricks, different techniques etc. But yeah, most "video media" is atrocious in all these aspects, but I'd argue all media is like that, good examples are hard to find in all of them, books have the added benefit of having been around a long time to amass a large corpus of genius.

Suppose you are reading a novel. Every narrative tool, the style and the descriptions allow the reader to immerse himself in a fictional world. Now, it seems to me that most of the criticism about cRPG writing consists in comparing a piece of dialogue and ending slide of a cRPG with literary classics, and dismissing them because they don’t have the same sophistication. That’s idiotic for two reasons: (1) cRPGs present audio-visual narratives, so the “writing” part actually includes the art, the soundtrack, the sound effects, etc., even the voice over is an element of the quality of the narrative; (2) because cRPGs are first and foremost games, the narrative part is restricted to gameplay elements, which involves budget restrictions, especially the audio-visual elements I mentioned above; (3) the audio-visual elements mentioned in (1), plus quest design, plus budget restrictions and the inherent limitations of working with teams makes really difficult to achieve excellence. (4) it’s also difficult to achieve excellence in literature or cinema, but I don’t see anyone saying that there is something wrong with literature or cinema because of that. (5) if I’m right, it follows that many Triple-A games (Far Cry, God of War, etc.) are better written games than most cRPGs, even if they are much worse games.

 

[LESS T_T]

Leave it to the professionals

Some of you have been asking how the voiceover work is going...*

*Just kidding, we're going to let the professionals handle this. Thanks anyway Stijn.

 

[Jezal_k23]

Nice.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/larianstudios/divinity-original-sin-2/posts/1842838

Kickstarter Update #35 - Tentacle Hands, Chicken Fingers and More!

This day has been coming for a long time. You and your merry band have grown apart. What started as minor differences in ideals has culminated into outright hostility and arguments. It’s time to kiss this party goodbye.

There’s three of them against one of you, but you’re a seasoned Knight, full of Constitution and Strength. You’re not afraid of a few scrawny magic users. You ready your blade and rush in to cut one down, but, suddenly, she sprouts wings and flies away.

Well that’s new.

You turn to the next player, but he is already summoning a fiendish creature to aide him in battle. It grimaces defiantly at you, but you make short work of it.

“Is that all you’ve got?” You taunt, but the Conjurer smiles as he raises a blood totem over the mess you’ve made. Three other totems appear around you. You hesitate.

That’s when your third party member raises her arms. She looks at you sadly. You think maybe she’s going to ask everyone to stop, or perhaps call for a surrender. Instead, her face tightens in resolve, her eyes grow cold and she screams:

“CHICKEN CLAW!”

With a roar of wind you feel your entire world tilt and slam around. The trees around you shoot up to enormous heights, your bones and flesh grind together in incredible pain. In a moment, the haze is gone, and you can see the horror the Metamorph has wrought.

You open your new chicken beak to cry out for help, but all that comes out is -

Welcome to Kickstarter Update #35!


You voted for them during the stretch goals and today we’re now ready to introduce the Polymorph and Summoning skill schools!

Swen has more information about our latest additions and, in an effort to help explain the new concepts, has invented an entirely new technique for sharing the changes. We’re calling it: Cooking with Sourcery. By we I mean just two of us in the office.

The good news is that you can check all of this out yourself as we're launching a major patch to Early Access (which is available now on Steam and GOG) today!

Praise the Divine!

Summoning Succotash!

The Summoning school uses Incarnates and totems to make life a living hell for opponents. Both Incarnates and Totems take on powers based on the surface they are summoned on, and they can be buffed as well. Every Ability Point in the Summoning combat ability will increase your summons' Vitality, Damage, Magic Armour and Physical Armour. So go nuts!

Incarnates can be further infused with powers that allow it to be a flexible and efficient partner. A small, hairy, creepy little partner. Anyway, for example, you could use Power Infusion on it, which lets your Incarnate cast Warrior skills like Whirlwind and Battering Ram, and it also beefs him up with physical armour. If you’re more interested in ranged attacks and magic armour, go for the Farsight Infusion instead!

On the automatic-home-protection side of things, Totems automatically launch different forms of attacks, buffs and debuffs, making them a useful tool for controlling movement and the tide of battle.

The current skill list for Summoning in the Early Access is:

• Conjure Incarnate - Conjure a personal elemental that matches the ground surface it's summoned onto. Your Incarnate can be buffed with Infusions.
• Elemental Totem - Target a ground surface and conjure a totem of the corresponding element. Each turn, this totem will fire a projectile at enemies in sight.
• Dimensional Bolt - Shoot a volatile bolt that deals damage of a random type, and then creates a corresponding surface.
• Farsight Infusion - Unlock ranged attack for your Incarnate. Buffs Magic Armour.
• Power Infusion - Unlock Whirlwind and Rush for your Incarnate. Buffs Physical Armour.
• Rallying Cry - Target character regenerates Vitality and Magic Armour according to the number of allied characters and totems in their vicinity.
• Supercharger - Target summon deals increased damage during its next turn-- then explodes. BIG BADDA BOOM!

We’ve created a new preset class called the Conjurer to take advantage of this new school and we hope you’ll experiment and play around with all of the combinations and possibilities. Especially when you combine these skills with the Polymorph skills!

Chicken It Out

Speaking of Polymorph, let’s talk about it! This skill was by far the most popular skill school in our vote, so we knew we had to make it extremely awesome. If Swen’s demonstrations with the Chariza--we mean with the chicken--didn’t convince you, then we don’t know what will!

Polymorphs are inspired by nature and their magic takes some of the best and worst aspects of other creatures and puts them to combat use. For example, you can grow wings and fly over surfaces, and then chain that with the Flight skill for longer distance flight. The Polymorph combat ability gives players one free Attribute Point to your avatar for every Ability Point invested.

The Early Access will include seven insane skills:

• Bull Horns - Magnificent horns sprout from your forehead. You can rush at your enemies and gore them.
• Tentacle Lash - With tentacular (it’s a word, look it up) limbs, lash out at the enemy and Disarm them.
• Chicken Claw - Turn the target character into a chicken. Squawk!
• Heart of Steel - Your skin turns to steel, increasing Physical Armour and regenerating a portion of it every turn.
• Chameleon Cloak - Become one with the shadows so that you're invisible to your opponents.
• Spread Your Wings - Grow wings that unlock Flight skill. You ignore ground surfaces as long as you keep moving.
• Skin Graft - Reset all cooldowns, yet also strip off all Physical Armour and Magic Armour. Removes Burning, Poisoned, Bleeding.

We’ve created the Metamorph preset class so you can adapt and transform and be as tricksy as mother nature herself. We’re not telling you to combine some of these polymorph skills with summoning skills, but we’re also not telling you NOT to do that. Have fun!


War! What Is It Good For?
The new skill schools aren’t the only big addition coming with this patch! We’re also letting you deep role-players have even more fun with the addition of the “Make War” option.

“Make War”, much as the name suggests, allows you to turn your former friends into enemies. When you select this option, you will become enemies with your ex-party members and will enter turn-based combat with each other whenever you approach. Whoever runs away or dies loses the battle. Since your character will really die if there is no one around to revive them, maybe don’t choose this option unless you think you’re really not ready to reconcile and just talk things out.

If you don’t plan to fight your old party mates, but just want to do some things behind their backs, be sure to check the option to prevent them from seeing your quest journal. You sneaky sneak you.

But that’s not all!
Oh you thought we were done? This isn’t over yet! Patch v3.0.50.423 is full of other goodies, fixes and adjustments.

• We’ve updated Origin stories and how party members engage with NPCs.
• We’ve updated Examining a character to be more efficient.
• We’ve added a new Arena level: Castle Outskirts.
• Your friend AI 2.0 has been given a slight upgrade. Don’t be too frightened.
• We’ve made some changes to combats in and around Fort Joy.
• We’ve tweaked a few gameplay items such as lockpicking, ladder animation, targeting and more.
• We got out the shoe and destroyed some bugs!
• And tons more!

For the full run-down of changes head to our patch notes and dive into all those bullet points!

This patch was created using your feedback (and some magical analytical spells), so we hope you will continue sharing your thoughts and impressions with us so we can keep making Divinity: Original Sin II better and better.

And remember!
We’d like to remind you that this patch affects so many areas that previous saved games will no longer be compatible. But don’t panic! If you want to continue playing an old saved game you can still do so by following these instructions:

1. In your Steam library, right click the game Divinity: Original Sin 2 and select Properties

2. In the Properties screen, click on the tab BETAS

3. In BETAS, click the arrow to open the dropdown

4. Choose the branch you would like to play (ea_version_1 - For saves with version 2.0.1.165.341 if you want to play the original launch version of D:OS2, ea_version_2 - For saves with version 3.0.5.530 to play the first patch, or ea_version_3 - For saves with version 3.0.14.546 to play the second patch) and click Close.

Now Steam will not update your version, so you will be able to load your old savegames and keep soldiering on.

PAX It Up!

We also spent the past weekend in Boston, Massachusetts for PAX East. Despite the cold weather, there were tons of gamers all in one glorious place!

Our devs and awesome volunteers had a blast talking with fans, explaining the new demo and gathering feedback about the changes. Your energy at these live events really helps to motivate us and to remind us what it’s really all about. We can’t wait for PAX West!

A very special thank you to our volunteers. You all were so helpful and so great at sharing your passion for the game with new fans Thank you for donating your time to our booth and we hope you enjoyed PAX East!

The Future is… Soon
We’re still hard at work finishing Divinity: Original Sin II and there are a few more features you can look forward to in the coming months:

• Skill crafting
• Relationship systems
• The Undead
• The modding tool
• Game Master mode
• And plenty more!

We’re looking forward to getting these features out so we can hear what you think, but we want to make sure we get them right. And a timetable for release is coming soon, thank you for continuing to be patient while we strive to create the best product possible.

Now. It’s time to get back to work.

Shoutouts
But before we go, we have some shout outs to share! Sacred Fire deserves your attention and then your cash! It’s an rpg that focuses on the psychology of the characters, as opposed to focusing on weapons or attacks or damage types. The Caledonia setting, along with the idea of engaging in combat with emotions and utilizing your inner strength, as opposed to just physical strength, is really intriguing to us, and we want to play it! So let’s get them to their goal!

Go check out Torment: Tides of Numenera. We haven’t had a chance to play it ourselves yet, but we love the folks over at InXile Entertainment so play it and tell us what you think!

WARTILE is a real time strategy game featuring minis! They’re currently in Early Access and we want to help them get a bigger audience, so check the game out and be sure to share your feedback with the developers after you play!

 

[J_C]

The codex has to run coop sessions with this game. It looks so much fun!

 

[Wild Slop]

As of this posting an interview with Sven is set in about 15 minutes. https://www.twitch.tv/egx

 

[LESS T_T]

It's live:

 

[LESS T_T]

Not much new thing, just a playthrough of very early area, and it was too short.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/132196510?t=02h31m46s

 

[Wild Slop]

Too bad. I was hoping for a jam-packed hour of full of goodness.

 

[JasonNH]

I'm glad they aren't going to try and voice the whole thing. I hope it stays that way when they try to port it to consoles later.

 

[Infinitron]

LESS T_T, everybody else - FYI, Twitch archive automatic embedding is currently broken. Here's how you do it manually:

[MEDIA=twitch]channel=egx;video_id=132196510;t=02h31m45s[/MEDIA]

 

[Infinitron]

 

[LESS T_T]

http://steamcommunity.com/games/435150/announcements/detail/665811780572453478

Hotfix v3.0.52.425 - The dead walk no more

New features, while exciting, sometimes come with adorable little bugs in tow. In the event that a few slip through our virtual net, we try to squash them as quickly as possible. This hotfix fixes the following problems:

• Corpses standing up after playing for over one hour
  
• Doors being open visually, while they were actually closed
  
• Being able to share skills via character portrait
  
• Corrupt textures on certain characters in the character creation screen

Savegames are compatible with v3.0.50.423.

Thank you for the quick feedback on our most recent patch. Please keep posting any issues you have!

 

[Wild Slop]

If this game doesn't come out by Summer I'm going to have a chimp out temper tantrum and throw shit at the walls.

 

[Valky]

I hope Swen plans on letting me buy that shirt he's wearing. I want a D:OS2 shirt.

 

[JasonNH]

 

[Aenra]

674 floppy disks ^^

Sometimes i forget how far ahead we've gone. I still think of three floppies as 'wow, much content!'.
And April 1st aside, it really would look cool as an 8bit, would pay twice easily for such a backport.

 

[Gay-Lussac]

Is there going to be a codex play group for this game?

 

[LESS T_T]

Larian added "Game Master build" to their internal Steam branches: https://steamdb.info/app/435150/history/?changeid=2866130

I guess GM mode is in quite an advanced stage.

(Also it looks like they're going to release another hotfix: https://steamdb.info/app/435150/history/?changeid=2864128)

 

[biggestboss]

At the risk of harvesting a bunch of negative buttons, is it worth buying into D:OS2 early access if I couldn't get into the first one? Also, how much content (time wise) is there in EA right now?

 

[JasonNH]

Hard to advise without knowing what you didn't like about the first one. That said, not sure why someone would want to dive into early access if not already a fan boi. You have to be willing to lose saved games, do things over again, and deal with an imbalanced and unfinished game.

 

[biggestboss]

Hard to advise without knowing what you didn't like about the first one. That said, not sure why someone would want to dive into early access if not already a fan boi. You have to be willing to lose saved games, do things over again, and deal with an imbalanced and unfinished game.

Fair enough. I guess my issue with the first game was how the dialogue system worked since I played solo. Also, there was something about the art style that bothered me about the first game where this second one personally appeals to me from screenshots and footage. The Steam reviews for this game's EA is really making me want to put money on it as well.