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

[Popiel]

I'm downloading it right now, never played originals EE, but loved the vanilla, if D:OS2 is more of the same I'm all for it.

 

[imweasel]

• Can only rotate with end and delete keys? *sigh*

Middle mouse button?

You can rebind camera rotation to different keys. QE for example.

The dialogue system. [...] It's uterly jaring to constantly read "Tell him X" "Say to him Y", write like normal people Larian, you have been trying for god knows how many years and still cant do it

This is easily my biggest complaint about the alpha. Larian seems hell bent on avoiding writing dialogue options in the first person, this type of writing is very awkward and non-conventional for an RPG:

Spoiler

Funnily enough Larian is not consistent, the PC and companions will often speak to each other in first person:

Spoiler

Who the fuck greenlighted this mess? Fire the idiot.

Well, Swen is the creative director.

 

[Infinitron]

Funnily enough Larian is not consistent, the PC and companions will often speak to each other in first person:

Because multiplayer: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...e-on-early-access.102060/page-95#post-4732468

 

[Kem0sabe]

Played a bit more, the dialogue style is just... such a terrible, terrible stylistic choice.

Also the writing quality so far has been inconsistent as fuck, and not a marked improvement over other Larian games, if you didnt enjoy Larian writing before, this wont change your mind.

Combat is the real deal breaker tho, its exactly the same as D:OS, which means no buy from me.

 

[CyberWhale]

Larian, reinventing the (dialog) wheel instead of adding day/night cycle. Lizard Christ.

 

[Mazisky]

Larian, reinventing the (dialog) wheel instead of adding day/night cycle. Lizard Christ.

Day night cycles are useless and nobody like them.

Instead, making dialogues in a way it seems you are interacting with a mentally retarded robot is the best improvement ever made in years.

 

[4249]

I haven't been following the development of this one pretty much at all since the Kickstarter and gave the early access a quick first try this morning before work. I can't really understand what the *Say x to y* dialogue style adds to the game and what's the reasoning behind adopting it, especially since the lines seem to be about as long as in the "tarditional" dialogue style. To be honest the way they're done, with an asterisk in front and after each line, makes it look (and hope) like they're some kind of placeholders that will be removed later.

Are they still using the godawful completely randomized loot system or has that aspect been improved?

 

[Roguey]

Why is this in EA? Looks and behaves like a feature complete game. I remember the first DOS release on steam and it was shit. Dunno what is there to add to this one besides some voice acting.

~Balance~

Of course a same-engine sequel beta is going to feel a lot more complete than a making-everything-from-scratch beta.

 

[undecaf]

Gave it an hour and the game feels quite nice, for starters. It looks and works pleasing enough, though a bit more ambient environmental sounds might be a good idea (the lush visuals and the relative silence of it all do not match all that well). Combat feels good (for early on). The indirect dialog does take a bit of getting used to, though, and the game seems happy to heat up the GPU.

 

[Bubbles]

The new dialogue system was part of the initial Kickstarter pitch. Judging from the amount of confused comments in this thread, one might think that a lot of people backed the game without reading the pitch or looking at the screenshots

 

[Roguey]

The new dialogue system was part of the initial Kickstarter pitch. Judging from the amount of confused comments in this thread, one might think that a lot of people backed the game without reading the pitch or looking at the screenshots

A bigger question is "Why would you preorder a sequel to a game you hated?" Larian's going for the Josh Sawyer-approved style of making sequels here.

So like you said, you made a modest impact, you really struck home with some people that really liked the game, and maybe the execution needed some work. So why not just make the execution of what you were going for so that the next one is totally awesome and those things that people loved about it is now even better. Then if there’s stuff that’s janky about it, yeah change the janky stuff, but not if it’s something that those people that loved the game really liked. Just make it better. I think there’s where things go wrong. People look at something and go, “Ok, so we have this core of people that love the game and this other group that fundamentally hates it, so let’s make it a different game.” And it’s like, “Well… no. They hate the game. They didn’t like anything about it. You’re not going to win those people over. They don’t even like the idea of what you’re making.”

 

[undecaf]

I knew the dialog was going to be that way, but the actual practice of it feels surprisingly different from how it looked like in screenshots - the constant back and forth between the NPC's direct lines and the PC's indirect ones.

Doesn't bother me, though.

 

[Athelas]

Most of the indirect lines could be easily tweaked into direct speech, just by removing the 'say that/tell them' parts at the beginning. Maybe they deliberately wrote them that way in case people reacted negatively to the indirect responses so that they could easily change them.

 

[4249]

The new dialogue system was part of the initial Kickstarter pitch. Judging from the amount of confused comments in this thread, one might think that a lot of people backed the game without reading the pitch or looking at the screenshots

Guilty as charged. I pitched in the Kickstarter solely based on their prior efforts. Although looking at the Kickstarter pitch dialogue images now, the placeholder effect is even stronger.

 

[Got bored and left]

The indirect dialogues don't bother me at all, and overall there seems to be a marked improvement over the first game, where the writing was freaking horrible. The game is fun so far, we'll see if it can keep it up (does anyone know how far Early Acces goes? Does it cover the entire Fort Joy storyline?). But it definetely is Original Sin+, so if you didin't like the first one, stay the hell away.

 

[Infinitron]

Indirect dialogue is like keywords, it facilitates tr00 roleplaying instead of putting words in your mouth (where "you" can belong to wildly disparate races and cultures who shouldn't talk in the same way). It's also less work for the developers.

They could just write bland/generic lines of dialogue instead, but I guess they wanted to try and eliminate the charade completely. Maybe people will totally hate it and demand they change to that.

 

[imweasel]

Played a bit more, the dialogue style is just... such a terrible, terrible stylistic choice.

The indirect dialog does take a bit of getting used to, though

the constant back and forth between the NPC's direct lines and the PC's indirect ones.

I am trying to get used to the indirect dialogue system, but it feels like an improvement for the worse to me.

Most of the indirect lines could be easily tweaked into direct speech, just by removing the 'say that/tell them' parts at the beginning. Maybe they deliberately wrote them that way in case people reacted negatively to the indirect responses so that they could easily change them.

Which of the following is better and why?

*Say you didn't see any Voidwoken; they must have gone down with the ship.*
​

or

Say "I didn't see any Voidwoken, they must have gone down with the ship"​

 

[gaussgunner]

I'm guessing there's still no combat speed slider?

Correct. They said it'd be too difficult to implement.

That's funny. This very morning I'm implementing basic combat animations for my 2D crpg..... with at least 2 variables for combat speed (movement speed and after-attack delay). Then it's a simple matter of adding sliders, once I add an options GUI, which is a boring pain in the ass, but DOS2 already has that.

Did they give the same excuse for run speed? I finally tweaked that in DOS EE. Once I found the right tool to unpack MainLSF.pak, I just had to tweak one hex byte in player.lsf. Obviously there's a variable for it. If it can't be changed in-game because it drives a bunch of other stuff at initialization, they could load it from a plain text .ini file so anyone who knows how to use Notepad can change it without jumping through hoops. Or just put it in the Options GUI and say "you must restart the game for this change to take effect."

 

[Bubbles]

Played the EA for nearly 12 hours straight, which is probably unhealthy. No crashes, no noticeable memory leak, remarkably few bugs. Good game too, though the Memory system will probably cause a bit of debate over the next few weeks. Right now it feels pretty restrictive and really forces me to weigh abilities against each other; I personally like that, but I'm sure there'll be a vocal group of people who'll want the old system back.

 

[covr]

I'm guessing there's still no combat speed slider?

Correct. They said it'd be too difficult to implement.

That's funny. This very morning I'm implementing basic combat animations for my 2D crpg..... with at least 2 variables for combat speed (movement speed and after-attack delay). Then it's a simple matter of adding sliders, once I add an options GUI, which is a boring pain in the ass, but DOS2 already has that.

Did they give the same excuse for run speed? I finally tweaked that in DOS EE. Once I found the right tool to unpack MainLSF.pak, I just had to tweak one hex byte in player.lsf. Obviously there's a variable for it. If it can't be changed in-game because it drives a bunch of other stuff at initialization, they could load it from a plain text .ini file so anyone who knows how to use Notepad can change it without jumping through hoops. Or just put it in the Options GUI and say "you must restart the game for this change to take effect."

Does your game have multiplayer?

 

[Mazisky]

Does the combat speed slider (along with other features) been avoided cause of multiplayer?

 

[J_C]

Does the combat speed slider (along with other features) been avoided cause of multiplayer?

Yeah, they said that it would cause asyncronity problems.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Indirect dialogue is like keywords, it facilitates tr00 roleplaying instead of putting words in your mouth (where "you" can belong to wildly disparate races and cultures who shouldn't talk in the same way).They could just write bland/generic lines of dialogue instead, but I guess they wanted to try and eliminate the charade completely.

The idea is pretty good, they just need to get rid of the asteriks, really. Seems like a minor thing to complain about but it just jumps into your face as completely artificial. If the goal is tr00 roleplaying - and by extension a deeper level of immersion - the asteriks make an absurdity of the attempt. Like someone else said in the other thread, it feels like interacting with a computer program or writing code.

 

[Mazisky]

So, seems like day\night schedules and combat speed slider were discarded cause of multiplayer. Also, the weird dialogue system (direct and indirect mixed) cause of multiplayer.

I have some sort of Simcity 2013 deja vu feel, but maybe i'm overexagerating.

It's good for those who love online experiences, tho

 

[CyberWhale]

The new dialogue system was part of the initial Kickstarter pitch. Judging from the amount of confused comments in this thread, one might think that a lot of people backed the game without reading the pitch or looking at the screenshots

Codex members that aren't autistic? Disgusting.