Divinity Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition

[Lacrymas]

We know it's shit, lol.

 

[Roguey]

Thursday: Wow, this is great!
Sunday: Dropped.

Looking forward to inevitably liking this.

 

[Abu Antar]

Perkel To be honest, I was waiting for the meltdown.

 

[Infinitron]

These criticisms probably have merit, but I feel like there's some apples vs oranges going on here, because Divinity: Original Sin 2 was clearly designed around you playing a larger party than the first game. Hence the fewer actions per turn, nerfing of crowd control, etc.

 

[Abu Antar]

These criticisms probably have merit, but I feel like there's some apples vs oranges going on here, because Divinity: Original Sin 2 seems to have been designed around you playing a larger party than the first game. Hence the fewer actions per turn, nerfing of crowd control, etc.

I don't know, man. All the changes in the game are for the worse. Fewer actions per turn and crowd control nerfing isn't the only problem. I was one of the first to mention my dislike of the armor system and number bloat. I'm just not very vocal about it. The problem is that the changes made removes the "fun" of the first game for me. The attribute system is worse, skills and talents aren't as good. Overall, the changes made makes me like the original game more than both the EE and DOS2. Most people had a 4 man party in DOS if they didn't take the Lone Wolf talent. I don't hate the game, but in general, DOS is not an improvement over DOS. I got the feeling that random weapons were handled better until the numbers bloat kicked in. I was also disappointed by the fact that unique items were more or less useless.

 

[Infinitron]

These criticisms probably have merit, but I feel like there's some apples vs oranges going on here, because Divinity: Original Sin 2 seems to have been designed around you playing a larger party than the first game. Hence the fewer actions per turn, nerfing of crowd control, etc.

I don't know, man. All the changes in the game are for the worse. Fewer actions per turn and crowd control nerfing isn't the only problem. I was one of the first to mention my dislike of the armor system and number bloat. I'm just not very vocal about it. The problem is that the changes made removes the "fun" of the first game for me. The attribute system is worse, skills and talents aren't as good. Overall, the changes made makes me like the original game more than both the EE and DOS2. Most people had a 4 man party in DOS if they didn't take the Lone Wolf talent. I don't hate the game, but in general, DOS is not an improvement over DOS. I got the feeling that random weapons were handled better until the numbers bloat kicked in. I was also disappointed by the fact that unique items were more or less useless.

Yes, I was only referring to Perkel's first two criticisms in his above post.

It's obvious that the game's core vision was that you would have two characters (remember they only added two more companions in a post-release DLC). It turns out that it was pretty fun with four characters too, but I guess that was sort of "accidental".

In general, I think lots of things that the Codex likes in RPGs work best in single-character RPGs.

 

[Roguey]

These criticisms probably have merit, but I feel like there's some apples vs oranges going on here, because Divinity: Original Sin 2 was clearly designed around you playing a larger party than the first game. Hence the fewer actions per turn, nerfing of crowd control, etc.

Fairly early on, quite a few people were saying that taking lone wolf on two characters and going all-in on physical damage was the best way to play, and as far as I know, they haven't nerfed it.

 

[Black]

remember the companions were only added in a post-release DLC

But henchPEOPLE were available from the start.

 

[Fairfax]

In general, I think lots of things that the Codex likes in RPGs work best in single-character RPGs.

 

[Infinitron]

In general, I think lots of things that the Codex likes in RPGs work best in single-character RPGs.

Impactful abilities that can change the battlefield. Character building choices that really matter because you can't rely on another character in your party to fill the gap. Smaller, more carefully designed battles instead of trash mobs.

Some posts of mine from 2016:

What you want is the feeling of "my choices have an IMPACT that I FEEL". This is much, much easier to do with one character. Because he's one guy and everything depends on him. Suddenly that heavy suit of armor you choose to wear doesn't just reduce X from incoming DPS that the other guy in your party can easily heal anyway - it's a life or death choice. Suddenly that weapon you found isn't vendor trash because two other guys in your party already have a weapon that fills the same role - it's the only way for you to defeat a particular encounter.

I believe this is why folks on this forum really like these new single-character RPGs like AoD and Underrail. Every difference in your character build is something you really feel, because that's all you've got. You'll never get that "omg, I created a different character and combat is entirely different now!" feel in a party-based RPG, that's just not how these games work.

(This may also explain the popularity of those BG2 mage duels. What BG2 does in effect is collapse the Baldur's Gate gameplay from a party-based RPG down to a single character RPG where every decision you make on how to configure one single character (your mage) has a powerful impact. If he has the right spell, you live. If he doesn't, you die.)

 

[Kem0sabe]

If you go back to codex best all time rpg lists, most of the top entries will be party based rpgs. Personally i prefer single character rpgs if they are action rpgs, while I perder party in turn based or rtwp.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

If you go back to codex best all time rpg lists, most of the top entries will be party based rpgs. Personally i prefer single character rpgs if they are action rpgs, while I perder party in turn based or rtwp.

No: Fallout, Fallout 2 (don’t quibble), Bloodlines, Gothic 2, New Vegas. That’s half the top ten.

 

[imweasel]

It is debatable if Fallout 1 + 2 are party-based or not. Followers can join your party, the only difference from other games is that the companions are scripted.

 

[Kem0sabe]

No: Fallout, Fallout 2 (don’t quibble), Bloodlines, Gothic 2, New Vegas. That’s half the top ten.

Fallout 1, 2 and new Vegas allow party... While Gothic 2 and bloodlines are single character only.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

No: Fallout, Fallout 2 (don’t quibble), Bloodlines, Gothic 2, New Vegas. That’s half the top ten.

Fallout 1, 2 and new Vegas allow party... While Gothic 2 and bloodlines are single character only.

Eh, no full party control = single character.

 

[Darth Roxor]

(remember the companions were only added in a post-release DLC).

fedora and jahan were there from the start

 

[Haplo]

No: Fallout, Fallout 2 (don’t quibble), Bloodlines, Gothic 2, New Vegas. That’s half the top ten.

Fallout 1, 2 and new Vegas allow party...

So I guess Neverwinter Nights is party based also?

 

[Perkel]

These criticisms probably have merit, but I feel like there's some apples vs oranges going on here, because Divinity: Original Sin 2 was clearly designed around you playing a larger party than the first game. Hence the fewer actions per turn, nerfing of crowd control, etc.

In DOS1 you control 2 main party members and 2 characters outside of them which are either pre created or custom made by you. So no it is 4 vs 4.

fedora and jahan were there from the start

Henchmen were also from start

 

[LESS T_T]

Here we go. Interview with system designer Nick Pechenin on the armor system: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news...rnbased_combat_of_Divinity_Original_Sin_2.php

Designing drama into the turn-based combat of Divinity: Original Sin 2

There’s a special kind of anarchy in the fights you experience in Divinity: Original Sin II.

This computer RPG, released last year by Larian Studios, encapsulates the freeform promise of the genre, allowing you to tackle its quests and face its world’s threats in wildly varying ways. Nowhere is that principle better expressed than when you’re in combat. In any fight, half the battlefield can end up on fire and the other drenched in acid. The air might be thick with electrified clouds, and summoned characters and resurrected corpses wander free.

Victory often feels as if it’s plucked from the jaws of death – or from chaos – and yet DOS2’s combat design is founded on establishing predictability for players, so they can make and execute plans, tight pacing, and also a sense of a story within the battle. As systems designer Nick Pechenin says, “Fights are basically performances, and you want some kind of plot in them.”

The trouble with armor
DOS2’s combat design is a close evolution from 2014’s Divinity: Original Sin, but Larian Studios knew the original had some issues. The team liked the depth of its combat, but felt that it tipped the balance too far towards chaos. The problem was with its armor system.

Armor had the chance of blocking status effects, meaning that if you planned to knock a bunch of enemies out with a stun attack, you didn’t know for sure it’d work in every case. “The good part about this was that every encounter felt different, so when you started a fight it felt fresh. Things went wrong and right in very different ways,” says Pechenin. “But at the same time it really prevented long-term planning, because you didn’t know how many people you’d stun, so you couldn’t predict what you’d do next turn, and because of this you just wouldn’t think about the next turn.”

So one of the big changes to DOS2’s combat design was to its armor system. Rather than absorbing a proportion of incoming damage, armor completely negates it. There are two armor types: physical and magic, which negates any magical attack, including negative status effects. But as these values take damage they’re whittled down, and once gone, the character is left open to losing HP and vulnerable to status effects.

So far, so deterministic, but Larian wanted attacks to retain a ‘spicy’ feeling. The solution was a small variability in incoming damage which may entirely knock armor out, or it may not. “So there’s still some RNG there and you don’t know exactly how things will turn out, but you have a high chance that things will go as you want them to,” says Pechenin. “But at other times the game will throw a curve ball at you and make you scramble to find a new plan.”

Pacing a battle
The next challenge was to set the pacing of battles. Larian wanted each to last an ideal number of turns. They wanted the time it took to destroy the armor on an enemy to feel good, as well as the number of turns that it’d take to stun an enemy, to destroy the armor on a player character, or to kill them.

It was not easy, since DOS2 features so many variables. Larian’s combat designers never know how many characters the player will be fielding in an encounter, since one or more of them can be off exploring an entirely different part of the map.

The characters who are in the fight will be equipped with very different armor and weapons, which might be very powerful because they’ve explored every inch of the maps, or they might be very weak because they’ve only played through the main campaign. They may be high level for the area, or low. Players might have unlocked many different spells and abilities, or very few. They may not know how to use them well, and they may simply forget to use them. They may have large stocks of consumables such as grenades and potions, or they might be hoarding them. In short, the dynamic range of the potential power a player fields in any given encounter is very wide.

Larian’s approach to balancing enemies’ armor and HP values was to create a curve to the way HP increases as characters level up, and then to use that a baseline value from which enemies’ stats would be calculated.

“Getting that curve nailed down was quite a challenge, just because of how much extra content we have,” says Pechenin. Some players might have discovered an amazing sword that allows them to one-shot enemies, which effectively reduced the challenge to nothing.

Embracing OP design
But rather than balance out these extremes, Larian embraced them. “Our usual philosophy is for player to be as OP as they want to be,” says Pechenin. But to mitigate the effects of a player finding an amazing sword, they also steepened the HP curve so that in a few hours that sword will be next to useless, returning the character to the baseline – unless they’ve found an excellent replacement.

In truth, he admits they went a little far with the steepness, because players complained about their super weapons getting superseded too soon, and so they patched in a slightly gentler curve. “This is completely valid, but in general the curve allowed us to give something very impactful to the player but still present them challenges even after 50-60 hours of playtime.”

And beyond just placing powerful swords around the maps, Larian is also comfortable with players exploiting its complex systems. If a player figures out a way of teleporting lava into a fight and drops it on a troll’s head, that’s a good thing, providing a good player story and fulfilling a lot of the reasons why many people play CRPGs. But as a player, you should have to work for it, whether creatively or effortfully. “And once you’ve used an exploit like this, it shouldn’t be universal, it shouldn’t carry you to the end of the game,” says Pechenin. “That would be no fun, and kind of boring.”

One of the ways Larian discourages exploits – and players favoring certain tactics too much – is in DOS2’s combat design. In Act III of the game, many of the encounters are specifically set up to flummox certain powerful tactics. So, for example, in one fight the player faces enemies with the Fortify ability, which prevents them from being teleported by the player. If they’ve been playing so far by teleporting enemies into killzones, they’ll need to scramble to come up with a new approach.

Making turn-based fights feel desperate
Still, whether you have a good strategy or not, DOS2’s battles have the knack of making you feel you’re hanging on by your fingernails. “We see the best tactics when the player realizes a fight that’s going OK goes for the worst,” Pechenin says. If you see a chunk wiped off your mage’s physical armor it can often seem if it’s about to become dangerously vulnerable, even if across the party you have suite of fantastic powers that will see you victorious.

One of the ways the game conjures this feeling is by managing armor and HP values in relation to the number of hits Larian wants it to take for them to be eliminated. So, if they want a player’s character to ideally be killed in five hits, they have enemies’ damage output kill them in 4.5 hits. The character still dies in five hits, but their HP bar will look more depleted and have just a sliver left before they receive the final blow.

“Just seeing this bar being very short will feel a lot more threatening,” says Pechenin. “You don’t know where it’s going to go, and you’ll be pushed to focus on this guy.”

Moreover, Larian’s careful to ensure DOS2’s AI picks its targets in the right way. They don’t want them to be merciless, always focusing on the weakest player character. “Of course for AI it always makes sense to pile on one person and just murder them completely, but for the player it really just sucks, because the damage isn’t spread over their characters,” says Pechenin. “They want to feel threat piling up, not having their characters one-shotted without being able to respond.” Larian knows that a good fight is not about fighting in the most brutally efficient way but the most dramatic, with pacing that allows players to face threat and then have have a chance to react to it, before the AI mounts the threat.

The trouble with armor (redux)
Balancing DOS2 was a major challenge, one which has continued after its release in September of last year. The process has led to various surprising observations about the way players approach kitting out their party. Pechenin says that, overwhelmingly and regardless of skill, players buy skillbooks over any other item from shops. Then they’ll invest in upgrading their weapons. But even good players tend to skip buying armor.

That’s particularly true when they’ve experienced a period of being overpowered, and it’s only countered when they’ve felt threatened across several successive battles, after which they tend to blame the game for having a difficulty spike. But it was their gear that was the issue.

Armor continues to pose problems in combat itself. To put it simply, players hate to hit armor. Pechenin says that if, for example, you have two enemies next to each other, one with 100 HP and the other with 50 HP and 50 armor, the player will almost always go for the unarmored enemy first. “Just for the pure psychological joy of digging into HP,” says Pechenin.

But it’s the wrong choice: since armor blocks such status effects as stuns, it’s more tactically sound to clear it before hitting HP. ”It’s kind of counterintuitive; as a systems designer you don’t always think about this stuff.”

To help counter this, Larian tried to make hits look good to the eye. “It’s not a trivial matter, because when you hit something you want their bar to go down in a very visible manner, a good chunk of it gone," Pechenin concludes.

"This kind of pacing is separate from challenge; it’s hard to nail down, especially in a game where you can have four party members with wildly varying power levels. At the end I think we got something close to feeling good."

 

[Infinitron]

But at the same time it really prevented long-term planning, because you didn’t know how many people you’d stun, so you couldn’t predict what you’d do next turn, and because of this you just wouldn’t think about the next turn.

O_o

This article is just bizarre.

The characters who are in the fight will be equipped with very different armor and weapons, which might be very powerful because they’ve explored every inch of the maps, or they might be very weak because they’ve only played through the main campaign. They may be high level for the area, or low. Players might have unlocked many different spells and abilities, or very few. They may not know how to use them well, and they may simply forget to use them. They may have large stocks of consumables such as grenades and potions, or they might be hoarding them. In short, the dynamic range of the potential power a player fields in any given encounter is very wide.

^I don't understand what this paragraph has to do with the rest of the text. The guy who transcribed this probably didn't have a good understanding of the material.

 

[Perkel]

But it’s the wrong choice: since armor blocks such status effects as stuns, it’s more tactically sound to clear it before hitting HP. ”It’s kind of counterintuitive; as a systems designer you don’t always think about this stuff.”

O.O like wtf is going through his brain.
I will attack 100hp dude without armor first because all of my skills will work and then i will have 1 less enemy to fight.

When you start battle in DOS2 almost all of your fancy skills are useless because you either need to cast those damage dealers or your are fucked.

The characters who are in the fight will be equipped with very different armor and weapons, which might be very powerful because they’ve explored every inch of the maps, or they might be very weak because they’ve only played through the main campaign. They may be high level for the area, or low. Players might have unlocked many different spells and abilities, or very few. They may not know how to use them well, and they may simply forget to use them. They may have large stocks of consumables such as grenades and potions, or they might be hoarding them. In short, the dynamic range of the potential power a player fields in any given encounter is very wide.

In other words because player B spend hours of playing optional content we feel like he should be same as player A who just goes for next main quest.

I mean why ? Whole point of doing side stuff is to increase your chances i finishing main quest. If player B spend 10 hours playing side content on first map he should get comfy trying to kill Kniles in dungeon.
But hey we can't do that man. Values bloat so you gear and findings doesn't matter lol.

 

[Infinitron]

I will attack 100hp dude without armor first because all of my skills will work and then i will have 1 less enemy to fight.

He might be thinking of AoEs, take down the armor and then hit/stun them both.

But yes, to claim that it's categorically always "more tactically sound" is weird.

 

[Elex]

the interview is clear: is the game designers that have no idea what they are doing.

sound like divinity original sin one was pure luck.

they have put random loot, totally random loot, then wonder why people is undergeared.

At the same time they put gear bloat on purpose (new gear that you can find after each level up) : and they don’t understand why people don’t upgrade constantly their armor........

they really designed a game around replacing the gear of 4 character after each level up?????

 

[Perkel]

He might be thinking of AoEs, take down the armor and then hit/stun them both.
But yes, to claim that it's categorically always "more tactically sound" is weird.

But even when you talk about AoE there is next to no chance you will get all armor off enemies AND they will stand in same place. So your AoE status skills are almost always single target.



In DOS1:

You start battle and from start you think about managing battlefield because you have very little chance to win if you don't. So you use skills from start that give you ability to slow down, change placement of enemies, block their way, etc.
It is like a puzzle you need to figure out.

In DOS2:

You start by trying to shove off armor from enemies and after few turns because it won't happen in 2 or 3 you then try to control battlefield. So it is puzzle after a while and before that it is just another random party rpg and not fun to play at that.


In DOS1 every skill you get matters. In DOS2 every skill matter only after you take off that armor. Which is fundamental difference. And DOS2 straight up feels painful to play, especially with lack of AP to do anything important.

 

[Fairfax]

Armor had the chance of blocking status effects, meaning that if you planned to knock a bunch of enemies out with a stun attack, you didn’t know for sure it’d work in every case. “The good part about this was that every encounter felt different, so when you started a fight it felt fresh. Things went wrong and right in very different ways,” says Pechenin. “But at the same time it really prevented long-term planning, because you didn’t know how many people you’d stun, so you couldn’t predict what you’d do next turn, and because of this you just wouldn’t think about the next turn.”

So far, so deterministic, but Larian wanted attacks to retain a ‘spicy’ feeling. The solution was a small variability in incoming damage which may entirely knock armor out, or it may not. “So there’s still some RNG there and you don’t know exactly how things will turn out, but you have a high chance that things will go as you want them to,” says Pechenin. “But at other times the game will throw a curve ball at you and make you scramble to find a new plan.”

But rather than balance out these extremes, Larian embraced them. “Our usual philosophy is for player to be as OP as they want to be,” says Pechenin.

Moreover, Larian’s careful to ensure DOS2’s AI picks its targets in the right way. They don’t want them to be merciless, always focusing on the weakest player character. “Of course for AI it always makes sense to pile on one person and just murder them completely, but for the player it really just sucks, because the damage isn’t spread over their characters,” says Pechenin. “They want to feel threat piling up, not having their characters one-shotted without being able to respond.” Larian knows that a good fight is not about fighting in the most brutally efficient way but the most dramatic, with pacing that allows players to face threat and then have have a chance to react to it, before the AI mounts the threat.

The next challenge was to set the pacing of battles. Larian wanted each to last an ideal number of turns. They wanted the time it took to destroy the armor on an enemy to feel good, as well as the number of turns that it’d take to stun an enemy, to destroy the armor on a player character, or to kill them.

The round-robin initiative and the armour system make elaborate plans and set-ups unreliable, but that seems to working as intended. You know for a fact you won't be able to stomp the enemies with an opening sequence, but that means it won't happen to you either. They killed creative set-ups in favour of making things less random and safer for the average player.

Armour blocks most forms of CC entirely and there's no damage reduction. This means you can always check your physical/magic armour and eliminate a ton of possible outcomes while planning your next move. With cooldowns, capped APs, and RR initiative, things are even more predictable.

Everything about the game's combat was designed to make options more reliable and the experience more consistent.

I think it's more likely that Larian was looking to limit the possibility of stomping with the opening sequences than making it safer for the average player. It's the same reason they introduced physical and magical armor.

Why do you assume they'd care more about powergamers than the vast majority of their potential customers? Also, both are inherently connected in this case. If powergamers can stomp mobs in the opening sequence, mobs can do it to bad players/weak parties. Same with the armour system: if you can't abuse cc to beat enemies, enemies can't do it to you either.

With the certainty that armour will completely block most status effects, the player is safe from a wide variety of options for a significant portion of the fight. So are the enemies, of course, but the average player doesn't mind if they can't steamroll enemies with cc and whatnot, they only feel passionately when it happens to them. Casuals savescum and rage at XCOM for a single missed attack, to the point where it's a meme. Getting stomped in an RPG makes these players feel even worse.