Interview Divinity: Original Sin 2 Post-Release Interview at PC Gamer

[Black]

The Codex is vast and full of Wonders: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?forums/larian-studios.107/

That's the reason why the Codex got a reputation of decline. Posters perpetuating opinions without first hand experience.

At least you are honest enough to admit it. But don't think that these posts matter. They are easily spotted as they lack rationale arguments and spout derogatory slang. Or are the typical one-liners meant to trigger a response.

But these create noise. You hardly can have a sensible discussion on the Codex after a thread is bigger than a couple pages because the meaningful stuff gets buried by the reflexive posting.

Think about it for a minute.

What a load of shit, not one DOS 2 defenders bothered to tell me how wrong I am in http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...2-release-thread.118260/page-143#post-5327153, unless 2 butthurt ratings count as defence.
Luckmann released his vast inner autism and went full sperg on how DOS2 attributes are banalshit compared to DOS1 and it too went pretty much without echoes.
Multiple people went on and on how the armor system is decline without anyone bothering to even play devil's advocate.
You can hardly have a sensible discussion on the Codex if you're a 2017 who's just talking shit.

One liners get you cool ratings, sperging over video games gets ignored.

 

[Fenix]

Multiple people went on and on how the armor system is decline without anyone bothering to even play devil's advocate.

Because people had no intention to fight with windmills?
Nobody cares to refute baseless sperging, while many people alreay said that this armor system is actually a good move.

 

[toro]

Don't dump rpgwatch in that shit bucket. I bitch about games on there all the time.

Fair enough.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

Interesting how well it did, I got bored just before leaving the first island a never touched it again.

Exactly the same experience here. I'm not going to slate it's features and combat because the first few hours just bored me so intensely I shelved it to see what happens with patches down the line. How people can enjoy this dull, plodding game with awkward camera controls and constant container opening is beyond me. It reminds me a bit of Wasteland 2 on release, except not as good and with worse camera.

Wouldn't exactly call it 'intensely boring, dull and plodding' and neither did I deliberately shelve it, it is more like my interest just gradually petered out to nothing. One day I turned it off without any special thoughts and forgot about it. Maybe it's the lolrandom item system, that shit feels like a singleplayer mmo.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Black]

Because people had no intention to fight with windmills?

Lmoa, with that attitude you can just fuck off.

 

[Quantomas]

Multiple people went on and on how the armor system is decline without anyone bothering to even play devil's advocate.

That's precisely the problem, that opinions are treated as a way to establish facts.

Any good scientist can tell you that's rubbish. It's not a rarity on the Codex that opinions about a game or any of its aspects are perpetuated as facts, but if you look closer it's plain wrong or at least not based on rationale arguments.

Toro began his trashing of D:OS2 by presenting the "established fact" that the game is ambush after ambush. This was easily refuted by simply iterating the combats in Fort Joy.

Not much better fared his claim regarding armor:

Magical/physical armor was intended to fix cheese but it failed: it punishes parties with split damage or hybrids, it extends each fight with 1 or 2 rounds needed to destroy magical armor, crowd control is gimped or no longer possible and overall it enforces one fighting strategy - 'damage is all that matters'.

It's simply not true as I explained above.

It's not as simple as physical damage rules all. For one thing there are way more parameters that matter. If you had a party built for physical damage output, you'd also have to think about your defensive, because if you had no magical armor your party would be stunned, frozen and charmed to death. So what is it you are proposing, strong physical offensive and strong magical defensive?

There is also the matter that physical armor blocks effects like knocked-down.

Likewise if a magical skilled opponent brings down the magical armor of one of your party members, it could be argued that the focus could switch away from that member because he can now be stunned, frozen, charmed, poisoned etc. But it's not that easy because armor can be restored by shield-up, spells and skills.

That said, it's not a simple affair. There may be balance issues in multiplayer, but for the regular campaign fights, you have such a vast toolset, that playing with a hybrid party is no problem at all. Moreover the encounters are designed to challenge your party members in various ways and you have sometimes secondary objectives, for example saving paladin Cork.

What is lacking on the Codex is a due process how to establish facts. I know it's a dirty word because the big corporations use it, and not very smartly. But this is not proof that it doesn't work if it is applied correctly. I am working in a discipline where establishing facts is paramount, because otherwise the systems you build simply don't work to spec.

That's probably the reason why I am appalled by the bland disregard for rationale arguments, and countering these rationally, by way too many Codexers.

 

[Fenix]

Because people had no intention to fight with windmills?

Lmoa, with that attitude you can just fuck off.

Just like you.

 

[Au Ellai]

I'm pretty surprised by the amount of people that don't like the armor system, and doubly surprised by the "fights are ambush after ambush" claim. It's really rare to not see the enemy before combat starts, and whether you instigate combat or let the enemies instigate is almost always a conscious choice. I have a feeling a lot of people weren't expecting to have to actually think about combat and change up their strategies in this game. The whole thing about the armor system punishing split damage and/or hybrids is hard to make sense of. I mean, if your strategy is always to focus down one enemy at a time, then yeah, you'll have an easier time w/ a single damage type, but that's just one strategy out of many. You have so many tools at your disposal that there are other ways of approaching combat than focusing one enemy at a time. Sure, that's the optimal strategy in most rpg's, but just because it isn't here doesn't mean you're being punished. You're being punished for not thinking wider about combat and trying to the same strategy you do in every other game, not for taking split damage. If you don't split your damage types, you will only have access to half the cc types as well, so you're punished for choosing a single type as well. I agree with Quantomas, if you dig into the systems, they're really well designed. I also find it amusing that he's using tons of examples from the game to make his point, and his detractors are just saying "nuh uh!" without any hard examples from the game. Even if I knew nothing about the game and were reading this thread, it's clear that his viewpoint is by far the most researched and thought out.

 

[DeepOcean]

Multiple people went on and on how the armor system is decline without anyone bothering to even play devil's advocate.

Because people had no intention to fight with windmills?
Nobody cares to refute baseless sperging, while many people alreay said that this armor system is actually a good move.

What I disagree: Useless sperging.
What I agree: Totally 100% correct.
Are you sure you wanna go there?

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[DeepOcean]

Any good scientist can tell you that's rubbish. It's not a rarity on the Codex that opinions about a game or any of its aspects are perpetuated as facts, but if you look closer it's plain wrong or at least not based on rationale arguments.

You, yourself, are mistaking facts with opinions here with a convoluted theory, this is too much convoluted subjectivity for me, so, I will just sum up the discussion on the main thread because I must suffer of autism too:
Fact: To use disabling abilities on D:OS 2, you need to remove physical or magical armor.
Negative opinion: This is bad.
Positive opinion: This is good.
Negative argument: This is bad because makes the combat way too focused on raw damage, with less variation on fights and less variation on tactics. The game become more repetitive as on most cases the optimal answer is just raw damage. Repetitive combat is a big problem when the seller feature is exactly the combat and the content is geared towards combat.
Positive argument: This is actually good because it cuts on the CC abuse of D:OS, where every fight was the same with you spamming disabling abilities with a high initiative party. The enemies have a better chance to react and actually threat you.
Negative reply: I get what you are saying, but this trade off didn't pay off, you never win by making enemies more challenging because you removed players choices.
Positive reply: You didn't remove players options as you can still use disabling abilities on enemies, you just need to remove the armor first.
Negative reply: On many enemies, by the time I remove their armor, they are pretty much dead anyway, this is specially true as they removed saving throws. If an enemy has 2000 of life and 2000 of armor, it means that I will only be able to use my CC spells when the fight is half way through, by that time or I'm already dominating hard and don't need those abilities anymore or I already reloaded.
Positive reply: This isn't the case as not all enemies are like this and some have 400 of armor and 2000 of health.
Negative reply: No, this enemy only have 400 of armor and 0 of health as when the disabling abilities hit after the armor stripped, because of the lack o saving throws AND cooldown based combat, it will be perma stunned and for all effects, out of the battle until dead.
Positive reply: But this makes the battles more tactical as you will target magic damage on magic weak enemies and physical damage on physical weak enemies.
Negative reply: Really, this simple binary choice isn't that entertaining to begin with and just return to the point that the only thing that matters is raw damage. They could have achieved the same effect of keeping disabling abilities under control without this shit that turn the first two or so rounds of every single combat in the game the same, magic attacks on low magic armor, physical attacks on low armor, do it and repeat, again, again, again, again, again. again, again, again. Wasn't the objective of this mechanic to make the combat LESS repetitive and not MORE repetitive?
Positive replay: "LOL, if I gonna read this sperging shit. I gonna rate you butthurt and say how I love Larian. LA!, LA!, LA!, LA!, LA!"

 

[thesheeep]

It's not as simple as physical damage rules all. For one thing there are way more parameters that matter. If you had a party built for physical damage output, you'd also have to think about your defensive, because if you had no magical armor your party would be stunned, frozen and charmed to death. So what is it you are proposing, strong physical offensive and strong magical defensive?

Damage output and armor values are completely decoupled.

My mage has higher physical armor than my tank (even if just slightly so). Why? Just happened to find items with fitting bonuses to other stats. Happens.
All of my characters (on Tactitian on the second last island, level 18) have more or less the same armor values.
The only difference is that my tank has about twice as much HP due to constitution and that Warfare bonus HP feat.

There is absolutely no reason to have your mage have a super high magic armor and your melee fighter a super high phys armor. Enemies spread their damage pretty evenly if your armor is spread evenly (otherwise, I think they focus down like you do) and everyone is teleporting around wildly anyway, so typical tank positioning becomes borderline irrelevant.
I don't think there are many fights where your enemies are focused on dealing physical or magical damage (only then I could see a purpose in focusing on some defense type yourself). Usually, you fight mixed output groups.

I think a large portion of the complaints about the armor system come from the starting island, which is just horrible on Tactician, a cheesefest extraordinaire and it would be so much better with DOS 1 rules. The Tactician bonus to enemy stats is just way too much early on.
Later, after levels 10+, things relax a lot as then your party will have way more skills and tools available to deal with most situations. Also, you get more money, so having 4+ resurrection scrolls per character becomes the norm

As it is right now, the start of the game is much too hard, while the last third is a bit too easy (if you did most of the quests on Reaper's Coast).

I still don't like the armor system, but at least it is much less annoying later in the game.
I think in future playthroughs, I will play the starting island on Classic and the rest of the game on Tactician. If that is possible...

 

[Fenix]

Multiple people went on and on how the armor system is decline without anyone bothering to even play devil's advocate.

Because people had no intention to fight with windmills?
Nobody cares to refute baseless sperging, while many people alreay said that this armor system is actually a good move.

What I disagree: Useless sperging.
What I agree: Totally 100% correct.
Are you sure you wanna go there?

Sure.

 

[Fenix]

I have a feeling a lot of people weren't expecting to have to actually think about combat and change up their strategies in this game.

Exactly what I thought when I saw all this ranting - people just didn't expected changes, and was literally shocked.

 

[Quantomas]

Any good scientist can tell you that's rubbish. It's not a rarity on the Codex that opinions about a game or any of its aspects are perpetuated as facts, but if you look closer it's plain wrong or at least not based on rationale arguments.

You, yourself, are mistaking facts with opinions here with a convoluted theory, this is too much convoluted subjectivity for me, so, I will just sum up the discussion on the main thread because I must suffer of autism too:
Fact: To use disabling abilities on D:OS 2, you need to remove physical or magical armor.
Negative opinion: This is bad.
Positive opinion: This is good.
Negative argument: This is bad because makes the combat way too focused on raw damage, with less variation on fights and less variation on tactics. The game become more repetitive as on most cases the optimal answer is just raw damage. Repetitive combat is a big problem when the seller feature is exactly the combat and the content is geared towards combat.
Positive argument: This is actually good because it cuts on the CC abuse of D:OS, where every fight was the same with you spamming disabling abilities with a high initiative party. The enemies have a better chance to react and actually threat you.
Negative reply: I get what you are saying, but this trade off didn't pay off, you never win by making enemies more challenging because you removed players choices.
Positive reply: You didn't remove players options as you can still use disabling abilities on enemies, you just need to remove the armor first.
Negative reply: On many enemies, by the time I remove their armor, they are pretty much dead anyway, this is specially true as they removed saving throws. If an enemy has 2000 of life and 2000 of armor, it means that I will only be able to use my CC spells when the fight is half way through, by that time or I'm already dominating hard and don't need those abilities anymore or I already reloaded.
Positive reply: This isn't the case as not all enemies are like this and some have 400 of armor and 2000 of health.
Negative reply: No, this enemy only have 400 of armor and 0 of health as when the disabling abilities hit after the armor stripped, because of the lack o saving throws AND cooldown based combat, it will be perma stunned and for all effects, out of the battle until dead.
Positive reply: But this makes the battles more tactical as you will target magic damage on magic weak enemies and physical damage on physical weak enemies.
Negative reply: Really, this simple binary choice isn't that entertaining to begin with and just return to the point that the only thing that matters is raw damage. They could have achieved the same effect of keeping disabling abilities under control without this shit that turn the first two or so rounds of every single combat in the game the same, magic attacks on low magic armor, physical attacks on low armor, do it and repeat, again, again, again, again, again. again, again, again. Wasn't the objective of this mechanic to make the combat LESS repetitive and not MORE repetitive?
Positive replay: "LOL, if I gonna read this sperging shit. I gonna rate you butthurt and say how I love Larian. LA!, LA!, LA!, LA!, LA!"

That's merely trading opinions.

The first claim that you present as a fact, that to use disabling abilities you have to remove armor doesn't check out. You can always teleport enemies and dump them in an oily patch which applies slow.

What's that about? It's about positioning! You reduce the game to dealing with armor, completely disregarding positioning, before the battle starts and in the battle. Also, with armor removed and a party member becoming vulnerable, it's very difficult to recover IF you only have one single character. But you play with a party of four and there are plenty of ways to dispel effects and restore armor, which gets you back into the game.

What the armor system truly does, it elevates defensive skills and spells and boosts, because you can use these regardless of armor.

I think a large portion of the complaints about the armor system come from the starting island, which is just horrible on Tactician, a cheesefest extraordinaire and it would be so much better with DOS 1 rules. The Tactician bonus to enemy stats is just way too much early on.

That was also my first impression. But as you pick up skills, it becomes fun as you learn to cope.

Positioning is the key. Additionally, it truly helps to maintain your defenses, with Shield-up, Armor of Frost and have two party members who can cast Restoration. On top of that Sebille can cast First Aid and eat body parts to regain health. Food can help here too, but I haven't used it so far.

Getting the items and skills for two party members to cast teleport is well worth it. On top of that Sebille can use Cloak & Dagger to teleport herself around quickly, even stealthily before the battle starts.

In general the armor system favours defensive playstyles, which is an interesting turn. I enjoy the more substantive battles, where you simply stand your ground and your party members slowly begin to dominate the battle.

It is not true that you simply strip the weakest armor, magical or physical, from any enemy target. It happens frequently that I strip the stronger armor from an opponent because it makes situationally more sense.

 

[luj1]

DOS is too generic and infantile. A true RPG veteran need not touch such mediocrity.

 

[abnaxus]

 

[Reapa]

i love it when the interviewer doesn't interrupt the self fellatio so we can admire its full glory.

 

[Achilles]

Swen is clearly calling out Darth Roxor.

 

[Sentinel]

heh watching people that support the initial efforts of a developer get relegated to an irrelevant "vocal minority" by the time the second one comes around is always fun

 

[imweasel]

I wouldn't be surprised if Larian's next project is an Oblibion clone.

Gimme dem Dolla' bills.

 

[Xeon]

I hope its still an RPG and not something like Dragon Commander.

 

[Fenix]

Oh hell, that wining about armor system getting OLD.

 

[Black]

I'm sure they censor it on rpg watch