Divinity: Original Sin Pre-Release Thread

[Infinitron]

Okay, I pledged to this. Hey Larian, ditch the exclusive item for the first 5000 backers! Or at least increase the threshold to 6000.

Seriously, exclusive items suck.

 

[ForkTong]

But this? Or cases like it? Fuck em all.

You do understand that, as developers, we can't really be that way to people?

I mean. You should see our support mails.

 

[Roguey]

I'm sure it'll be easy enough for one to share the pants, not unlike The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

 

[Kaldurenik]

Okay, I pledged to this. Hey Larian, ditch the exclusive item for the first 5000 backers! Or at least increase the threshold to 6000.

Seriously, exclusive items suck.

I agree not a huge fan of things that are exclusive. I would rather have everyone game the same content whenever they back the kickstarter now or buy the game after release but thats just my opinio.

 

[SCO]

Since 'exclusive items' tend to be overpowered crap, i don't mind at all.

Hey larian, thinking about Divine Divinity gave me OC flashbacks to quickloads to get more slots/armor/abilities on the random items. The way that the random items also got more powerful than supposedly super-unique items on later hero levels was also major annoying. I hope that not only the enemies don't level scale, but also the items.
Item location randomization would be very fine though.

 

[ForkTong]

"Exclusive items" we give away as bonuses do not unbalance the game. It's not like you get the Red Dragon's Footman's Lance Of Brutal Smiting +1 or anything.

SCO: in DivDiv, items are generated at the moment you open a chest. This indeed causes ppl to save/load glitch spam before opening stuff. This is still the case now. I will ask why. I wonder why not "generating" at level initialization. I would think this would make the generation even more fair...
Balancing of uniques vs generated: with our current itemgen / item definition system, that is easier to control / balance.
The levels of the items in containers are determined by the NPCs/monsters surrounding the container. Not the player's level. (So if you can sneak into a high level camp without getting noticed, you still get loot that makes sense. Or if you succeed in killing a higher level creature, he won't drop items that are your level, that also doesn't make a lot of sense.)

 

[SCO]

That's what they always say. Then you get Vhailor helm in BG2 with unlimited simulacrum. But that's ok, since it's what the majority of pledgers want anyway.

 

[Infinitron]

"Exclusive items" we give away as bonuses do not unbalance the game. It's not like you get the Red Dragon's Footman's Lance Of Brutal Smiting +1 or anything.

Sure, but why discriminate between Kickstarter backers who have pledged equal amounts of money? You want to incentivize MORE backers to pledge, not make them feel bad for being late to the party.

 

[jagged-jimmy]

So someone edited the wiki for D:OS. I wonder who might that be .

 

[Hobz]

ForkTong I'm ok with exclusive content as long as it doesn't unbalance the game and helps your kickstarter campaign. Give some of those pants to the codex fundraiser though. Give some on facebook and tweeter and later on in the campaign announce you're giving it to every backer.

Edit for clarification : As Infinitron stated, those pants do nothing for you and your campaign now that the 5k backers threshold is crossed, so you'd better get rid of it at some point, but in the meantime there's no harm done in trying to build some hype with giveaway. Give 500 of those pants to PC Gamer or RPS, it'll make them talk about you again and give incentive to those who got the pants to back/buy the game.

 

[Roguey]

The biggest problem with the pants is that they announced it when they had like 500 left to go to get them so it only motivated that many to get in asap. Typical Larian mismanagement.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

I have a bad feeling about this, haven't heard anything that I don't like about the game

 

[Infinitron]

Edit for clarification : As Infinitron stated, those pants do nothing for you and your campaign now that the 5k backers threshold is crossed, so you'd better get rid of it at some point, but in the meantime there's no harm done in trying to build some hype with giveaway. Give 500 of those pants to PC Gamer or RPS, it'll make them talk about you again and give incentive to those who got the pants to back/buy the game.

Great advice. At the very least, the pants threshold should be increased to something you want to achieve in the future. 10-15k backers.

 

[JarlFrank]

Yeah, a special item for only a very low number of first backers is a really bad decision, you should give the pants away to others too.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

Really weird reading this about pants without knowing the context. Pants for homeless shelters for reaching kickstarter goals?

 

[May God Gently Caress You]

Really weird reading this about pants without knowing the context. Pants for homeless shelters for reaching kickstarter goals?

From the third update

Early bird reward
As a token of appreciation to all our fans who pledged already (and the ones we hope are going to pledge in the very near future) we’re giving away Zandalor’s trunks of epic intelligence to the first 5000 backers! Wear these and you’ll be able to discover an easter egg in the final version of the game – but beware, these trunks are rumored to have an opinon about things! (Item does not unbalance the game.)

"Exclusive items" we give away as bonuses do not unbalance the game. It's not like you get the Red Dragon's Footman's Lance Of Brutal Smiting +1 or anything.

Sure, but why discriminate between Kickstarter backers who have pledged equal amounts of money? You want to incentivize MORE backers to pledge, not make them feel bad for being late to the party.

Common "early bird" rewards even give the same thing for less money. While I agree that they can put off some people (and, indeed, I, myself didn't support a few projects simply because I missed their early-bird rewards), I've seen quite a few examples where they actually work as boosters during the early stages. Rather, I'm inclined to agree with Roguey's point. It may not be too late to use the pants for promotion as Hobs suggestion, though.

I don't think I'm the only person who feels sad about the "mismanagements" in PR area since I think Larian devs approach is honest one. Heck, even Obsidian summoned up some cheap (but probably effective) tricks such as using that Ouroboros symbol.

 

[SCO]

SCO: in DivDiv, items are generated at the moment you open a chest. This indeed causes ppl to save/load glitch spam before opening stuff. This is still the case now. I will ask why. I wonder why not "generating" at level initialization. I would think this would make the generation even more fair...
Balancing of uniques vs generated: with our current itemgen / item definition system, that is easier to control / balance.
The levels of the items in containers are determined by the NPCs/monsters surrounding the container. Not the player's level. (So if you can sneak into a high level camp without getting noticed, you still get loot that makes sense. Or if you succeed in killing a higher level creature, he won't drop items that are your level, that also doesn't make a lot of sense.)

Well, yeah, i was never a fan of just 'creating' loot out of thin air. Much prefer the ultima 7/BG style where the loot was designed by designers instead of random algorithms (and if they have a bit of ingame and/or readable lore, so much the better, which 'algorithmic loot' never does for obvious reasons). I wouldn't mind that most of this loot could have many random locations where it could be found, but i'd prefer if it was something i could recognize across replays as consistent. No dealbreaker, but just my anti-diablo stance.

Think back to divine divinity, and the most interesting loot was of this variety (like the dragon armor, or the god armor set). Pity this effect was diluted by the random loot+scaling, which assured that you'd not use it on the endgame even if you went to the trouble to get it.

I can understand it's much easier for the map makers to use random looting so as not to have to set every enemy equipment painstakingly, but i'd expect a TB game would have a lower combat encounter density, more like U7 than diablo that would make it possible.

 

[Infinitron]

Common "early bird" rewards even give the same thing for less money. While I agree that they can put off some people (and, indeed, I, myself didn't support a few projects simply because I missed their early-bird rewards), I've seen quite a few examples where they actually work as boosters during the early stages. Rather, I'm inclined to agree with Roguey's point. It may not be too late to use the pants for promotion as Hobs suggestion, though.

I don't think I'm the only person who feels sad about the "mismanagements" in PR area since I think Larian devs approach is honest one. Heck, even Obsidian summoned up some cheap (but probably effective) tricks such as using that Ouroboros symbol.

You can hardly call it an "early bird reward" if it was announced after the early bird had already flown. It's a retroactive early bird and that's just stupid.

 

[Jaesun]

Then what would be your suggestions to drive more people to this project?

 

[SCO]

BTW, if you do allow people to create fixed loot with descriptions on the editor; PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, don't make the mistake that the infinity engine did of not having a separate 'automatically filled' description or graphical interface area for effects, stat changes and such miscellanea from the 'lore' text itself. The infinity engine had to reuse the description filed for this, which meant that when mods tried to affect the same items (with WEIDU, a programming language to compose changes to IE files) they always tended to get the description of the effects wrong since mods that mass changed items had no general way to change only the part of the description relating to the new stats.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Add a (long) quest chain as a stretch goal where you have a hand in creating the dragon terror patrol and the money will pour in, perhaps.

Damn, I'd pay for that someday. AND EAT IT.

 

[Gord]

Personally I think it's not unlikely at all that they will succeed now even if they didn't change much.
But in Larian's place I'd probably crank PR up to 11, to get as much exposure as possible.
Almost one month remaining, which should be enough to draw in some few thousand backers through one or two good preview articles in the right places.

As for the early bird reward - I like it, but I wouldn't be upset if in the end it get's offered to everyone on Kickstarter, or expanded to the first 7500 or so backers.
Anyway, I'm eagerly awaiting the Tuesday update.

 

[Wizfall]

A good kicktarter campaign is very important for sure and Larian has make some mistakes here and there but it doesn't explain everything.
The W2 and SR demo video show more or less as much as D:OS video so we can reasonably compare our expectations about these 3 projects.
And while i find D:OS interesting, i'm still much more excited about W2 and SR (or PE and Torment but we know a lot less about this game so it's not comparable).
So i'm not very surprised that the D:OS campaign doesn't raise as much.
I must not be the only one to think like that and not everyone is as much interested as us in cRPG so they don't pledge.
The game will be funded anyway.

 

[catfood]

A good kicktarter campaign is very important for sure and Larian has make some mistakes here and there but it doesn't explain everything.
The W2 and SR demo video show more or less as much as D:OS video so we can reasonably compare our expectations about these 3 projects.
And while i find D:OS interesting, i'm still much more excited about W2 and SR (or PE and Torment but we know a lot less about this game so it's not comparable).
So i'm not very surprised that the D:OS campaign doesn't raise as much.
I must not be the only one to think like that and not everyone is as much interested as us in cRPG so they don't pledge.
The game will be funded anyway.

This is how Kickstarter works best. What Fargo did was show you his plans for his games, and you in your mind envisioned them as being perfect for you. You imagined them as having the perfect graphics, perfect gameplay, perfect story, perfect everything. On the other hand, Divnity shows you pretty much everything from the get go so now you know exactly what to expect, and some of its features are not as awesome as you would have liked.

Fargo sold you a vision.
Swen sold you a concrete product.

Fargo targeted your emotions.
Swen targeted your reason.

This is how marketing works, it tells you want you want to hear. VD could probably explain it better, seeing as how he worked in this business.

 

[krist2]

I for my part am more exited for this project than the other Incline projects. And that's saying quite a bit as I'm very glad for those