Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Character Progression Concern

With the potential for this game to be over 100 hours in length, I am quite concerned with the character progression. If anyone has played Skyrim (I'm sure you all have), it is the perfect example of a very long game that practically looses any sense of character progression around the 50-60 hours mark. By this point, if you want to play a specific build or class, you have reached the end of your progression line. Only those who want to play as a jack-of-all-trades can continue progressing.

So basically I am really hoping that D:OS has a solution for this that makes progression feel significant at each level up, but also manages to keep your character continually progressing beyond 50-60 hours into the game.

On a side not: Anyone know if there is any in-game play time recorder to see how many hours you have been playing the game for? (Something Divine Divinity was sorely lacking)

If you play using Steam it'll keep track..

Really...

I don't think I need to respond with any more than that.

I was referring to your side note.

Yeah I got that, but you missed the sarcasm in my response. Of course Steam will track to amount of hours, but that does not answer my question/concern whatsoever. Firstly, steams tracker is very bad, as it requires you to be online at all times for it to be accurate. When you suffer from consistent disconnects and have someone else who shares your steam account, it only further enforces how bad the steam tracker is. I don't want an external play time recorder, I want one in the game.

You could try keeping track of how many hours you play using pen and paper.

Character progression is really important to me too.
I wish we can become some kind of legendary character in some skills. However, it requires a strong skill feature that does allow progression. ANd Larian, those guys have always be very good at that, giving you a feeling of progression, and becoming very powerfull. I remember fondly divine divinity, (or beyond), when you thought character progression was over, only to discover a whole layer of new godly powers. I loved that.

And keep in mind there will be mods. Mine will be focused on skills, replayability, randomness and world interactions. And the big result will be to gain a feeling of character power, but not only through numbers and items powers, but also through possibilities.

And keep in mind that it is also fun for some people to keep playing, and feel the power once you are at the top.

Yeah, that is exactly how I like it. Sounds great!

Unfortunately for me though, I haven't gotten very far in Divine Divinity to feel how the character progression is yet. I can tell you though, playing Neverwinter Nights 2, particularly the Baldur's Gate Reloaded mod, I really dislike the character progression. It is way way way too slow and each level up feels very minute and unimportant. My favourite progression feel in out of any game is definitely from Diablo 2 and the Elder Scrolls Series (particularly Morrowind). Those games had consistent and very effectual character progression that I adore.

Well I agree with you, character progression is a deep part of pleasure in RPGs.
In the mod I will try to construct (I have good hopes, because the Editor looks so much like the toolset, and the programming langage used by Larian looks pretty understandable), there will be MANY skills, with various levels (unknown, novice, apprentice, compagnon, master, grand master), with levels tied to specific skill experience and characteristics (so you will need, say , "10" in strength to be able o become a compagnon in mining, and "15" to become a master, and so on, such allowing great replayability (you WON'T be able to become a grand master in all skills, impossible).

What I mean by world interactions is that there will be many things to interact with (plants, rocks, cadavers, animals, tracks, whatever), but if you don't have the skill, you willm hardly be able to get anything from these things. But if you have the proper skill, you will have much more chance/more/better results from your interactions.
From example, your char comes across an "unknown rock". If he is has a prospector skill, he might identify it as an "iron ore", the better the skill, the better the chance to identify. And then, the better his "mining" skill, the more he will get from the Ore.

And one important feature is that top skills should yield top unique results. So in the above example, only if he is a grand master in mining would he have a chance to get a "Iron gem", a fantasy powerful enchantable gem.

Add this to many many skills (hunting (bonus to hit and damage of animals), tracking, trapping, prospecting, mining, skinning, butchering, leather working, tailoring, farming, taming........), and I think the replayability and character progression would be very interesting. Well, at least it was imho in the mod I already built for NWN2 (frontier, a french mod...)

But again, I reallu trust Larian, they have always been great at roleplaying in general, and character progression in particular.

I've also enjoyed Larian's character progression, mainly because of having a whole bunch of interesting fun skills, and imo they are good at providing a strong sense of gaining in power and utility. However, their games have also seemed to suffer from some skill redundancy. Maybe this is just part of their efforts to provide lots of playstyle options and skills to try and as such this could be seen as a strength, however usually some skills are obviously 'essential' and others can seem almost worthless, at least from a power-gaming perspective (I'm not really into powergaming but I do like to make my character skill & stat choices informed by what's optimal, so I can weigh that against what I want for my character for role-playing reasons). I'd much prefer to be making more difficult choices between viable options than going I should take this, this and that if I want to be powerful, I don't need this and I don't know why anyone would take that.

In DD I felt I had to make skill choices based much more on what's optimally powerful in order to deal with the sheer amount of trash mobs everywhere. And in D2 so many skills just didn't hold any appeal to me (haven't played BD). In both games my character choices just seemed to make themselves without much delicious deciding.

I'm not a stickler for balance so I don't mind this too much in a classless system of Larian's style, I'm more concerned that we'll end up overpowered towards the end. I found this to be the case in both DD & D2. Except for a few challenging encounters here and there both games became a cakewalk after a certain point (I played D2 on nightmare, though I played DD on normal because I knew about the trash mobs clickity click and didn't think that harder difficulty would make that style of play much fun. Whatever, in both cases difficulty eventually left the country altogether except for the occasional postcard).

I'm hoping that this time having party dynamics instead of a just a single character to balance things around and especially the extra attention to hand-crafting battles that the kickstarter enabled (YAY! :-), will result in more satisfying progression and challenge throughout the whole game.

According to update 46:

"In the past, we always had the problem that we were spread too thin, and so the design and balancing of the character development systems were done almost between the soup and the potatoes. This may surprise you, but there are many many moving systems in an RPG and when you make them with a small team, you can't afford to have too much specialisation.

But now, thanks to your generous contributions, we can afford to have a team that is focussed on balancing our combat systems and tweaking the formulas that affect character development. It's a very big improvement ;)"

I'm really super interested to see how things turn out. Party-based, turn-based battles with magic-elemental-environmental interactivity in a Larian game.... oh goody Considering the role of magic in all this fun interactivity I wonder how they will make magic not so overpowered as to far overshadow other combat playstyles.

I wonder how they will make magic not so overpowered as to far overshadow other combat playstyles.

My mage ended up practically as support for my archer, and was a couple levels behind for a while late in the alpha area, though managed to catch up to only a level behind almost at the end.

I am probably quite strange for what is categorised as a hardcore gamer. I am not the type of RPG player who much enjoys a continuous challenge in a game. I want the beginning and middle parts of the game to be challenging and somewhat of a struggle, but eventually; as for character progression I want to hit the point where I become OP. Essentially, I am able to defeat everything and anything (apart for bosses) with ease. This is something I loved from D2, Divinity 2 and Morrowind. This is something that hopefully D3:ROS will fix due to it lacking in vanilla. And I hope, this is something that will be present in D:OS.

However, there needs to be a balance of OP-ness. I did not enjoy it to much in Torchlight 2, as it felt cheap. The skills didn't feel very impactful and looked that particularly powerful in some cases. Visual power and statistical power work hand in hand to make you feel powerful.

I can appreciate that Nightblaze. I suppose I can relate somewhat as the div games didn't bother me too much in this regard as I said. I mean I don't prefer that but I can enjoy it.

Raze, you are a champ! That is great and reassuring news to hear. I'm getting really excited for this game. It just seems too good.

So, any update on whether or not Larian are going to be adding a game time recorder in game?
If there is any sought of statistics menu, I think a major feature would be the time played aspect. :P