Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Opinion: Hybrid characters are no good

That. What Zozma said. Thank you for your articulate and patient answer.

Erra, I apologize for the personal attack, for judging your responses from your starting tactics, and for venting my cumulative impatience with you and several other people all at you. I should not have made that post. I should maybe have made this one instead.

You ask why I didn't answer your specific points as though that were the only possible subject of discussion. At least you aren't tone-policing me for rudely calling out rudeness, for which thanks.

Your viewpoint is your own; you have a perfect right to it; the conversation would probably be interesting if I were willing to accept and engage with your charming approach to discussion. I'm not. (Some others here seem to be. More power to them.)

You have:

• replied to disagreement with aggression and insult
• taken your premises and analysis as absolutes
• caged the discussion to your conclusions and your statements of opinion-as-fact
• twisted responses and argued with your own version instead.

All of these points are classic tactics of dishonest argument. I'm in a glass house on the first point, granted. That doesn't make it any less true in your case.

There's been a steady stream of this kind of crap from several people here in the last month. I'm tired of it. I'm annoyed enough for other reasons that I suck at ignoring it. Pity me. Whatever. None of that has to mean anything to you; I expect it doesn't.
Which said:

• If you follow what I'm saying, and you really want a conversation, please knock it off.
• If you can't or don't want to follow, I expect I could quote specifics all day long and you would just shift the grounds and your argument to avoid acknowledging your behavior. If I'm doing you a disservice here I owe you an apology, but I doubt it. History suggests not.
• If you just don't give a damn, or this is how you amuse yourself, then you just carry right on. As though you needed my permission.

This is also didactic, btw. You asked. This is the best I can do. My bad.

But you don't seem tired of Stabbey spewing out the same crap, since the beginning of the alpha, do you? To me his "what a load of crap", "that's a ridiculous idea for any game to have" and others are on the same page with erra's "dishonest argumentation."

This is a rhetorical question.

Yes, I've been harsh and a jerk at times. That's true. People called me out on it, and since then I've tried to be better, hold my tongue, phrase things in a less confrontational way, make better arguments based on reason. If you've got something to say to me, say it to me.

Therefore you loose the argument vehemently. And laughably.

Btw, she, or he is right and you are completely wrong.
All of your "argument", which is just a long ranting complaint coming from the crying mentality approach to the game - is very similar, if not actually exactly the same as all that crying and complaining about running into a few early enemies using poison clouds that killed your characters - WHILE YOU repeatedly refused to ADAPT your tactics and USE THE AVAILABLE resources to increase the poison resistance.





Which is another personal attack, judging the responses from what you imagine and strawman in as "someones tactics" while using these pathetic cheap tactics yourself - while spewing accusations you invent - and venting various psychological traumas and angst, deeply distorted by false arrogance coming from ignorance.

So... things as usual, eh Pete?




No, thats what you are doing - very blatantly, directly point by point - while you are trying to accuse someone else of it.

Psychological projection at most direct display.

I also prefer the random spells provided at vendors.
If they are just going to make all the spells available at each vendor, then why not just make it a UI screen where I choose the exact skill I want.

Just because my char wants to be a fire mage does not mean that the world and the skill vendors should make this an easy path. If my char cant find fire spells, then they will have to search harder or re-evaluate their path.

And for people who do want to plan out all their character's skills, the editor should make it very simple to achieve this.

He wasn't making an argument, he was just making up a bunch of unfounded dime-store psychoanalysis crap because I DARED to disagree with him.

And learn to spell 'lose' properly.



Your arguments were ridiculous then and they still are now, since the point was "hey, maybe an attack which has the tankiest character getting basically one-hit killed from full health, while also being an AoE which can hit multiple chars is doing a bit too much damage!"

I did adapt my tactics, if you bothered to remember. That doesn't mean that there was not a problem.

Your claim of the solution being "USE THE AVAILABLE RESOURCES" is inherently contradictory with erra "being completely right", since erra's idea is to arbitrarily make resources (in the form of skills) not available because random is awesome.

Additionally, the poisoncloud arrow issue is a pretty odd example to use in defense of erra. Your said it was fine to leave it as it was, because all you had to do was make sure that your characters equipment and supplies were focused around food and equipment that offered poison resistance. That reminds me of erra's dislike for a rigid, inflexible approach to solving problems.

Thanks for demonstrating my point, Hiver.

I thought you were ignoring me?

Maybe want to do that some more? Here: I'll reciprocate. Buh-bye.

So from the research my friend and I have done you believe that all spells have been found when there aren't even recorded instances of a single level 5 spell for some schools? Being that we saw 25% of the content in the world and it's been factually stated spells at the highest level could be quest only... it is a logical conclusion that all spells have NOT in fact been found.

So you already have displayed in your arguments that you lack complete information and make logical conclusions based on false information to suit your purposes. This lack of conclusive, exhaustive self auditing is why my language seems so harsh.

Your other points are equally spurious and contain the same amount of linear thinking as your fictitious assertion above. No need to independently disprove them...I'd suggest you think in a nonlinear way about a line of code that could solve your geomancer for an aeromancer problem...maybe weighted loot tables dependent on skill choice. Probability is just a number.


As for the amount of randomness I want? Enough to make the experience feel emergent but not random? So like in the current systems while there are many developments which are random in WHEN you come across them they're still likely to occur within the game given a thorough exploration of the features. Even then it's plausible certain items you may never encounter with a paucity of fixed loot. These sort of what we would call 'tertiary' details are the types of things that should be random.

Class skills being random is as I said an affectation of emergent narrative. The concept here is that while all the skills are indeed available the unplannable nature of that development keeps the player on his toes. It means that even if you are a metagamer you are still presented with challenges and barriers to your playstyle. Things to overcome.

What's endlessly challenging as a game designer is finding ways to challenge all of your players. Ways that you can thwart their attempts to exploit your resource deprivation (You know the classic reloading shops to get what you want through any means necessary). And then part of the experiment is to see how far they're willing to go and how much they'll react to losing control over the situation.

Skills are treasure in this game. They're objects within the world outside of the initial ones you receive as a remnant of your characters beginning training. You have only -decided- on that conclusion based on a preconceived notion as to how games operate...unfortunately this game has chosen to operate in a fashion that will be providing you with new challenges.

Awesome. Now I disagree with someone on what "rhetorical" and "question" mean, too. Better and better.

Let me clarify the part that "I" "seem" to have miffed you about.

Stabbey is pretty damn blunt with opinions, and can be an ass when provoked. Same with me. Same, apparently, with you.

But I haven't seen Stabby do any of these things, unlike some I could name:

• dive straight into frothing attack mode at the first hint of disagreement.
• insist on escalating things when the provocation stops.
• condescendingly explain to other people how they think, what they want, and that their idea of fun is wrong.

And over the time period I can comment on - wasn't here for the alpha - Stabbey's contributed a *hell* of a lot of information, perspective and constructive ideas to the discussion to balance the occasional bullshit. Way more than you, I or Erra, that's for sure.

Erra launched into the noise right off the bat.
Stabbey met fire with fire.

You can tell me those are the same thing all you want, of course. This not being Fox News, and you not being Bill O'Reilly (probably) nobody's gonna cut the mike for you as soon as you're done shouting, so I don't have to look like I'm convinced.

Raze can get tired of the crap again and shut us all down, of course, which would pretty much be justified at this point.

Glamour: yeah. Guilty. Good call.

The spells and skills which remain unknown in the game are higher level ones, not dropped or sold by anything in Cyseal. Nothing we've been told or learned suggests that there are a bunch of low-level skills which no one has found.

Being able to choose a skill selection is not remotely close to "the same as choosing when to level up". Getting the desired spells is not inherently unbalancing. A lot of the time, you CAN get the skills you want to use on your characters. By your logic, that should obviously break the game in half and make it laughably easy. That is not true.

The idea that having a skill selection of your choice makes the combat boring and predictable is provably wrong by actually engaging in combat. Unpredictable things happen all the time. Attacks you counted on hitting miss. Enemies unexpectedly pile attacks and statuses on a character. Status effects disable a character you thought you would have use of. Mis-aimed lightning bolts stun your own characters through invisible pools of blood and water. Party members get killed. If you're not finding the combat challenging enough, what difficulty are you playing on?

A huge difference between my what you call 'personal attacks' is that they aren't actually attacks of character.

They're indications of flawed thinking models. Now if you view such pointed criticism as a character flaw than that is a personal worldview requiring a more sophisticated thinking model. Larger perspective, pulled out scope, self-auditing, empathetic presence.

You obviously have the capability to at times utilize those based on this post. So let's extend them over to my initial concerns (I will break myself down for you):

The reason I use such language is that as someone who uses this dynamic thought approach I encountered an individual on this board whom asserted a specific desire for a change in the game based on what they perceived as a flaw. A flaw alone.

At no point was this information considered as a potential design feature nor awareness shown that there were potential benefits to the game play flow from the presence of this design.

Even more significantly was the demand that this feature be changed based on a requirement that his specific character have access to specific spells at a specific time in the game. This assertion was made with absolutely no concession to other aspects of tactical balance in the game.

Calling this a linear, rigid thought process is not inherently insulting. It is factual. It is a line of thinking that travels one thread directly and reaches a predetermined conclusion. It is not a thought process with branching, multi threading, and an analysis based outcome.

So having identified that this individual has only one line of thinking how else should my viewpoint stand? Has anyone with only one frame of reference ever had the full point of view? While my viewpoint may not be completely correct in terms of degrees of randomness necessary within an emergent narrative (This is a lever which needs to be carefully tweaked to ensure neither side is too dominant) it's impossible for my point of view to be less complete than his. Why would I take a stance of conciliation with someone who has one conclusion in mind? Now if he had instead engaged me in a more peaceful discussion or his initial post was one of an arm extended for conversation "I'm not sure of the reasoning behind this" or "What is this providing to the game" than my response would have been matched to his initial tone. If someone wants to take a hardline tactic it seems foolish to expect soft power in return; the sign of an individual not expecting to be challenged on their unrefined notions.

There's nothing dishonest about my argument style. I will concede to two things: It is very predatory of rigid, linear thinkers. That's the point. It exposes the house of cards on which their one note ideas stand. Hence it results in anger and true personal insults from the other side. I called no one stupid, dumb, or anything that is meant to demean them. My statements were restricted to the information displayed in their ideas alone.

The other is that I never tried to break down the actual nature of the motivations behind his posting like you have done. You have tried to engage me as a poster whereas I tried to engage his idea and the way he was presenting it alone. Had I tried to engage him as a poster lets be quite clear: the response would have been far more brutal.

Your last statement is a perfect way for us to examine the other side of a situation. Perhaps you've seen many people utilizing these tactics because this board is filled with very rigid, linear thinkers that want the game to be built in one way? I specifically signed up because I read no less than 25 threads with comments similar to this with...a holistically 'give me everything on a silver platter' approach to game design and not nearly enough people disabusing them of their poorly thought out concepts.

Also speaking to your previous post: The fact that neither of you can even competently argue and discuss the idea of an emergent narrative and how it informs this games design does in fact lead me to conclude that you lack the necessary background to competently discuss these game design facets. I've yet to hear a cited experienced of where you've enjoyed emergent narrative that was fueled by your predetermined spell lists.

You are a horribly bitter person; it is quite obvious.

I'm sorry you view my information in such a negative light. Perhaps someday your mind will be able to consider two ideas simultaneously and you will stop this. What I would suggest is you print out all of your posts on this board, scratch out the name, change the font, print them out and read them out loud to a friend.

You need to pull yourself out of your path of inevitability. The fact you still haven't even begun to think of spell availability as a resource is really troubling. You are simply not allowing new information into your brain. You are refusing ideas based on you not being the originator of said ideas. It informs others of your age, worldview, and mental acuity quite clearly.

It explains why you dislike your thought mode being broken down in plain site. It is fragile and constructed with no third party concepts with which to reinforce once a hole has been made.

His solution sounds like exactly what I would say: Here's how to adapt to this in game. Find some poison resistance gear/items to overcome the challenge. If that is a weakness of your party, the game has an option available to deal with it. Needing the designer to change it because you choose not to partake in ANY of those options(Doesn't have to be all of them...there are a variety) is identical to your display here.

You encountered a barrier to your preconceived notion of the outcome. You have already decided how things should go and when your plan was foiled by the natural dynamic of the game you sought solutions outside the game world. That is the opposite of a strategic, tactical mind in every aspect. That is the mind of a rigid, linear thinker who relies on authority to solve their problems.

I'm sorry you don't enjoy this. I'd suggest not putting your volatile character on display if you don't enjoy watching it be broken down.

OMG I tried, you can't imagine how much I tried. But here in Fanboys Land, this was an impossible task.
And don't pay attention to Hiver (aka brainiac), someone must have inadvertently left the cage gate open. However, its permanent insults will probably have it go back there pretty soon.

Erra,

One poignant fact you keep omitting from this debate is the assertion that beta and release are, in fact, separate entities. The fact that release may or may not contain more skills is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, which is about the current beta functionality of skillbooks and their role. What this entails is that there are no more skills available to us, regardless of the opportunity for there to be more at a later date, the release one to be exact.

Now you keep arguing that we don't have all the facts, but we do. We have every fact required to form a coherent argument - that skills are not treasure. Their role as a restrictive mechanism to prevent a path is incongruent with the limiting factor that once we assign points, we cannot reassign them. Your acknowledgement of this fact, by way of the suggestion they might skew probability in favour of learned skills, is indicative of this. Whether you like it or not, you are admitting that the game would be in a worse state to keep skills entirely random so that people who go rank 5 pyro aren't faced with the option of never finding another pyro skillbook in their playthrough.

Again, you are insistent on purporting an argument by attempting character assassination, which is a very sorry state of affairs. You are trying to win an argument when there is no argument in place, these boards are here to provide feedback and produce communication between players, which you are not looking for it seems.

Once Larian studios realises they lack the diversity in skills I hope they are encouraged to improve the skill situation rather than leave it so haphazard that players believe discovering 15 different skills will make the gameplay more emergent. (I'm not sure how emergent it is when you discover a large fireball spell on your knight/ranger combo heh).

On a final note, I shall remind you that when you have an agenda, you can try to think in multiple ways, and you can accuse everyone else of being linear, but ultimately you're only fooling yourself.

Duder, Stabbey erupted into child mode the first time someone put up a well reasoned response to what he/she views as a determent to emergent gameplay. And when further discussion came to his reply, he couldn't be bothered with any more participation.

From what I've seen in this thread is that few people are up to par with discussing gameplay on Erra's level.

: \

Welcome to the Larian forums! There's all kinds of amazing discussion about the upcoming game, loads and loads of threads. Most new people's first posts are questions, comments, or suggestions. And yet, of all threads to make your debut, you poke into here to attack me and defend a nutbar who spent paragraphs and paragraphs making unfounded personal attacks in lieu of anything of actual merit. What a coincidence!

I smell an alt account by erra.

Erra, please stop fighting with your imaginary "rigid, linear thinking" foes.

You think randomness in skill acquisition makes the game more emergent? Good, then that's true, but only for YOU. It can be different for other persons. You have to accept that.

That's OK, Erra seems to have imaginary friends, too.

With any luck, they'll take the debate offline into Erra's wetware.

Also, "have to accept" seems somewhat optimistic to me. But I'm cynical