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One of the few worries I had for Divinity Original Sin 2 was that it could possibly again make compromises in SP for the sake of a well designed coop/MP.

Since the original DOS1 some things have been improved, like the new inventory with the whole party inventory in one menu screen or the shared gold.

But with DOS2 new problems have been introduced (or better: old problems have been intensified), especially with the origin stories, the vastly improved narrative reactivity and the new four-player coop functionality. The design for MP is pretty clear: every human player navigates and controls their own character in the party. Every player can talk with NPCs and explore the world and the story. Ideally there are no traditional companions, only real people playing with (or against each other). And it works pretty well for that case .

But for SP this causes some problems. First, there is a certain dissent whether the player controls a single character with companions or whether the player controls a whole party. While the issue is pretty clear in combat (-> party) the narrative side is not that clear. Like in coop/MP every character in the party can talk with NPCs. And just like in coop every character in the party can do so one after another, pretty much having the same dialogue with NPCs for two, three or four times with the only difference of origin or race specific dialogue options. But the standard dialogue options are all the same. Again, this makes sense in MP in order to give every human player the same possibilites and chances in the game, even if they split up. Nobody should be disadvantaged or demotivated. But SP is different. In a SP RPG I want to experience a story in a kind of immersive way which means that dialogues should be unique. Immersion is pretty much ruined when NPCs say the very same thing four times in a row and the whole party says pretty much the same. But even beyond that, this coop/MP design severly undermines the reactive storytelling approach and its replayability potential. Every companion offers different race and origin answers/possiblities that could benefit my party and the outcome of quests. With this in mind I might end up having every dialogue in the game four times, with every character in my party. Lohse can't convince an NPC? Ok, let's try again with Sebille. Or the Red Prince. Or last, Ifan... And since I might experience a vast variety of different dialogue possibilities in just one playthrough, I'm way less motivated to try the game with another character with a different race or origin, finding different solutions to narrative challenges and quests. In my opinion, the current dialogue implementation in SP destroys the whole potential of the origin stories in SP because it makes them more of a chore than an exciting choice. On top of that, this design makes dialogues way too time-consuming. I doubt that the writers and designers at Larian had it mind that SP-gamers might lead dialogues four times in a row every single time...

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One player, four characters, four samey scenarios in a row, a lot of repetition and nonsensical dialogues = no immersion


I think it's pretty clear that the same dialogue system that works well in coop/MP (best in 4-player coop) has its flaws in SP, especially for narrative and replayability purposes. But I also have a suggestion to how this issue could be possibly solved. In my opinion SP should follow the same narrative principle that works in 4-player coop: every player only controls one player. Why this is obviously a non-issue in combat, it needs a change of design for the dialogue system in SP. There are imo two possiblities/options how to solve/improve that for SP (and coop with less than 4 players):


1) Only the original player character (the one you made during character creation and with which you started the game) can lead dialogues.

This way you pretty much play a solo RPG with companions in narrative terms while having the luxury to manually control the whole party in combat. If you want to experience different origin and race effects in dialogues you have to create another character and start another playthrough.

2) Only one character of the group can lead a certain dialogue.

This way you lead the whole party in both the narrative and in combat but you have to decide before you start a dialogue which character of your party you want to use for that, benefitting from its special racial and origin traits.


Both suggestions are imo better than the current implementation in the EA version, but both have their pros and cons. In the first option you still have a minor dissent between solo and party (narrative vs. combat) but it's imo bearable. The second system though could still lead to "system abuse" which means that people might save before dialogues and then reload four times in order to explore all dialogue options with different characters and then finally choosing the one that might fit them best. That way nothing would have been really changed in respect to the current implementation, it would just make the whole process much more tiresome. On top of that this solution has the disadvantage that it can lead to unwanted events in which the game starts a conversation with a character you didn't want to lead the respective dialogue (usually the one that currently leads your party through the world).

That's the reason why I personally prefer the former option. In that solution the system cannot be played or tricked and the whole dialogue and narrative system makes the biggest immersive "sense". It's probably also the easier solution to implement because you just had to link the player character
to every possible dialogue in the game, no matter which party character leads the party through the world. So whoever leads the party, the dialogue is automatically linked to the player character that you created at the beginning. With the latter solution you had to make sure that you can't talk with NPCs again with another character which might require more complex technical adaptions. Of course as a prerequisite both solutions need the engine to realize how many humans are currently playing the game and which characters they are controlling.

One thing to keep in mind though is that with the former solution you should skill your player character with pet pal as soon as possible (since you can't use your companions for that)... wink

What do you think?

Last edited by LordCrash; 19/09/16 08:38 PM.

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I actually really like that all four pc's in SP can talk to people. One of my favorite moments in Fort Joy is with Butter. If you hit on her with one character, and then claim that you aren't really interested in her, and then if you try to hit on her with a different character she will outright refuse that characters' advances because she has already heard that line. Also in a lot of instances if you say certain things as one character it locks you out of talking to that character with others.

I think more instances of the game remembering which characters have already gone through which dialogue, and changing the options these other pc's can say, and changing what responses npc's can say, would make for a better experience then what you are suggesting.

Last edited by Damashi; 19/09/16 10:14 PM.
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Originally Posted by Damashi
I actually really like that all four pc's in SP can talk to people. One of my favorite moments in Fort Joy is with Butter. If you hit on her with one character, and then claim that you aren't really interested in her, and then if you try to hit on her with a different character she will outright refuse that characters' advances because she has already heard that line. Also in a lot of instances if you say certain things as one character it locks you out of talking to that character with others.

I think more instances of the game remembering which characters have already gone through which dialogue, and changing the options these other pc's can say, and changing what responses npc's can say, would make for a better experience then what you are suggesting.


There are only very instances in which this is the case. Most NPCs just act like the previous dialogue never happened and that's imo pretty bad. I really don't want to go through the same dialogue ever and ever again.

I can only imagine how much work and time would be needed to enhance every possible dialogue in the game in order to give it the proper reactivity to four possible dialogue partners, remembering all the stuff that has already been said. I doubt that Larian is able to do that so I would rather opt for one of the solutions I suggested above. I mean, I rather have a stringent but clear design approach than a system that offers pure repetition in 90% of the cases.

And even if you put all that effort in making all the NPCs remembering all the dialogue lines with different characters there are still issues to be thought about, like replayability and player behaviour. In a system that offers possible specific dialogue for all four party characters the player is motivated to talk to every NPC with every single character of the party. I think that this is tiresome in the long run, especially in SP. I'd really prefer a solution that would require me to play the game several times with different characters than to be subliminally "forced" to use all my characters for the very same dialogue partner all the time.

You see, I like your example above, I really do. But it's just a one shot example that sounds promising on paper. If you have to go through every dialogue up to four times in order to find such instances it gets incredibly tiresome very soon. It's just busy-work, much like looking for crafting-materials an such in other RPGs. And I really don't think that this was the intention of the writing team, to drag out the narrative and dialogues in this specific way.


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The only thing I don't like in SP is companions talking to each other under the exclamation sign. It's the same thing as it was with DOS1 - I talk to myself again, choosing every companion dialogue options. And it's weird. Since there are origin stories now, allow those companions who have them talk for themselves according to their origins. That way they will finally feel less like dummies.

As for the ability to talk to npcs with any companion - I actually find it cool, because of different attitudes npcs have to each origin and race and subsequently the amount of information they're willing to give them.

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Yeah, it's difficult enough to roleplay ONE character... trying to keep track of four gets crazy, and I'd much rather the other party members behave as companion characters in other party-based RPGs (and, indeed, in OS1), with lines defined for them if they're not the character I actually created.

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I'm also not a fan of the current implementation (although I understand some people like the idea of RPing all 4 characters at once).

But my understanding is that this is just a placeholder until they implement the "love and hate" feature, which I expect to be designed so that companions roleplay themselves when not controlled by a player.

I will also confirm that I'm uncomfortable with being able to initiate any conversation with any character. The PC should be required to take the lead most of the time. (If you meet an animal, it would be fair for the companion to interject and help out once he sees you trying to talk to a dog. It's much better than having to micromanage and choose the right character for each NPC.)

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Originally Posted by Ayvah
I'm also not a fan of the current implementation (although I understand some people like the idea of RPing all 4 characters at once).

But my understanding is that this is just a placeholder until they implement the "love and hate" feature, which I expect to be designed so that companions roleplay themselves when not controlled by a player.

I will also confirm that I'm uncomfortable with being able to initiate any conversation with any character. The PC should be required to take the lead most of the time. (If you meet an animal, it would be fair for the companion to interject and help out once he sees you trying to talk to a dog. It's much better than having to micromanage and choose the right character for each NPC.)


What if you think of it as the PC telling party member 3 "hey, you're a dwarf, they're dwarves, maybe you should talk to them instead of me"? :p

The thing is, they want the game to react to different characters in different ways, and if the player can only do a given interaction with their main character, then that severely limits how much content they see per playthrough. Replayability is great, but the percentage of players who will play through any game more than once is tiny. And with five races and hopefully at least two origin stories per race, there's still room for lots of replayability even if you can see the unique stuff for each of your four party characters.

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Originally Posted by mesmerizedish
The thing is, they want the game to react to different characters in different ways, and if the player can only do a given interaction with their main character, then that severely limits how much content they see per playthrough. Replayability is great, but the percentage of players who will play through any game more than once is tiny. And with five races and hopefully at least two origin stories per race, there's still room for lots of replayability even if you can see the unique stuff for each of your four party characters.

It's like: "Hey gamers, we wrote all those different racial and origin dialogue options, now READ THEM." But actually the different racial and origin dialogues should offer options for the player. They should make each playthrough unique and each character unique. They shouldn't serve as an excuse for bad narrative design or even stretching out content.

I don't see how suliminally forcing the player to read each dialogue four times is helping the game. Again, this is a concept that sounds great on paper. But it doesn't play great. It becomes tiresome very, very soon. After 12 hours with the EA version this is the thing that bogs me the most, by a very big margin.


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Originally Posted by mesmerizedish
What if you think of it as the PC telling party member 3 "hey, you're a dwarf, they're dwarves, maybe you should talk to them instead of me"? :p

Personally, I think the point of having a group of characters is that they all participate. Like, for example, when you encounter the lizard being assaulted in front of Fort Joy, you decide to keep your nose out of it, but your companion, The Red Prince, decides he's going to intervene anyway.

At the moment, it's like The Red Prince isn't even there.

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Originally Posted by Ayvah
Originally Posted by mesmerizedish
What if you think of it as the PC telling party member 3 "hey, you're a dwarf, they're dwarves, maybe you should talk to them instead of me"? :p

Personally, I think the point of having a group of characters is that they all participate. Like, for example, when you encounter the lizard being assaulted in front of Fort Joy, you decide to keep your nose out of it, but your companion, The Red Prince, decides he's going to intervene anyway.

At the moment, it's like The Red Prince isn't even there.


I'm with you on that point. But I don't think forcing all player interactions to be through the main character is a solution (and, adjacently, I don't think allowing player interactions to be through other party members is a symptom or cause of the problem you mention).

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Originally Posted by mesmerizedish
I'm with you on that point. But I don't think forcing all player interactions to be through the main character is a solution (and, adjacently, I don't think allowing player interactions to be through other party members is a symptom or cause of the problem you mention).

So what's your suggestion?



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Originally Posted by LordCrash
Originally Posted by mesmerizedish
I'm with you on that point. But I don't think forcing all player interactions to be through the main character is a solution (and, adjacently, I don't think allowing player interactions to be through other party members is a symptom or cause of the problem you mention).

So what's your suggestion?


I've already offered my suggestion: do it the way every other game does it and have the companion characters speak their lines without player input, when appropriate. But that's no reason for me to be unable to take one of the characters to the other side of the map and have a generic interaction with a merchant.

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Larian already said they were going to add A.I personalities latter, just like in DOS1.

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Originally Posted by mesmerizedish
I've already offered my suggestion: do it the way every other game does it and have the companion characters speak their lines without player input, when appropriate.

Well, the problem with that solution is that it would require the devs to treat SP and MP very differently. That's imo completely out of question (time, budget, etc). There must be a system that could be used with only little adaptions for both SP and MP. In coop your companions are controlled by other human players so there can't be any automatically initiated companion interactions in dialogue. Something like that doesn't exist yet. There is no "narrative AI" since the game sees companions as possible player characters that could anytime be controlled by humans. The devs would have to create such scripted multi-character dialogues from the scratch and with only SP in mind (since they wouldn't happen in coop MP in the very same situation). That's something that just won't happen, I'm afraid.

The issue with DOS2 is (like it was with DOS1) that it's primarily made with coop/MP in mind in every possible situation. Every solution for SP must either basically just be the same or at least be something that doesn't require a completely different system or design approach.

Last edited by LordCrash; 20/09/16 12:29 AM.

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Except it wouldn't require they treat the two modes any differently at all. The lines are already written; it's just a matter of choosing a default that gets used if the character isn't player-made.

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Actually, in DOS1 if you didn't want to manually walk both protagonists through their lines there was an option for protagonists - personality presets. They could, for example, automatically agree or disagree with each other, or follow one of the personality presets. I don't see how those presets are any different than origins. Everything already is set in the game, AI companions just have to consistently use their origin lines, or tags when origin lines are not available. And since there are no perks that are affected by replies I see no repercussions for devs to make AI replies automatic by default.

Last edited by Aramintai; 20/09/16 12:52 AM.
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Originally Posted by mesmerizedish
Except it wouldn't require they treat the two modes any differently at all. The lines are already written; it's just a matter of choosing a default that gets used if the character isn't player-made.

It's not about the lines, but the dialogue system. It's not made for dialogues with more than two participants. And of course every such dialogue would require extensive scripting in order to let the companions participate in it. So of course that's a different take on the topic with a lot of additional work just for the SP part. I heavily doubt Larian would do that.

Originally Posted by Aramintai
Actually, in DOS1 if you didn't want to manually walk both protagonists through their lines there was an option for protagonists - personality presets. They could, for example, automatically agree or disagree with each other, or follow one of the personality presets. I don't see how those presets are any different than origins. Everything already is set in the game, AI companions just have to consistently use their origin lines, or tags when origin lines are not available. And since there are no perks that are affected by replies I see no repercussions for devs to make AI replies automatic by default.

In DOS1 you couldn't even talk to NPCs with your companions. In most cases the NPCs then said "I only talk with your master." That's exactly what I want for DOS2 as well. You shouldn't be able to use every four characters for dialogues with NPCs.

And my critique isn't about the situations in which you can agree or disagree with your companions. Actually it's not about that at all! It's about each and every normal dialogue with NPCs (see my screen in the first post). Giving the companions behavioural presets is fine with me, that would "fix" the situations of party discussions. But that has again nothing to do with how normal dialogue between one party member and an NPC is treated (and fixed).

Last edited by LordCrash; 20/09/16 12:55 AM.

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Originally Posted by LordCrash
It's not about the lines, but the dialogue system. It's not made for dialogues with more than two participants. And of course every such dialogue would require extensive scripting in order to let the companions participate in it. So of course that's a different take on the topic with a lot of additional work just for the SP part. I heavily doubt Larian would do that.


One of the very first conversations in the game, where Dallis is confronting Atusa, has at least four participants. My memory of D:OS's toolset is very fuzzy, but if simply changing the speaker requires "extensive scripting," then they're in trouble.

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Originally Posted by LordCrash

It's not about the lines, but the dialogue system. It's not made for dialogues with more than two participants.

Why would we need a dialogue system here with more than two participants? I haven't seen companions interjecting if one of them is already talking to someone, nor should they - it's a mechanic that can be used to do some sneaky business while npc is distracted. And if they all have something to say game shows their lines one by one. So I don't see what's the problem.

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Originally Posted by mesmerizedish
One of the very first conversations in the game, where Dallis is confronting Atusa, has at least four participants. My memory of D:OS's toolset is very fuzzy, but if simply changing the speaker requires "extensive scripting," then they're in trouble.

With extensive scripting I mean that the game has A LOT of dialogues with a lot of possible combinations of party members. If you really want to add scripted party dialogues to the game you have to adjust and manually create A LOT of dialogues in various combinations which leads to, well, extensive scripting. wink

Maybe that'd be possible for certain, main quest relevant dialogues. But for the vast majority of "normal" dialogues with random NPCs or side quest NPCs that can't be a solution imo. It just require too much work. Work that only goes into SP without benefitting the coop/MP at all.

At this point we should think about realistic solutions for the general game and every single dialogue in it, not about dream solutions for specific dialogues or events. wink

Originally Posted by Aramintai
Originally Posted by LordCrash

It's not about the lines, but the dialogue system. It's not made for dialogues with more than two participants.

Why would we need a dialogue system here with more than two participants?

Well, because that was the idea above. I just reacted to it.

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And if they all have something to say game shows their lines one by one. So I don't see what's the problem.

The game doesn't do that since it only shows dialogue lines for one character.

Last edited by LordCrash; 20/09/16 01:04 AM.

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