Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Request: Two+ dimensional characters, please

Please Larian, please: this time, can you add a second dimension to the characters in the world? I think that one of the things which bothered me on some level about Original Sin is that a very large number of the people you meet are pretty much just one-dimensional, with no depth to them. They are just cardboard cutouts, which makes it hard to care about them.


A lot of the named town NPC's fall into a mold of having overly-clever dialogue and patter, but nothing else interesting about them. I remember Divine Divinity. You could talk to the first farmers you meet after entering the Farmlands and while their dialogue wasn'tparticularly interesting, it felt honest and real. Hugh the farmer had a backstory about being a 'tailor' who also served as a gigolo to rich ladies, and had to escape to the farmlands to hide, and he also likes to wear women's clothing on occasion. I don't think there are more than one or two people in all of original sin who come close to the character that Hugh had.

And okay I am being unfair here because most people even in Divine Divinity didn't have close to the amount of character Hugh had. The plague victims you had to choose between didn't have enough to make the decision matter.

But even though a lot didn't have character, at least they were more than caricatures.

In Original Sin, we get: Esmeralda is a slut lol. Cecil is deaf lol. I don't think I could really name any particular standouts from Silverglen. The only other towns are full of one-dimensional evil people who usually don't get names and who you will probably slaughter anyway.

An immaculate's standard greeting to a stranger is along the lines of "Any reason why I should not kill you?" Because they're all one-dimensionally evil, of course.

Save a wounded immaculate's life and he attacks you for profaning a star stone. No gratitude at all. Free some goblin prisoners who know you are not Immaculates and they attack you on sight because you are human and they are evil. No gratitude for being released or even any proper prioritization of revenge (on either the Immaculates or Laurence). Everyone on the Immaculate's side is one-dimensionally evil and does evil things because their motivation is that's what evil people do. (No, I don't consider "my sister slept with my boyfriend, so therefore I shall destroy the universe" to be especially two dimensional.)


A minor saving grace is seeing Silverglen, which is a village mid-conversion. There, we see some reasons why people join the Immaculates they came in and cured the Rot, and got some followers but the Immaculates which are between the stages of "slaughter animals to make healing stones" and "slaughter people who are not Immaculates are missing. We only see one guy who gets to that point and then goes "screw that, I'm leaving!"

Characters, that's the real heart of an RPG. Not the combat mechanics, or the crafting system, or even the game world. What an RPG needs to get people invested in it are the characters that inhabit the world.

We want to see Characters, not Caricatures.

Am I right if I think of the Dragon Age: Origins main characters? I don't know if you played the game, but every character that played a role in the story somewhere had something you would remember them by. For example: Alistair was the guy with the sarcastic jokes, and Morrigan was a dark grim person. When they meet, their personalities collide, which creates amusing dialogs. Something like this, but instead of only for the main characters, it should be done to all named townspeople. I think that would add a whole new layer to the roleplaying experience.