Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General I feel kind of ripped off (Lament Thread)

This would take a LOT of writing to pull off, which would cause further delays, you'd be essentially writing several different lines of dialogue for one option alone, this is the reason that even Bioware use archetypes and set combinations in Dragon Age Origins.

We all want to be able to use a hundred different tags to craft a perfect character, but it's not possible yet, not until a computer can generate dialogue specific to a certain combination, otherwise you could be looking at millions of lines of dialogue and 95% of it never used.

Well, I'm also slightly disappointed with the tag system so far. (as well as the skills, especially the available diversion, as there are for example no summonings, no direct curse, etc, right now)

I hoped it would be more akin to the traits in the dark eye ruleset. Similar stuff was done in Arcanum. For example a "greedy" perk that makes you able to haggle with persons you otherwise couldn't. But therefor you can't accept quests that offer no reward. Then reflect that in the fitting conversations with a couple of lines.
Maybe an additional quest option here n there.

Nothing that would require the entire amount of conversations to be rewritten.

It's not a strawman. I am taking the suggestion he made and showing an instant problem with it, using the VERY SAFE ASSUMPTION that Larian will not delete the origins.




All we have seen of the Red Prince origin is him on Concentration Camp Hellhole Island. It is very wrong to assume that the only effects of his origin can be covered in those generic tags.




I highly doubt that.




You are of course free to make that suggestion to Larian to delete all the origin stories and instead replace them with a bunch of small scenes tied to very specific tags to produce a mix-and-match.

However, I don't believe that "delete the origin stories" will get a warm reception at Larian.




I'll repeat myself:

All we have seen of the Red Prince origin is him on Concentration Camp Hellhole Island. It is very wrong to assume that the only effects of his origin can be covered in those tags.

If there are scenes later on with someone who personally knows the Red Prince, such as a scheming nest-sister, those will not work with any combination of generic tags. Each origin story has a late-game origin quest tied specifically to the origin. That won't work with a mix-and-match pick-your-tags origin.

Your suggestion is basically to substitute in a bunch of tiny minor generic pieces in place of specific details. Trying to weave in 2-3 random setpiece generators (like you can find wandering the wastes in Fallout) might be possible, but the limitations of fitting in all race and gender combinations would make them seem bland and impersonal, like a novel in which the protagonist only describes his relations like "Parent One poured a bowl of cereal for Younger Sibling."

Also, it probably wouldn't be all that coherent. What if I pick the Merchant,and Bandit tags and encounter the "[Bandit's] Old Gang robbing [Merchant's] Old Partner" setpiece? If you break each origin into several different tags, that allows for those tags to be mixed and matched with potentially opposed tags from other origins. Untangling all the complications would be a massive headache for the writers, coders, quest designers

If these setpiece generators become tags, then they would have to be limited in multiplayer. A tag could only be picked by one player. You couldn't have two Merchant players reach the same trigger for a setpiece.




I can't imagine Larian removing the origins either, especially not based on suggestions from people who haven't seen how they work off of Concentration Camp Island.

Back in the Kickstarter days they showed the Island Heiress origin, which was off the island and had specific interactions between the heiress and existing NPC's. That was just an example, but it should be paid attention to when thinking about how the origins are likely to work once off of the prison island.

There's nothing stopping the game from suspending your disbelief and allowing all 4 individual rogues to be THE rogue for the purpose of a quest.
For example: You get to remove all 4 collars as "The One" if you use the "open 4 clients and give all characters to yourself" way of having a custom party.
Custom characters of each race will also have their own unique Origin stuff, and you can have a party of 4 humans in multiplayer.

Aside from the negligible minutiae of how things are written, there is literally no practical reason to treat origin characters any better than the custom made ones.
The effort that went into the origin stories could have been better used making the tags feel more relevant and/or having more of them.

I'd gladly have a 'merchant' aspiration instead of Ifan as a thing at all.

Totally this.
And honestly Stabbey, ask around, how many people want to have a preset character instead of a custom made one? Larian is bragging about their ability to create pen&paper like rpg games, an effort could have been made for the tag system. This is just a question of how much energy you want to put into this, there's no real impossibility here...

You're right, it's a matter of energy. Six fully-fleshed out origins which dramatically alter many NPC reactions is already extremely ambitious. There's nothing impossible about adding a dozen tags to create interesting custom characters, but it's a ton of work, more than making a single origin to make it meaningful. Maybe they oversold the idea of creating your own background through tags (though I can't recall how big of a deal they made of that), but perhaps they'll be adding more tags.

If I were to make a wild guess, making custom characters meaningfully customizable in their background would probably be about the same work as two to three origins. I would say an origin is probably worth 3-6 tags in terms of uniqueness, depth, and breadth of effect, so you'd probably need at least 10 tags you could choose from to make your character feel unique, some of them not part of any given origin, since origins also have tags. I'm not sure how many tags are in the game already or exactly how large of an effect they have besides dialog options, but you'd definitely need quite a few more to to really do custom characters justice.

Which, to be clear, would be ideal. I'd like deeply customizable character backgrounds as much as anyone. And maybe that's Larian's plan, but I wouldn't necessarily count on it. Most people will find six interesting origins with lots of choice in their development to be quite generous as is.

One easy way to make customizable characters special would be to let them choose from some special talents at the start of the game that have large stat effects, mostly with certain drawbacks. Say, something like the "Merchant" background would grant you 3 Bartering and 1 charisma but reduced constitution, or that sort of thing, perhaps even granting some unique effect like merchants have more things to sell. Ideally you'd gain some special dialogs with other merchants, where it'd also be a tag, but that's moving into the less easy way to make customization. Mere gameplay effects nothing equivalent to an origin's story relevance, but it'd offer some sort of flavor to custom characters.

Ok so it is unrealistic to actually do the origin system by actually creating the origin system.

Why say you are doing it and then not... But say your doing it anyway. That this is clearly what was always intended.

If they never advertised the Origin system "I" certainly wouldn't have been disapointed.

Better yet you know what game DOES do the exact same thing with tags? Tyranny... You know what they don't do? Call it an Origin System :P

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And I said all that without just tearing down your example... Which is easy because it is flimsy "all or nothing" reasoning.

As if applying a "Likes applesauce" tag means that every single NPC needs a "Likes Applesauce" conversation path.

But... Maybe I am being unfair, does Divinity Original Sin 2 CURRENTLY apply at least half the tags to say 90% of the conversations? Well... No...

Does the game have conversations with no tag interactions? Yes...

The majority of conversations use 1-2 tags.

So... If hypothetically there were 100 tags. What would be the easiest way to handle it? Order them.

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The thing is... The current "Origin System" is FLAT OUT a cut corner / Cop out.

They knew they had to do NPC partners. So what is the easiest way to account for the PCs? Just make the NPC partners the PC characters.

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Don't give me that fluff! The game STILL advertises itself by what has been said in the Kickstarter with none of the words being changed.

Larian used a clear language to imply a feature that it has fulfilled in the most lackluster way possible to the extent that its continued insistence that it is fulfilled is rather dishonest all things considered.

"Yep we have an origin system all finished!"

"So, we get to play an origin?"

"Yes! You get to play a character"

"So... We get to play a character?"

"No... An Origin!"

"So... We can play a mage from the royal academy and meet up with our buddies?"

"If we have a character with that backstory"

"But wait, are we getting an Origin or are we playing a complete character?"

"A complete character"

"Then why are you calling it an Origin System, that is completely confusing and doesn't represent it at all?"

"Because we originally intended on you giving your characters origins allowing them not to just be faceless people who popped out of nowhere... But we decided that was too hard"

"Then why not change it?"

"Because money..."

"Ohh"

Or rather: Just because something is technically true, it doesn't make it honest for lack of a better word. Which is advertising 101.

So if it says "You can drive over 1000 blocks!" and it turns out they are all lego blocks...

I actually wouldn't be as peeved if they would just drop the pretense and go "No it wasn't feasible we don't have an origin system anymore".