Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Original Sin - Matt Chat Interview

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tIpfydUsaNw

Well I listen to the full hour and it was amusing. I truly hope the sheep crowd doesn't warp him (they are drowning everything else out on the kickstart comment board).
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He did ask for suggestions for the stretch-goal at the end so here are a few:
1) additional area with more amusing (and long lasting) side quests.
2) The option to raise a child.
3) (not sure how the game handles morality of player; but it would be good if towns can 'hear' of players good or bad behavior and react appropriately when the players arrive to a town (including specific quests that are triggered based on character morality - example if helpful - find my child - if evil - kill this annoying guard/politician ...; and amusing chance to redeem self or switch morality based on reaction in quest)
4) ability to dye/customize items
5) pets (non-combat pet that you have to protect when they get into trouble; and you feel very sad if they die )
(You know it would be a lot easier to suggest stretch goals if we've played the game since we would know what is or is not there)
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I wonder if Lar actually read these threads...

For those who didn't listen, here's the Matt Chat summary. (I hope you appreciate this. My wrists are hurting now.)

• (9:30) Quests aren’t going to hand-hold you through them. There isn’t going to be a “Quest Completed!” pop-up. Instead, your journal will have little parts of information, like “we found a book by a dead guy that talks about lying statues”, later if you talk to a statue, you might find “we met a statue, It might be one of the lying statues from the book”, and if you deal with the statue somehow, it’ll just be a thing, and you may not even realize that it was a quest.
• (13 min) In that demonstration battle on the 10-minute kickstarter video, they died three times. That’s one reason why they never showed the conclusion to that battle!
• (22 min) The main characters relationship is not specifically a love story. You can certainly take it in that direction if you wish, though. Their relationship is defined by two different axes: Affection and Affinity. Affection is how much they like each other, Affinity is how well they agree with each other on moral dilemmas. So they might hate each other, but work well. You aren’t going to accidentally end up as your friend’s gay lover, it’ll be a conscious choice if you go for that.
• (23:30) The main characters are Source Hunters, and one of the perks they get from being trained in that area is that they can talk to animals.
• (24 min) No sheep henchmen at the moment. They are thinking about adding weresheep in the game, but you cannot have a deep meaningful personal relationship with sheep yet. You will have to make a tough moral decision about the sheep at some point in the game. And the rabbits. And a cow.
• (25 min) I think there may be multiple different ways to try and get your way in a dialogue (Charm/Reason/Intimidate), instead of the current “I agree/I disagree” system. I’m not sure. The context of the situation is also important. I think that for example, the “dead body on the beach” would probably be a Charm or Reasoning situation, and Intimidation would have a penalty.
• (27 min) No mini-games. Lockpicking will be item based and dexterity based.
• (28 min) The Source (elemental) magic is not just for mages casting spells. It also gives you Source-based warrior and Survivor skills
• (28:40) The editor is not about making it easy for a novice, it’s more of a tool to do powerful things. They’ve used that technology (or parts of it) for over a decade to make their games, and that’s why as a small team they have been able to make such big games.
• (30 min) They’ll integrate the modding scene with Steamworks, and there will be another TBD thing to centralize mods for those who don’t use Steam. If the community picks it up, Larian will support the hell out of it.
• (31 min) “Have you thought of adding any DRM to this?” No.
• (32:20) Larian admits that some of the reward tiers for the Kickstarter may not be cost-effective for them.
• (33:30) What’s the minimum pledge tier for fans to get the full experience? Just the $25 for the base game, although it does play well with a friend ($40 for the duo-copy pack).
• (35 min) If Divinity 2: Ego Draconis had been a PC game, it would have been released a year earlier and in much better shape. Development for Xbox lead to a lot of compromise just trying to finish the production.
• (36:10) Beyond Divinity was bad, it was a game they company made just to survive. They never got a dollar of royalties from Divine Divinity. They were only able to get a deal to make Divinity 2 because they were going to do it for Xbox. If they asked to do it for PC only, the game wouldn’t have happened.
• (37:50) "Why did you end Ego Draconis the way you did?" (I’m going to save my fingers from typing and just link to that spot in my LP. Watch the videos for the actual experience, not the text I added.)
  
  - It goes back to Divine Divinity. They decided not to cut the game at the end of the Council of Seven sequence and instead went ahead and added a new “Wastelands” zone, despite warnings they’d never finish it. (Spoiler alert: It was a huge combat zone with no quests.) The publisher wanted them to show variety in the environments. “If there is not a screenshot with orange stuff, we’ll sue you.”
  
  - For Divinity 2, Swen figured it would be better to stop with a cliffhanger and cut hard, instead of making another weak ending area.
• (41:40) Dragon Commander is going to take a lot of people by surprise. The leader writer and animator spend a month in London recording dialogue – more dialogue than they’ve ever done before (Divinity 2 had like 9 hours of dialogue, and it felt like more). That’s just to cater for the choice and consequence in the game. Dragon Commander is probably the most complex game they’ve ever made from a gameplay point of view.
• (43:50) “What would you need to personally hear or see about Original Sin to get you to buy it?”
  If you invest in it now, you’ll have more fun in a couple of months. If you’re planning on buying it anyway, buy it now and get it better later. It’s future profits from the game being invested into the game before it’s released. They’re not taking your money for an already funded game, they’re taking your money and giving you a much better game (at a discounted price!). They’re not pushing Original Sin as far as it could go because they haven’t enough resources, not enough time, not enough budget.
• (48 min) Final thoughts: Other non-human playable races is a huge, impossibly high stretch goal, because it would be so much work, because of how the game reacts to how the players are. If you wanted to play as an orc, they’d have to cater for that all over the dialogue lines in the entire game.
  
  - He’s not keen on full voice acting, because there are more tangible gameplay things that can be added instead for the same price or cheaper.
  
  - They hope to get enough for the Perks stretch goal (650,000), and do things like have synergy bonuses if the party affinity go up if they perform combos with each other, or maybe solo bonuses if they don’t work well together.
  
  - In Dragon Commander, there is an extraordinarily complex depth to your generals/councillors/princesses, because of the way that game was specifically constructed with that in mind. You couldn’t do that for Original Sin at this point, but at the 800,000 stretch goal, they hope to add more depth to party interaction and give the henchmen more personality and story presence, with branching choice and consequence based on how you treat them. Ideally, tying that into the players social stats and perks as well.
  
  - It’s a bit tough to get professional authors in at this part of the development. They’ve worked with a bunch before, but it’s tough it they’ve never done videogame work.
• (55:10) The game would work well on the console with a controller, but that was killed early in development. Maybe as another stretch goal in Kickstarter, but they probably would react poorly to that idea.

[satire] Original Sin unconsciously made me gay! [/satire]

Thanks for the writeup Stab.

While watching I was thinking it was too bad that the info wasn't available in a written form. Thanks, Stabbey!

Oh woah. You should let Matt use that as a video description lol.

Thanks for the summary, Stabbey. I shamefully have to admit that I didn't have the patience to watch the entire interview.

Good interview! Thanks Matt!

There were many interesting things said. I thought the description of the play not being quest-based, but rather a more natural exploration activity, was interesting. I also thought the mention of a 10 minute battle intriguing. Would love to see footage of a large battle of this sort.

Fantastic interview, I really enjoyed watching it! You see in every second the passion towards RPGs Swen is blazing out. Lot's of new information aswell.

Thanks very much for that Stabbey! Was handy while at work earlier and will watch now.

Is an interesting idea that quests will not be based on questlog. Also there will be not minigames like the lockpick, you'd think an RPG like this would be full of minigames but fortunately Larian understand that such distractions mainly ends up bothering players. And there will not be DRM which bothers only the legal users. But the most important I heard is the no commitments for consoles, PC focus and avoid casualization EJEMdragonage2diablo3COFCOF... ah, sorry for the cough, it happens...

DRM is useless anyway as the only thing preventing pirates is the time it takes to crack said DRM. Plus less and less people are willing to back companies that force DRM down their throats which has a possibility of screwing up the game.

By not forcing DRM on the users the devs are basically saying, yeah there's pirates but there's nothing we can really do about it, we trust you to make the right decision.


Which is good, not only because multiplatforming is a huge pain in the [redacted] it also forces the game to be "dumbed down" to be played by console controllers.

I still wonder what Kingdoms of Amalur would have been like if it were pc only.


Press A button, something awesome happens!

And console USERS! hehe! The worse of multiplatform games is the casualization of the entire playability: dumb dialogues, short maps, easy combats, less control of everything, including stats, skills, scripting, etc. I wish the only problem was only the damned controls! Dragon Age Origins could be much better only with bigger maps (while DA2 has no possible fix)...


Don’t make me cry

Ah yes the unconsciously gay (or paedo) feature of Dragon's Dogma. (Or straight for bi/gay players who didn't want an opposite sex partner, take your pick)

For those of you unaware. Dragon's Dogma featured a forced romance system. Thing is the game never tells you this. You can end up romancing ANYONE and by ANYONE I really mean ANYONE including children.

Going into the game knowing this, I avoided romancing the wrong NPC and effectively chose the one I wanted but I read some threads of people who ended up with same-sex romances as they were unaware of the romance feature. That isn't the problem here though: I later heard that Capcom didn't apply restrictions on children. This meant you could romance the child characters Pip and Symone. Now that is sick.

In any case I hated the fact that the game forced romance upon you. Characters with a high affinity for you (thanks to you being kind to them or whatever) were in love with you. I knew Larian would avoid a stupid system like this and not force it upon you.

I generally hate romances in video games. I think only Baldur's Gate and DA: Origins did them well as they added to the story. While Dragon's Dogma's romance system was part of the story, the fact that it was forced upon you, unexplained and chose the last person to have high affinity for you to be your romance meant that it was a horrible system.

I blame Bioware for popularizing the romance thing.

Imo KoA was quite fun on PC and I played it with mouse and keyboard, wasn't a problem at all.....

AND I would support a port to other platforms after the PC release. Larian should also bring this great games to the console people if they want to do so and consider that a good business option, why not? Would be a win-win-win situation.

Multiport games have nothing to do with the points mentioned above. The problem is that the audience for video games is much bigger than 10 years ago and turned from "hardcore" gaming of some nerds (like we are probably) to a more casualized gaming for everybody. But that's not the fault of the consoles. If you want to blame them for something, then blame them for bad controls if you want to play with mouse and keyboard. Everything else is bullshit. (And I even don't have any console....)

I thought KoA was awful. It wasn't the controls; I just didn't enjoy the structure of the game. It felt like a series of tacked on events. Go here do this go there do that but i never felt like i was part of a story.
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There were a few bugs; mostly clipping and related to boss fights; and while the bugs were very annoying they were restricted to a very small portion of the game. Having played it I would not buy the game a second time or recommend the game to folks who have not played it.
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I liked dragon age; though the combat was kind of lame but the story/presentation was great. I was one of the few who did not think dragon age 2 was a total bust. The only thing I absolutely hated about dragon age 2 was the constant reuse of very small areas - there were other aspects of the game I disliked but i would give it a 6.5 (where KOA was a 4 and dragon age origin was an 8) for folks who like numbers. DKS was by far the best of the bunch during that period. Another couple of sleeper I played during that period that i truely enjoyed was king bounty legend and just before space rangers 2.
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Anyways it is some what unfortunate to Larian (since they started ahead of the curve) but this is the year (not calandar year) of the TBS rpg. At least 8 are comming out next 18 months after such a long draught and most of them look promising.
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Seems like the only thing missing is Wizardry 9.

I don't mind romance as long as it done non-aggressively and properly and YOUR choice. I really hope to see some light romance in DOS but I'm afraid that all these whiny complaints (release of few bad games with bad implementation of romance made people hate it in general, without giving other game a chance) on Kickstarter and on forums and the fact that Divinity game's setting usually isn't so good for such kind of relationships in the plot pretty much nullifies any chance of such relationships, even subtle.

That's why we can't have nice things.

I would like dialogues like in BG 2. There were romances in there but not as a "dedicated feature". They were a part of the "normal" conversation and interaction with your companions.

The problem is not with games designed to take the best from PCs (large areas, vast use of HD & RAM, great graphics, etc), and later they were ported (or remade) for consoles. The problem is when they were designed simultaneously to both platforms from scratch, so the final game will be some kind of hybrid too complex for consoles and too simplified for PCs. Didn’t you miss in Dragon Age Origins the point &click inventory, random named enemies which Baldur’s Gate used to had, larger areas, more detailed graphics, etc? That was a millionaire game and failed to enough satisfies PC users (not mention DA2 please...).

Just listen this video when they talk that Divinity 2 could be ready a year earlier if it were for PC only...

Thanks Stabbey for the work of writing such a long text full of information about that interview !

D:OS looks very promising to me !! I really look out to have fun with D:OS! And the Editor not for "novice"? Well, I know it I will be buzy for at least many many years with the Editor only!

Other TBS rpg's are coming, really?
I only want Divnity Original Sin !!