Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Mods Hey other dudes working on mods

How far from release are you guys?

I'm months away still, unfortunately. I'm so scared I'll finish it just in time for the steam community to die off.

I made zombie time as a complete joke mod and have over 5000 hits, lots of positive votes and 500 subscribers, and that took 2 weeks to complete.

I'm so looking forward to releasing something of quality. The community is hungry for it...

Still working hard on ODAD with Baardvaark.

We got more or less half the quests in the first city and most dialogs and most fights in. Everything needs some solid polishing and testing to make sure it works as expected and that combats are properly balanced.

If we keep on this pace maybe in ~ 1 month we'll have something solid and polished in terms of quests,combats and dialogs.

We talked about possibly opening an alpha to the public to help out with testing but we decided to test ourselves much more and polish the mod a lot. We figured the players won't play our mod twice so we want to have a solid first city.

I'm looking forward to playing your mod Burgee

What gameplay length are you guys estimating? I've been intrigued by your project since it was announced.

Baardvaark is better suited to answer that question.

I honestly have no idea at this point. The more into the project we get, the harder it is for me to estimate how long it will take people to read dialogs, figure out what to do next, beat the combats, etc. I'd say there's at least a couple of hours of gameplay right now depending on how much you read and how quickly you can solve some of the quests. If you read all the short stories, that'll probably tack on another hour. I've been focused a lot on the day night cycle lately which doesn't really add playtime but adds an enormous amount of immersion. We're going for quality over quantity, but there's still a decent amount of stuff right now. Really excited about some of the quests, scenes, writing, and combat we're doing.

I'm pretty much finished aside from adding the music and credits. Or some sort of ending that pulls the player out of the game. Once I figure that out, I'll release it.

6 months? I'm solo and only work on it parts of 3 days a week. I'm not planning an overly long mod but am planning one with 3+ solutions for each quest, choice and consequences, and all that jazz.

One thing that drags out the amount of time this is taking is having to keep straight all my dialog flags over multiple files and such. It's a shame they don't link together in some way like the story editor can grab all your items and triggers.




I'm actually not worried about this one. DOS still has tons of players without having major sales. Once Larian gets closer to releasing their next couple games it will continue to snowball interest in all things Larian.

I'm still in a holding pattern of dabble and design, so I would still be a year out from any completed game, methinks. I'm hesitant to dive in headlong until I see some measure of good faith from Larian that they're serious about supporting this because it's rather lacking at the moment. I got burned by Dragon Age and don't want to invest tons of time again just to bang my head against some frustrating impediments that never get addressed.

That said, I don't think there will be a problem with finding people to play. If you are enjoying what you are doing and can see it through to the end, I wouldn't concern yourself with audience size. The graphics and gameplay will still be relevant for a long time and people will enjoy new adventures if they are well done.

Mine currently is up to about 3.5 hours of gameplay from beginning to the point in the quest I'm at. I'm planning another few hours of "main quest".

Aside from that there will be a fair amount of side quests, some involving combat, some involving puzzling around.

Once I have the MQ done I'm going to step back and polish it all up to make sure it's as perfect as I can get it, during that playthrough I'll decide where the player could use a break and implement level specific side quests in those places.

Combat balancing is going to be a nightmare, not looking forward to that. I really wish save games were easier to keep in place after making changes in the editor. It would be so much easier to test, load the editor and make a change, load the save and test the change. Oh well.

I can't wait to release it though, but first I'll likely look for help testing it here.

You can actually play yours now? We'll that's something hehe.

Mine you can play about 20 minutes till everything is broken into pieces. Once I figured that the biggest challenge will be scripting everything into quests and such I went full bore into that and went completely bare-bones on everything else.

Currently you can start about 8 quests in my mod and partially finish one of them. Each day I work on it I basically map out a dialog for one part of the quest. Then later attach various pieces from other characters the next day or as necessary.

Basically I'm doing the whole mid-game of my mod first, and will bolt on the more linear early and late game once I get the good part dialed.

I was hoping to be done or at least close to it, but I haven't had the time I thought I would over the last couple of weeks.
I started with what I thought would be a much more simple mod than the one I really want to make in hopes I could get it completed quicker. I had no idea it would take as long as it has!
The more I work on it the more respect I have for the devs that do this every day. I am not trying to do anything fancy like adding features, just trying to make sure that what I do is done well and that what in end up with is something people won't quit out of boredom (hopefully.)
This translates into a lot of fighting and fairly large map areas to contain it all. I have one town with a cemetery area and 4 transition areas that lead to 4 level areas.
Maybe 80% of my terrain and placeables are done, but there won't be a ton of quests, but I am aiming for some richer dialog options among party members.
Ideally, the upcoming patches for the engine will come out soon so I can add some of the placeables I think I will need before I feel comfortable releasing it, though at this point I have no estimate of how much longer it will take. I have decided to stop creating false schedule pressure for myself, as that seems to only create opportunities for compromises.
The way I look at it, if you guys and other modders play it and appreciate it, that's enough for me for now.
Maybe there are only 5-10 mods in progress, but I think thatprobably adds up to a fair amount of playtime for users. Maybe some of those users decide they could mod too, and next thing you know there's a huge community.
What I'm trying to say is I don't believe there is a deadline. Deadlines make you accept less than you intended. As much as I love D:OS, even Swen said there were parts of the game they wanted to be better but they ran out of time.