Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Suggestions for Sin2: Camping!

Hi,

I really enjoyed the first Divinity and Original Sin is a great role playing game - so far. For some reason I began playing this title, sort of late. Sin, part one, has re-implemented loads of things that I've missed really badly in RPGs of late. For instance no BIG arrows or "X mark the spot" - Questhelpers - instead only an old log book and your brain as tools. Repair is also great but could be even more complex in "part 2"in my opinion. But for "part 2" I really would like to see the old camping scenario coming back. Kind of Dragon Age I camp with all of your party sitting by the bonefire hopefully being able to discuss your adventures so far.... I dont remember the actual title but in an old PC RPG you had to really start a fire, bring food and camping became a necessity because you healed and more during that time! Also you ran the risk of being attacked and had to set "someone" (skill set?) to safeguard your camp! If something like that would be implemented it would be really nice. There is probably nothing so "RPGish" then to set a camp, in different environments (!), cause you might get attacked and perhaps also some kind of "wake up" timer (skill?) could be implemented to make it even more interesting. I might add other suggestions after I've played through the first Original Sin.

//Mem

There's no day or night cycle in D:OS 2, so that's the first and biggest problem with trying to camp for the night.

Needing to eat food rarely adds much. The only recent game I can recall which had you eat food was Legend of Grimrock, which was set in a dungeon with limited food resources, and if you were hungry, you didn't regenerate health/energy over time and when resting. In a game where there isn't really limited food, that kind of mechanic wouldn't add much. EDIT: Whoops, I forgot, there is infinite food thanks to some respawning snails on floor 6. Snail slices - yum!

There's no fixed party in the game, you could have one of several origins (or even no origin) and several companions with different origins, so that's another little obstacle which would complicate adding campfire chats.

It would be nice to have some camping but it won't be in this game. Hopefully in D:OS 3 if this game does well and they are feeling ambitious enough to add a day/night cycle because that won't be easy given the current complexity already. (But it would be so worth it!)

That's pretty pessimistic. It's like Larian saying, "We heard your feedback about wanting a deeper story with more interesting characters, so we we added complex origins to the characters. The only catch is that they can never do anything, and have no role in the story."

I'm not fussed about camping, but banter should be practically mandatory.

As a HUGE fan of the Ultima games, I was among the firsts to complain about the lack of a day/night circle in the first game (a future that was announced during the KS campaing, to make things worse).
Then, I realized that there is at least one technical issue that prevents Larians to add this feature to the game: the co-op campaign. Specifically, the chance for one player to get involved in a turn based combat while the other(s) is wandering the world in real time.
With a day/night circle in place, and the aforementioned possibility, you will have absolutely moronic scenarios where several days pass while one player is stuck in combat.

Not really much of an issue. In Metal Gear Solid V, a full day is 72 minutes. In Witcher 3, it's 90 minutes. It'd take a long battle to last longer than a day.

I really think the only obstacle is that it's difficult to make a living environment, which was essentially Larian's goal with the day/night cycle. People going to bed, etc.

Implementing a day/night cycle should be easy (just make it a bit darker ...not that I dislike a distant moon and stars :P ) and thinking more of that now, as I write, it should probably be added just as a nice "lifelike" feature, even without campfires. Also, in a game like this, and without day/night features, at least I presuppose, that they are sleeping some night hours, for example, at base without that now being graphically shown. So what I mean in this is that even without a cycle it could be a nice feature to camp out in the field or in a dungeon. Who says you will only camp at night when out and wandering through the countryside?

Adding some differentiated food and re spawning them in inns and the countryside (mushrooms...mmm) shouldn´t be that hard either. I admit I haven´t played through the first Original Sin and so far - agree that maps maybe not that big for a campfire feature - but then, at least, the travel to the Luculla mine over all those bridges were long enough for some well needed breaks a long the way.

The third thing you mention about chats I cannot understand since they are talking rather much already in Original Sin. Jahan for instance has talked for more than 15 minutes with my main character, only so far. Every companion does not need a background!

No, I still think this would be a great feature, even in this kind of game. As an alternative to using different beds for healing (in its simplest implementation) or even add some more animals, plants and so on to the maps which also will make it possible to expand the crafting part of the game! Instead of one pack of wolves there could be several, and re spawning mushrooms and plants - shouldn´t be that hard.

I want to sit by the fire singing a anthem, sounding like an imp.

Yeah; I think Oblivion's is one of the shorter days and even there it's 48 minutes by default (though I usually increase it to two hours or so). Changing schedules is nice but not essential: I like it when it happens in Oblivion etc but it doesn't bother me so much when NPCs have the same schedule 24 hours a day such as with Divine Divinity and Morrowind. The only thing I sometimes dislike is trying to find somewhere for my character to sleep once it starts to get dark!

I said it would COMPLICATE campfire chats, not make them impossible. Because it would. But all right I'll retract that last one since it shouldn't be especially complicated.



I believe that Larian has considered this, but has decided that if day/night cycles are in the game, that they are to mean something and not just be cosmetic only.

Yeah, they would definitely need to add a "gather your party together first" mechanic in order to have a hope of making it work. With the emphasis they want to put on independence in DOS2, not likely something they would want to spend time on. Could be an interesting mechanic for a mod, but day/night cycles are already a pain in DOS and I think it's unlikely to change much in DOS2. If you add NPC schedules to the mix, fast forwarding becomes even more tricky and requires a very well thought out design up front.

Guys in case you forget the reason the Day Night Cycle was difficult for the first game to do wasn't because it was difficult to simulate a sun going over the sky with changing shadows... that was the easy part.

It was giving every single NPC in the game a daily routine and structuring quests around taking advantage of it.

This is doubly difficult in the second game where time is quite variable.

That's pretty much what I said a few posts back: there's the visual effect of day & night cycles and then there's the way it affects characters and what-not: it doesn't necessarily need to do both. Though having done the latter a fair bit, it's not necessarily that difficult, but it can be a fair bit of work (I guess especially if the game engine doesn't have clock-triggered quests: I have no idea if the D:OS series does or not since I haven't done any mods for it).

It would be a jarring inconsistency if you ask me. A combat round is supposed to simulate a handful of seconds of "real life", while what happened in real time to a player not stuck in combat takes minutes, if not hours. With a day/night circle in place this issue (which already exists in the first game) will be even more obvious and ultimately annoying.

Sorry, but I think camping will not happen.

I play DA:O now. There you create one char and all other party members are NPCs with a fixed personality.

In D:OS2 you can have:
- A situation like DA:O, you create one char and recruit some NPC
- You create several chars of your party. In this case you would talk with yourself. This is like the RPS moments in D:OS1 as single player, which felt kind of strange to me.
- You play multi player. The players can talk all the time (either directly or via their chars) and they can show their point of view by their actions in the game world (cooperative or competetive questing).

Currently in the game you create one char with a fixed personality and get other party members with a fixed personality :P

In real life, travelling anywhere interesting by foot would take days, not minutes. Forests and towns would be much bigger, and you probably wouldn't have to stab someone more than once to kill them...

It's all fairly abstract.

Ohh how surprised you would be to find out that all of those are mooostly untrue (well half-true).

Points of interest in real life can be within a day's journey, forests can be tiny (though they typically have different names), and "towns" (as in populated settlements) can have about 5 buildings or less...

And to top it all off people have been known to survive a lot of punishment and it isn't unusual for someone to die AFTER a battle (Some famos examples of people who were riddled completely with arrows and bullets). So "probably" nothing, you will probably have to stab them a few times before they stay down.

Actually, the only time related abstraction in a turn-based combat system is the turn order. As for the time length of the rounds, they were traditionally supposed to represent a very specific and very short amount of time (usually from 2 to 6 seconds).
In a single player game, this remains consistent because the whole word freezes when a combat begins. In D:OS it doesn't happen (for obvious reasons), but at least, with no day/night circle in place the issue is masked to some degree, because the whole notion of "flow of time" is not in the game.
With a day/night circle in place it would become painfully obvious that something is wrong in the way the time flows.

I think Ayvah's point is that a game world is an artificial (and not least: symbolic) world with more or less different rules of time, space, life/death etc. and doesn't have to adapt or try to adapt rules of what we call our one and only 'reality' (i. e. what we have in mind when we think or speak of reality). And many elements of games are genuine and utterly game logical and don't even fit the special reality system of the game world, so aren't and can't be explained from an internal point of view, they even don't exist as such, such as life bars, action points etc. (at least often it's possible to 'translate' them: as character attributes like 'strong', 'powerful' etc.). One of the specific artificial aspects of (most) games is that saving the whole world actually means saving about 30, 50, 100, maybe 200 of NPCs in a very 'compact' game world: distances are smaller, real-time durations are shorter etc. Also 'epic' fights between whole kingdoms are mostly represented by a couple of figures or troops. What we see in D:OS - 'four source hunters fight five undeads' for example - actually means more than that, actually it means: source hunters of Rivellon fight the undeads. And therefore 'four source hunters fight five undeads in ten minutes of real time' can mean: source hunters fight undeads in a hard and long-lasting battle, and this could be symbolized by a simulated sunset. So regarding the specific artificiality of games it wouldn't be a contradiction by itself, just a matter of design.

Maybe the time of day should be entirely player controlled? Meaning if the player wants to play at "night" then that means going to your rest menu or whatever and selecting the time of day if the other players agree with it that is (if multiplayer)

In that way if your quest objective requires you to act at a certain time of day you wait/rest until that moment and the time of day is suspended at that time until you choose to move to another time of day.

At least this way you can have night quests without having to wait. NPC schedules would not be such a bother either because NPCs would be where the game says they should be at that time of day. You avoid the problem of wandering npcs although you would still have to lay out sleeping quarters and such things for npcs.