Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Question for Larian regarding balance changes

Many developers tend to "fire and forget" their games, not balancing skills and such after launch other than bugfixes. Some noticable offenders are Skyrim and Fallout 4. For example in Skyrim destruction magic desperately needed a buff in damage (having to dualcast fireball like a 100 times to kill a legendary dragon). In this example it was bad balance because you shouldn't be able to stunlock something indefinitely, and the damage scaling of destruction was horrible. This was a problem that was NEVER fixed.

So yeah. Just wondering if you guys at Larian will go over the skills in the game and balance them after launch now? I'd hate to see skills remain unbalanced forever.

This includes buffing weaker skills, fixing tooltip errors (currently seen 2 skills with tooltip errors). Tweaking skills when it comes to cost, AOE and such. Nerfing skills that are too powerful etc.

Many people tend to defend developers who does not rebalance single player games with a logical fallacy that "singleplayer games do not need balancing" which is something facepalm worthy I've had to suffer through countless games. Or other stupid arguments like "mods will fix it". When it comes to balance changes mods should not fill in the responsibility of a developer to balance their games!

So yeah. Just wondering if a closer look on the skills by the combat devs will happen and if we can expect balance changes in the future after the most important bugfix patches and so are sorted?

They even did a fully Enhanced version of the first game and gave it away for free, so I don't think they will forget this game completly.

Balance is done in most cases if you wanna fuck with it use mods as you just said if they wanna touch balance it would likely be in the enhanced version like they nerfed bleed heal basically.

Devil's Advocate Counterpoint: Divinity: Dragon Commander

I don't like games to change after release. I've built my characters and invested 100+ hours based on the current balance, not a different one. Do not break my game.

They already re-balanced the game severely since the Early Access. They had ample opportunities to change this, this is now final.

Larian's policy is that updates cannot break saved games, so no worries there. However, some changes might not apply without starting a fresh game.

Nothing is perfect, so to say that this is the release version so no more patching for any reason is ridiculous.

Dragon Commander is a RTS with ARPG element, if I'm not mistaken, so even more a different kind of game?

Also you are able to fully respec for free after Act 1, so you could easily adjust to most changes?

???

I was giving an example of a game Larian forgot about completely very shortly (as in 2 months at most) after release.

I see, did not get your context. But Dragon Commander was not their Kickstarter-Golddonkey, so I guess, it is less likely it will happen to Divinity, excpet if they get pissed because of the feedback.

The whole game wasn't re-balanced. In DOS1, there was a lot of work needed later in the game that was never tested for example. I'm pretty sure they'll support it, it will depend on data mined and feedback if they make balance changes. If they make a console version, perhaps again that will be a EE version, that I would expect a full review and adjust.