Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta About 3 design-flaws apparent in alpha

I believe the designers have said that this game is more about reactivity than simulation, which is why it doesn't have a million "simulation" skills like Cartography and Skinning for a ton of professions.

I'm sure that a lot of people would love to have to spend hours doing every stage it would really take to craft a piece of armour but personally, I like the play games for the fantastical and the strange, not the tedious and the mundane.

You do have a point that clicking on dozens of crates isn't very interesting. In part that's probably not helped by the amount of times you repeatedly play the same areas after the game gets patched.

The crates are the only real source of crafting materials at the moment. Obviously right now the amount of crafting materials that exist is far too low - they're going to go over the game and add in more hand-placed materials once they've taken a look at what things are required the most in formulas and such. They should make use of NPC merchants to sell crafting materials.



I also was unimpressed by the lack of housing. They had a big video some months back where they said that because of the schedules, they had to add in second floors of houses to accommodate where the NPC's would sleep, and it turns out that even several of the named NPC's have no known houses. (Maybe it's possible they're past the development barrier on the bridge, but I doubt it.)

On the other hand there are good reasons why that can't be the case. The engine only allows for so much stuff per map, and I'm heard that Cyseal's map is extremely full, there's little to no room to add additional upstairs/downstairs rooms.

Another reason is that if they did have the room for a zillion houses, it would get insanely boring and repetitive. It'd take forever to get anywhere. Most games have that problem. You only have the resources to make so many interesting characters per town, but that's not enough to give a town the feeling of a real town instead of an empty near-abandoned one. You need generic multitudes to make a town feel right, but there's no way to realistically house them and make it interesting and fun.