Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta List of suggestions/issues/bugs- Alpha 1.0.167

@Neanikos - yeah, I couldn't resist the temptation to play the alpha myself, but stay strong.

Now for a major suggestion I've seen mentioned elsewhere in the forums, although considering the amount of work that would be involved, I'm afraid it might be too late to implement before release: please, Larian, NO RANDOMIZED LOOT - all loot found on enemies, in the game world (especially in containers like barrels and crates), and (to a degree) within merchant trading inventory should ideally be hand-placed according to the surrounding context. In my opinion, here's why:

1) Randomized loot breaks immersion: For example, finding silver ore (!) and eyeballs in barrels outside the tavern is just goofy. In such barrels, you should find junk like empty or broken bottles. Or again, having merchant trading inventory scale to the player's level (as if the game world were centered around the player, and not an independent and organic system) is nonsense - see also "game balance" below.

2) Randomized loot encourages save-scumming: Currently, if you need an item for crafting, you can try to load and reload (and reload) until some random crate coughs up a set of antlers. A much more logical and fun system would be to get the antlers off of a deer. Weak example, but you get the point.

3) Randomized loot ruins game balance and the fun of exploration: At least based on my experience so far, one player may happen to hit the RNG right and get an Uber War Scimitar of Godly Smiting from some orc grunt (or from Esmeralda, who happens to know the player is now level 7 and therefore somehow "deserves" her legendary stock) that does 120 damage. These types of items should be carried by bosses, or tucked away in difficult areas of dungeons, or hidden in secret vaults; in other words, the player should have to work for them - see also "save-scumming" above. The whole idea of level-scaled and/or wildly randomized loot, so unfortunately ingrained in the "traditional" CRPG, needs to be killed with fire. Repeatedly.


Anyway, these are my one-and-a-half cents. I should say here that I also deeply appreciate Larian's bravery and transparency in releasing the alpha to thousands of opinionated gamers. Regardless of whether they change the final product to 100% match my own personal RPG tastes, this is the kind of interaction with players that builds trust and loyalty. So to any devs who might be reading this - thank you!

Heck yes! Finding fresh tomatoes in a dungeon otherwise filled with bones and dust always made me sad.
...But take heart, because I don't think that loot has to be placed by hand. I think 95% of loot can be distributed by assigning crates to a loot category, like for example loot_city, loot_villagehouse and finding uber gear in random barrels should not be possible anywys. I am not familiar with the internal workings of the game, of course, but in theory this would not be much different from the steps necessary to make different mobs drop different items.




I do agree wholehartedly!

Concerning loot. At one point, we started creating very specific treasure tables. But two problems became immediately apparent:

1. it is a lot of work to define those
2. it is a lot of work to go through the game and assign those
3. it is impossible to keep the item distribution fair and balanced in a big game

If people now say that they are finding too many fishing rods in generated treasure, it only takes a small change. Not enough bows? Small change. You do not have that if you have hundreds, if not thousands, of loot tables. But yes, I agree that you should not find fresh fruit in a dungeon, so point well taken

@ForkTong - Wow, you guys are even checking and responding to the forums on the weekend - I'm impressed! I completely understand that placing loot in such a huge world by hand this late in development is probably out of the question, and apparently from your response, assigning loot categories (like Neanikos suggested, and which I think would be a great alternative) may also be too much. But I do hope you find a way to at least address two major issues (or as I would say, problems):

1) Finding loot that's completely out of place. Again, I think of the example of the silver ore/eyeballs in containers in town - I don't remember exactly where these happened, but these and many other similar goofy things did occur during my playthrough.

2) The whole concept of scaling equipment to the player's level. I'm not saying it's as bad as the "bandits in glass armor" thing with Oblivion (ugh!), but for a game that you're so passionately attempting to make as immersive as possible, it seems completely out of place to have loot scaling. Again, it goes back to the basic notion of a game world that should exist independent of/around the player, and not because of/for the player.

Anyway, thanks for the input. I'll of course be thrilled if you implement at least some of my suggested changes in the original post over following releases (especially the improvements to the inventory/trading interfaces), but whatever happens, D:OS looks like it's going to be fun. Cheers!

Forktong --

I'm not 100% sure how you implemented things but I once defined loot tables for a mud and I don't remember it being too painful - we basically built our tables of different types of items (fruit, armor, ...) with probability based on difficulty and then we could build tables of tables with probability of the type of item based off area and location type.
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It is not a perfect system (also we generated much less loot than D:OS is generating (which seems a bit high right now). The biggest pain was too much crap (fillers) but in the end I don't remember too many complaints. Hum. I should find a play ground to play with some ideas.

Uh, since Forktong explicitly came in and said "we tried doing this for Original Sin, and immediately realized wow this is a crazy amount of work that is hard to tweak", I trust that he knows what he's talking a bit more than someone who once built a loot table for a simple dungeon crawler.

The most important thing for us to know, I think, is the fact that you guys are aware of the problem, because this means that if there is a fix, you will implement it. I trust you to do your best, so THANK YOU!





Hundreds or thousands of loot tables? And here I thought I was being clever... Sounds like there'll be A LOT of different dungeons and regions. I thought you could cover them with less than a hundred individual loot tables.

Would it be helpful to implement a kind of blacklist system? Region could have a blacklist that contains items that are not allowed to spawn: No eyeballs in cities, no tomatoes below Aleroth, for example. I'm sure you guys have already thought about that one, so I assume again it would not be as easy as I imagine?

Yeah, I also can't understand how - even assuming we've only seen about 10-15% of the game so far - you'd possibly need more than about 50 loot tables to do a pretty good job of making sure each area/environment has realistic random loot (especially in the generic "junk" containers like barrels and crates). I'm thinking something like one for caves, one for crypts, one for towns, one each for forest/swamp/beach/desert areas, etc. It seems to really come down to Larian's priorities - they're putting what must be a hell of a lot more effort into features like the (admittedly cool) day-night cycles, but apparently don't see the random loot issue as a big problem for a truly immersive world. It's not the decision I would've made, but I'm not a Larian employee, now am I?

Again, I hope they at least tone down the worst of this, and also invest some time in making the relatively much simpler interface improvements I suggested. Right now, I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time with boring tasks like managing inventory and other interface issues, which would be much better spent enjoying the amazing world Larian has created. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox again - I just really want to see this evolve from what's already a very good RPG into a truly great one. Either way, I can't wait to explore the rest of Cyseal in the next big update!

Please go back to 3 skill points per level for the two main characters. Henchmen would probably be fine getting only two.

Just 1 skill point per level makes me very sad. There are so many neat skills to work with and explore but how can I justify spending a point into crafting or social skills (and I love giving characters social skills in RPGs) when it will take me until level 32 to reach 5 in just two skills, assuming they started at 1 and you develop not a single other skill!?

Also a bit of weirdness I've noticed you can purchase the survival skill 'Reflexes' at character creation but then it is gone from the character sheet and thus can not be increased (yet it still gives a bonus to the defense value).

Larian really should have mentioned that your AB points per level increase to 2 once you reach level 6, and increase again to 3 once you reach level 11 or 16 (I'm not sure which).

Reflexes hasn't yet been removed from char creation, but it will.

I did read that after posting still it sucks to gain a level and not be able to get better at a skill you already know. Still with those additional points in the mix it still does not seem like enough skill points really. (Unless I am unaware of something that adds skill points besides levels)


A Level 20 character will then earn 44 skill points (49 if we count the 5 at creation). Shouldn't a level 20 character be masterful? But consider making a Master Thief: 5 in Pick Locks Pick Pocket and Stealth. It would take just about every point available with very little left over to make the character say charming or lucky or a passing archer or anything else really and this doesn't even address 'Way of the Ranger' that you'll want so you can learn charm, silence and other tricks.

Don't even dream of making an Archmage type character: all 4 magic skills, plus Lore, plus Willpower, plus Sourcery. Just getting those seven skills to level four would take 70 skill points! (Hope you didn't also want to make the occasional potion because you certainly don't have points for crafting)

Anyway I hope the skill system gets lot of attention before release. I'll be very disappointed if skill points are going to be that scarce.

I totally agree with you here, I was dissapointed with the new system as well. I like roleplaying games for satisfaction of achieving level ups, because with every new level you gain something new and cool, like a new powerful skill, or an upgraded version of the old skill, a new perk etc. But with D:OS new points distribution system leveling up now is not quite exciting, because you can't spend your points on upgrading something every level (unless of course you wanna play as a useless jack of all trades), you have to save those sparse points and wait a few levels, carefully planning what kind of very specialized character you want to be. And herein lies another problem - the advertised no-class system is no longer viable. You can't be a good fighter-mage or socially adept rogue with this system - you just won't have enough points to experiment like that and not make a gimped character.

Yeah, that. I'm not desperately keen on the sudden points famine which makes levelling up feel slightly pointless (er, pun unintended). I'm not sure if that's why the combat suddenly seems harder, too, but I'm not a fan.

Totally agree with the above. As with level caps (another one of my major pet peeves), limiting skill progression like this just takes the fun out of character development, which is central to a good RPG. If developers want to go for game balance, there are other ways to do it that don't prevent players from exploring more varied skills, spells, etc. You don't want your character to be a demigod at level 3, but level caps and scarce skill points have the potential to create an even worse situation for an RPG - boring, "samey" gameplay.

Of course, we all know Larian is planning some significant changes in the next builds. I just hope our comments continue to push these changes in the right direction.

The way you describe a class-less system, it is defined by having the skill tree of a traditional RPG and then throwing enough skill points at the player that he will have so many of them that he can easily invest some into other skill sets.
By that definition, increasing the output of skill points will turn any RPG into a class-less RPG. I don't want du devaluate your point, though, because scarcity of skill points will obviously have the reverse effect. My point is, that a class less game should achieve its class-lessness via other methods than an abundance of skill points.


Also: The fact that players will still gain more skil points at higher levels does not help?

Well, one of the posts above shows some calculations about skill points.
Say you get 5 points at the start of the game, 1 point until level 6, 2 until level 11(?) and 3 till 20(?). So it's 50 points total and with that you won't even be able to get all single tree abilities to top tier.
Maybe specializing is not such a bad idea if you take companions who can complement protagonists abilities, however, since they are not obligatory the game should be enjoyable and completely beatable without them, therefore I think there should be enough points to cover a decent variety of abilities.

Well that is a rather insulting way to phrase thing and a pile of rash assumptions on top of it.

You may have a point.

Pickpocketing could be rolled into Stealth and use its point value instead of being a separate ability, but that doesn't address all the possible issues.




You couldn't make an archmage character before either. Each ability requires 15 points, and in the last patch you could only get a maximum of 62.

I don't think that Larian wants players to be able to max out everything like in the Elder Scrolls series. I believe that this is why you have multiple companions and henchmen, and will be able to switch them around - to help full in gaps in your character's build.

Otherwise, items with +[Ability] will become quite valuable.

It was never indeed our purpose or goal to enable people to max out several abilities. It's a party based RPG after all. You can get a bunch of abilities to 4 and we are trying to make a level 5 ability really count. And like Stabbey says, items that have a +1 to an ability will become and feel more important. I think you'll understand once you see the new skills and the way they are organized and distributed. I also think that it's still possible to create a hybrid character.

For instance, in my current game build, I have already noticed that the following is a killer combo, maybe even a bit overpowered: create a warrior, spec him as a textbook warrior for some levels (up to level 5 or 6) and then put one or two points in a certain undisclosed magic school (or two), and you've got yourself one really powerful dude.

We are not trying to push you into a role. If anything is doing that, it's probably the requirements, and I still want to provide equipment and skills that are a bit more lenient (but also a bit less powerful).

Indeed, on the current 1-5 scale, +1 seems almost like an artefact, if it can make you go from, say, master (level 4) to legendary (level 5).



I can't wait to discover this system