Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta The loss of Day & Night Schedules.

You are describing it as two elements that interact, I'm trying to explain that the link goes a little beyond that, that player agency exceeds by far your definition of freedom


I didn't wrote that the game doesn't have spells or factions, I wrote that (in the context of freedom of the player) none of those factors have any meaningful impact in that game . Imaging a version of skyrim where you could kill the leader of one of the faction in the civil war, and it didn't just make the questline unavailable, but actually change how is developed, picture that factions are actually significant and if you allied to the contrary civil faction, the regicide has a heavy repercussion to them, maybe the first faction try a massive attack on the other faction in retribution, or at least add more soldiers to the patrols, but if you didn't align to anybody, they are just trying to found you, or if you are a member of the companions, they suffer the repercussions; and it doesn't necessary need to be just NPC being hostile to some others NPC, maybe you are a highly know Brotherhood member (tho' to be highly know assassin you have to be pretty bad at your job) and the news boost the number of jobs available, because, heck, if the brotherhood can kill that guy, they can kill anybody, is great publicity. Any of those would have an effect in the schedules, and it is not just because of the killing, a pacifist example could be that magic is actually meaningful, so you go to the leader, use charm and make him surrender, of course, the spell is only temporal and when he recover his senses, and if the universe has any consistent at all, he would dismiss his surrender and explain that he was charmed, but the fact that you can impact in such big way the world, opens a cornucopia of possibilities and makes the implementation of schedules really hard.

Emergent gameplay man, can you see how the original skyrim and the hypothetical game are fundamentally different? Emergent gameplay, skyrim virtually doesn't have it, sometimes one NPC come across another, and if one is hostile, the bump each other until one is dead and... yeah, it can happen again I guess, it can happen with important NPCs... but they are immortal so no consequence or emergent gameplay can branch from that, it could be a big deal if the number of enemies is finite and they killing each other has an impact in the total xp a player can have, but that's not the case... let me see... If the enemy got xp for every kill that could make really interesting encounters for the pla... Oh wait, most enemies autolevel with the player, silly me, expecting something to have impact in anything. If you think that the option to killing everybody is the only thing that skyrim lacked to implement schedules, you may want to look a little closer. But maybe those things are too much to ask tho', there no game that doesn't auto level enemies, has a finite number of them and let you kill essential NPC, of what game was this thread originally about?

And is not like I'm expecting Original Sin to be that hypothetical game, that obviously goes beyond the possibilities of the budget and development time, it probably goes beyond the possibilities of our technology, but if it offers even a slightly portion of that freedom, the schedules would probably not make it, unkillables NPCs or not, and that's kinda my problem because...


While not arguing about the difficulty on the implementation of schedules regardless of killable NPCs, you are definitely describing as the determining (even if not the only) factor for the lack of them, like if was the one thing that cost the feature, and if killing everybody wasn't in the game then it would have schedules. Like if they had to pick and they picked wrong.

I can see how someone could think that, killing NPC has been an example more than once about player freedom along with different approach to solve quest. And they definitely are ideal examples, in the sense that they are really easy to describe and understand. Trying to describe player agency and long lasting impact in the game world is harder, my example of skyrim is pretty long and that's assuming that you have a pretty good grasp of the game, for someone that doesn't know anything about it, it lacks a lot of contextual information. But Killing everybody is something that, even if you don't know much about the game, is easy to understand.
So someone, if he didn't have any knowledge of game design, could conceptualize this "freedom" thing as "solving quest and killing people" and with such simplistic concept, if they heard that schedules are off because of freedom, and seeing that there is this other game called skyrim that has (allegedly) different ways to solve quest and schedules but not the option of killing everybody then the logical conclusion is that killing NPCs is the determining factor. furthermore, if somebody else argue that freedom is more than that and it can include factors like the magic system, factions, crafting, etc., An (poorly critical) observation that skyrim has those things too would make the claim nonsensical. The logic is completely valid, is just that the hypothesis are wrong.

For example, just because a game has magic doesn't mean that is actually meaningful in the context of freedom of the player, in skyrim we have two main uses for magic, killing stuff and getting less killed by stuff (and considering that getting kill is pretty detrimental when trying to kill stuff, the second may be just an extension of the first), The first category branch into just killing stuff and being better at killing stuff. The first one are spells that change "is" to "was", basically all the destruction school, and it makes sense "destruction" and all, but I can't stop thinking that some of the spells may have, if the game allowed them, some practical uses. I'm not asking for a complex elemental interacting system like in original sin, is just that making fire with your freakin hands sounds like something that can have many other uses, it just doesn't in the game. Of the second kind, we can count all the buffs, and conjurations made for killing (every spell of the conjuration school), of course all the buff are only useful for combat and have no other use, unlike Morrowind that allowed you to fortify attributes, in fact it has a lot of practical spells, you could walk on water, float in the air and even lock doors with magic and boosting alchemy with magic and viceversa made all kind emergent options, you can find some crazy speedruns taking advantage of these options; man, skyrim doesn't even have attributes. and conjurations are so limited is not even funny, things to kill something or beings with the only use of killing it too. If you could hear all the creatives uses players found with summons in DnD, even in the beta of OS I just found an alternative use for the wolf, is a pretty good (or arguably bad) trap scout, an unfinished game has more player agency than skyrim.

Of the less killed category I was going to make a similar division between just getting less kill and making others worse at killing you, but apparently the game doesn't have the second kind, there are no debuff spells, I thought that I didn't remember them because the game was easy enough without them so I never bother to use them, but no, they just don't exist, only paralyze and maybe "calm" if you stretch the definition. Wow, I expect nothing and i'm still let down. the other kind is obviously the restoration school, and of course, you can't use those spells to save anybody that is scripted to die regardless of the context.

Of the few spells that don't enter in some of the categories, Detect Life, allow you to see enemies through walls and darkness, which is very useful strategic wise, Detect dead, that is pretty much the same with different enemies, Candlelight that makes you see better in the dark to detect enemies and Aura Whisper that let you see enem.... they are kinda samey in their own way. But there is ONE spell with emergent use, magelight. Is like Candlelight but on target instead of oneself, so is not especially unique, but is pretty practical to distract enemies, you can use it to avoid enemies or adjust them for backstab. There, emergent gameplay, and as minimal as that can be, the whole magic system doesn't elevate beyond that.

Similar findings can be made in every other aspect of skyrim, because the price of consistent (read, really buggy) schedules was way, waaaay more than having essential NPCS, the systems in skyrim are restrictive, they chain the player and give overall less freedom, no more. I'm not saying that you can't have both, but the extension of the freedom goes beyond the two aspect that you mentioned and there is a lot of things to consider making then.

So I'm not against you showing your disapproval, if I agree with the assumption that they had to pick between being able to kill everyone and schedules I would totally agree with you, but there is a lot more in freedom than that, and Larian didn't pick wrong, bethesda did.