Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Thoughts on single player experience

The Luculla Mines thing was contrived, though. That's a perfect example of how NOT to do tension right.

I think the best way I've seen urgency used in a game is by giving a choice. You can either do 1) Save this town, or 2) Go slay this monster. You can't do both. By doing this you are forced to make a meaningful choice, that changes the game going forward, but you can take your time in making that choice. So you don't have to be in a hurry to make the choice, but when you do someone lives and someone dies. I also like how this adds a lot to replay value.

Though I haven't played it myself (it's on my wishlist) I think Wasteland 2 had some choices like this.

No, those are the Bioware-type choices which don't befit RPGs. You shouldn't choose such things in dialogue. There should be nothing stopping you from leaving 2 people to defend the town, while the other 2 are on the hunt for the monster or simply leaving without doing any of these things. You also shouldn't choose it from a drop-down menu. Choices should be natural and in no way enforced by the interface. Consequences should also be logical and connected, whatever they may be. Look at Fallout 1 and 2 for an example of how to do reactivity and C&C well.

Chris Avellone is going to write for Larian!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Maybe not the best thread for this, but I have it open and I can't contain my excitement.

You are right Lacrymas.
Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=3&v=VJJaGSV75y0 (and also other videos from this one. I liked those about realism, uncomfort and "the shandification of fallout)

Before I stopped playing it out of pure boredome and frustration over the clunky gameplay, I had time to see one of those choices : it's really lame and doesn't bring much. What's more, it's precisely what Lacrymas despises : you choose to go to A or go to B, by clicking on a map instead of choosing in a drop down menu but it's all the same really.
Once I cleared the town, I was sent to the lab. Sure it' now overrun by mutated experimentations, but you have to do both in the end. I stopped there, right at the front door of the lab.

But really I find WL2 to be a ... waste, haha. Maybe the enhanced edition will be better but I'm not going to try and find out. I don't know whether it's free or I have to buy it again, I just don't care about it anymore...

And Chris Avellone ? Well, I'm kinda sad for Larian's team of writers. I already voiced how I wasn't thinking it was an interesting idea to bring him along, so no need to do it again. At least he will only do 1 origin story. I'd like to know which one after I finished the game, so that maybe I'll corrected if it happened I chose that one and really liked it, otherwise I'm not that big on the man.

Hail to the allmighty king of RPG writing

I hope he fits to Larian. Larian games have their special sense of humor. Chris made the best RPG characters ever, but his creations are about torment, suffering, endurance and such things.

Yeap.



Wasteland 2 mummified me from boredom.




If the origin stories are the way I think (hope) they are going to be. I.e. they are explored and expanded throughout the game, Chris would be a perfect fit.

Back to topic, about fake urgency:

The ultimate example I know is BG2. Once you come to the city there are tons of people who throw their quest at you and each one must be done at once (says the quest giver, you can do it whenever you like). There are some timed quests in BG2 that make sense (jans family, some in the drow city), but most quest have no timer.

It looks like most people have accepted fake urgency to be normal in RPGs. I do not like it. Urgency can be good in an action game, but not so much in an RPG, especially if the RPG is much about exploration.

I have read something (maybe gamasutra, I am not sure) about Portal1. The final battle has a timer. In the beginning it had no timer, people finished it in 3 minutes and it was not very impressive. Then they added a timer of 6 minutes. Suddenly people needed 4 minutes and they were filled with fear and tension. Suddenly it became much more engaging. The writers were also happy because they need only writing for 6 minutes. But Portal is not an RPG, it has a linear environment and it takes place in real time.

BG2 isn't really an example of good writing in general. It has other things going for it. If you don't want to play with fire (it's fairly difficult to do right), then just don't write such scenarios, there are many, many other ways to create tension.

I guess one problem is that real urgency is hard to achieve in a non-linear game. You can have it on a small scale, such as side-quests that are based on a timer (like the ship on fire in D:OS), but it is usually not very satisfying, because when the timer runs out, the quest is failed. Unless the failed quest leads to other things that would not happen with the quest successful, this is just bad from a design perspective. Players will not like it when stuff happens constantly that is outside their control.

On a grander scale (like the Divine Magisters about to arrive in the D:OS 2 prototype), it introduces world-changing consequences. I mean, what would happen if the Magisters arrive? It shouldn't be simply game over, since that again seems to be bad design. Instead, players might no longer be able to walk about in the open, additional enemies would be roaming the island, certain areas could be blocked off, etc. ...

One also would expect NPCs to behave differently and acknowledge the change through new conversation topics and maybe new quests, etc ...

It's a huge amount of work, for an event that may never happen if the player is fast enough. And it's challenging on the technical side too, since large-scale changes to locations and NPCs are difficult to achieve. Mostly you'd have to prepare different versions of the same level and switch over, unless the engine was written with such flexibility in mind and can apply those changes to existing levels/areas/maps/whatever.

I agree, I said it was a little clunky. I guess I should have said "very clunky".


Urgency may work well in some games, but it just can't work well in freedom-heavy games like D:OS. The creators don't want to cut you off from completing quests because of one choice you make, which restricts what the consequences of choices will be. Multiplayer and freedom of movement also make urgency difficulty to accomplish.

The teleporter pyramids, button-to-teleport-to-stronghold, and free escaping as long as you are not right nest to an enemy all wreak havoc with the writer/designers' ability to create the threat of a situation where you might get in too deep to get out.




None of that will happen because the Divine Magisters will never arrive. They'll always be arriving tomorrow. Tomorrow will never come.

But that does bring up an interesting point. I think it would be interesting if there were some maps which are perpetually at one time throughout the entire thing. Like one map which takes place at night and it is night throughout the whole thing.

That is why you restrain yourself and limit the choices to those that affect you and your party. Not every multiple-path should have earth-changing consequences, or any of them really, if you want to have a true reactive world. That way you can better control the design and outcomes of actions without retconning or introducing plot holes. MrBTongue's video, which Madscientist posted, explains this very well. (I'm familiar with his work in general). I.e. Manage the scale.

I know. My point was purely hypothetical in answer to the question why there exists mostly fake urgency in RPGs. Because real urgency requires a prohibitively large amount of effort to implement in a satisfying manner.

I made 2 games with the RPG maker 2000. There it would be easy to do this. But I know nothing about programming and I have never worked with a program that creates 3D worlds.

It's not technically *double* the work, but it's not easy. Still - manage the scale.

TBH, I was thinking on a reply on my way home, but decided to check the video first. To my surprise, it had my answer right there: namely "failure is a consequence".

Since we were just talking about (fake) urgency, I guess the most common "motivation" for the player is the looming catastrophe. But letting it actually happen would amount to a failure state. And a lot of games don't want players to fail.

Even on a small scale, there is often no opportunity to make a wrong decision. No wrong answer in dialogue, no way to irreversibly fail at the solution of a puzzle, no dungeon area that remains forever locked if we do or fail to do something.

How can there be real urgency if nothing negative or inconvenient is allowed to befall the player, no matter the scale?

That's called "bad design" and "hand-holding consolitis". I.e. BiowEAre. Of course failure is a consequence. In Planescape Torment you could fail conversations let alone anything else. Failure should be a consequence not because of "hurr durr console tards don't know challenge" but out of the overarching goal of creating a believable world with real causality. Failure also doesn't mean the "game over" screen, though that is one state of failure.

And the "game over" screen is probably the worst way to implement failure. Certainly a necessary evil in many games, but I much prefer less binary fail-states. And also subjective fail states. Say you have to defend a village from monsters, and there's lots of villagers that can be killed. The likely fail state probably won't be you getting killed, but the village being decimated. A way to signify that the player has done a more or less crappy job defending if more than X% of the villagers have died can be a good way to create a non-binary, subjective fail state. Some players won't care if a bunch of people die, and may just use them as meatshields. Or you might even prefer they die if, for some reason, their essence is being used to power some sort of artifact, and the more of them that die, the stronger the item.

As for urgency, I would really like to see, for example, the magisters show up on the island eventually, but you either need to have some way to show that time is passing to the player, or their arrival needs to be tied to certain events (the much more likely and easier solution.) It could be tied to one main event, or maybe if you complete 5 side quests, a party has arrived. I think this would work much better for something where people are trickling in, like refugees or a disorganized monster invasion, instead of for a ship, where the arrival of a big group of people is fairly binary.

I'd use the game over screen only in the eventual death of the whole party, even if you somehow screw up the main quest. Though I don't know how that would be signified, in Morrowind if you killed a plot critical NPC, a text pops up telling you that you have inadvertently failed your "destiny" and should probably reload if you want. You can continue playing normally though, you just can't complete the main quest anymore. Though there could be a better way. Like the magisters throwing particularly tough enemies at you until you simply can't beat them and lose. Like the final choice in Half Life 1, where the G-man asks Gordon to choose whether to help him or not. If Gordon chooses (i.e. not going into the portal, not choosing it from a drop down menu) not to help him he teleports Gordon to Xen, with no bullets and an army of aliens ready to pounce him.