Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Suggestion: Include Non-pregen character Origins

While currently the Origins are all tied with pregenerated characters that you can recruit into your party... I am happy to announce that, at least so far, you can edit them if you select their origin (to an extent... If you want to play a female Lizardkin with a story well sucks to be you!) in the character creator.

However that is only tolerable and really meh. Since I am sure that when Larian announced Origins no one was thinking they get to play pregenerated characters (or "edited" pregenerated characters) but instead wanted to make their own unique characters with origins to flesh out their role and existence in the world.

So I am putting in a suggestion here for Origins that are not tied to any pre-generated character with hopefully SOME depth.

They don't have to be too fancy but they need to ground the character in the world you are creating. NPCs who know them... Places that are important to them... Quest opportunities.

To quote Eurogamer: "You picked a predefined character" he didn't say "You picked a predefined origin".

----

Also. When you first heard about Divinity 2's Origin system did you
a) Think it was about playing a predefined pre-gen character
or
b) Giving your own custom character a background or origin?

I was thinking that the origins would be 'locked' in just a few cases (like The Red Prince for example), and you could choose to like pick an origin story that like 2 different races could have (say, human or dwarven thief/rogue guy, and not in the 'class' sense). And I know for a fact that Swen mentioned this in one of the kickstarter videos relating to the origin stories. But it seems that's not the case anymore.

That is an incorrect presumption, I did think pre-generated characters.

That is because the most prominent example given in the Kickstarter campaign was that of a young female sourcerer PC returning to her hometown after escaping Fort Joy. She was clearly a preset character because NPC's had pre-written dialogue making references to the PC and her history and relations with other NPC's.

I do still believe that you will generally be able to change your appearance and stats for the pregenerated characters, and so can build them into whatever class you want.


The latest videos show that D:OS 2 has pre-generated origins and generic history-less origin in which you can select your own tags. Obviously, the generic origin is not going to have the same depth. It isn't going to get [SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE ORIGIN] tags in dialogue, only ones for the tags.

You can just simply get more depth and better writing with preset origins than ones generated by users. That's because every reaction to every origin must be put into the database. That's the limit of what can be put into a computer game. It can't hold infinite origin stories, and it can't have the same high level of reactivity as a pre-generated origin.



A.

***

I do have some concerns about origins. For example, in the RPG Codex interview, Swen said that Chris Avellone was writing "the" Undead origin. "The" Undead origin.

That seems to suggest that each race might only get a single origin. I hope that was only a mistake of him misspeaking.

I think that can't be the case, since we already have 2 origins for humans: Ifan ben-Mezd and Lohse.

To answer the OP: A, I've always considered origins to be predefined characters. Actually, the fact that you can custom their appearance, name and even class gives me more than enough freedom.

Isn't a generic option just the same but without the "red prince tag" for instance?
So generic is not as deep since you can't expect all npc to react to a 'insert origin story" that does not exist?

And isn't a generic character with tag scholar an origin where you became a scholar?

//I will be playing as Lohse.

I expected a system similar to DA:O, where you picked "Dwarf Noble" or "Human Commoner" and some story elements were added for those specific origins, and TBH, that LOOKS like what they've done, you select the [Generic] origin tag, but you can select other tags to add to your own kind of "Custom" origin, Such as [Noble] [Thief], or [Noble][Merchant]. Just because you don't get a specific story for your "Custom" origin doesn't make it any less amazing.

As a matter of fact, thinking about it now - DA:O origins were basically pre-gen characters that you got to rename and customize, as they all had a specific origin story shared between them (Both Human Noble origins were the same, only slightly different between male/female.)

I won't scour all the videos with Swen from back then, but I am pretty sure he said at least twice that once chargen were open to players, when you choose (!) to make your sourcerer heir male, it would somewhat affect the relationship with your little brother due to inheritance laws, i.e. him being unable to claim a supposed birthright as the eldest son to justify his betrayal.

And I am 100% certain that Swen said multiple times during the time of the KS campaign that while origins like that sourceress and the Red Prince would of course lock you into a race, they'd try to provide as many race choices as possible (and plausible) to origin stories where your race isn't crucial - all of them, not just the bland generic one.

I can live with all origins having gotten a fixed race in the end, as long as each race gets at least one story, but locked-in sex? Absolute no-go that could very well keep me from backing their next game. (Unless, again, every combination gets an option, in which - unlikely - case I'd only be slightly annoyed.) Only thing worse in that context would be if there were no customisation at all.

That a day/night-cycle didn't make it into D:OS (nor D:OS2), after all, was disappointing but understandable. However, in this case, not doing that fairly little bit of extra work would not be readily excusable to me; it's not like every dialogue choice has to concurrently reference every aspect every time, especially when it comes to sex/gender.

B, absolutely B. They didn't even imply origin stories were just predefined characters. What a dickmove.

I hope at least every sex for every race will have a minimum of one predefined character. The current ones are just edgy af.

Perhaps you should wait until more information is available before declaring that origins are a trivial amount of work, if you can't see that from the demonstrations and interviews thus far.

As I stated in the similar thread, let's not conflate "characters" and "origins".

What we have are characters.

What we're asking for is tags for the custom character that reference an origin.

We're not asking for the same level of detail as the characters. Otherwise, we'd be asking for more playable characters.

The evidence so far is that we have tags, but these do not reference the origin of the character. All it would take for a tag to become an origin tag:
A) It is mutually exclusive with other origin tags
B) You meet a character who remembers you, per that origin.

That's the difference, and it's not hard at all.

Beyond that, it's not any harder than implementing any other tag. Actually, it's easier. It's mutually exclusive with other origins, so you only ever have to worry about the PC ever having one of the origin tags at a time.

Of course, you could go all out with it by taking it as far (or further) than Dragon Age: Origins, but we all know that all player characters start the game in the one place, and I doubt anyone here is expecting anything so epic.