Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Single Player, Multiple Characters

It's not about Larian deliberately wanting custom characters to be "less interesting". It's that every response, every line of dialogue, and every quest in the game must be put in by the developers and left alone. The single-player has no human person who can put in NPC's, dialogue and reactions to a backstory which only resides in the players head, and not the game.

So yes, origin stories will have more content than generic characters will. That's just the reality of videogames. They can't match the versatility of a human GM with pen and paper.

Larian has hired an additional SIX staff members just for writing. Paying them a living wage is probably a fair amount of money. It's not unreasonable for Swen to have a preference for players to see the fruits of all the work those writers - writers he's paying for.




Swen said nothing at all about hating the idea of allowing 4 custom party members. He said that it probably wouldn't be in at the initial release.

Everyone either has or likely will have some disappointments with the game. It's impossible to please everyone. Try not to take it as you being personally slighted.

I personally have some worries and disappointments about competitive questing and other multiplayer-only gameplay taking up resources which could have been used to make singleplayer better.

And you know completely fairly they advertised giving origins to "your" characters.

A bit of bait and switch never hurt nobody :P

Instead of say

"Origins: Play as your own generic character without one or as one of our preset characters we hand crafted."

Which honestly at this point I don't know why they don't just let you make your entire team. Given that the only PCs that have backgrounds are Pregens and they are already there in the game to be found anyway.

But I guess it would make you skip their introductions. (I really hate Sebille's... seriously... and the fact that she isn't optional if you don't want to be down a companion OUCH!)

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Actually it is funny this game, more then any others, kind of has the most companions I might have issues with...

Two are genocidal monsters... One is a sociopath... and one is normal. :P

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But honestly given that we might get more origins (especially for undead) does mean that there MAY be a point in not letting you create your team.

From what I've seen of the alpha footage, they've designed a different experience for single-player. For example, if the Red Prince meets Sebille, the conversation plays out differently depending on who's talking, based primarily on the characteristic that Sebille hates lizardkin.

Red Prince PC -> Sebille NPC
Red Prince NPC <- Sebille PC
Red Prince PC <-> Sebille PC

The point is that they're designing these situations differently.

I'm not sure that single-player means that you'd have more or less content overall, but it will definitely be an experience that is to some extent designed specifically for single player.

From what I've seen so far, it might be better just to create your own 3 companions because it appears that they are inconsequential at best since your PC seems to be the only one that matters in single-player. It appears that any goals of your companions are removed and only in place for multi-player 'competitive questing'

That isn't true exactly. Your other companions still have their own goals. It is just up to you to decide if you want to complete them or not and who gets priority when doing so.

The reason they cannot do competitive questing is kind of simple... You are making all the decisions. You cannot work against or around... yourself.

Competative questing is NOT a result of the origins and happen in MP even if everyone chose the "generic" background, no aspirations, and everyone was the same race. What competitive questing is, ALL IT IS, is that everyone doesn't have to agree on a topic. Remember all those times in the first game where you had to play Rock Scissor paper? Replace those with fights and alternate goals and that is competitive questing.

It does feel SOMEWHAT cheap that your companions can't just go "No! this is wrong! I won't stand for this" given that even in Divinity 1 I believe there were breaking points for companions. Yet meh... you would probably dequip them and remove their skill points if you knew it was coming.

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The "Origin" or more accurately "Pre-generated character" ones are... are quests you get from the get-go (or you can only get) that you can decide to play against your friends for.

OR you can work together... OR you can find alternate solutions... OR you can decide it isn't worth it and just give in to your allies.

So if your, for example, a member of the Thieves Guild you MIGHT want to prevent their destruction. You might even start off with a quest to steal something and the person who owns it knows someone is after it and asks the party to stop them. Yet you can always prevent this.

(Honestly this is a HUUUUUUGE FREEKEN REASON to have more then pre-generated character backgrounds. The fact that anyone who played the game will immediately know what your quest is and can circumvent you with metaknowledge)

So there should be so many elaborate, inter-related quests with conflicting goals, that with prior knowledge of the game (or a wiki/walkthrough) there is no way to anticipate possible conflicts?
You do realize that for competitive questing, every quest line must have competing goals with all other quest lines, right? Not only does that mean each background takes more work than the one before, all background quest lines must become increasingly complex (or at least longer) the more backgrounds there are.

Rather than theory crafting what a game 'should' do assuming unlimited resources, consider that origins are a core component of the game and there are four times the number of writers working on D:OS 2 than D:OS. If there are X origins, how reasonable is it to add on 2 or 3X more, or design adaptable backgrounds that are 5-10 times the work of a specific character?


Also, previous experience with any multiplayer game can always be used to gain an advantage over those who are unfamiliar with it.

That isn't how it works exactly.

"The Red Prince" has a quest to drink a bottle of Red Wine... Including Everyone Else if he clues them in.

Everyone else gets a quest to stop someone from stealing the bottle of Red Wine. Including "The Red Prince" automatically. This is regardless of your origin.

They can chose to do either one or to fight for it (or complete it first)

The way the game is set up... it isn't that every quest line has an entirely different goal depending on your origin.

That is why the origins are not exponential in terms of competitive questing.

It is why knowing the person's origin immediately gives away exactly what they are trying to do if they do not work with you immediately.

All this while ultimately everyone is on the same quest anyway (not four different main quests) so you have to work together at some point.

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Or rather this I am writing isn't how Competative Questing is done with Character Origins!

-Pregen Char 1: Has a quest to drink a bottle of wine
-Pregen char 2: has a quest to kill the winemaker
-Pregen Char 3: has a quest to deliver a bottle of wine to the cheesemaker
-Pregen char 4: has a quest to steal the reward money from the wine maker and cheesemaker.

How it works however can be!

There is a bottle of wine and you are offered a substantial reward if you can acquire it. You can
1) Steal it
2) Pay for it
3) Kill for it
4) Pregen Char: Wants to drink it

And you can chose any of these, fight for any of these, or attempt to solve it first or secretly.

So rather than hand crafted quests where there are individual motivations for conflicting goals, the quests should be simplified to the point they are generically interchangeable between almost every character, with no differences at all based on the actual origin?
Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of having origins?

Everyone having a wine related quest doesn't solve the problem of someone that has played the game before knowing when a conflicting quest will come up. They wouldn't know which conflicting quest, but they would certainly know when they needed an excuse to separate and get a head start.

I am not making the game, I am only translating what the information is... and even I can get it wrong.

It is better to think of it that for SOME quests a character's personal ties to it become an entirely new dimension to it that they CAN explore or subvert (assuming it isn't a quest that must be unlocked through having a specific party member.)

So if the party is dealing with a bunch of thieves... That is a quest in it of itself (whether it be by destroying them, getting them arrested, or helping them)

HOWEVER! one of your party members is secretly a member. This means that they can work against you and help the thieves guild... It also means they can use their membership as an extra solution to defeat the thieves guild. If they are so inclined (and this information COULD be found out). All of these are perfectly viable solutions as is doing the quest typically in spite of this.

Larian doesn't put put motivations into your head. You do not have to work against your party and you are not punished for doing so, or if you are there are ways out of it.

The point of the competitive questing system is that unlike before where you had to sort of begrudgingly agree with one another all the time. Now? You have solutions to get your way and it is infused into the setting... AND quests can have quite a bit of depth to them to allow people to go after separate objectives that might not even be visible to another player.

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Not that there can't be multiple objectives brought on by multiple origins. Just that the system isn't set up so that every mission with one has all of them active at once.

I'm also sure that competitive questing will in some cases be the result of limited rewards.

For example, if there's romance in the game, then it would be normal for the romance to be monogamous. The logical outcome is that two characters have the same romantic interest, then only one of them will be able to complete the romantic storyline. Hence, competition. I'm not sure to what extent this will be explicitly designed as competitive.

There are also other scenarios with limited rewards, which I believe were seen in the alpha footage. For example, one method of escaping the prison that you can only pursue alone. Hence, if you pursue this option, your companions would have to find an alternative.

These forms of "competitive questing" also seem to be present in the single-player version of the game. Except obviously with fewer arguments.