Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Response to Swen Vincke PCGamer Article

Hello there Larian devs! I met with some of you at TwitchCon last year and kept finding myself back to the Larian booth to check out more of this highly anticipated sequel. When Early Access was released, I immediately hopped on and had an amazing time through Chapter 1.

As a fellow game developer, I committed the cardinal sin and failed to provide feedback after testing. I enjoyed pretty much everything I was seeing and did not provide the positive feedback, which is just as important as the negative.

I wanted to write in response to the PCGamer article, specifically this section:

"There were some people that didn’t like the physical and magic armor, and that surprised me. I thought it was a major improvement to the game. But they had a particular tactic that they had in the previous game they can’t anymore, now. "

I wanted to note how much I enjoyed the new Armor system and would be very disappointed if it ended up being removed.

In D:OS1, though I massively enjoyed the game, I was not able to retain for a second playthrough. Even though I had changed my class significantly in style from the character I played the first time, the general tactics per fight remained the same. Crowd control and terrain manipulation were still the kings of combat. I only lasted for a few hours before realizing I felt satisfied with my single playthrough and would put away the game.

When fighting through the first encounters, I was reminded of that moment and started to question if this would again be a crowd-control dominated combat system. Then, Armor started appearing on enemies, and new tactics needed to be deployed. I needed to use different crowd control types against different enemies. When dual-armor enemies appeared, the tactics needed to shift again, focusing down an Armor bar in order to get a CC effect off. It shifted the combat dynamic and added a ton of depth and decision making, and by the end of the first chapter, I was absolutely dying for more.

While I'm here, I'll write up some of the other notes of feedback I had during the playthrough. This feedback is from a 2-player Co-Op experience, coming from a 2-player Co-Op double Lone Wolf D:oA1 player.

What I liked:

--New Skill System. Making hard choices is the very definition of what a 'build' is, and I was happy to see more restrictions placed on what skills you can bring into combat. In D:OS1, both of our Lone Wolf characters had a point in almost all combat skill categories, since it allowed us to use the basic, reliable abilities from each category. This is no longer efficient - I feel more pressure to specialize into a few categories, which makes me feel more unique and customized.

-Much more streamlined intro experience with more combat woven into the story segments. The murder mystery was my least favorite portion of DOS1, but I loved the pacing of this game's prison breakout.

-Shorter, more impactful combat. The lower time-to-kill for both players and enemies made for big-swing turns, where you either feel the threat of defeat or the thrill of victory with one big play from either side of the field.

-Less exploitation. The first game seemed to encourage me to go on a murderspree when I was at an appropriate level, looting absolutely everything from merchants that I had sold, and breaking the in-game economy completely. It does not appear this is possible in D:OA2, and I'm glad for it. I don't want to be a monster, but... dat XP though!

-Less exploitation part 2: No Teleportation Pyramid. My co-op partner and I made excessive use of the teleportation pyramid to exploit in combat, teleporting out of harmful situations. I would prefer if this didn't come back in the sequel, or was unusable in combat if so.

-Less exploitation part 3!: Fewer allied NPC's. The number of times we'd drag a tough fight to the town guards was pretty high in D:OS1, especially in the early game where we needed to XP to get on an even playing field. Between the distance between fights and allied NPC's, and the many gap closing abilities on enemies, this no longer feels like a valid or correct strategy.

-Overall game difficulty: For our experience, I attribute this greatly to the lack of early Summon skills. We struggled in D:OS1 until we learned some Summons to soak attacks, and after that, the game didn't provide too much challenge. Summons are not present early on, forcing us to make more use of our companions. Those companions died on several occasions, and we full-wiped on a handful of fights. The difficulty pacing felt right for the content. The final fight with the giant worm-beast was an awesome drag-out dance of getting the two factions to fight each other while picking off individual targets, ending with only one surviving party member on our side.

What I Didn't Like:

-The Crafting system from D:OS1 was never my favorite, and it doesn't look much improved yet. I like the recipes tab, but it doesn't seem to pick up all recipes you learn via experimentation. This is probably asking for too much given the 'learn it yourself' style, but it would make me more inclined to experiment if the crafting system filtered out all items that didn't have a recipe that used them. I am alright with trying to figure out the puzzle of which items go together, but I know that a large bulk of the inventory doesn't go with anything, and that really discourages me from trying to experiment. It's too large of a time sink that takes away from the rest of the amazing experience.

-Lone Wolf replacement being unlocked at level 8. I understand the reasoning behind this - you should give the 'normal' experience and the other characters a chance before you decide you don't want them around. I agree with this decision, but I do think it could come earlier, so you can get used to your new party size before Chapter 1 ends. Maybe level 4 would be sufficient to get to know the normal setup. We legitimately gave the other characters a chance, but we both agree that in a game like this, we want to play out that one character we crafted and decided upon.



In summary, I'm very pleased with being able to Kickstart this sequel, and can't wait until more of the content is available for testing. Larian has earned my respect as a fantastic developer and I hoped this franchise has many titles to come.