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

So I was helping my girlfriend with statistics for last couple hours, but I'm back!!

@Limz
My Chess analogy was loosely based. I said as much.

First, there is no such thing as live combat not having elements of chance.

Secondly, my entire point has and will continue to be: the lack of elements of chance create less pressure and take away from the fact that this is "combat" and thus detracts from the feelings of enjoyment of playing a tactical turn based combat game would/should evoke

Thirdly, the entire point wasn't that there's an objective measure of improvement for the game between the two games but that my opinion, and those of others, don't find this as enjoyable as it could be. Thus my and others *opinions,* as part of the player base, do in fact matter in an EA all about feedback in order to make a game more fun for all.

Fourth, I dont feel a need to dig into information gathering and pressure created through chance per turn given it's pretty self evident and me, you, and most others can follow that to it's logical conclusion on their own.

Fifth, the assumptions are made to simplify the problem....obviously. It should also be pointed out that we're all making assumptions since known can really test case all of this at the moment unless they can magically get ahold of both future versions of this system and other systems.

@SlamPow
While I don't think things would be as bad as you think, I thank you for agreeing that testing a new system would be worth it.

Also, I have about 300+ hours in D:OS Classic and EE (about 120 in classic and 180 in enhanced). So, I do have experience with the metas and so on. CCing in general was over powered and comboing in general while my mage has 30+ spells brought things down. Always had the perfect tool for the job...which is why I agree that the Memory system has a place here in the sequel. I have about 20 hours in the sequel, but I've never been a fan of pubs so you have me there. I have gone out of my way to see all the different combos and builds people can do though.

As for AI, I actually found what you said highly interesting. I wonder about the Starcraft AI and how much time it mustve took to hand craft it. That's not really adaptive so much as having a plethora of good advice shoved into it's head, it sounds like. Still a beautiful thing though to hear about.

You being up a good point of AI just needing to be challenging. That's doable enough. I just like thinking in extreme use cases cause I'm a minmaxer that'll spend hours in town just making sure I have every advantage before a fight and deliberate between what move to take for maximum efficiency. I'd like it if the AI could still push me to the limit no matter how good or how hard I plan. I'm masochistic like that in video games. My friends think I'm crazy....I think I just love a good challenge. I also don't like the idea of holding myself back to create that challenge...rather than a challenge run, I like putting the difficulty to max on my first run through in order to experience the real "challenge" that game can best provide.

As for me underestimating AI, I am aware how good RTS AI have gotten (though I didn't know about the handcrafted Starcraft one specifically) and I'm generally aware or real time turn based games and strictly turn based games. Everything I've seen and read though points to the limiting factor of an AI to think outside the box and employ high level strategy on the same level as a player when it can't search an entire tree for the best sequence of events. Intuitive and creative decision making are the hallmarks of a human player vs a computer after all; there are some new algorithms to help this along but they're all currently being delved into more. Perfect AI will come one day....I just don't think so for this game. You're Neverwinter Nights 2 was very lovely to read about though....and that may in fact be a good way to do things. I hesitate to equate the two though. Dragon Age type games aren't the same as D:OS after all. I'd say Civ is a closer comparison.

My experience lies more in the realm of either super deterministic games like chess or a text based RPG and GO in one case years ago....and more recently in the Fighting Game ICE environment. Specifically, wanted to create an adaptive AI that geared itself to defeating a specific opponent instead of being more general and had it limit itself based off shown player level -> ideally it would progressively get harder to fight it as it concluded your skill level and what would work best against you. Used MCTS for "ideal" move instead of optimal move, a KNN player model to predict future player moves based off past actions, and some scripts in the same vain as Greedy Portfolio Search (which is what I think the Starcraft AI probably uses since it's very good for RTSs given specific information concerning strategies and counters). We had limited testing time for the project but the results were very promising XD

Again, my issues don't lie with the AI really. The foundation lies with the fact that super deterministic combat such as this in an RPG where combat is limited to a focused group vs group based tactics against a non-human opponent isn't that fun in my opinion. Heck, even Civ incorporates chance with the maps, barbarians, and city-states and some AI behavior and interactions. Elements of chance are good things....Having everything under the sun being deterministic isn't all that great to my eyes and actually detracts from game play. Hell, even in fighting games at least you always know what the human player will do and I go out of my way to be more random for fun. Super deterministic games against other humans is fine cause the human itself creates constructive randomness...not so much with a computer opponent; or overall it just doesn't feel the same when they do manage it to a degree.

We're all allowed to have opinions of course. There's no objective value for fun. Which is why I like the idea of combining systems and tweaking that: give us more options over all and try to satisfy both parties.

Also, if mages are having trouble keeping up wit other "classes" than the answer lies not in their damage or their ability to have more guaranteed CC. Every archetype has a role. If one asks what the role of the wizard is than the answer I'd give is flexibility and battlefield control. If others can do that role just as well or better than we have an issue. Maybe we should encourage warriors to invest more in multiple stats so that they don't have as much utility as straight mages who only need INT an MEM. Maybe we need to change combat abilities to make them more costly to and desirable to specialize (I think this needs to be done already). Maybe we need to decrease the CC abilities of warriors and increase mage CC options. There;s a few things we can do, but I wouldnt label that as anything to do with the armor system itself and more to do with how the "classes" currently work.