Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General We're reading it all!

+1

Larian never announced any firm release date, so it's pretty hard to push something back that doesn't even exist yet.

cool! I was wondering.

I sincerely hope you're reading more than just the initial post. Because there's been a lot of posts that have been vehemently disagreed with by the other users, so it should be taken into consideration what the majority of your audience seem to want. Not that I feel I need to tell you that, but there's been a lot of developers giving into a vocal minority these days and I don't want to see you falling into the same trap.

While I see your point, I don't think the appeal at popularity is necessarily the best approach.
There are ideas that make sense even when just a guy is advocating for them and others that can be awful even when there's a loud group screaming they want them in the game.

If we were going by popularity, Skyrim would be the model of perfect RPG design, when in fact there is hardly any of its mechanics/subsystems that I would save after a close examination.

Skyrim is a popular game, and that means it must be doing some things right, even if it's just marketing.

But the "popularity" of a thread isn't very meaningful for gushing the popularity of an idea. Those of us in the forum are a very small fraction of the overall audience. While it would be foolish to ignore us, they need to look at the bigger picture, consider the broader audience and answer the questions:

What choices fit the vision of the game they want to make.?

What choices will allow them to reach a larger audience and keep that audience happy?

What choices will enhance (or maintain) the profitability of the game?

Hello again,

So just to give you a heads up on how we handle the feedback - these are the things we're doing:

1. We go through pretty much everything that's written on D:OS 2 all over the internet on a daily basis. For me, it's literally the first thing I do in the morning and I'm not the only one in the team. That gives us the trends. That we don't react to everything is just because we're only human and still need to make the bloody game too. Personally I wished I had the time because I'd love to react to everything but those days are unfortunately over for me.

2. We put a lot of new systems in there, some more subtle than others, and so one thing that we're particularly interested in is seeing if they are working as intended and if not, why. While we look at what people are saying about these systems or their experiences with them, we do have a lot of quantitative data we can look at too. When people agree to send reports, we get information on where they put their points, the dialog options they select, where they go on the map etc... Together with the opinions, this allows us to figure out if certain things are really broken or not.

3. How we fix things that we see are broken is a different matter. We certainly read people's opinions and allow ourselves to be influenced by them when we think they make sense and fit the vision of the game. But if they don't fit the vision, we don't take them into account. An extreme example of this is for instance people telling us to make the game real time. But there are less extreme examples too. Certain stat or system suggestions just don't fit what we want to do so we ignore those too.

We think of early access as a developer's playground where we can experiment with things with the goal of making a better game. That means you can expect plenty of sometimes radical changes over the coming months. Those changes will almost all be based on the insights we're getting from early access players followed by discussions we have in the team about what to do with those insights.

Right now, we're already at work on a few system changes that should address several things that we saw were not working that well, so you should see that come in your direction in the not so distant future.

I am more impatient about the mod tools than anything else.

Still, it's good to know that someone is reading us.

Thanks for explaining in detail.

Looking forward to improvements.

First off, thanks so much for the reply! You guys run a great business so just know that we all appreciate your team so much and we have loads of trust in you to do well.



Have you considered hiring a person or volunteer whose sole job is strictly that? If not, this might be a great time to consider such an option.

Effective communication from a community manager during Early Access can provide a wealth of assistance for a development team, and can certainly put a lot of customers at ease know they have a familiar face they can talk to to relay their biggest concerns.

This person can also provide a more "condensed" list of hot topic issues or suggestions from the community, and can facilitate "targeted" feedback when necessary. Having worked as a QA with other game companies before, I know I personally found this extremely useful.




I look forward to it! If we might beg for more information, any hints as to want systems are being looked into now, or things we should especially focus our feedback efforts on?

Swen, as people are giving feedback to various systems, that naturally leads to theorycrafting on how some things might be changed. However, a lot of that theorycrafting is inevitably going to be flawed because of a lack of information.

For instance, there's a lot of feedback on the power of Abilities, and if they should give bonuses for reaching various ranks. It's clear from the changes (1 Ability point/level, only 1 ability point is required to increase a rank) that Abilities work differently.

It might help people perform better theorycrafting - which means more thought-out feedback - if they had more information, such as:

• Approximately what character level do you see players reaching by the end of the game?
• Will players still get only 0.5 Civil Ability points, 1 Combat Ability point, and 2 Attribute points per level until the end, or as their level increases, will the amount of points they gain change?
• It might even be helpful to know what does an average level 20-25 characters stat sheet look like? How much of their Attribute points comes from level-up points, and how many from their gear?
• (Obviously taking a character legit from 1 to 25 can't happen, so to simulate you could do something like put a chest with LOTS of gold and a bunch of merchants with random gear of various quality levels and buy the best. It won't be completely accurate, but it'll be okay for a guesstimate.)

Thank you for being an amazing design team and listening to community feedback! I am very eager to continue to test the new changes you incorporate and seeing how this game improves over the coming months.

Once more into the early access my friends, we have more data points and feed back to provide. Guinea Pigs unite!

That's awesome! Keep it up and thank you for your hard work! I'm really excited and can't wait to play the whole game and see all the surprises you have for us.

+1

They should take their time and just release it when it is done. Just not "Duke Nukem Forever done", because that would take too long.

Come on day/night cycle!

The weathering is lacking a little and the camera angles when around trees is annoying (not enough transparency?? - similar issue with the rocks not enough transparency to see what is going on).

The blood splatter when an elf eats a limb/head/etc is so over exaggerated but it definitely grossed me out the first few times it happened. Different effects should happen on the age of the limb (less healing), the contents within the limb/how that person died (poisoned, frozen, burnt, etc.), and the major storyline content should have a tranced effect on them followed by a cut-scene?

Elves should have (like dinivity 2 - but not the class) a similar ability of mind reading/manipulation.

(SPOILER)

The Dragon knight's part should a lot more involved in this story. It should start the cycle up again where the dragon knights come back in a hard way! Pre-cursor to what is to come, a world full of peace with a undercurrent of some evil the knights cannot see and just when they thought all would be saved a horrible act of injustice, evil, and malice explodes out of the depths (think LOTR #1 dwarven halls - demon).

Massive (I mean huge!) enemies, demons in disguise of angels, Poison Anaconda's, etc should be something we can look forward to in the future (maybe not this game...) Twists in plots, saddening (actually heart breaking) tales to live out and murderous backstabbing friends that you never know what will happen with should be something that we can look forward to (not knowing whether to trust them or not is awesome). If there is a character on your party that dislikes you there should be a random choice he/she makes when in battle to participate whether mid-battle/beginning or end! That would be so frustrating and potentially devistating for the party (though being random if you died and came back he/she could change their minds to help).

ANyways, just some ideas!

Sorry for double post, but I tried in DOS 1 EE and I couldn't but we NEED to be able carry an anvil!

This isn't exactly the location for suggestions itself.

Also, thanks for listening Swen (and rest of Larian) and looking forward to what things will be changed, hopefully for the better, in the future. There are a lot of unclear elements currently with statistics, and hopefully by release all will be clear to all users.

Veel success met jullie nieuwe game!

After playing 1 hour of divinity: original sin I loved it to the core and bought second game in pre sale. After playing early access...I love it even more <3 Keep up the good work guys. I hope my words will be as inspirational as your game is for me :D