The purpose of randomness in games is to create uncertainty.

A small amount of uncertainty is good because it facilitates emergent play - something unexpected happens and the player is confounded or surprised and must react. At a fundamental level, this is the point of critical hit/miss systems. It is based on the idea that no matter how competent you are, it is still possible to fail. Or to put it another way, no matter how incompetent you are, it is still possible to fumble your way to success. The outcome in either case is not certain. The odds might be in your favour, or stacked against you but the player can now experience a whole host of emotions they would never feel if the outcome was 100% certain. The player can hope for success despite slim odds. The player can experience doubt over past successes because what if I fail next time?

Too much uncertainty is bad because it takes agency away from the player. The player of the game must be able to affect the outcome with their actions and decisions. If the outcome is entirely random, the player's actions have no meaning. Their past successes have no merit. Their future attempts at success are beyond their ability to control, so why even play at all?

I think D:OS2's loot randomisation sabotages some of its gameplay systems and reward mechanisms. BG2 is a good example by way of contrast because most of the loot in BGII is fixed and placed by hand.

BG2 has very memorable loot like Carsomyr because you don't just randomly find it in a barrel and thank your lucky stars for this gift from the stats god. You had to kill a dragon to get Carsomyr. The build up to the fight was awesome. The fight itself was awesome. The loot was awesome. There is a story behind the blade which you continue to write because it is now in your possession.

In D:OS2's early/mid game, skill books fulfill some of the promise of "static" items because new skills greatly expand the utility of your characters and the synergy between them. Skill books and most unique items are a squandered opportunity because far too many of them are available from traders that you can easily rob. I think more of these static items need to be hand placed into the game world, on to bosses, in to secret areas, inside hidden chests.

Randomized loot in D:OS2 can deprive the player of the satisfaction of getting great loot from a great battle. It can deprive the player of the joy of exploration - of wandering into a cave with a secret door that leads underneath a waterfall with a chest that has awesome goodies inside.

The way loot is randomised is strange. I became aware of certain loot generation patterns in the Tower of Braccus Rex/Gargoyle Maze:

1) at least one table of items is generated for each zone in the game.
2) certain triggers will re-generate or cycle the loot table (I think this also happens to affix combinations too). Some of these triggers are: entering a zone or looting a container in the zone for the first time, opening a trade window for the first time (or after 1 hour lapses in game) and opening certain chests.
3) Loot order is not fixed but distributed into clusters of containers. These are usually groups of similar container types - vases, crates, barrels, corpses.
4) Opening all containers within a cluster will always result in the same type and quantity of loot but not necessarily in the same order.
5) Alternating between containers in different clusters will change the type and quantity of loot from chests. If there are multiple chests, opening the chests in different orders will change the type and quantity of loot.
6) All of the above persists through a save state, so using trial and error, you can find a sequence of containers that results in a lucky charm proc, you can quick load, repeat the sequence until you get to the container that procs, quick save and reroll the item inside. Don't like the item? Change the sequence of the containers.

It isn't my place to say whether this is something you should or shouldn't exploit. It isn't my place to say if this is designed intentionally or that developer intent should dictate how you as a player should play the game.

This is my first Divinity game and I'm blind playing Tactician. I have to repeat many fights and many areas due to poor preparation/decision making. This is what made it easy to spot looting patterns. The Tower of Braccus Rex/Gargoyle Maze was a key for this because I kept reloading and repeating sections of the tower/maze due to accidentally leaving my party members chained. They kept dying to traps. The mechanics of loot generation are far too transparent.

The process is predictable to the extent that I can roughly identify clusters on sight. If there is a trader or chest in the zone, I know that leaving containers unlooted from at least two clusters will allow me to cycle the chest's contents or the trader's inventory without having to wait for an hour.

Despite how predictable this behaviour is, it consistently yields uncertain results because the affixes on the item change on every quick load. Due to the number of affix permutations, it is unlikely I will get my top 4 affixes. There are not enough rules to protect the player against against nonsensical affix combinations. You can roll single handed and dual wielding on the same Legendary Wand, meaning that one or the other stat is always wasted. This should never happen.

Large scale random generation/allocation of items is not compatible with a game that has a finite number of lootable containers and enemies. You cannot re-instance an area and enemies do not respawn.

D:OS2's random loot is most similar to Diablo 3 which is a big problem in itself because Diablo 3 is all about re-instancing and rolling the dice. It isn't an adventure game with treasure hunting elements any more and hasn't been since the design of the game centred around greater rifts. It is now more appropriately described as a gauntlet style arcade game where enemy hp and damage output scale exponentially with greater rift level. The last time I played monster hp was doubling every 4 levels. Keeping pace with the doubling of hp requires damage multiplier stacking and each new season added items that provided damage multiplication. This is how 100k damage numbers became 10 trillion damage numbers in about 1.5 years.

This is fine as long as you know what it is and what it involves. Its a dice roll game you involuntarily play while levelling up. Levelling up inherently involves killing hundreds of enemies per minute, all of which are capable of dropping randomly generated loot. The faster you do it, the faster you level up. The uncertainty of what you might find and how incrementally useful to you it might be is part of what breaks up the monotony of grinding paragon levels.

On a seasonal schedule it makes sense as a way of holding the player captive to a personal goal for a few months at a time. It makes no sense in a game like D:OS2.

Last edited by Hayte; 12/10/17 03:38 AM.