Larian Studios Forums Divinity General Discussion What races are planned for Divinity and party size? Expecting more or less?

Well I havent played Divinity, only watched a couple general videos about it, so I wouldnt know how important race is in these games.


But apparently we play different games. I see the D&D5 races as deeply impactful on my gameplay.

Invisibilty as a cantrip for example, one of the strongest spells in the game, is huge.

Mage Hand is also uber helpful in the really tough battles.

Or shield proficiency in a version of D&D where you dont ever want to melee if you can avoid it and armor class is king.

And dont even get me started on the Halfling racial. In a game where skills are so important on the protagonist, and there is always that pesky chance to lose a roll, Halflings are just uber. Also makes certain builds which hit all the time, like Tavern Brawler builds, even better.

Wild Half-Elf and Drow are also very interesting packages.


How much impact Race should have on your gameplay is a good question. Basically as much as the developer can afford. I've played Lineage 2 where each race has its own unique set of classes. Has its limits, obviously, because why can only Orks play Monk again ? Still, interesting.

Perhaps.

I've played all the races in BG3 (Besides Dragonborn) and I rarely even noticed any difference between races.

Especially when factoring in stat scaling for various things (Elf cantrips using INT. Tiefling spells using CHR.). Whereby if I'm able to actually use the darn thing, I have other stuff from my class instead...

There's a couple of racials that are nifty. Like Duergar's invisibility (Made more useful by being once per battle not once per long rest like other racial spells), Gith's very overloaded racial toolkit (Bunches of weapon proficiencies, proficiency with all skills of a chosen stat and their 3 Psionics spells), Halfling's Lucky etc.

But these hardly change gameplay. You still play the game the exact same, you just have a little bonus on top of your class skills. Of which the impact gets watered down throughout the game as you pick up magical items that provide anyone with bunches of skills to access. (Like, just in the Underdark you get access to items that provide Invisibility, Misty Step, bonus action Sprint, Magic Missiles and Featherfall. That's ONE area providing tons of utility skills)

It's nowhere close to how Undead literally changes how you interact with the game in Divinity. You have to obtain completely different health potions, you have to utilize completely different spells to heal up (Using poison based spells) and if you're using healing spells because your party isn't exclusively Undead (I.e. You're not playing Solo or Lone Wolf with Fane) you have to make sure to position away from AoE healing spells and effects (Including Blessed surfaces).

This is on top of the whole thing about needing to either use a Faceripper to disguise yourself or be completely covered in armour so NPC's don't just attack you on sight (Which also changes how you do the initial prologue before you make the Faceripper)

Being Undead isn't simply having a few extra things added on top of normal character. But a completely different way of engaging with the game.


It's honestly a difficult question.

On the one hand, making races unique makes them more interesting to play and makes replaying the game have more variety.

On the other hand, there's always the issue of blatently more powerful races or locking certain classes or features to a particular race, causing people to feel forced to play a race they find less interesting.

The issues with racial diversity is why humans got nerfed in 5e (And BG3 further watered things down by making racial stats player determined rather than tied to race). Humans having that bonus feat meant they were just so much better than every other race outside some very niche builds that could capitalize on another racial bonus in some way enough to compete with the bonus feat (Even then, such builds only competed, they never really outclassed just playing Human and having 1 more feat)

It is something that also sparks a lot of discussion in MMO's that have classes locked to races (And sometimes gender. I recall Warhammer Online's Witch Elf class was female only... And their armour was exclusively bikinis)

In the end, I think the best compromise tends to be to provide racial diversity through writing than builds.

Having more comprehensive dialogue differences based on how a race is perceived, having unique prologues to set up a character's background culture and potentially even a slightly different story arc to reflect the standing of that race (For example, in Divinity, Imps aren't well liked. So a playable imp might follow a different route to get to the "Saving the world" part of a story than a more socially accepted one)

Of course, the issue with this is the whole "Blank Slate" vs "Origin" debate. Where Larian often writes PC's as being nothingburgers so that people can headcanon whatever they want so racial interactions are pushed aside to not offend headcanons (Though the simple solution would to have a specific "Blank Slate" character, while having "Origin" versions of each race - Not to the extent of being an established companion character, but just enough to be "You are a member of this race from this race's territory and have a history in the race's culture")