Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General The Random Loot system - A honest feedback

Ignoring a problem doesn't solve it nor address it.
Beside, you are implicitly assuming this feature comes into play just with deliberate "save scumming", when there can be several instances where the reload is actually forced upon the player by unwanted circumstances (crash, unexpected death and so on).

Again, my point was concerning one of the supporting premises you used.

As for the other issue, that "problem" would be very specific and likely not to occur as such. That is, you would have to crash at the moment you opened the chest and saw what it contained (loot is randomed on opening the chest). That would be a very specific moment of a crash and to be honest I have never had that happen in my game. How often does it happen exactly at in that timing?

As for an unexpected death? What does that have to do with loot? If your party wiped right when you saw an item, well... sorry... you lost the fight, you don't get the prize. /shrug

I'm not a fan of the current loot/itemization system. It can create vastly different experiences between two games, and not in a good way. It also clearly encourages and rewards both save-scumming and container hoarding (why open that chest now when you don't really need it, since the contents will scale to your level later on). None of those are good things.

You folks arguing with Tanist should know he'll continue to argue that the loot system is perfectly fine until his dying breath. It's his thing every time the subject comes up. Eventually he'll fall back on the "this is how all Larian games are done, so love it or leave it" line (if he hasn't already). He'll also suggest using a mod to fix any issues you have with the loot system, without actually knowing what that even involves.

I definitely have to disagree. Maybe a better randomized loot system would be nice, but completely removing it would kill replayability for me. Part of the fun is waiting to see what kind of loot I'm gonna get from those big chests, and if I know what it's gonna be, it's not fun anymore.

For example, on my current playthrough, I opened a barrel after fighting the lighthouse fight, and found a I thought it was really cool to find that there and made that playthrough unique. If that item was always there, it would be cool the first time, but after that I couldn't care less.

I'm fine with some hand-placed stuff, which there already is, and maybe wouldn't mind if they reduced finding so many magical items everywhere. They could maybe sharpen the randomization curve and encourage better items after the boss fights, but removing randomization altogether would be a pretty big mistake I think.

I don't have a huge problem with the loot being random, although I do think more encounters should be peppered with static drops to guarantee that someone's difficult battle doesn't "randomly" end up in utter disappointment. I do wish, however, that containers were not vulnerable to save-scumming and level manipulation.

I also don't personally feels that replayability would suffer if vendor inventories became more static. They can (and probably should) change as a character levels to provide more and more advanced equipment, but their current setup encourages (and rewards) save-scumming as well.

Piss off Troll.

I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here.
The point isn't that I don't get the loot I wanted if I die.
The point is that with this system I may end not getting that loot when I win, after a reload.

the problem with this approach is that there isnt much player customization, devs would just put the plate for warrior cloth for mage forcing a fixed patch

its not better in the end

that said i agree with you this random loot is not acceptable, but there are many ways to fix it leaving at least some sort of randomness

it just has to not be full random but piloted someway, leaving some randomness but also having some bounds

I understand that, I even commented on that aspect.

Can you describe some actual events where this result would occur and can you reason that it would occur at any frequency to warrant a serious objection?

I mean, if this issue has a rare occurrence and that is the basis of support for your complaint, well... I mean... lets be reasonable here, how often is that going to be a problem?

They already do to an extent. This is why you normally don't see quality gear in fish racks/barrels, etc... It is also why you tend to see at least some level of quality from chests, and better.

Now if you are saying that the loot should be tailored to your party, well... who decides what you really need or want? What if I was planning on adding some ranged to my character, but was waiting until I came across some gear that would support it? This is why the whole tailored approach is not a good solution in a open skill system game like this.

While I think it would be reasonable to tune the drops to avoid getting empty chests too often, I don't think anything needs to be done to tailor loot for the very reasons I explained.

- Both main characters being low on health and suffering from damage-over-time status effects right after a fight concludes and switches to real-time, with the loot still on the ground.

- Failing/forgetting to save between obtaining desired loot and stumbling across a scenario where you need to reload. Could even be as simple as recovering items from a chest and then two steps later stumbling into an unseen trap that wipes out your two main characters.

Probably other scenarios as well. I didn't want to spend more than a second thinking about it.

Well, actually an ideal scenario would be one where you wouldn't just have *a* plate for your warrior, but several different ones, tuned to be slightly considerably different but more or less of equal value, just to suit different builds. And so on for each class.

And let me repeat what I posted elsewhere (and yes, I'm essentially quoting myself, which I realize is a bit impolite but since I'm arguing the same topic across different boards...)

What really surprise me, every time the itemization topic is argued, are people who try to claim that randomness does incentive "replayability", when in my personal experience it's always been the opposite.
When I think a RPG is good enough to deserve a second playthorugh, the last thing I want is the "thrill" to end up with an entirely different itemization and having to improvise from there, honestly.
In fact, on the opposite, I love to plan ahead things like "I'm going to build a party where the warrior uses weapon X and the cleric weapon Y" (i.e. BGII/ToEE) or "I'm going with a dex build based on that weapon and that armour" (i.e. Dark Souls), maybe even having it as an influence on the order I will address content.

Games like TES or Borderlands, on the other hand... I always feel like I got nothing, as "special items" don't feel special at all; to me they feel just like a foggy blob of random crap that can happen in your hands anywhere, at any time, by mere chance.

yes it would be good this way
but like you said its ideal, utopistic
you know devs arent usually good players right?
they would end up putting those item *they* think to be good while probably a good player would want the item with statX+statZ they never thoght of

some randomness solve the problem of having devs thinking of every combination



well in some game you could build characters based on items, but thanx god this isnt the case

dunno why we are talking about replayability btw

This line makes me laugh every time. It's like you're saying someone's retarded and have the rebuttal being "that's the same with his dad!".

So it's in the genes...got it.

Context is an amazing thing, though I wouldn't let that get in the way of a good circle jerk with your buddy there.

Piss off Troll.

Fixed items exist. They are not simply random drops. Maybe you should search a little better.

Your entire response just reeks of a rigid selfish thinker. "This is hilarious", "Wow, That's prrety much the opposite of the truth", "What the hell are you talking about". You use derisive turns of phrase to try and devalue your speaker without utilizing cognitively sound arguments to defend your position. Unfortunate that in 'thirty years' you haven't learned how to be an empathic person. Hence why I was so 'patronizing' towards you: You showed your true colors right from the start. Like everyone that's held this position you have a very rigid way of thinking about games and are obessively, compulsively focused around everything being fixed. Planned. Predetermined.

Just step back and examine the way you think about the game more deeply. Stop looking at the surface of "I DID THIS THING AND I WANT A SUPER SPECIAL REWARD". Look at the -encounter- difficulty as the reward and the loot as the tools that you utilize to achieve the next encounter. Stop expecting everything to be able to be planned and expected and enjoy the fact that a journey is supposed to surprise you. It's supposed to be unpredictable. You're an adventurer dealing with random events...why would every adventure be the same?

You're obsessed with being 'appropriately rewarded for the encounter'. You think that random loot is somehow 'compulsive' but the only people who act compulsively over random loot are OCD mentality types. Most people can accept their rewards and move on. Do you identify every item after it drops too? Imagine a world where you wait till HOURS of gameplay occur before you identify what items you received... a world in which it's not the reward mechanism that you enjoy but the actual game.

Jagged alliance 2 is a terrible representation of emergent narrative gameplay. You didn't even understand why I cited those games and showed yet more of your cognitive failures because you believe every 'tactical squad game' is somehow the same.

You've proven your mindset yet again right here.

You want to feel -special and rewarded-. You want that special and rewarding feeling to come from pre-planning. You hate the vagaries of chance. You play games to be in control of the outcome and you want that outcome to be something you can predict.

Instead of acknowledging it's a player problem (You being the player with the problem) you seek to make the game conform to your rigid ideas of the way things should be presented to you. So instead of examining your own expectations and behaviour and psychological motivations, you simply decry it a failing and expect it to be changed.

You should re-read what you just wrote and how self-absorbed it comes off.

I'm going to double quote this because you actually specifically said you wanted to do something that MULTIPLE people have said the game is TRYING to avoid.

" I love to plan ahead things like "I'm going to build a party where the warrior uses weapon X and the cleric weapon Y" (i.e. BGII/ToEE) or "I'm going with a dex build based on that weapon and that armour" (i.e. Dark Souls), maybe even having it as an influence on the order I will address content."

This is what the game is trying to curtail. It wants each adventure to be different so instead of your -grand strategy- working from the start of the game you have to utilize the various tactical opportunities the game presents. The randomization ensures you can never do the thing you want...because the game wants you to try what's best for your situation. Not mold your situation into what's best for you.

As i've said: It's a player problem, not a game design problem. Stop trying to change a game feature other people love to conform to your OCD issues.

Oh, yay, new thread, same topic.

Honest feedback: Honesty and the internet have proven to be quite mutually exclusive.

I feel that the current system of loot, as it is, is adequate and requires no more than some fine-tuning at most. But I am not about to start trying to convince the "non-believers" to share my views.

Definitely agree with this, and I think it has a huge effect on the random loot as a whole. I don't like entirely random loot in games, but it's made worse by everything being the same. Even as early as the end of the 2nd map, every unidentified Sarong drop meant less to me than a Scroll I might be able to get some use out of. Same with Belts, Bracers, and various weapon types.

Which isn't to say those shouldn't drop, but with some added modifiers they could at least be interesting.

Anyways I don't really mind the random loot stuff. I don't like it, but I accept it as a different way to make a game. I do mind it in the shops, however. I feel that is kinda unnecessary, especially with as difficult as it is to get stuff like Dyes in the early game. It's not a huge deal because I save scum'd so whatever.

I will say beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I couldn't save scum I would have enjoyed the game way less. It's great that people like the random take-what-you-get system, but I am absolutely in to min-maxing and couldn't care less about that. Especially when there's such a black and white line to which modifiers are good and which aren't. There's no reason both ways to play the game can't exist.