Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta About 3 design-flaws apparent in alpha

IMHO, "loot" should be realistically skill based randomised.

Realistic: don't find piece of armors on animals, for example, but only animal parts.
Then you could craft leather armors with animal parts, but realism here.

Skill based: a butcher should find meat on animals. A pillager could find more gold on corpse, a miner could get some ore from metal veins. An alchemist could identify that this skeleton's skull is just the perfect one for some alchemical powdering, for example.

Randomized: a corpse could spawn a usable basic armor and some cloth rags and a few gold pieces, while the other, only a dagger but a little more coins, while mining a vein could sometimes spawn a precious stone. A skeleton should obviously drop some bones or a skull ALMOST every times (because sometimes, its skull gets smashed. So the random factor. Shit happens.)

Skill based randomized: the better the skill, the more/better the loot. So a legendary Skinner could recover 2 or 3 perfect patchs of skin from a dead doe, while a basic Skinner would probably make a mess out of it, and recover punctured skin bits...


However, I am aware that this is definitely not the direction Larian is taking with its loot/skills approach. Just sharing ideas here.

And "bosses" could have a limited "hand crafted" loot table of high value realistic items, among other mundane skill based loot, for interest and replayability's sake.

@Hakea
I really agree with you on many points, like cliches, navigating in cyseal (I opened a thread about this "issue"), "boring" battles, the risk of the feel of the game being outdated, and maybe some basic realism issues.

However, Larian has always delivered great RPG's. So I really trust they will do the same with DOS. There are still at least 4 months before the final release (spring ends the 21st of june...).

I am very confident, but can't help being overly critical about some features, hoping that it will keep them on their toes (if they give a shit about what I think, which I reaaaaaaally doubt ^^). It's not unheard of seeing great studios fall over overconfidence, or doing the same stuff over and over again, and losing sight of the good stuff (like Creative Assembly did for Rome 2, or Dragon age 2, for example...).

Just found a malachite and a pearl in the beehives. Maybe honey would have made sense. Then, because I am nice and imaginative, I can say that the bee tender hide his belongings in the hive. Why not. But well, you know...

BTW, and I am picking up all the crates, barrels, water barrels, I can. Really funny. Hopefully, weight of items and effects of weight will be added later (actually, it HAS to be added, come on) Because some nicely crafted or bought bags could be nice too, if I want to keep my things organized. Couldn't find any in the vendors of the market.

Ah, I see, so loot tables should be more in favour of what your base skills are, so if one of my characters has several points into Two Handed, then the odds of a random two-handed weapon dropping are increased. Yeah, that seems like a good idea. It doesn't sound TOO hard to implement (although things are rarely so simple).




You can get honey out of beehives. You need to drag a Jars over it. Otherwise, it doesn't seem like a bad place to hide small valuable objects.

Indeed, this is not exactly what I had in mind, but it is easy to imagine that someone who is very good at two handed weapons would pay special attentions (in a kind of a "professionnal" way) to two handed weapons he/she comes by in the world, and so find/loot them more often.
But then, NO RANDOM two handed sword if the enemy you were fighting did not use one...

Another example. Sometimes, I find teeth in the world. Why the hell would any sane PC be interested in teeth ? But, as a crafter/alchemist/jeweller/whatever, you might know a recipe that requires some teeth, and so pay more attention to suitable teeth for your recipe, and so start to loot them on corpse, or "loot" them more often.


A proper loot table, taking into account all skills as variables, the looted item/critter, and so on, could be a real challenge to create.

IMHO, loots are a great way to increase the feeling of growing capacities and skills for a PC, but it would requires a lot of fine tuning, dedicated gathering/looting skills (for the PC, not the devs ^^), and so on, to be really interesting. But that would be another game.



Inadequate/unrealistic loot tables are a design flaw IMHO.

It really makes sense. So realistic in some ways, so unrealistic in some other ways :-(


Yeah, lol ^^.

Other than bosses, Enemies DO drop the proper loot types. Animals drop bits, never swords.

Here's an old, but relevant link to this topic, I think.

This is something I would like. Keep the random in but have some drops be predetermined or (the better choice in my opinion) have them be randomized from a set list. That way there's still the random thing but there's more control over just what you might get.

@ Stabbey
Again, a nice proper answer from an inquisitive, knowledgeable and tolerant spirit. Thanks.

Right, we are only criticizing because we feel (or at least I feel) that it is already a decent game with the potential to be a fantastic game, with more polish and some important tweaks. Otherwise we wouldn't bother posting here. Steam says I've sunk forty hours in D:OS so far; despite all the bugs and 'design flaws' I just keep coming back for more.

Exactly. Good suggestions.



To me, The Dragon Knight Saga felt like a creative advance on a game format that was already getting tired and derivative. Many other game makers seemed to be dumbing their output down and just making kids games with endless random loot drops and a conveyor belt of enemies with pretty graphics and sparkly effects to cover up the basic simplicity and repetitiveness of the design. Fair enough, there's obviously a market for it, so why not? But some companies, such as Larian, seemed to be trying to go forwards into new territory.

This game currently feels like a big step backwards. It's an old fashioned RPG with prettier graphics added, a lot more stupid crates every few metres, the same old parade of stereotypes, and some pretty dull dialogue. It feels like something they found in Black Isle's old waste paper basket and added a fresh coat of paint and a few hundred more crates and barrels to.


After reading the Kickstarter hype I was hoping for something fresh and original. What a major disappointment this is!


Improving your equipment and developing your skills is always going to be a big part of these games, but does it have to be so darned cheesey? I'm certainly not asking for hyper-realism but at least I'd like to be able to suspend disbelief long enough to be able have some involvement in the story. Yes, I would like to earn my improved equipment and skills in a way that was at least vaguely realistic, not by collecting a torrent of randomly generated rubbish in containers that clearly would have no reason whatever for being there except to keep giving the player another little present to open every five seconds. It gets so lame very quickly.


I'd like to be able to walk into a town that actually felt a little bit like a community. Here, we have the usual locations - docks, tavern, shops, town hall, etc but not even the pretence that it might actually be able to function as such, or that more than a handful of the NPCs may have some sort of home in the area. It all just looks plonked down to tick the location boxes and provide a backdrop for some more barrels and crates.

Then I'd like to be able to have some conversations that were actually worth reading and get involved in some interesting action that would allow me to get better equipment - either through getting paid and being able to buy items, being offered a specific item as repayment, or perhaps looting equipment from a dead enemy's corpse or camp that might conceivably have been used by them, and so on. I've no problem with finding some equipment randomly but couldn't it be better done? An occasional hidden coin purse, a chest with some old armour in an attic, etc. but not in barrels every few metres.

Ditto for improving skills. Make it more realistic - have the improvement connected to both training and to actual performance. Currently it looks as if Larian are trying to put in something for everybody - the old school rpg fans, the puzzle solvers, the Diablo crowd, the barrel smashers and loot junkies, and all the others. But if they get it wrong they run the real risk of pleasing nobody.


One would certainly hope that the uninspired dialogue and cliche characters would be improved considerably before release date but the basic loot system seems to be entrenched in this game now - and, to be fair to Larian, in many others too - which is a pity. Of course, many players will probably like it, and I wish them all the best. It's probably my own fault for persisting with a genre that now mostly seems to aim at younger players in a mass market. Maybe it's time I finally accepted that it's time to grow up and move on to other entertainments. It was interesting to have the chance to see what a game looked like at the Alpha stage and I don't grudge Larian a single cent of the Aus $46 it cost me. But I certainly hope that they can turn this from something that looks suspiciously like a turkey into something closer to an eagle before release date.


End of rant.

+100

@Hakea:
Again, I agree with you on many points:
skills, community, locations, stupid crates...

The difference might be that I am still hopefull Larian will deliver a great game in the end. Keep in mind that this is only an alpha, not even a beta. So I suppose you are as frustrated as many of us, by the lack of scope and new game elements. I think they fix the biggest issues in the alpha, and will use the beta to fine tune the system based on the whole game, not just boring Cyseal.

And then, I am hopefull the editor will allow us to craft the world and features we like if they don't.

Keep hope indeed. We all want to watch this game soar instead of fry...

I believe the designers have said that this game is more about reactivity than simulation, which is why it doesn't have a million "simulation" skills like Cartography and Skinning for a ton of professions.

I'm sure that a lot of people would love to have to spend hours doing every stage it would really take to craft a piece of armour but personally, I like the play games for the fantastical and the strange, not the tedious and the mundane.

You do have a point that clicking on dozens of crates isn't very interesting. In part that's probably not helped by the amount of times you repeatedly play the same areas after the game gets patched.

The crates are the only real source of crafting materials at the moment. Obviously right now the amount of crafting materials that exist is far too low - they're going to go over the game and add in more hand-placed materials once they've taken a look at what things are required the most in formulas and such. They should make use of NPC merchants to sell crafting materials.



I also was unimpressed by the lack of housing. They had a big video some months back where they said that because of the schedules, they had to add in second floors of houses to accommodate where the NPC's would sleep, and it turns out that even several of the named NPC's have no known houses. (Maybe it's possible they're past the development barrier on the bridge, but I doubt it.)

On the other hand there are good reasons why that can't be the case. The engine only allows for so much stuff per map, and I'm heard that Cyseal's map is extremely full, there's little to no room to add additional upstairs/downstairs rooms.

Another reason is that if they did have the room for a zillion houses, it would get insanely boring and repetitive. It'd take forever to get anywhere. Most games have that problem. You only have the resources to make so many interesting characters per town, but that's not enough to give a town the feeling of a real town instead of an empty near-abandoned one. You need generic multitudes to make a town feel right, but there's no way to realistically house them and make it interesting and fun.

There should be a difference between "realistic" and "simulation". I agree, I don't think DOS should be a crafting simulator, definitely not the point. I too have rather live adventures than spend hours crafting ONE armor. Anyways, Larian stuff.

OMG NO. Mundane DOESN'T HAVE TO be tedious. Mundane skills should be very streamlined, and only help you feel your power and world interactions grow, IMHO. Then maybe add in a few "professionnal" choices, and you have a great replayability, and many new character development choices. It really really all depends on the systems you create. Anyways, Larian stuff.


OMG, are you suggesting that Larian will add more crates O_O ^^. The Nightmare invasion of werecrates from the greater Plane of crates and barrels...

+10 for the housing issue. waste of time IMHO. It seems that Larian HAD to find a stretch goal. But this one really doesn't seem interesting. However, I am really looking forward a night/day cycle, which I haven't seen yet.

Maybe a "Survivalist" Ability or Talent that lets people loot from corpses a second time, and lets you get additional uses from plants/mushrooms when crafting?

In the story, you play inquisitors hunting down and eliminating users of banned magic, not pioneers. Lots of monster and bad-guy killing will be required, so the base game is probably going to focus more on abilities that support that part of the game and story.

The idea of skills improving through use is certainly possible - a build the weresheep played before the alpha release had ability caps of like 100 or so. Implementing all the changes required to support such a system would be a tremendous amount of work, though.




No no no, not more crates, they'll add more pre-placed items in the world, like branches and herbs and shells, stuff like that.



Just adding a cosmetic day/night cycle is easy - they did it in Divine Divinity. But in this game, that's something Larian wanted to tie together. They do want their world to make sense, so they weren't going to add in a day/night cycle just to have everyone sitting in the same place 24 hours a day. The stretch goal was for the schedules and reactivity required to make an actual day/night cycle instead of just a cosmetic one.

I'm thinking of the difference between Morrowind and Oblivion with that one: in Morrowind, it was just cosmetic, shops stayed open all night, NPCs continued to wander about aimlessly, but in Oblivion it did actually mean something: shops closed, streets cleared etc. It was sometimes a really inconvenient pain in the bum, but I liked it overall. I'm not so keen on games that just have perpetual day (or night, for that matter).

+1 . Larian stuff.

Day/night cycle should dn't be cosmetic. There should be a way to tell the difference from a Scripting point of view. Some creatures go out at night only, and stuff like that...

But I really don't know what to do of all the mobs during night. They would have to go to bed at some point.
Maybe then, for simplicity's sake, day/night would have no influence on citizen's behavior.

Yeah... that's the idea behind the schedules. Yes, you can do pretty much anything with enough scripting, but the idea is to make a system that handles that sort of stuff so you don't have to make a million scripts. That one of the reasons for the delays - they're making systems to handle things instead of scripts.




That can't happen at this point - not since Larian started taking people's money in promise for implementing that idea.

I disagree with OPs first two points - the mixture between serious and humorous content has always been part of Larians games, and I therefore never expected anything else. Actually, it's one of the things that make their games special.
The dialogue is not always exceptional and great, but it's ok, and i think there are several characters in the game that show a distinct personality. My biggest issue with dialogue has been that the writers like to use a few too many modern-age expressions that derive directly from real world history and therefore seem out-of-place in Rivellon.

I can agree with the complaints about itemization, however.
Personally I always prefer hand-crafted meaningful loot to randomized and largely unmemorable stuff (meaning, we all remember Lilarcor the Talking Sword, but not the xth iteration of Adjective Sword of the Noun +Number).
I don't think that items have to be necessarily in the same place all the time (although I do think that some guaranteed rewards/placings are good). E.g. Icewind Dale combined guaranteed loot with random loot, iirc, so you would always find the same unique item in a certain chest, but the chest might also contain anything out of a list of a few other items.

Somewhat connected to the issue of random items is the scaling of items.
Here again I guess I'm somewhat conservative, but I don't really like systems where you start with weapons that do 1-2 damage, but end up with weapons that have 500-900 damage, MMORPG and Diablo-like. I prefer weapons to stay within a more narrow and plausible range over the course of the game, e.g. the way D&D and many other RPGs based on PnP systems do it.

My main experience is with Bethesda's stuff, but yeah, a simple schedule was enough for the vast majority of characters and creatures, most of whom weren't scripted but were just given a timetable and whose AI filled in the rest.