Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General I am very sorry, but i got to say this

Greetings from a long time Larian fan (albeit new to their forums). This is in regards to schedules and time cycles being cut off. I know this has been "covered", but i had to post my view on it.

1. You got almost one million euro. You received MORE than what you asked, for what you said YOU wanted. No questions asked. Did any refunds occur when content paid for, and in advance, was left out?

2. There was a game called Morrowind. Huge brand behind it, huge follower base. It too had the same issue. Know what they did? Let me remind you. They shipped it. They survived the "horrified masses finding their game unable to end" just fine. Fine enough in fact to spurn more and more of that series. Make it listed in top of all times in fact.

3. Said game had a very simple solution. You killed a unique NPC that was essential to the main chain? You got a warning, phrased in a lore friendly manner, stating you were about to get to a progress block. Maybe the next few minutes, maybe next month, but you game would -never- finish. You reloaded a previous save, or you moved on. It was called choice. Better in with insurmountable obstacles, than out. Those damned rails.

I know your reasoning as posted at least in the forums. But i am sorry to say i found it lacking. Very disappointed.

Pretty much everyone is disappointed that the NPC schedules, day/night, and weather cycles aren't in.

2. Morrowind had a cosmetic only day/night cycle. They didn't have schedules. I'm pretty sire they also had a hell of a lot bigger budget than 1M Euro. Should this game have cosmetic only day/night cycle? I do think so. Larian doesn't, they want all the features to have effects on gameplay.

3. What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with day/night cycles. You CAN kill NPC's and your progress is NOT blocked (you may need to do more work, granted). Larian has repeatedly said you can kill all NPC's and still finish the main quest. I have no idea what you are trying to say here or how it relates to D:OS.

I know what i am talking about, to quote you

Question is dear friend, do you. Unless i am mistaken, the reason for said omission in upcoming final release was that -with- schedule and cycles included, the complexity of the game had risen exponentially, and possible main quest breaks could no longer be anticipated. In their entirety anyway. So, rather than risking people (whining) complaining about such issues left "unfixed", (read: boo hoo hoo, i killed the most central NPC and game broke, FAIL), they simply took it all out. So now eeeveryone can happily finish the quest.

Now read the Morrowind example once again and tell me if it starts making any sense to you.

Once again, do -you- know what you are talking about

I wanted to add this earlier, but I had to leave at pretty much the same time I was posting:

Yeah, people are disappointed that the schedules won't be in, and yes, Larian shouldn't have promised something they couldn't deliver, and I hope they remember this in the future.

They did screw up and were left with two bad choices - to cut the stuff out, or spend a tremendous amount of resources, weakening the rest of the game to try and get it in. Of those two choices, I think that cutting the stuff out to leave the rest of the game in better shape was the right call.




It's a huge over simplification to say that the problem with the NPC schedules was that you could kill anybody. That's not the reason why the schedules couldn't be in.

The really hard reason is all the reactivity they would need to be alive and doing things, and to have the proper contextual dialogue anytime you talk to them, whether at work, relaxing, or if you woke them up at 2 AM.

instead of looking for what it is lacking, look at what they did add? they took player character creation suggestions and added in all of them.. The long hair, the male facial hair and the tattoos/tribal paint. They have added some really neat spells~ and to be honest not sure if cycles would be worth it. Maybe for a thief who wants to steal in the night. Also if there were cycles and NPC schedules. I have a feeling then you would be upset that npcs were sleeping when you wanted to sell or talk to them.

Larian is going above and beyond what most companies do in listening to their fans, I personally am glad I can make the character I want to play over seeing the lighting change..Not all of us are upset about day/night.

*pst* Also remember the game will be allowing mods, I am sure someone or a group will figure out how to do day/night stuff with schedules or it might even be an official DLC at some point ^_^

First, I didn't even think Larian would hit the million mark to begin with. Also I figured it be cut out as they would have 2x as much NPC text as they do now to program for this to work.

Some benefits:
Don't have to wait for day to come around to buy and sell at a shop.
Don't have to wait for night to hit up the black market...
Don't have to wait around for a specific hour for an NPC to show up.

I personally find the game complex enough, honestly I'm glad day/night got axed.

10% of that million dollars went to kickstarter fees. And 900K get spent pretty darn quickly when you got a building to run, utility bills, employees to pay, software licensing fees (huge chunk invested), and services we take for granted like these forums and the Larian Vault in operation.

If Larian made about 5mil in that campaign, then I can see it do-able for them to get the staff they need to implement this. For a video game development budget, 900k is not that much money.

Skyrim development:
$85 Million
90 employees
83 Voice actors
3.5 years development.

I can easily see how a Million seems like a lot, but in the corporate world it isn't Larian made A LOT of changes with only $900k extra in their pockets. I know my kickstarter money was put to good use

Source: http://www.statisticbrain.com/skyrim-the-elder-scrolls-v-statistics/

I doubt that the concern was to do with the player killing someone that they shouldn't, since this can happen anyway. The problem with schedules is that - as demonstrated in Oblivion (TES4 to Morrowind's TES3), the addition of schedules can easily result in NPCs going splat without the player doing anything or even being aware of the fact that it's happening, sometimes due to unpredictable engine issues.

A famous example being the butler of Castle Skingrad who would fall to his death because, if his schedule said he should be returning to the castle as the player entered the area, he would run afoul of the fact that he loaded before the bridge he was supposed to be crossing did. Oops. ( http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Shum_gro-Yarug )

That's just one example. The game was riddled with issues like this that resulted from the addition of schedules and the relative complexity of the game world. Skyrim (TES5) went to a great deal of trouble to try to cut down on this, but it was still apt to happen even with the safeguards that were put in place (especially when NPCs' schedules sent them out into the wilds).

DOS isn't quite as prone to this sort of thing due to the world design, but it'd still happen, and it'd still result in a lot of unhappy customers whose games get blocked (or at least made far more difficult to complete) due to world management messes that they had nothing to do with.

Something akin to Ultima 7's schedules would be relatively safe, but still not completely so given the dynamic impact of environmental effects (something that wasn't really a factor in U7 - NPCs weren't going to randomly incinerate themselves because of the terrain unless they were specifically scripted to do so, for example).


I'd still like to see dynamic schedules added later, but only when they can be done right - and done in a way that's NPC-AI-proof.

My guess that it could be possible to get the game done and send it out and then have those features that comes in as patches though...

But everything is still possible though...XD

I'm not a designer but if the brainless Sacred games can do this, why can't Larian? The prospect of day/night cycles is the single biggest reason I backed the game. I hope they consider adding it in later patch. It's just weird having an open world in perpetual daylight.

I just imagine my party is sleeping at night ;-)

That source must be fake. Everyone can hear that there are only FOUR voice actors in Skyrim...

90 employees is almost a shame for a game with the size of Skyrim. No wonder the game is so incredibly lacking in almost every aspect. With proper competition in the open world 3D RPG genre nobody (apart from the few fanboys like always) would even consider Skyrim a mediocre game...

Even with its very limited budget and its way smaller team D:OS already achieved way more than Skriam, although they are in slightly different genres. Sadly, D:OS is also miles away from the classics of the genre, especially BG2, imo...I guess games like that never will be made again (well, let's see what Obsidian can achieve with Pillars first...), so it's no attack on Larian here.

So here we have it...

D:OS is "miles away"
D:OS offers so much already, far more then any recent RPG.
The brainless Sacred also had day/night.

Brainless is a key word. It is easy to make schedules for lets say 100 NPCs.

So with D:OS miles away, offering tons more content then other games and just the beta alone we already got so much more. How much coding do you think will really be needed to get these schedules? How are we to beta test by following stinking NPC's around their scheduled cycles to ensure they don't fall off bridges and die?

I'm sure Swen really and truly wants the day/night schedules and having magic effected by different moon cycles more then any of us. But he had to make the decision, and I'm sure it bothers him along with the hundreds of other ideas they had that got axed.

Regardless, what we pitched in on the kickstarter and early access is making the game far better then it would have been a year ago. Our money was well invested and I'm sure you'll still tell others that while the day/night cycles are gone, the game sure does kick ass!

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeh.
I'm not sure if you know what 'easy' means.

Since making schedules for 100 NPC's aint it.

I hope there is some irony hidden in this sentence. I'm no game programmer, but i created some mods, and NPC schedules will break your games, and are a big pain to debug (no fixed game states). Please let me tell you, this is really harder than you think and will use resources best used elswhere (imo).

Probably also one of those whiners that said that Skullgirls funding was asking too much to make each one character ($225k). Some people don't know how expensive and difficulty it takes to make dev games. Night and Day cycle would have spread the budget on the game too thin to complete it, risking having to rush out an unfinished and bug/glitch fested game once they have run out of money, which is something Larian has said they wouldn't do. Anyways it's time for people need to move on.

I've seen this happen all the time. Features that the developers thought they could make, promisse they'll work and then near the end of the development cycle they have to cancel it.

It's something that you realy need to be engaged in the gamming industry in order to fully understand and it's definately not a couple of forum posts that will make people understand...

It happens all the time when you are on the frontier between wanting to boost entusiasm on your product and being realist and boring and then not as hype is created. Sometimes you just have to make a leap of faith and promisse stuff based on a feeling and rough calculations and predictions. It's just how the entertainment computer software works.

Even giants with dozens of millions dollars bugets do it, it's not a matter of trying to deceive people, it's just as development progresses A LOT of things change, A LOT of itinerations fail and have to be started all over, a lot of things just don't work as expected before.


I understand your frustrations if that particular thing was something you really wanted, but as for me i personally think if the day/night cycle was in, the amount of QQ in this forums about the game being wayyyy toooooo harddddd annnndddd borrringggg because you need to wait for NPCs to be in the right time at the right place for you to start/end quests would be "deafening".


Can't please everyone i guess. I personally think it's fine that stretch goal is not in, if they replace it with other stuff, and they already did that with many things already in the beta that was not even in the initial game plans.

So if a game with 100 NPC's is hard to make schedules for, then how would a game with 1k of them be any easier? That right there is my point. Though in all reality, I think the final product will have well over 1k NPCs to deal with.

A $1,000,000 budget for a dev team and game of this scope is peanuts. Although D:OS isn't exactly a perfect RPG, it's amazing what Larian has been able to achieve on such limited funding (even accounting for the other "leftover" money they had tucked away).

Just going to say that the 1 mil (900k, w.e.) they raised via kickstarter is NOT their whole budget. The money they raised on kickstarter was meant purely for extra content for the game, besides their main source of funding from investors and whatnot.

Too many people have stated that that's their whole budget and it just plain isn't true.

The game was BETTER BEFORE latest Patches.they canceled a lot of talents,cnahged traits and reduces points per level.please return to previous rules.all other improvements are apreciated anyway.