Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Non-plussed about "Memory"

I like how you need to make choices with attributes between keeping your damage very relevant or getting more skill slots or whatever else you want.

I think balancing for people save scumming is futile. The game should be made for people to have fun not because someone wants to have every fight perfect. If you don't want to lose you can play on explorer.

Then again, what fun is there going into a fight to get rekt because you just got the wrong skillset?
I for one must say I don't really see it.
Since there are random encounters, the only way you should play not to actually savescum is keep a kind of fixed skillset to ensure maximum security in case of a fight, so basically, several elemental spells, and pretty generic buffs/debuffs.

I don't really see the improvement in terms of fun in fact. I could get it in terms of balance, but definitely fun can not be an argument for this system.

I have to agree with the OP. I don't like the idea of memory, it should be scrapped all together. Limiting the skills we have learned to a select few limits the fun of the game. I like having all the skills I have learned at my disposal, it makes for a much more fun and tactical experience! Even the smallest skills have a use late game in some situations.

Memory is the smartest thing in this game. With 4 guys, having a character able to access a ton of abilities on the fly would kill character variety. Why bother making a buffer if everyone can buff themselves? Why bother setting up character synergies when everyone can just cast all the right stuff on themself? That's what happened in Original Sin. Without memory, character specialization would fall apart, and it's even more important for it to be a thing when there's 4 characters instead of 2.

That may have been the case on Explorer mode in D:OS, maybe even Classic mode, but if you wanted to play Tactician, your characters had to be specialized. Sure, maybe the Archer would have taken the Man-at-Arms skill "Helping Hand", but they had to waste a skill point in Man-at-Arms to get that skill.

That system is no longer present in D:OS 2, it seems. You're no longer limited by your proficiency in different spell schools, so I guess they chose Memory as the alternative limiting factor.

I'm happy with the memory system, it seems very D&D-esque and I think limitations can lead to more interesting characters and party combinations. I might disagree if you couldn't change what spells you use but since you can, I'm okay with the system, at least so far in the early game.

I'm not sure how I feel about it yet, but I think over-all the idea is good. In D:OS1 you could generally get an idea of what you were going to run into based off of the area you were in, but you didn't change anything with your character because you didn't need to. Now you look at your surroundings assign spells that you think will be beneficial, and then if you're wrong it's most likely your fault. It's telling players "you have to pre-plan for an outcome you aren't sure is going to happen" and I love it. I don't minmax or save scum, so I guess I'm in the minority. Just dled it last night, so we'll so how it goes as it could definitely be too limiting.

I think it is potentially a good mechanic, but at the same time it feels like it probably needs very heavy watching/balancing. I like the idea mentioned earlier, of gaining free memory slots every few levels.

Really weak, or low level spells, I think should ideally be relegated to a 0 memory tier with its own separate number of slots.

The stronger abilities that take multiple slots, I have yet to try them out, but my fear with them is that their cooldown+damage/effect ratio might not be enough to justify taking up a spot for two other abilities.

[quote=CharityDiary]That may have been the case on Explorer mode in D:OS, maybe even Classic mode, but if you wanted to play Tactician, your characters [i]had[/i] to be [i]specialized[/i]. Sure, maybe the Archer would have taken the Man-at-Arms skill "Helping Hand", but they had to waste a skill point in Man-at-Arms to get that skill.

That system is no longer present in D:OS 2, it seems. You're no longer limited by your proficiency in different spell schools, so I guess they chose Memory as the alternative limiting factor.[/quote]

I didn't play the enhanced edition, it came out after I had already beaten the game with my buddy and I didn't want to play it again(cause playing with a buddy ruled but took a lot of time). But I did notice that they limited the amount of skills you knew very heavily, while in D:OS classic they didn't do that much at all. I prefer limiting what you can implement more than what you can know, because it allows for swapping stuff out and experimenting rather than being paranoid about skill selection.

That's why I like memory, and why I think it's a vital mechanic in a game with 4 player controlled characters. Even with a large amount of skill categories, without some way to limit what you are able to do character specialization becomes meaningless and thus a big part of co-op RPG play is no longer relevant.

Well I don't know why I can't quote you without quoting me but okay nice

Well, even if you could know every skill in the game, they could just make it so that you sucked at using the abilities you were "unskilled" in. That way you wouldn't have to worry about running out of ability slots, but you'd still have to specialized. As it is now, you have to spend skill points to be able to use a certain ability, then spend more skill points to make sure you have the memory to use it.

[quote=TsunAmik]I am quite okay with memory system. It deals with biggest balance issue in DOS1 - for cost of just 1 or 2 skill points, your (for example) aoe fire/geo mage with wand and shield, maxed willpower and loremaster can suddenly get ENORMOUS power boost, thanks to really easy to obtain and not very restricted usage of level 1 spells like regeneration, battery ram, bitter cold, rain, thunder jump or oath of desecration. We all know, that these "one point wonders" turned your specialized character in allmighty godlike machine of war and for extremely small cost, and absolutely no disadvantage (as 1 skill point is nothing on later levels) - suddenly instead of classical slow and fragile mage, you could have selfhealing aoe ball of destruction zipping around battlefield with low cost spells like no tommorow. So yeah, memory is indeed needed to balance things out.


BUT I strongly suggest one of two tweaks for this:
1) automatically expand memory slots with leveling up. The way it currently is, you can have lvl 20 character, but if you spend no points on memory, you will still have only 5 slots... which is quite meh and seriously no fun whatsoever. I would suggest, that characters get atleast 1 memory slot every 4-5 levels, this way you can have 8-10 slots at high level+few extra depending on your stat distribution (15 max with 20 memory?) This in my opinion sounds much better, as you can have no memory character, which must choose his main spells wisely, but is not too limited by this. Or you can have little more "hybrid" character, which gets much more spells in his skillbar, but has lower main stats as int and strength.
It keeps the basic idea intact, but won´t be so restricting that it might not even be fun anymore.

2) after reaching certain skill level (lets say level 4 pyromancer), your low level fire skills could have 0 memory cost. This makes sense, because it would be really weird, that my allmighty fire mage who is capable of bringing down meteor from sky is not able to shoot small fire projectile at enemy.
So with massive investments into your chosen skill tree, you can become real master of that type of warfare, enabling you to use much more skills, but only from that tree. Which perfectly solves the above descripted problem of all mighty hybrid builds. If this restriction isn´t enought, we can introduce specialized talent (lets say "Fire attunement"?) to enable this.

Ideas?[/quote]

Oh man, these are some brilliant ideas. Please use either of these and I'll love them dearly.

His first suggestion would be very balanced and standardized. In my opinion.

Suggestion 2, however appealing it might seem, could be a little too easy to achieve and abuse though. My variation of it would be to make it so that when you hit 4 or 5 with Pyro for instance, your character can learn 2-3 novice skills with no Memory cost, while the rest maintain their normal cost.

I feel like the original suggestion might make it too easy to just dump all your points into the Ability skills (eg: Aerothurge, Hydrosophist, Pyromancer) and get ALL the low to mid level skills of those trees without having to invest much into Memory. For instance:

At level 5 you have 7 Base Combat Ability Points.
Following suggestion 2 rules that can easily convert to: 4 Pyro+3 Aerothruge if you ignore other cmb. abilities
A player with this setup could easily learn all of the Novice level Pyro Skills at no memory value and have a wealth of abilities available at ALL times. By level 6 he could do the same for his low-level Aero abilities, and easily be cruising through with like 12 abilities at that point, with no points in Memory at all. So he'd have a ton of abilities to access still with damage behind them because he'd still be able to invest into his INT stat. I could easily see this becoming like DOS1 again but with potentially WAY MORE abilities at your disposal.

I thought memory was ok at first and that people were being babies...

But then I looked more closely and... For every 2 points you get 1 memory point...

And... some skills... take more then 1 (and almost none take 0).

---

Here is kind of the thing... Memory is a SECONDARY attribute. Properly done you only lightly invest into it. 16 at level 20 should be a good amount.

Yet they currently balance it as if it is absolutely as vital as intelligence or constitution so its growth is extremely slow (as if you would EVER want 20-30 memory).

Which REALLY REALLY REALLY kills multi-class characters again...

I agree with the idea to give you one free Memory slot every 4 levels. I also think that a few low-level/low-power skills with 0 memory cost -OR- 0 turn cooldown could be a good idea.

Currently the way attributes and scaling works, you can't actually afford to put points into Memory, Constitution or Wits in the first place.




I'm not disagreeing with your premise, but I'm going to take a closer look at your example's math:

You get 2 attribute points per level, so level 20 is 19 level-ups, which is 36 points. All characters start out with 10 in all stats as a base. 16 Memory at level 20 means you put 6 points into Memory and 30 into other things. So you could have 40 INT / 16 MEM, or 30 INT / 20 CON / 16 MEM.

Six points into something at level 20 isn't a huge investment.

It depends on how "secondary" Larian considers those attributes. Of course, right now the attribute system is broken so even 40 INT / 16 MEM gives you a severe damage penalty to int-based skills.

Having nearly beat the alpha, I can honestly say that the memory system seems a bit strange. Once you access more advanced skills, they start to take up more memory. 3 to be exact. And they need a source point, of which you can only ever have 3 at a time. There's enough limiting factors on, granted, very powerful skills. I like this idea of the higher your skill at a school the lower the memory point cost because it does make sense. A master Aerothurge wouldn't be limited to a small pool of spells. They would have a large repertoire. It gives an incentive other than a small damage boost for investing farther into a school, but I think it should be set at breakpoints of 5. That way you have to commit 4 levels if you start with a point, 5 if you don't. Investing as much could reduce the memory cost of all skills in that tree by 1. Considering there are I believe 5-6 spells for low level skills in each class, and that the next tier cost 3 memory, it wouldn't make you too overpowered in my opinion.

This is actually what I was thinking, have it auto expand the memory as you level up and lower the memory cost as you upgrade that particular skills.

Or they could just not mess with it at all and keep it how it was in D:OS1, which didn't have any issues.

D:OS1 had huge issues. In the classic game, there was no limit whatsoever on how many abilities you had available, which was a balance nightmare (and not that interesting, honestly). The Enhanced Edition limited how much you could KNOW, period, which was just terrible, because you had no flexibility unless you wanted to keep buying new skill books every time you wanted to swap out.

Memory is a good idea to create a middle ground between the two. It just needs tuning to make it less... annoying. As I think has been suggested, having higher levels of the relevant skill reduce the memory footprint would be a good start.

I played the Enhanced Edition for like 500 hours probably and didn't really have any issues, although I was disappointed that you could only learn one or two Master skills when there were three available. But the actual balance for all the skills was really well-done, I thought. You could put 1 point in a magic school even if you weren't a mage and get some basic spells, but you'd suck with them. You'd be much more effective in your particular area of specialization, but at least you wouldn't be limited when it came to abilities, and if you ran into a situation where that Level 1 Aerotheurge skill your Ranger learned 30 hours ago could finally be useful, albeit on a very crude level, you could use it without having to sacrifice your other skills!

In my opinion, the only negative aspect of Enhanced Edition's skill system was the fact that you could only learn X amount of skills, so you were constantly afraid that you'd use that Skill Book you'd been carrying around and then immediately find a better one but be unable to use it.

[quote=mesmerizedish][quote=CharityDiary]Or they could just not mess with it at all and keep it how it was in D:OS1, which didn't have any issues.[/quote]

D:OS1 had huge issues. In the classic game, there was no limit whatsoever on how many abilities you had available, which was a balance nightmare (and not that interesting, honestly). The Enhanced Edition limited how much you could KNOW, period, which was just terrible, because you had no flexibility unless you wanted to keep buying new skill books every time you wanted to swap out.

Memory is a good idea to create a middle ground between the two. It just needs tuning to make it less... annoying. As I think has been suggested, having higher levels of the relevant skill reduce the memory footprint would be a good start. [/quote]

After a playthrough, I think that memory can work if we get attribute points at the frequency we get now. My fear is that that will be unsustainable at later levels and will affect the lower levels negatively. It's a delicate balance and one that could make it much more challenging going into encounters, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Definitely is a system that strikes the balance between knowing spells, and having them available to use. I didn't like the 'having to relearn' thing in EE so pleased by this system.

Also, the 'reach a certain skill level and it reduces memory cost' I think is a great idea. Again, something that can and will be balanced as time goes on, and I'm intrigued to see how it goes.