Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Tell me my eyes fooled me: "morphing armor"

If every single class is wearing exactly the same armour, then there is probably a larger problem with the game design.

And no, I can't suspend disbelief on this. There's no in-game magic that explains why heavy armour made from metal turns into a bunch of tree branches on an elf.

Sure there is. It was done by...

MAGIC! (or source, pick whatever feels better)

To be honest, if this game is completely ruined for you because you absolutely can't accept that the Developers wanted to give each race a specific aesthetic and chose programming practicality as opposed to complete gritty realism concerning something as off to the side of game mechanics as armor appearance, then just find a game that does. Or wait for modding tools to come out and do it yourself. Having played games with a large number of race/class specific armor and weapons I much prefer having the ability to easily swap gear. I've seen people say 'well if the game had more depth then race specific gear wouldn't change what armor you had available' but to such a degree if you put one awesome lore related piece of gear in the game worn by humans, well you'd need another quest or quest line for one that could be worn by dwarves, and elves, and lizardmen, and eventually undead, and possibly another race if they feel motivated to do that with dlc. And say you wanted to play a party of only dwarves, well than 4/5s of all those quests are now pointless and can be avoided, because the awesome rewards are just vendor trash. Your claim that it's just the 'developers being lazy' is kinda a weak claim when if they actually did what was expected, and balanced it properly, it would literally add 100s of man hours of work for the developers. Personally, I'd prefer them to actually finish the game and fill it out with compelling story content before they focused on turning the game into a fashion dressup game.

If everyone always agreed with everything the developers were doing, then we could just close down these forums right now. No one said it's "completely ruined". We said we don't like it.

It doesn't necessarily have to require 100s of man-hours custom designing every item of armour for 4 different races (although that's something they seriously should have considered as a cost of trying to promise 4 races that are very physically diverse).

Ideally, what I would like is for them to commit some effort into designing a system that allows armour to automatically morph to different body shapes without them having to hand-craft it from scratch every time. I'm certainly not expecting that armour should generally be restricted to specific races, but if they really want to enforce a particular aesthetic, it would be best if they would rely on providing benefits to the armour that work with specific races.

As it is, if someone wants to mod in an extra playable race (such as orcs), and they want to match the visual quality of the existing races, then they'll need to do the same heavy lifting to hand-craft all of the armours. It's pretty much guaranteed that won't happen. This is a big blindspot as far as modding support is concerned.

I am concerned generally with Larian's strategy this far of using brute force and manual labour to solve problems instead of building systems.

The only way they could do what you are asking for, is if they had made all the races share the same skeleton. But in doing so, the races would not be as unique visually as they are now. It would be like in Skyrim or Dragon Age, where everybody obviously has the exact same body and animations.

Do you think they don't already share the same skeleton? Haven't you noticed that sometimes the lizard's tail looks a bit weird because they're using human animations, which weren't designed for a tail?

They all have two arms and two legs. The lizards also have a tail which you need to account for but that only adds a little extra complexity.

For the most part, when it comes to chest and leg armour, it's a matter of connecting it to the universal skeleton, and applying the relevant morphing rules to make it match the body shape and animations of the specific body type.

Lizards would need unique boots and possibly also gloves. Of course, many of the races may also need unique helmets, but this limits the amount of extra work you need to do just because one race has a bigger chest than another one.

As someone who recently came off of working on a game with just such a system, the results tend to be (specifically with a smaller team like Larian's) a small mix of boring generic armors with issues like stretching and clipping. And in part of the "resource saving" strategy, you also get a lot of reskins. Really, it just ends up making the armors bland. You're not really going to find a non-AAA studio that can make 100s of different armor sets that fit all races. Hell, Bioware couldn't even do that for the first Dragon Age, and they cut tons of corners (remember that sweet sweet dwarf beard attached directly to their chest?). Even 2 didn't really do it well. It wasn't until 3, when their manpower reached several hundred artists, that they could reasonably create that many unique armors. Other games of this nature, like PoE or Sword Coast, have such low graphical fidelity that they don't even need to worry about the armors looking good. But Divinity has a certain style to it and they've chosen to embrace that style. Maybe it'll mean one elf looks pretty similar to another elf, but I'll take that over having the same 4-5 pieces of armor haphazardly stretched across all the game's unique races.

Seems I misses the KS Update mentioning this... still, doesn't change the fact, that I dislike it.

@nojanath
Well, the fault with that "one super awesome piece of gear not available to everyone" statement sadly is the notion itself. Something like that shouldn't exist at all. If it does, then there's something wrong.
A simple example: If a farmer wants to transport a truckload of potatoes he won't use a ferrari, as well as you won't se a tractor in the formula 1.

That also applies to the drop mechanics, and is where I say the crafting should be improved instead of being cut down.
Then players can decide for themselves what they want to do with the resources they bought from vendors for example. Something that was a nice start in Original Sin 1, but was just in the fledgling stage.

Can't say I'm really a fan of the morphing armor either.

Different looks for armor is fine. Different materials than what the armor says it is, is not fine.

Yeah, small differences can be ok-ish.

And for everything else > new category/instance. Meshes, and texture etc are all there, so numbers just need to be juggled to a new table entry. The only additional work would be the need to create another inventory icon.

I'm bummed about this also.

First of all it takes control away from me regarding the aesthetics of my own player character, which is retarded I think.

Secondly as you mentioned they advertised this game's theme as "not pants on head retarded like DOS1", which was the main complaint about DOS1, and now you have chainmail morphing to leaves and INSANE body postures on female models, etc....

It actually shows integrity and maturity, plausability of the gameworld if there are great pieces of armor which are made for dwarves, and you can't wear as a lizard, etc.
It's just better. Less lazy too.

But hey it's Alpha so let's hope they get their shit together

Oh really? How are the elves in DOS2 insane? Sounds like someone is judging elf culture by human standards. Perhaps the elves think human clothes are insane and an affront to nature?

The morphing armor is sometimes strange, but otherwise the RNG would even be worse. You would more likely get good stuff, but no one can wear it. Because the specific race members in your team are skilled in a different way.

They would have to make the loot drops accounting for the group your are playing.

I already mentioned that some posts earlier. There is no need for that problem to exist at all. Crafting is just one aspect.
It's only another reason to get rid of that aweful RNG.

Does character appearance really bother people?

Its important to me in a lot of rpg's, but you know... with an isometric camera which has no value being zoomed into the character I barley notice my characters appearance.

its a thing that definitely is important to me in many games just not here.

EDIT ah i realised its more about integrity than looks in this thread, *shrug i guess I see the point.

If you enter the inventory you see the look.

What bothers me there is: female lizards are so tall, their head gets cut off all the time.

I think from a dev standpoint expecting the armour on any of the races to be changed in such a drastic manner at this stage is highly unlikely.

(I could be wrong) but I don't think I am.

It seems fine, a handy convenience. Imagine how annoying it would be to have RNG armour perfect for one race which happened to be in another race's size. I think it's a sensible concession to party flexibility and playing for fun.

Btw, it's really really not ok to use 'retard' as a pejorative word, any more than you would a racial curse or a sexist curse. Sheesh.

I'll go ahead and repeat myself:

1) It's absolutely fine to have the RNG give you whatever it wants. You can sell it and buy other stuff. You can dismantle it and craft it into something else. You can save it for a future follower. If you have a menagerie of followers than certainly that piece of equipment will be fine for one of them.

2) A "convenience" feature it may be to you, a "lazy" feature it is to me, and also retarded. Sorry, I mean, "dumbdown" feature. Both from the aspect of the promise of integrity and maturity which they repeatedly promised (and why I supported in kickstarter), but also because I don't want the sillier aesthetics forced on my player character.

3) I'm sorry the word retarded offends you. I certainly won't stop using it but.. yeah. Let's not discuss this because it is offtopic.