Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 - The Modding Dungeon Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Modding General Early Access Impressions

Since folks will be waiting another day or so before seeing the toolset for themselves, I figured I would just say a couple of words about my early access experience.

First of all, my hat’s off to the toolset team. What a hard working, humble, and conscientious group! There were times when they were answering questions at 1 or 3AM their local time. Despite many of us being scattered over the globe, the timeliness of their feedback and help was remarkable. They took every bit of feedback seriously and really seem to love seeing what the community will do with their tools.

I went to Ghent in early August and spent a week in the studio and then we were given an early access branch a couple of weeks later to continue from home. Nimue_de and I worked together in collaboration as a team. Our goal was to create a simple, standalone campaign with a single quest line and incorporate as many typical quest components as possible. We wanted to focus on how the editor performed under collaboration while creating a typical campaign. Larian provided a spreadsheet for us to note bugs, improvements, and general impressions. As I mentioned earlier, they were very attentive to our feedback. So our experience is couched in this context. It was not our goal at this point to push the editor to its limits, we had the "average modder" in mind who wants to tell a story. I come from a NWN2 and DragonAge background so thought in terms of those kinds of adventures. Thankfully, there are other talented modders doing CrAzY things.

As someone who evaluated the first editor and put it down after a couple of months, I will say that I am quite happy and motivated to create the campaign that has been in my head for some years now. We were able to do pretty much everything we wanted to do in a quest and all from within the editor. I can't think of anything that was innately really difficult to do. The hardest part would often be trying to figure out where to start or sometimes what all of our options were. The good thing here is that documentation can solve the lion's share of those issues and Larian are working on documenting themselves and giving us a solid platform to have community driven contributions to it. Over time, I think you will see a nice library of the most commonly faced issues so that even those intimidated by scripting or having less modding experience can navigate through the technical aspects given the inclination to do so.

I'm hesitant to say toooo much more about my personal opinions because I don't want to set expectations too far in one direction or the other. It might be best if I just answer whatever questions folks may have. I'm by no means an expert but I'll answer what I can. Hopefully some of the other EA modders here will chime in, they are a great and talented group.

Oh boy I'm excited, since it seems like the editor is in line with my expectations. I was a little disappointed by the editor tools for the first game. While they were fairly powerful, they were not at all intuitive. Given the lack of mods from other users, it would seem many shared these feelings.

I played around the GM mode for a while and found that even the in-game GM mode gave the player a lot of options for managing the campaign, which is excellent. Terrain editing and something like conversation/goal scripting are things for the external tools, and I'm hoping (and I guess expecting) that these are things you can do within the editor. One thing I found nice about the GM mode is how easy it was to use. The interface worked pretty much as expected and I didn't really find myself getting stumped with anything. Given how the GM tools exceeded my expectations, I'm really excited about the editor tools.

Mainly, I'm just interested in what other users can create. I don't expect some 60 hour AAA RPG quality, nor the huge persistent worlds of NWN, but if I can get an hour long dungeon crawl with traps, puzzles, and some sweet loot, I'll be more than happy.

Just to help keep expectations in line, the editor interface does not look like the GM interface. It is closer to the first editor in this area. I went through a similar mental process. I saw the GM interface during the Kickstarter campaign and hoped that the editor would get a similar look and feel for placing and manipulating objects in the world. When I first sat down and opened the editor, and was greeted by the familiar face of the first one, I was a bit worried. But once you overcome the initial disappointment and get familiar with it, along with the polish and quality of life improvements it has received, you forget about what you thought you wanted it to be and appreciate it for what it is.

Yeah I expect the editor to be very similar to the first one, given that the game is utilizing the DOSEE engine. I just thought the GM tools showed the kind of approach they were taking to modding this go around, in the sense that it isn't just a tacked on thing.

How easy is it to modify properties of an entity with the DOS2 editor? My experience with the first is that it basically involved unpacking the script files and then having to navigate through a very messy folder tree to locate the script you thought might be responsible for the behavior of an entity. Even then, often times the script you modified wasn't the correct one, and you would have to navigate some more folders until you found an identical script in a different file path that would make the in game things respond to your edits. Has this process changed at all?

Thank you for posting. Did Larian tell you around when they were planning on releasing tutorials or documentation?

I'm not sure which properties you meant exactly in your question. There are a lot of things you can change in the object properties panel for a given object. They can have several scripts associated with themselves. If you click in the script, you then get a list of script variables that you can change right from the editor. I think this is how the majority of object properties get changed.

If you mean re-writing character and item scripts to behave differently, then I haven't done as much with that.

I'll give you one example of what I am talking about. In our mod, we have a cemetery with gravestones. When you click on them in game, you get text displayed on the gravestone. In order to do this, there is a script associated with the object called "DisplayTextOnCharacter". When I click on the script within a window pane, it brings up arguments to the script, one of which is "DialogKey". You fill it in with the filename of the dialog you want to display when the character clicks on it. There was no searching for the script and manually editing it. Everything is done by point and click through the object properties.



I don't have any dates on that, sorry.

That should happen at the same time as the editor. Note that while there is already quite a bit of documentation (much more than there ever was for the first editor), it is still very much a work-in-progress and more will be added over time.

The BIGGEST improvement, is not necessarily the editor. It's that there's an established knowledge base from both 1's editor and Larian's commitment to being more involved in the mod community. In the early D:OS 1 editor days everyone was running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Now you'll have help and answers. I'll try to help out as well as I did on 1's mod board :P


The main thing I'd say about the D:OS 2 editor is to the people looking for a more simplified experience, that's not really there. It is in some aspects but not enough that I'd call the editor substantially less complex. Wind sort of explained that.


It is somewhat easier to just dive in and get some things going. Scripts are included where in the original 1 editor they were not. In 2's editor you can rip off a few level templates place some characters and make things happen in about an hour.

Thank you @Windemere for sharing your experience.

Thanks Windemere for your feedback! I am an NWN 1 developer and my question is blunt on topic - do you think DOS2 could be a valid replacement for NWN 1 and NWN 2 when it comes to building Persistent Worlds with up to 30 or 40 players online at the same time? Since you come from the NWN 2 community yourself I suppose you know what I am talking about? :)

I am totally aware that DOS2 don't have the content compared to NWN 1 and NWN 2, but if there is a solid ground DOS2 can build on, that would be more than enough for me! :)

I can't foresee that kind of possibility. The game is capped at 6 players and not really designed at all for persistent world-like experiences. Sorry, maybe Legends of Aria will be the next venue for that sort of thing.