Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Why the animal cruelty & lazy writing?

"I agree about some missing dialog. That's a different issue from missing "favorable outcomes", which is a matter of taste. Game writers have to strike a balance between giving choices of outcomes and preserving the tone of the story line. If you always had choice for all possible outcomes for every mini story, that would dilute the dark feel of the game, which is intentional. You're probably right that it's much different from DOS1, and DOS2 may not be right for you"
-Yeh I do find the constant animal suffering distasteful, like I said earlier my gf won't play this with me and we loved DOS1. Favorable outcomes are a matter of taste, for sure. I just think a lot of these pet pal interactions go no where and are just there to give you a cheap tug on the heart strings. I think Larian is better than this. The first game accomplished grimness without this. Ultimately yeh, I'm prob not going to give this game another play through when I finish. Again, I'm totally fine with unfavourable outcomes for certain pet pal quests. It just seems like Larian relied on these situations again and again as the story progressed. They didn't last time, why this time? And the lack of dialogue progression and quest choice (the feeling this was a quest that was removed for whatever reason) in certain situations is what annoyed me the most.

"The lack of additional dialog, sure I'll give you that. But you also said you wish you could take the cute undead cat back to the ship, and cuddle it and give it all your love, etc etc. Setting aside the logistics of what you want, if we take that to an extreme, maybe we should take all undead or otherwise suffering creatures, of ANY species, from all side quests, back to the ship and take care of them. I met a group of talking fire slugs in a cave that were cursed by some bad guy and got brainwashed. Should we take them with us?"
-This is foolish. My quam with this situation is the dialogue disconnect. Logistics? Of what? Carrying a cat? You developed the ability to teleport a possessed girl to a boat out of thin air. Why not bring a long her undead guardian and life long friend? Why not allow us to TELL the thing what happened. How is this particular situation relatable to undeads you see in the world? The fire slugs had a little society in their cave. There were no orphaned fire slug youths crying about their mother after you decided to teleport it to the white house or something equally ludicrous. You speak out of context and it's annoying.

"This one is easy. Yes! Absolutely. It's justified as being part of the story. The killing of that cat by the magisters serves to show their vile nature, and it also shows that not everything is under your control. For me that was an eye-opening moment which started to set the mood for the rest of the game for me. That instance served its purpose well, as a plot tool."
-Ok. I thought it was moronic. Why would the magisters have a KOS order on black cats? It was more than just one magister that would attack the thing right? Are they telepathic? Must have been some KOS order right? I was also annoyed that I couldn't bring up the fact some soldier randomly attacked an animal that was following me in dialogue. And of course, hopeless Emmie is right around the corner. Just part of a larger trend in DOS2. I will concede that seeing the prick shoot my new cat made skull f@#king him more satisfying when I got around to it. But still, it's just strange man.

"And when I first watched the movie Cujo, I can honestly say that was the first time in a movie I saw a rabid dog go on a killing frenzy. Was it necessary to make a horror movie about a frenzied dog viciously killing people? I'll let you answer that yourself, but obviously that's not a movie for everyone. "
-Was Cujo a wizard? Is this high caliber story by your estimation? When's the last time you killed this many dogs or listened to their sob stories in a video game? I get the impression u understand my point and are at least in partial agreement. Thank you for not conflating my position with an aversion to violence or an atmosphere of despair in general.

Yup, Good Discussion, in parts anyway.
Cheers

Yea, good discussion, except you REALLY should tone down your hostility toward others in this forum, who are only expressing their opinions, while you are making this personal. Your frequent insults are getting quite irritating and the forum moderators should keep an eye on this.

Lol. I'm an accountant at year end, shoot me. But yeh I guess I'm being heated. I've said what I've had to, I'll leave the progression of this topic to the rest of the community.

Giving more options to troll or compete is fine. But the way they made it, they killed the coop-feeling you had from the first games. There are no interactive dialogs like in the first. One guy talks and all others can only listen, pushing them into passive roles if you want to play coop.

If Player A talks to an NPC and Player B does it afterwards, it is as if the Player A talking never happened. From some events you therefore can 'earn' rewards with every character seperatly like the thirsty corpse in the well. In the first game it felt like you were two soulmates fates to travel on together, now you just feel like up to four random dudes, following the same path by accident. Also in the end you still get forced to fight each other anyway. I already saw the Angry Joe video long time ago and it made me worry if I remember correctly, but sadly it kind of got even worse than expected. Not shared exp and not shared social skills just shove into your face, that you are not really a 'group'.

Honestly I expected something like the first game, after you escaped the prison island. Hearing that it won't be that way, just is extremely disappointing. There are so many flaws to the combat system regarding balance and progress my friend and I ever never really bothered to play that far. The armor system kills all the crazy and/or controll oriented builts. The only thing that really matters is pure damage now. Attributes lost all their depth and same goes for skill trees. Requirements for high level skills are so low, that there is no need for real investment, instead you will invest in Skills like Warfare or Polymorph, even if you don't need their skills, just because their will offer a better general damage boost instead of a specific one.

Regarding summoning I'm not sure. I love my summoning as a support with witch craft, though in late game summons lost their importance and this is not really different in the second game, excluding lone wolf probably. Also being a summoner but being able to handle only one summon at the time like everyone else, that really sucks.

Regarding races: undeads are awesome though probably overpowered, elves are irritating but still kind of cool, but all other races feel extremely lacking and unspecial. Also why are normal spells from first game now racial skills and even so kind of weaker versions of those? Same goes to the fact, that some skills from the first game now need source, which I find very irritating.

In general speaking: there are some cool ideas, but in the end most stuff feels half baked and lacking and core issues from the first game like inventory management did not see improvement at all.

P. S.: In the first game you got a real feeling for getting more and more powerful overtime. In this game it lacks, you already get that feeling at the start. Bigger numbers is not enough to feel yourself really more powerful.

Quite. A gentle reminder to everybody to keep it polite and friendly, please.

On the upside, the devs will certainly take notice of all this feedback, which is a good thing
We all feel strongly about certain things, and we can have lively discussions, while keeping things civil.

I say Larian should keep the cute animals alive and well, and kill off the ugly ones. There, problem solved.

I take it you don't eat any kind of meat IRL at all? Cause it would be quite ironic if you got your tidy whities in a bunch over a virtual undead cat and then eaten a real animal for Xmas dinner.

But those don't count right? Unless it's cute, it's food. That's why there's no mention of cows or pigs.

P.S.: feel feel to analyse and criticise my "grammar, spelling and sentence structure".

Not gonna lie, I kinda gave up on this fella. He points my grammar mistakes when I'm doing my best to write in a language that isn't mine and conveniently avoids my "wall of text" complain, which is more than acceptable. He constantly avoids discussions about cruelty towards people. He can't even make a point without acting like a douchebag.
For some reason he likes to forget every situation in which animals actually gets saved, like the Void Touched Deer in Driftwood which you can take down and save the other three - that didn't happened it seems.

I'll just leave him to cry over some pixelated animals. OMG THERE'S A MISSING DIALOG REGARDING A RANDOM BEAR CUB, CALL THE INTERNET POLICE.

Too much Disney destroyed his mind, lol.

Seriously, guys, play nice. Discuss the subject, not other forum members.

lol
Well, the entire game is pixels. That doesn't mean you feel nothing when you play it (I hope). How do you feel about movies? Those are pixelated too

I think the OP's main point (other than getting a little personal with you) is that some of the sad scenes involving animals feel pointless to him, and they serve no purpose in the story.
I think the point is that it's a cruel world full of tragedy, where sad things just happen, and there isn't always a reason - exactly what happens in reality. There isn't much you can do about a sad orphaned bear cub, and that's precisely the point. There isn't much you can do about someone else pointlessly killing a cute kitten. That's the point. But it's not just animals - humans and other species also get killed in the game for no good reason.

I think the writers aim to evoke certain emotions, and to stimulate your senses, which IMO they've done effectively for the most part. It's a very 'grown-up' game, much more so than the first one.

I agree with this. Never played Dos1, but I found that the involvement of animals in DoS2 to be interesting and an enjoyable aspect of the game. There were a few events that I wished I could have done more, but for every animal event that turned out that way for me, there were 3 human events of a similar note. As I am human first and foremost, I found those to be far more impacting.

On the note of unfinished story arcs, I do agree. I would have enjoyed a bit more reach on some of them. Like the dog's in the prison...throwing a ball and were done. Would have loved to get the two dog's back together and perhaps even see them later on in the storyline.

Something for the Dev's to think about for improvements in the game. There are animal lovers out there who would like to see conclusion and continuance in some of the animal stories as well.

I would assume that they didn't push to far with the animals due to not knowing how much the playerbase would like/dislike the focus. That could be a good question to further drive this topic (and keep it positive): How much would those replying like to see more in depth animal questlines in the game? something to carry on into multiple acts, perhaps even some animal companion storylines that could play out much like the origin quests?

I have also noticed there seems to be a fair amount of bad stuff happening to animals in the game. I mean, the first time you get to use pet pal is on the dog on the boat with you and there's nothing you can do for the poor scared dog, and the dialogue actually has an option for killing it.

The black cat and buddy were both refreshing uses of pet pal after the first impression you get with it, and the crab on the beach was also relatively light-hearted. The black cat has a happy ending, but not being able to help Emmie really sucked. Maybe it was meant to suck though, because Emmie is the reason why I show absolutely no quarter to any Magister I meet.

Poor Peeper though. Why did he have to kill all of the other chickens?

While I think the OP's reaction was pretty strong they are legitimate complaints about some of the quests feeling unfinished when it comes to animals. Might be a side effect of pet pal requirements leading to these quests not getting the same polish as other side quests.
Though I think something was missed in the discussion in comparison to OS 1 - in my opinion the sanctuary where you find dozens of slaughtered animals who were pretty much defenseless against the immaculates was far worse than anything I've found in OS 2 so far. The problem at that point was there wasn't a good enough motivation for killing them by the immaculates to justify letting it happen, at least to that degree. It's confirmed later on that the Immaculates kill animals for their bloodstones but this should have been established before getting into that sanctuary. Then Icara doesn't mention it at all after that, and you can't tell her about it either.
I think the solution for any writing problems would be to give the player the dialogue choice to show they care for the animals that are suffering and have options available to you that are plausible. That sanctuary situation could have been handled better if, as mentioned, the motivation for killing them was established and Icara shows some reaction to the news, and also able to save that family of wolves or at least a few other animals aside from one boar. For the bear cub in OS 2, just giving the option to respond to the cub's reaction, like trying to convince it to live on its own, or putting out of its misery, as options. Emmie would have been very simple, give the option for them to meet and if Emmie is too far gone and kills Buddy that would feel finished. That cat - yeah, just have the dialogue option to tell it what happened to its owner.
In summary, give as much attention to pet pal related side quests as other side quests do.