Russian: http://www.igromania.ru/articles/550386/Eshe_bolshe_vozmozhnostei_Prevyu_Divinity_Original_Sin_2.htm
No more cartoonish look, I guess?
And 4 player party and 4 races (human, dwarf, elf, lizard).
Divinity: Original Sin 2's narrative is fuelled by dizzying, twisted multiplayer
Straight from the Source: impressions of Larian's ambitious RPG sequel.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 is an RPG heretic. It wants you to split the party. It wants you to work against each other. It'll even force your hand, as our team of four mismatched heroes discovered when trying to get into town. Party leader Gwynne got a warm enough welcome, at least as warm as a prodigal daughter last seen being arrested as a corrupt sorceress can expect. Her dwarf companion had no such luck though, being rudely and immediately turned away at the gates by the racist guard. For him, the only way in was to find an alternate route, through a series of caves far from the gates and far from his so-called friends. All of them already questing without him.
At which point he was handed a task of his own: assassinate Gwynne. Her brother had no interest in his sister reclaiming her birthright, and he was willing to pay to get rid of her.
Hmm. Decisions, decisions. Specifically, use a lightning bolt, or an arrow?
Divinity: Original Sin 2, due to hit Kickstarter any minute now if it hasn't already, is already shaping up to be a fascinating game, not least for drawing as much inspiration from the likes of Spy vs. Spy as its predecessor did from Ultima 7. On the surface, yes, it looks familiar. Under the graphics though it's a huge leap forwards, both for the series and Larian's new approach of building games around multiplayer systems instead of having the world revolve around a single player.
Every character has an origin. Whether or not we'll play them, a la Dragon Age, depends on the success of the Kickstarter, but either way their impact ripples throughout the game.
Now, as before, that doesn't mean you have to play it socially, though you can - up to three players this time, either with one character each or sharing out the party as you see fit. Larian is well aware that only around 10-15 per cent of players teamed up last time (their numbers) and the focus is still very much on the single-player experience. The advantage of designing for multiplayer anyway though is that it forces systems and scripts to be more reactive and open and bulletproofed, with the result that you get a far more responsive, weighted world. An NPC can't simply teleport out of jail behind a fade-to-black once found innocent for instance. A quest has to work whether or not one player knows what's coming, or finds a key character dead on arrival.
The implementation of this in Original Sin was a good start, but it wasn't hard to see the limits and the ways that Larian kept its chaos more or less under control. As well as the path through the game being heavily constrained by enemy levels, its approach to anything-goes questing tended to boil down to very simple raw design, and NPCs leaving a lot of very convenient notes near to their corpses to point psychotic players in the next direction. This time, Larian is shooting higher, with far more focus on both emergent systems and player freedom to experiment and subvert things for whatever reason. Town guards for instance will get more suspicious as things go wrong rather than simply switching into search and destroy mode at the slightest provocation. If you're holding contraband goods, no problem. If you've raised suspicion enough for random searches, problem. If another player has quietly let them know that you're worth searching, intrigue!
At its core, the idea is that a party should be a collection of individuals with their own stories, their own opinions and their own opportunities that may or may not mesh with what everyone else wants. Often, goals will be secret, unless you choose to share that your character is, say, a member of a brotherhood of assassins, or your family vault contains vast amount of treasure that you aren't confident you can get to alone. After all, why should you share your birthright?
This is 'competitive questing' - not just PVP, but players racing to solve problems around town to get the reward, chasing unique rewards, finding alternate routes that only they can, like working with smugglers to get aboard a boat or persuading a local lord to give you a ride on his dragon. Eventually the team will come together again, but in these moments you can be out on your own.
The party will have to come together to continue the story and fight through certain challenges, but in towns and other key places, everyone can happily split off.
Examples. In the demo town, the big story revolved around a poisoning - two suspects, one dwarf, one human. Neither suspect will talk to the wrong kind of person, immediately putting at least two characters on different paths with scope for intrigue, argument, sabotage, and great acts of bastardry. Need to slow down a rival? Slip something illegal into their pocket and quietly alert the town guards. Is another player working with a prisoner to prove their innocence? Slip through the shadows and cut their throat. To assassinate another player, sure, you could just start a scrap but where's the style in that? Far better to mix some poison and red dye to create a very special, ahem, 'healing' potion. Or, as I did with my two characters: quietly trigger a fight while near a boss, and then zap! Lightning in the back, all without risking stirring the boss at all.
Death in this case doesn't have too much sting. A party wipe means game over, but otherwise a fallen character just respawns - Larian is hoping that keeping score will offer sufficient incentive to keep competitive questing relevant, and avoid the obvious problems. That said, what's stopping the team just agreeing to make Gwynne take one for the team and then splitting the reward? Nothing, any more than everyone hitting the arena after agreeing to throw a fight.
There may later be pragmatic reasons for players not to work together like this, but really, Original Sin 2 will live or die based on whether it's more fun to compete than it is efficient to collaborate. Competing can also take many forms, from which side the party ultimately helps out, to deciding the fate of towns the party visits, to smaller scale things like who gets to look after the party's precious teleporter pyramids. A friendly team for instance could easily use them to sneak the unlucky dwarf into town, or indeed help fight the guards. Or they could just run off, to the point of leaving the entire zone to continue the quest while leaving their comrades eating dust.
All of this is due to factor into the single player game too. Larian's still working on the details, but single-player mode will feature some form of AI-driven companion system so that the party will still be at cross paths and following their own goals, beyond the basic "Vell heavily disapproves of that" type karma meter that we're used to in other games from BioWare et al. Whether that means them literally wandering off, autonomously chatting to people, and returning with a beaming smile and a suspiciously red looking health potion or not, it's too early to say. Hopefully so.
In our demo, each game had two players controlling two characters each. You can chop and change that as you want though, keeping yours or passing them around.
Even if not though, designing for this freedom offers plenty for everyone. Much like Dragon Age, the key theme is 'origins'. Each character in the party will have a unique one (along with a 'no origin' option if you just want a blank slate), with a jailbreak at the start of the game hooking your character up with three NPCs, and all of your stories running throughout the adventure. The island I saw was Gwynne's childhood home, meaning that she knew most people, whereas her party were arriving as strangers. The level of detail here is crazy, not just with every character reacting differently to each race and special-case character, but those characters reacting differently to everything they saw. To Gwynne for instance, a statue outside of town is described as "How this statue used to frighten me." To another human, it's "Harrald, the hero of the Northminster siege." To the dwarf, it's "Harrald the Mighty? Harrald the Maimer more like!"
Once in town, dialogue gets truly ridiculous. Along with every character having tags that offer extra dialogue options, like Swindler or Witty or Heiress, and the last game's Pet Pal skill for talking with animals, Original Sin 2 adds ghosts. Specifically, every character you kill leaves behind a ghost, and yes, they have new dialogue for party members who can talk to them, and yes, you can abuse the hell out of this. The first town features an investigation into a poisoning (for some players - the suspects won't even talk to some characters) where the victim is lying comatose. A healer might be able to do something about that. A spirit talker can shrug, murder the victim, and demand answers from their ghost. For extra bastardry, possibly on threat of eating their soul.
As impressive as all this is - and as terrifying just a mental image of the dialogue trees and scripting can be - I do have a few concerns about how this will play out. In particular, the downside of offering so many options is often that progress becomes more about choosing one than actually figuring anything out, especially when the steps and mechanics have to be both fluid and resilient enough to have Sherlock Holmes paired up with Roger The Psycho and let both of them have play in their own way. I fear for the weight of things, especially knowing that being thrown into jail or dying just means a short walk back from a respawn point. Having to rely on other party members to break you out/resurrect you has its own problems, but even in a short demo it quickly became easy to shrug off any consequences with just "Whatever."
On top of this, there's also the standard online RPG problem - it only takes one person who's already done part of the game to disrupt it for everyone. You know who I mean. The one who just magically knows that you get the hidden key here and you kill that guy, and we go thereand hurry up hurry up what the hell are you doing 'savouring the journey' when there's gold!
Larian is hardly blind to any of this though, or the fact that realistically most players will be going through the game in single-player. Even with the best will in the world, it's hard to find a good team of four for a 50-plus hour adventure, especially a kind that borrows from table-top design enough that you'd want to be doing it with actual friends rather than random internet people. If you've got that, great. Even if not, it's still looking at Divinity: Original Sin 2 as its Baldur's Gate 2 - bigger, better, building on what worked and refining what didn't. That stretches from systems, allowing for more freedom and roleplaying, to the basic lore of the game. There's now a whole team devoted to that, rather than the writers just throwing everything at the wall.
The additional ideas already on show are fresh, promising, and most of all, feel like they're coming at the right time. Historically, Larian's problem has always been having cool ideas without the foundation to make them live up to the premise. With Original Sin, it laid them well and we all saw that they were good. Now it can really have some fun with them, and see how high they let it build.
Divinity Original Sin 2’s Competitive Roleplaying And Diverging Narratives Are Boldly Inventive
Divinity: Original Sin 2 [official site] has just landed on Kickstarter but we’ve already played an early build. It’s an ambitious sequel, supporting up to four players who will now be able to compete as their objectives overlap and diverge. As well as bringing about the life and death of the party, Original Sin 2 brilliantly overhauls its predecessor’s turn-based combat and introduces multiple playable races and an origin system that defines each character’s evolving place in the world.
Bold and inventive, it adds complex layers of overlapping narrative consequences to Original Sin’s world of interlocking systems. This is how it works.
In the Fallout games, it’s possible to reverse-pickpocket, using your sleight of hand to plant an item in an NPC’s inventory rather than removing one. This unlikely skill can be used to arm NPCs or to mess with their dress sense by replacing one item of clothing with another. Most people don’t use reverse-pickpocketing to leave a surprise gift in an NPC’s pocket though – they use it to drop armed explosives into peoples’ trousers.
Is that a stick of dynamite in your pocket or are you just pleas-
And so it goes.
For their sequel to the extraordinarily inventive Divinity: Original Sin, Larian are seeking to elevate reverse-pickpocketing and other chicanery to an artform. The stand-out fresh feature in Divinity: Original Sin 2 is inter-party competitive questing, which should not only allow for diversity in narrative and objectives, but also allows the studio to build on the systemic simulation of the world. I spent a couple of hours playing an early build set in a single town last week, and while the new origin stories and cleverly branching subplots are the big news, the changes to crafting and combat are just as smart and exciting. For crafting, the big addition is the ability to combine skills, allowing for the creation of a stealth spider (stealth + spider summon) or a rain of blood (rain + blood; heals characters with a vampirism skill). That, in itself, is exciting. There’s a whole lot more to come.
A few quick paragraphs on combat before moving on to the main course. Fighting is still turn-based but there are two major changes. There are fewer action points to use in a turn. When Larian announced that, it seemed like a minor change but in practice it’s akin to a rewrite of the entire system. Rather than calculating how many action points will remain if you choose to move or use an ability, now your characters speed determines movement range for a single action point while skills take up one or two points. It makes the game far more tactical, flexible and legible.
The second change relates to Source abilities, which are the strongest powers in the game. To use them, you burn Source points and these are hard to come by. We were shown three abilities that allow players to gain them. Bodies can be ‘consumed’, in and out of combat, which provides one Source point but also shifts the player’s karma. What the consequences for that shift are, I can’t say yet, but I can say that making corpses explode into a bloody mess during a fight is A Good Thing. The second method involves Channelling, which freezes the character and allows other characters (including Source-powered enemies) to draw points from them, chipping away at their health as they do so.
The last method we were shown ties back to the wider mechanics of the world. In the first Original Sin you could kill any NPC and finish the game without them. That’s still true but now, dead NPCs leave behind a ghost and characters with the right trait can communicate with those ghosts. It’s also possible to consume their soul, which will top up an empty bloodstone if you have one handy. Bloodstones, when charged, can be used during combat to provide a Source Point. Handy.
Talking to ghosts is fascinating though. It means that if we were playing together, I could kill an NPC that you were hoping to talk to, interrogate his ghost and then use the information I discovered to cause more trouble down the line. You see, even if we were to play together, we wouldn’t necessarily be on the same side. Not all of the time, anyway.
It makes sense that Larian, the mischief-makers of the modern CRPG, would create an entire set of mechanics that enable trickery and encourage playful deviation from the usual roleplaying flow. That flow generally involves accepting a quest, going to the quest location, killing the thing or collecting the thing, and then returning to the quest-giver to receive a reward or advance the story. Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian, dismisses the word ‘quest’, preferring ‘situation’ – “A quest implies a definite objective, a situation tells you to be reactive and to improvise.”
Here’s how it all plays out. When you create your character, you’ll choose a race and an origin story. There are currently four selectable races – dwarves, humans, lizards and wood elves – but the game will include more at release. Your race and elements of your origin story (‘noble’, ‘criminal’, ‘assassin’) are tags that NPCs might be programmed to respond to in various ways. Many dwarves, for example, are economic refugees who have left their crumbling empire to carve out a life among the other races of the world. In many places, they’re unwelcome and a dwarven character is likely to meet with hostility in certain quarters, while receiving support from his struggling fellows.
Another character was secretly in the employ of a group of assassins and had a target on the island. The other players didn’t know about this but could accidentally ruin the assassin’s chances of success by interfering with the target. In a perfect example of the kind of intertwined branching objectives that can emerge, one character might follow a plotline that makes them reliant on the survival of the assassination target in order to leave the island, while the assassin has been promised safe passage if he carries out the job. The respective players might not be aware that they’re locked into contradictory objectives but when they do become aware, they can either decide to work together for the greater good, or apply metaphorical (and perhaps real) knives to backs.
In the scenario I played, the four characters in the party had been shipwrecked and were trying to escape from an island. One of the two humans in the group was of noble birth and was a native of the settlement on the island, a place now divided along racial and economic lines. Original Sin 2 still has much of the silliness that helped its predecessor to stand out from the crowd – Pet Pal, the Dr Doolittle skill, is in glorious form during a conversation with an unhappily pampered dog – but there’s a serious bite to the world. Racism, class warfare and fear of Source magic and those marked by it all play a part in the situations that arise during our party’s attempts to leave the island.
Source magic is the one common element shared by our characters. They all channel it and, indeed, the meeting place for every character, no matter what their origin, is a prison in which they were to be purged of their abilities. This would leave them hollowed out, effectively lobotomised. Their escape places them in a predicament – when they meet characters who know of them, due to their chosen origin story, their Source abilities may be exposed. I chose to have one character lie, convincing people that she’d been freed because her apparent Source affinity had been a false alarm. It’s also possible to threaten, boast and charm. Dialogue choices, as well as actions, might lead to new tags being applied to your character, opening up new NPC reactions and options during conversations.
It’s exactly what I wanted from a sequel, building on the anything-goes nature of its predecessor with a narrative system that should produce controlled chaos similar to the elemental accidents and combinations that drive combat. There are whole sets of new behaviours that plug into the competitive party elements, including the ability to steal an item and then drop it in another player’s inventory. Inform a guard that you’ve seen that player’s character acting suspiciously and the alert status of the area rises in relation to that player alone. Next stop, a ‘random’ bag search, and either a fight, a bribe or a trip to jail.
Creativity is encouraged at every turn. Combine the new flexible crafting system with the ability to plant or gift items and you’ll soon be providing your so-called allies with shiny red healing potions…that are actually bottles of poison with a dash of red dye added into the mix. There’s a great deal of scope for murder between friends and Vincke says the possibility of constant grief and griefing will be countered in two ways. First of all, this isn’t an MMO. It’s a game for up to four people and those people will likely know each other and want to have fun. Sometimes the fun will involve murdering one another in sneaky ways but the penalties for intra-party slaughter will be slight. And that brings in the second point – characters who die will resurrect at the most recent waypoint they visited. There will be some penalty but the details of that will come later, when the world is complete and balancing begins in earnest.
What Larian are aiming for with Original Sin 2 is remarkable; an enormous RPG that adds four possible player-centred layers of systemically driven narrative on top of all of the complexities that were already in place in the previous game. Constructing a world that can support this kind of competitive and cooperative narrative is daunting, in terms of both design and workload (the amount of dialogue required just for the location in the early build is astonishing). If it all comes together, it could have many of the qualities of a social tabletop roleplaying experience with the benefits of a complex set of mechanics that begins with the finely tuned turn-based combat and runs right through to the tangle of overlapping objectives that make up the narrative.
The major challenges for Original Sin 2 might well relate to directing the player experience. Will the game effectively promote cooperation as the solution to major conflicts without placing artificial limits and brakes in place at key points? Will the singleplayer experience benefit from many of the new features? The building blocks are already in place and the strengths of Original Sin have been amplified. Vincke says every situation in Original Sin 2 has “N+1 solutions”. Fail at every turn of the script and kill everyone who might have been able to help, and you’ll find an escape route as you scrape the bottom of the barrel. That’s the heart of Original Sin – for every problem, a thousand solutions. Larian know how to construct compelling situations that make use of their existing design and if they can master these new narrative systems as well, Original Sin 2 will be another triumph.
We’ll have more coverage early next week, including thoughts on the Kickstarter campaign and the challenges ahead.
