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If he isn't around Ghent I imagine Swen charged him with responsibilities regarding Larian's recent aggressive expansion (new offices in Ireland, Canada and Russia) but that's just speculation on my part.
Stabbeyabout 2 hours ago
And take a look at the RPGCodex forums. Generally speaking, they loved D:OS 1, but the suggestion that Romances will be possible in D:OS 2 - even with the very few details provided in the update - has made a bunch of people there enraged and a few have even mentioned dropping their pledges.
Anyway it's sad to see only the Romance options in the relationships stretchgoals. I'm not into Romances so I'll skip it, sure, but I like the idea of giving even more life to the characters relations.
Flums42 minutes ago
@ people at RPGcodex enraged due to missing voice-over: They seem to be able to write and read (proved by their own comments). Therefore, they have no dyslexia.
Maybe you should propose a voice over for their comments in the forum. The comments to that should be interesting
Creator Larian Studios LLC21 minutes ago
(Swen here) Well, the Codex represents a great variety of people, so I guess it's only natural some of them get upset from time to time. It's good for balance because they often upset us We always wanted to fool around with what you could do with roleplaying relationships and linking them to the narrative - exactly how we'll be doing that however is not a decided thing yet. There's many ways that haven't been tried before and if nobody tries out this stuff, no progress will be made. It also speaks for itself that if you want to have strong narrative, relationships are something you want to explore.
As to the voices- I disagree strongly. I think voices add a lot to the immersion (if done well) but I understand there's people for who it breaks the immersion. Luckily there's a voice volume slider
Creator Larian Studios LLC15 minutes ago
I should probably add that we are envisioning many more possible states than just romance alone in the relationship system.
Man, Swen and his flip flopping relationship reasoning is getting painful. It's almost like he can't decide if he 'always wanted' relationships/romances or if he 'never wanted' them.
But on the issue, so called "romance" in games has become a deal breaker for me. The shit biocrap is doing in that area is nauseating enough to induce projectile vomiting. Add to that the unavoidable inclusive crowd and their demands and you have a recipe for utter cringe worthy crap.
If romances in Divinity 2 will be like romances in Dragon Commander, then I want romances. Gimme my undead waifu. (yeah I know that combined with political picks romances were like 1/3 or even 1/2 of social play in DC but still...)
...actually, I never wondered but I wonder now - how is it that writing in D:OS turned out to be so much worse than in DC? Did the team at some point just run out of special ingredient that makes quirky and not serious writing work? Or was it completely different writing team? Or is it just that DC had focused gameplay for writing and talking like a visual novel and D:OS is just too big?
Creator Larian Studios LLC21 minutes ago
(Swen here) We always wanted to fool around with what you could do with roleplaying relationships and linking them to the narrative - exactly how we'll be doing that however is not a decided thing yet. There's many ways that haven't been tried before and if nobody tries out this stuff, no progress will be made.
..actually, I never wondered but I wonder now - how is it that writing in D:OS turned out to be so much worse than in DC? Did the team at some point just run out of special ingredient that makes quirky and not serious writing work? Or was it completely different writing team? Or is it just that DC had focused gameplay for writing and talking like a visual novel and D:OS is just too big?
Ah, one person does everything - how fitting for game development.
Man this guy must love his worlds and characters. Now I wonder how would he work together with other writers, and is he a tyrant or can write together with other people. Really interesting.
On the potential effects of the new stretch goals:
The average pledge right before they were announced was $45.52. The day the stretch goals were announced it rose to $45.89. It is currently $46.00.
As individual days:
It is safe to assume that a not insignificant amount of people upgraded their pledges, but the updates happened over 2 days, so it's very hard to tell how many simply purchased add-ons as they became aware of them for their own value, or upgraded their pledges because of the stretch goals.
09/10 also raised $30,638, a 60% increase over 09/09, but only a 15.6% increase over 09/08 (Update #6). After that, the game raised $25,263, which is slightly above the average of the week before the update.
However, yesterday only had $17,424 in pledges, the worst result since the campaign started, although the average was above the $46. It is currently at $12k for today, so no improvement there yet.
As I said before, the effects of stretch goals are still open to interpretation. Mine is that people are increasing their pledges, but the effect is already proving to be short-lived, and the number of new backers is going down along with the daily pledges. The effect was positive, but not as strong as it could've been. The successful examples I usually mention, Torment and Eternity, had boosts that doubled (in some cases almost tripled) the total funds per day for several days in a row. The most notable example was Eternity and its update #20, 6 days before the campaign was over, where they announced the Stronghold and Big City 2 (Twin Elms). The effect was so dramatic that the average on that day reached $99.49 and the usual "final 3-day stretch" actually became a 6 day long final push that raised $1,407,462.
Now, as for D:OS2, I think the DM mode is definitely the kind of ambitious stretch goal a game like this could use, but the other ones..not so much. My take on adding romances as a stretch goal is entirely personal, but objectively speaking, it is still controversial. The uservoice page and the reactions everywhere are proof of that. I think the majority does support the idea, but those who don't - like myself - have fairly strong opinions on it. It should've been announced as a feature right off the bat (and it was planned long before the update, as was clear in the Codex preview article).The dedicated mod tool support should've been either an initial feature (it was available for the first game, after all), or an earlier stretch goal. Same for the mask, to be honest. It's also hard to get excited about the mod tool without seeing it in action. It's the kind of thing that could really use a video showing its capabilities. "Look, here's what you'll be able to do with it", etc.
In comparison, with 20/20 hindsight the PoE Stronghold was obviously terrible, but it could have been a great addition. As for Big City 2, Twin Elms was a considerable portion of the game and very different to the rest.
It is also where the endgame takes place
So for better or worse, it's hard to imagine the game without it. D:OS2 already has a player housing goal which should be reached in 4 days or so, but it's not as ambitious as the Stronghold+Endless Paths and we know little about it.
What's odd to me is how they announced what could be the final set of stretch goals for the game (at this rate, it is unlikely to reach 2.1 million). They could've waited a few more days and posted an update on the Hall of Souls, another devline, or something that explains another aspect of the game. It keeps people talking about the game and brings new players while they wait for the stretch goals to be reached.
They also could've announced 2 stretch goals at a time. First the mod tools and romance, and days later the mask and DM. Considering they've already added new tiers, add-ons and (probably) all of the stretch goals, there aren't many tools left to boost their funding, and the campaign still has 16 days left.
They've changed the name of Dungeon Master mode to Game Master mode, as DM is trademarked by WotC.
Larian writer Char said:
Sure! So our main offices are in Gent and there is where we have the majority of the team, including most of the programmers and artists and our lead writers. In Dublin, we are just 6 employees - 5 writers and 1 producer. Quebec has designers and scripters, and St. Petersburg has programmers and scripters. Despite location and time differences, it works well as we talk to each other all the time on internal chat - in fact, it feels quite cosy!
Not all the time, no! From the writing side, we spend a lot of time in a collaborative writing environment, so our "chatting" is mostly refining and tweaking story and characters
Numbers of iterations depends on a lof of things. The kickstarter map you see changed a lot. It's core remainded the same but I can't remember how much stuff we've changed during the time we were creating that. Seriously, I can't remember. You know, I've been in the industry for 10 years (I'm new at Larian) and one thing I always say about my work is "90% of my work is to redo my work". Also, improvements are often related to the time it takes to go to 1 path to there other, sometimes a spot doesn't fit with combats, sometimes we want to add a vista somewhere, sometimes (OFTEN) we need to change stuff because it doesn't fit the story anymore and so on. Also, for the difference, on the last update, you can see Swen, when he talk about the tools, he's looking at a screen and you can see a glimpse of what was my 1st draft of the kickstarter map. You can see that some of stuff has changed but the core is the same. PS: For people who are on the forum, I'm also norD. We are both one being.