Divinity: Original Sin Pre-Release Thread

[DwarvenFood]

Zep: there's more "annoyances" on KS than just that... Here's ONE example. I will not go into detail about how user-friendly "composing" an update is.

Wouldn't clicking that logically prompt you with some "Are you sure you want to fuck up everything?" dialog?

Would you try clicking just to find out if there is another dialog ?

 

[evdk]

Would you try clicking just to find out if there is another dialog ?

Sure, you just have to savescum.

 

[Breydel]

The Kickstarter is going pretty slow today, for unknown reasons. Too much incline for the general public to handle? I'm going to be so mad if this doesn't get to 800K.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Orange area as a stretch goal plz

Edit: Possibly as an easter egg, you step through a hidden portal and end up in an area that is just completely orange, yes?

Like so,

Where's agentteal to complete the colour spectrum decline team?

 

[J_C]

Zep: there's more "annoyances" on KS than just that... Here's ONE example. I will not go into detail about how user-friendly "composing" an update is.

Wouldn't clicking that logically prompt you with some "Are you sure you want to fuck up everything?" dialog?

Would you try clicking just to find out if there is another dialog ?

I'm sure there is a confirmation dialogue. When I cancel a pledge, I have to enter my password again, and tell them why I cancel my pledge. I assume cancelling funding has at least the same ammount of security.

 

[Haba]

lar_q confirmed to be a fellow alpha!

Upgraded my pledge.

...but how do you play this game with girlfriends, since it is only two players? Can't even play it in a bubble bath since no controller support

Also, this game needs to have romances. Especially gay romances. With sex scenes.

Player 1: You, me, sex!

Player 2: No, no, noooooooooo!

*rolling 2d6 against Player 1's intimidate value*

*Player 2 fails roll*

<fade to black>

Player 1: You fuck with no honor. Like a woman!

Player 2: *sobs uncontrollably*

Player 1 and Player 2 have gained the trait "Lovers"

 

[Arkeus]

Snip hilariousness

 

[felipepepe]

Fantastic. Mentioned twice on his blog, quoted in a RPG Watch newspost, now featured in a video complete with awesome Josh Sawyer and Avellone quotes. This is a fine fifteen minutes.

Time for Act II; see the light, abandon your false Sawyer and pledge tons of money to Larian, as a final act of redemption.

 

[MicoSelva]

Fantastic. Mentioned twice on his blog, quoted in a RPG Watch newspost, now featured in a video complete with awesome Josh Sawyer and Avellone quotes. This is a fine fifteen minutes.

Time for Act II; see the light, abandon your false Sawyer and pledge tons of money to Larian, as a final act of redemption.

Roguey has already backed this game, I think.

 

[evdk]

Fantastic. Mentioned twice on his blog, quoted in a RPG Watch newspost, now featured in a video complete with awesome Josh Sawyer and Avellone quotes. This is a fine fifteen minutes.

Time for Act II; see the light, abandon your false Sawyer and pledge tons of money to Larian, as a final act of redemption.

A vision of things yet to come:

 

[Commissar Draco]

lar_q confirmed to be a fellow alpha!

Upgraded my pledge.

...but how do you play this game with girlfriends, since it is only two players? Can't even play it in a bubble bath since no controller support

Also, this game needs to have romances. Especially gay romances. With sex scenes.

Player 1: You, me, sex!

Player 2: No, no, noooooooooo!

*rolling 2d6 against Player 1's intimidate value*

*Player 2 fails roll*

<fade to black>

Player 1: You fuck with no honor. Like a woman!

Player 2: *sobs uncontrollably*

Player 1 and Player 2 have gained the trait "Lovers"

Don't wana diss-a-point you son but this aint gay at all (Done in susch alpha as fuck places like Roman Legionary Barracks, aboard Viking Ship away from land, aboard U-Bots and Pakistani Battleships and inside cloisters and prisons) All arses are wymyn from behind.

Anyway looking forward for feminist butthurt and Librul Manginas who ridiculed Fox News concernes in the past whiteknighting for censorship.

 

[Jack Dandy]

Watching the interview was so nice.

These times Swen just started losing control and talking in a.. how do I say it, "carefree" way? "Unbound? Anyway, they were great and he seemed to almost channel my feelings about the genre. I appreciate this.

 

[Monty]

384k - hope they make it tomorrow, leaving half the month to get to the stretch goal(s).

 

[Jaesun]

Summary of info from the Matt Chat video from the Larian forums:
http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=462220&gonew=1#UNREAD

For those who didn't listen, here's the Matt Chat summary. (I hope you appreciate this. My wrists are hurting now.)​

• (9:30) Quests aren’t going to hand-hold you through them. There isn’t going to be a “Quest Completed!” pop-up. Instead, your journal will have little parts of information, like “we found a book by a dead guy that talks about lying statues”, later if you talk to a statue, you might find “we met a statue, It might be one of the lying statues from the book”, and if you deal with the statue somehow, it’ll just be a thing, and you may not even realize that it was a quest.
• (13 min) In that demonstration battle on the 10-minute kickstarter video, they died three times. That’s one reason why they never showed the conclusion to that battle!
• (22 min) The main characters relationship is not specifically a love story. You can certainly take it in that direction if you wish, though. Their relationship is defined by two different axes: Affection and Affinity. Affection is how much they like each other, Affinity is how well they agree with each other on moral dilemmas. So they might hate each other, but work well. You aren’t going to accidentally end up as your friend’s gay lover, it’ll be a conscious choice if you go for that.
• (23:30) The main characters are Source Hunters, and one of the perks they get from being trained in that area is that they can talk to animals.
• (24 min) No sheep henchmen at the moment. They are thinking about adding weresheep in the game, but you cannot have a deep meaningful personal relationship with sheep yet. You will have to make a tough moral decision about the sheep at some point in the game. And the rabbits. And a cow.
• (25 min) I think there may be multiple different ways to try and get your way in a dialogue (Charm/Reason/Intimidate), instead of the current “I agree/I disagree” system. I’m not sure. The context of the situation is also important. I think that for example, the “dead body on the beach” would probably be a Charm or Reasoning situation, and Intimidation would have a penalty.
• (27 min) No mini-games. Lockpicking will be item based and dexterity based.
• (28 min) The Source (elemental) magic is not just for mages casting spells. It also gives you Source-based warrior and Survivor skills
• (28:40) The editor is not about making it easy for a novice, it’s more of a tool to do powerful things. They’ve used that technology (or parts of it) for over a decade to make their games, and that’s why as a small team they have been able to make such big games.
• (30 min) They’ll integrate the modding scene with Steamworks, and there will be another TBD thing to centralize mods for those who don’t use Steam. If the community picks it up, Larian will support the hell out of it.
• (31 min) “Have you thought of adding any DRM to this?” No.
• (32:20) Larian admits that some of the reward tiers for the Kickstarter may not be cost-effective for them.
• (33:30) What’s the minimum pledge tier for fans to get the full experience? Just the $25 for the base game, although it does play well with a friend ($40 for the duo-copy pack).
• (35 min) If Divinity 2: Ego Draconis had been a PC game, it would have been released a year earlier and in much better shape. Development for Xbox lead to a lot of compromise just trying to finish the production.
• (36:10) Beyond Divinity was bad, it was a game they company made just to survive. They never got a dollar of royalties from Divine Divinity. They were only able to get a deal to make Divinity 2 because they were going to do it for Xbox. If they asked to do it for PC only, the game wouldn’t have happened.
• (37:50) "Why did you end Ego Draconis the way you did?" (I’m going to save my fingers from typing and just link to that spot in my LP. Watch the videos for the actual experience, not the text I added.)
  
  - It goes back to Divine Divinity. They decided not to cut the game at the end of the Council of Seven sequence and instead went ahead and added a new “Wastelands” zone, despite warnings they’d never finish it. (Spoiler alert: It was a huge combat zone with no quests.) The publisher wanted them to show variety in the environments. “If there is not a screenshot with orange stuff, we’ll sue you.”
  
  - For Divinity 2, Swen figured it would be better to stop with a cliffhanger and cut hard, instead of making another weak ending area.
• (41:40) Dragon Commander is going to take a lot of people by surprise. The leader writer and animator spend a month in London recording dialogue – more dialogue than they’ve ever done before (Divinity 2 had like 9 hours of dialogue, and it felt like more). That’s just to cater for the choice and consequence in the game. Dragon Commander is probably the most complex game they’ve ever made from a gameplay point of view.
• (43:50) “What would you need to personally hear or see about Original Sin to get you to buy it?”
  If you invest in it now, you’ll have more fun in a couple of months. If you’re planning on buying it anyway, buy it now and get it better later. It’s future profits from the game being invested into the game before it’s released. They’re not taking your money for an already funded game, they’re taking your money and giving you a much better game (at a discounted price!). They’re not pushing Original Sin as far as it could go because they haven’t enough resources, not enough time, not enough budget.
• (48 min) Final thoughts: Other non-human playable races is a huge, impossibly high stretch goal, because it would be so much work, because of how the game reacts to how the players are. If you wanted to play as an orc, they’d have to cater for that all over the dialogue lines in the entire game.
  
  - He’s not keen on full voice acting, because there are more tangible gameplay things that can be added instead for the same price or cheaper.
  
  - They hope to get enough for the Perks stretch goal (650,000), and do things like have synergy bonuses if the party affinity go up if they perform combos with each other, or maybe solo bonuses if they don’t work well together.
  
  - In Dragon Commander, there is an extraordinarily complex depth to your generals/councillors/princesses, because of the way that game was specifically constructed with that in mind. You couldn’t do that for Original Sin at this point, but at the 800,000 stretch goal, they hope to add more depth to party interaction and give the henchmen more personality and story presence, with branching choice and consequence based on how you treat them. Ideally, tying that into the players social stats and perks as well.
  
  - It’s a bit tough to get professional authors in at this part of the development. They’ve worked with a bunch before, but it’s tough it they’ve never done videogame work.
• (55:10) The game would work well on the console with a controller, but that was killed early in development. Maybe as another stretch goal in Kickstarter, but they probably would react poorly to that idea.​

 

[DraQ]

Publisher demanded a screen shot with orange stuff for Divine Divinity o_O

Fargo wasn't exaggerating with the red shoes bit.

Wait, where?

As much as I Larian, I'm not sure I want to sit through over an hour long interview (I want my text and have console rash, apparently).
Edit:

NVM, Jaesun.

Fantastic. Mentioned twice on his blog, quoted in a RPG Watch newspost, now featured in a video complete with awesome Josh Sawyer and Avellone quotes. This is a fine fifteen minutes.

So, how does it feel to be a punchline?

 

[tuluse]

Wait, where?

You know the middle part.

I don't recall exactly when he said it, he was talking about the ending of Divinity 2, and he got on the subject of the end for Divine Divinity. So they had to cut a lot of stuff from their original plan (as happens), and they found a good place to end the game with what they could finish. However, the publisher demanded an orange screenshot to put on the box, so Swen decided to do the desert area they originally planned after where the new good ending was.

 

[DraQ]

Wait, where?

You know the middle part.

I don't recall exactly when he said it, he was talking about the ending of Divinity 2, and he got on the subject of the end for Divine Divinity. So they had to cut a lot of stuff from their original plan (as happens), and they found a good place to end the game with what they could finish. However, the publisher demanded an orange screenshot to put on the box, so Swen decided to do the desert area they originally planned after where the new good ending was.

I've seen it, thanks to Jaesun.


Well, in Divinity 2 he apparently wised up and put the orange area much earlier (Sentinel Island - a welcome change of scenery actually, and at the exact point it was needed).


And I liked the ending of the original. Not least because it caused untold butthurt in many players, but also because it built up well and rather subtly, so it was neither an asspull, nor something you could see coming from half of the game away making you rage at your protagonist's stupidity.

 

[Darth Roxor]

And meanwhile, when Larian is struggling to get 400k of its goal, Garriot gets 2mln.

There is no fucking justice in this world

 

[Gord]

Relax, they will make 400k tomorrow or wednesday latest. It's the stretch goals I'm more worried about, though.
1mil would be so sweet, but also so unlikely. Maybe at least 650k I hope.

I wonder if we might be lucky and get some stuff of the stretch goals through an expansion, if they earn some money by the game.

Another thing I've been wondering about today is how items are going to work. Divinity 2/DKS has this typical aRPG thing going on there, with weapon damage increasing by ridiculous amounts over the course of the game. By comparison, classic cRPGs which are much closer to their old PnP roots, have relatively modest (and more plausible) increase in weapon damage and as a consequence enemy health/strength/etc. (this holds true for the character/level system behind it as well, aRPGs are giving small but and fairly minor increases on level up, while more PnP-like systems have less levels up, which however matter much more).
ForkTong, can you tell anything about that?

 

[evdk]

New update contains the Matt Chat synopsis (which Jaesun's already posted) and this video:

 

[Jaesun]

Small Update today:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/larianstudios/divinity-original-sin/posts/448488?ref=activity

We're getting very close now! We are less than 15K$ away from our funding goal, and as you can probably imagine, our stress-levels are at an all-time high. There's a slate of announcements lined up to mark the moment, and with a bit of luck, you'll be reading about them very soon.

Today's update is going to be a bit shorter than usual, but that doesn't mean it doesn't contain any good stuff. On the contrary!
Continuing the Butcher quest

In our first update, Axel showed you how our editor worked by scripting a simple quest. In todays update video, Leslie, our enigmatic & brilliant 3D artist responsible for such gems as the dancing whale (featured in Divinity: Dragon Commander), takes charge and shows us how he envisions Axel's quest should develop further. Good stuff!

 

[Zep Zepo]

ForkTong,

With the editor, will we be able to drop our quests or areas or whatever into the existing gameworld, or will mods just be standalone scenarios separate from the actual game?

Zep--

 

[Stabwound]

This could end up being one of the better (if not the best) games from the upcoming CRPGs by the sounds of it. Virtually everything sounds like some serious incline, especially the emphasis on open world/exploration. I also like how supposedly you can kill every single NPC and still have it possible to complete the game. The only thing that sounds questionable to me is the big emphasis they put on the multiplayer thing, but that's more of a worry that it will taint the single player game.

I fully agree that it's a hilarious shame that Shroud of the Avatar got nearly 2 million for what seems like such a terrible game, while this by all accounts seems like a true spiritual successor to Ultima and it's possible they won't hit their $1,000,00 stretch goal, which would really add a lot. The only way this could give me some hope that people aren't complete dumbfucks is if the SotA backer base is mostly UO players, which actually might be the case.

Swen seems like one of the coolest and most genuine guys in the industry and it really sounds like he has his heart in the right place here. Too bad that means a ton of pressure to put out a great game. I mean, this is their first game with no publisher fuckery (although they do have private investors) and Swen is very open with his disappointments and failures in previous games. The disappointment in his voice is palpable when he talks about the cuts and changes he had to make to previous games to satisfy their publishers. Original Sin sounds like a game by bros for bros, like Chaos Chronicles, and I love that shit.

Fuck it, I'm backing this thing. The only other game I've backed was Wasteland 2 and that's because bro status should have been permanently revoked from anyone that didn't vote for the incline. I absolutely can't wait to play this game.

Great interview with Matt, too. I liked Swen going off on tangents about what he hates/loves about CRPGs in general and you can tell he's a bro. Matt is one of my favorite interviewers, too, because he actually asks questions that people want to know, not slinging them bullshit preplanned questions mostly meant to just give the interviewee the opportunity to promote their game. The interviews feel like they flow naturally, more like a conversation than a Q/A session.

So much fucking . I can't wait for this game.

 

[Arkeus]

Creator Larian Studios LLC 8 minutes ago

@LC: We've been low-key on story because we want our lead writer to take the lead on this. However, he's been knee-deep into the voice recordings of Dragon Commander and just returned today after a month of exile in London. Once he's recovered , you'll get a massive story update here. He did a heroic job btw, but I'll blog about that later.


Well, good to know.

 

[Breydel]

If I could brofist Stabwound I would. It's almost physically pissing me off that this isn't more successful.