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[kanisatha]

Do any of you have any thoughts on whether this new "Divinity" game from Larian will be turn-based or action combat? That may end up being the deciding factor for whether I care about it.

[Lexx]

Probably same gameplay as the other Divinity games.

[Wormerine]

5 hours ago, kanisatha said:

Do any of you have any thoughts on whether this new "Divinity" game from Larian will be turn-based or action combat? That may end up being the deciding factor for whether I care about it.

Well, it’s not Original Sin3, so I assume it will not play like those. I didn’t play previous Divinity games but from what I understand they were actionRPG. I assumed this new divinity would also be somewhere under his umbrella, though I can’t begin to guess what could it look like. 

[Wormerine]

Just when I thought to myself “I should really wrap up Silksong” and spend an evening hunting some of the few remaining secrets and bosses. 

 

Edited Tuesday at 01:42 AM by Wormerine

[Humanoid]

2 hours ago, Wormerine said:

Well, it’s not Original Sin3, so I assume it will not play like those. I didn’t play previous Divinity games but from what I understand they were actionRPG. I assumed this new divinity would also be somewhere under his umbrella, though I can’t begin to guess what could it look like. 

I could see them simplifying the name if they're making turn-based RPGs their signature and just soft-reboot the naming scheme. The name Divinity: Original Sin is a bit of a mouthful otherwise. But it's also fully possible that gameplay might resemble Divinity 2 (third person new Witcher-like), or less likely, Divine Divinity (isometric Diablo-like). I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's got no chance of resembling Dragon Commander.

[Lexx]

5 hours ago, Wormerine said:

Just when I thought to myself “I should really wrap up Silksong” and spend an evening hunting some of the few remaining secrets and bosses. 

 

Don't know if I will ever finish the game. Unlike the first game, some of the choices in here really sucked the life(blood) out of me. 

But looks like the trailer is going to bring back that cut underwater area. There's probably just going to be more 1 hit 1 kill death traps and such in there. Not sure if I really want to.

Edited Tuesday at 07:19 AM by Lexx

[HoonDing]

Original Sin are just spin-offs in the end.

The main line is Divine Divinity -> Divinity 2: Ego Draconis/Flames of Vengeance -> Divinity 3?

Beyond Divinity never happened.

[Wormerine]

2 minutes ago, HoonDing said:

Original Sin are just spin-offs in the end.

The main line is Divine Divinity -> Divinity 2: Ego Draconis/Flames of Vengeance -> Divinity 3?

Beyond Divinity never happened.

Or were the original Divinity games mere spin-offs or turn-based RPG Sven really wanted to make in the first place?

[Wormerine]

4 hours ago, Lexx said:

There's probably just going to be more 1 hit 1 kill death traps and such in there.

Oh comeon, I don't think I have encountered a single trap like that.

Though I did spent most of the evening banging my head against Karmelita yesterday. To be fair, it's been a while since I played so I am a bit rusty, and my stick drift does muddy up my execution. 

Edited Tuesday at 11:21 AM by Wormerine

[Lexx]

Sure, it's more like 1 hit, lose health, get stunned, clip into boss/trap, lose more health, get hit again, die. 

[Malcador]

18 hours ago, kanisatha said:

Do any of you have any thoughts on whether this new "Divinity" game from Larian will be turn-based or action combat? That may end up being the deciding factor for whether I care about it.

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/divinity-will-be-turn-based-with-a-new-ruleset/

TB it seems. 

[Wormerine]

3 hours ago, Malcador said:

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/divinity-will-be-turn-based-with-a-new-ruleset/

TB it seems. 

"It's not a clone of D:OS 2 in that sense, it's a new ruleset, a ruleset built on everything that we learned from all the previous games that we've done,"

It will be interesting to see what they will keep from D:OS and D&D and what they will change.  

[kanisatha]

Yup, I saw an interview with Swen where he confirms it will be TB, party of four, will use early access, and is using a new version of their engine with supposedly several new capabilities that were not present in the old engine. Some of what they say has me interested, but will it be enough to overcome my dislike for TB combat and very intense dislike of the Rivellon setting? We'll see.

 

[LadyCrimson]

Turn-based counts me out - well, 98% chance of that, anyway.

The only Divinity I played was Divine Divinity, anyway (GoG version ages ago), and I assume new Divinity wouldn't resemble anything like that, even if it wasn't TB.   
I don't think I finished DD. I remember really liking the early game/early dungeons, having a grand old  time. But I don't remember why I stopped. I vaguely feel like I found the enemy power curve too high or something, like jogging two screens over was occasionally akin to exploring the "wrong" way in FONV and running into deathclaws. So at some point after much optional mucking about, gear etc, I followed MQ where I promptly died in some fantastic unexpected fashion, or ran into my usual "story commits choices, ugh" and I didn't want to bother. But maybe I'm mixing up memories again, heh.

Edited Tuesday at 11:24 PM by LadyCrimson

[Sven_]

6 hours ago, Wormerine said:

 

 

It will be interesting to see what they will keep from D:OS and D&D and what they will change.  

Hopefully the level systems for items and gear won't come back. That was certainly an improvement, but it was down to D&D not dealing in such. It's a part of what made Original Sin play out like a thinly veild combat parcours: If a sword level 3 does like twice the damage of a level 1 sword, not only does that mean you constantly have to trash weapons. It also means that you shouldn't even try beating enemies above your level. Thus every area on every map in DOS had a clear level assignment.

Mind you, Original Sin had much more of a combat focus than BG3 in general. I haven't played a major RPG with as little mandatory combat as BG3 in forever, especially the 1st map. Ok, maybe Kingdom Come in a lot of parts. One of Warhorse's biggest prides was showing that you can reach a crowd without every single quest boiling down to bloodshed. The quest design in KCD1+2 is oft deeply rooted in the "mundane" in general.

Like picking flowers with the missus. Or looking for a corpse in a pile of sh*t behind the Bylany tavern at 6 AM (and getting a stinky debuff thereafter, with every other NPC reacting badly to it).  

Edited yesterday at 01:02 AM by Sven_

[majestic]

I watched a bit of Josh Strife Hayes' new video on Cyberpunk 2077, and once again I am reminded how different experiences can be. All of the problems with the game he talks about are there and valid criticism, but for me, they just don't matter that much. Like the problem that so many games with side content have. V has only a few weeks left to live, but you have all the time in the world for side content. 

A problem that Baldur's Gate 2 already had with having to chase after Imoen. Or not. It makes no difference - plot wise, at least, and I am completely indifferent to the dissonance it introduces. Being able to fully experience all of a game is much, much more important than having the added stress of having to complete something within a certain timeframe. This is a very big reason why the only achievements I have left to do in Hollow Knight and Silksong are the speedrun ones. That's just not how I (want to) play games. Enough so that I actually don't bother doing them in spite of it driving me crazy to have the achievement completion percentage not at 100. 

Anyway, there's one thing I want to talk about that I found interesting: Josh's reaction to various game elements that were introduced bit by bit and changed in various updates along the way, with the big overhaul of Phantom Liberty bringing the greatest changes. Many of the things he criticizes were, funnily enough, quality of life changes that were introduced in various patches and updates. Like grenades and health items not being limited, but auto-regenerating.

They used to be limited, and you as the player spent a non-trivial time in the crafting menu building more of them. The change to auto-regenerating with perks to increase regen-speed or effectiveness of the items was an incredibly good change to the flow of the gameplay, but as a new player, you can't know that, having never experienced the game as it was before. It is not unreasonable to say that limited consumables would have been nice because you'd have to prepare for fights more than you do now, and yes, on the surface level that is correct. It is correct for many games. It just isn't for the flow of combat in the game. 

There are a hundred tutorial popups that were added for different mechanics or systems that the game didn't launch with. Yeah, the auto-fixer wasn't introduced in a tutorial mission because buying cars was this nightmare of having to drive around the city and buying them directly from garages and parking lots after getting a text message from someone (mostly fixers after completing side quests for them). 

He complains about the more or less unenecessary stamina bar, but there was a time in the game when out of combat sprinting was linked to stamina and to improve the athletics skill you basically had to sprint-bunny-hop through Night City. The stamina bar of Cyberpunk 2077 2.x is a holdover that was turned into something affecting shooting and melee and you pick perks that make it matter less and less. Again, not a bad change from what it used to be, but from a fresh perspective it is really weirdly implemented.

My point is, here, that being part of the development of mechanics changes one's perspective. It's not always for the better, like when the constant balancing of Pillars of Eternity made the game expierence worse for me because all the combinations and mechanics I used to progress more easily through the troves of pointless combat encounters of the game constantly got weakened. For someone new to the game, having the product now as it is - that might not make a difference. 

[Sarex]

22 minutes ago, majestic said:

I watched a bit of Josh Strife Hayes' new video on Cyberpunk 2077, and once again I am reminded how different experiences can be. All of the problems with the game he talks about are there and valid criticism, but for me, they just don't matter that much. Like the problem that so many games with side content have. V has only a few weeks left to live, but you have all the time in the world for side content. 

A problem that Baldur's Gate 2 already had with having to chase after Imoen. Or not. It makes no difference - plot wise, at least, and I am completely indifferent to the dissonance it introduces. Being able to fully experience all of a game is much, much more important than having the added stress of having to complete something within a certain timeframe. This is a very big reason why the only achievements I have left to do in Hollow Knight and Silksong are the speedrun ones. That's just not how I (want to) play games. Enough so that I actually don't bother doing them in spite of it driving me crazy to have the achievement completion percentage not at 100. 

Anyway, there's one thing I want to talk about that I found interesting: Josh's reaction to various game elements that were introduced bit by bit and changed in various updates along the way, with the big overhaul of Phantom Liberty bringing the greatest changes. Many of the things he criticizes were, funnily enough, quality of life changes that were introduced in various patches and updates. Like grenades and health items not being limited, but auto-regenerating.

They used to be limited, and you as the player spent a non-trivial time in the crafting menu building more of them. The change to auto-regenerating with perks to increase regen-speed or effectiveness of the items was an incredibly good change to the flow of the gameplay, but as a new player, you can't know that, having never experienced the game as it was before. It is not unreasonable to say that limited consumables would have been nice because you'd have to prepare for fights more than you do now, and yes, on the surface level that is correct. It is correct for many games. It just isn't for the flow of combat in the game. 

There are a hundred tutorial popups that were added for different mechanics or systems that the game didn't launch with. Yeah, the auto-fixer wasn't introduced in a tutorial mission because buying cars was this nightmare of having to drive around the city and buying them directly from garages and parking lots after getting a text message from someone (mostly fixers after completing side quests for them). 

He complains about the more or less unenecessary stamina bar, but there was a time in the game when out of combat sprinting was linked to stamina and to improve the athletics skill you basically had to sprint-bunny-hop through Night City. The stamina bar of Cyberpunk 2077 2.x is a holdover that was turned into something affecting shooting and melee and you pick perks that make it matter less and less. Again, not a bad change from what it used to be, but from a fresh perspective it is really weirdly implemented.

My point is, here, that being part of the development of mechanics changes one's perspective. It's not always for the better, like when the constant balancing of Pillars of Eternity made the game expierence worse for me because all the combinations and mechanics I used to progress more easily through the troves of pointless combat encounters of the game constantly got weakened. For someone new to the game, having the product now as it is - that might not make a difference. 

I imagine it would be much the same trying to replay Rogue Trader today.  Because of the experience of my first playthrough I'm afraid I would be bored out of my mind this time around. Maybe just finding another way to overpower mobs would be fun, but I kind of doubt it.

[majestic]

15 minutes ago, Sarex said:

I imagine it would be much the same trying to replay Rogue Trader today.  Because of the experience of my first playthrough I'm afraid I would be bored out of my mind this time around. Maybe just finding another way to overpower mobs would be fun, but I kind of doubt it.

True, I got bored out of my mind with all the combat in Rogue Trader even when you could make your characters one-shot every enemy including bosses. Wrath of the Righteous on Unfair is in a similar boat. Granted, that difficulity is mostly for people who can't stop themselves (like me, I guess), but it was painful even before they fixed the most overpowered and broken game mechanics, like AC double dipping and Ember's Rays of Enemy Deletion (she basically one-shot Baphomet on Unfair for me) or breaking prerequisites with Loremaster, etc. 

[kanisatha]

More on Divinity ....

In another recent interview, Swen makes it a point to say that in this game they're putting in a lot of work to build out the setting/universe, because they learned from making BG3 how important it is to have a strong, well-developed and detailed universe where everything fits together and makes sense, which he admits has never been the case with their setting in past Divinity games. This matters hugely for me, because the #1 criticism I've had of the D:OS games, by far, is how utterly pathetic and trite the setting is in those games. Swen even specifically says that "world building" was never Larian's thing in the past, and that is a courageous and welcome Larian mea culpa. For me, world building is the foundation for a good RPG. So, if this indeed happens with Divinity, and I have no reason to believe it won't happen, then that goes a very long way to making me excited for this game. TB combat systems always suck, but I can hold my nose and live with that. It's these other essentials for a good RPG that matter most to me.

https://www.ign.com/articles/if-you-like-baldurs-gate-3-this-is-gonna-be-great-larian-boss-swen-vincke-reveals-what-to-expect-from-divinity-in-first-interview-since-the-game-awards-announcement

And in another separate interview, Swen also says that the rules/mechanics they will use in Divinity will NOT be the same as in the D:OS games, and will be something new that they create from everything they've learned from their past games. That's another huge YAY from me.

[Sarex]

3 hours ago, majestic said:

True, I got bored out of my mind with all the combat in Rogue Trader even when you could make your characters one-shot every enemy including bosses. Wrath of the Righteous on Unfair is in a similar boat. Granted, that difficulity is mostly for people who can't stop themselves (like me, I guess), but it was painful even before they fixed the most overpowered and broken game mechanics, like AC double dipping and Ember's Rays of Enemy Deletion (she basically one-shot Baphomet on Unfair for me) or breaking prerequisites with Loremaster, etc. 

Tbh, I couldn't even do a regular second playthrough of WotR, I think I dropped it half way through. Although my issue is that I can't help myself but do all the side content and that is very draining when you have already done it once before.

But to be fair this is not a rare occurrence for me, there are only a handful of games I replayed, Baldur's Gate 2 being one of them that I can remember of the top of my head.

41 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

More on Divinity ....

They should be very careful with that. BG3's world building is supported by D&D and its external media. While I love world building, cramming it in one game is very risky. PoE is a great example where the sheer amount of text dumps stunned the players in to a state of not caring.

The only game of that format where I saw it work, and I say work very loosely, is Disco Elysium. 

[Humanoid]

On the other hand, the existing Forgotten Realms worldbuilding can get in the way of immersion as well. I did not find the existence of the Act 2 area being left cursed for the past 100 years to believable for example, in a similar way perhaps to how Bethesda Fallout games would have you believe people still live in bombed out ruins full of debris 200 years after the war. And that's to say nothing of how the story interacts with access to restorative and resurrection magic in the setting.

But yeah, mechanically the D:OS games were weird with the extremely steep level scaling essentially funneling the player into a fixed path through the zones. BG3 didn't have that issue at all, but in some ways had the opposite problem inherent to modern D&D which unbelievably still has things like empty level-ups where you don't do anything but click the confirm button, and the continuing insanity of only every second stat point increase doing anything (seriously, a quarter of a century of this nonsense).

Thankfully Cyberpunk did not level/stat/perk-gate silent takedowns so I could still merrily ignore every single mechanic complained about by that YouTuber. Healing? Grenades? Stamina? Never heard of 'em.

[Wormerine]

15 hours ago, Sven_ said:

Hopefully the level systems for items and gear won't come back. 

ha! Yes, I forgot how annoying the itemization was in D:OS2.

 

5 hours ago, majestic said:

I watched a bit of Josh Strife Hayes' new video on Cyberpunk 2077, and once again I am reminded how different experiences can be. All of the problems with the game he talks about are there and valid criticism, but for me, they just don't matter that much. Like the problem that so many games with side content have. V has only a few weeks left to live, but you have all the time in the world for side content. 

A problem that Baldur's Gate 2 already had with having to chase after Imoen. Or not. It makes no difference - plot wise, at least, and I am completely indifferent to the dissonance it introduces.

I didn't watch the video, so am just replaying to your post. Even back in a day when Baldur's Gate2 was in my mind the gold standard for everything that is right and good, the dissonance between main quest urgency and what I thought was the intended and enjoyable way of playing the game stand out as a flaw. By principle, I believe that game's narrative should be tied to a gameplay exerience - if the narrative requires swift forward, gameplay should at the very least encourage it as well. If you go for laidback do what you want experience - come up with the scenario that supports it. I get that devs want movie like hook propelling things forward, but at least to me, it hurts it more in the long run. It forces me as a player to ask myself a question: "is the threat presented by the game narratively real or a facade", and I just don't think it's in games best interest to have me think that.  

That said, I didn't think Cyberpunk2077 was a particularly bad example of that, but it did roll my eyes every time V got "worse" after progressing main story a bit. It was just a bit too obvious that his condition doesn't exist unless one does very specific quests. I didn't find C77 story very effective, but that wasn't a part that suck out to me. To me Baldur's Gate3 was a far, far, far worse offender. In C77 there might be a bit of dissonance between the game's story and players affinity for side content but in BG3 the characters didn't seem to decide if they have a ticking bomb in their heads or not. 

[Sarex]

26 minutes ago, Wormerine said:

I didn't watch the video, so am just replaying to your post. Even back in a day when Baldur's Gate2 was in my mind the gold standard for everything that is right and good, the dissonance between main quest urgency and what I thought was the intended and enjoyable way of playing the game stand out as a flaw. By principle, I believe that game's narrative should be tied to a gameplay exerience - if the narrative requires swift forward, gameplay should at the very least encourage it as well. If you go for laidback do what you want experience - come up with the scenario that supports it. I get that devs want movie like hook propelling things forward, but at least to me, it hurts it more in the long run. It forces me as a player to ask myself a question: "is the threat presented by the game narratively real or a facade", and I just don't think it's in games best interest to have me think that.  

That said, I didn't think Cyberpunk2077 was a particularly bad example of that, but it did roll my eyes every time V got "worse" after progressing main story a bit. It was just a bit too obvious that his condition doesn't exist unless one does very specific quests. I didn't find C77 story very effective, but that wasn't a part that suck out to me. To me Baldur's Gate3 was a far, far, far worse offender. In C77 there might be a bit of dissonance between the game's story and players affinity for side content but in BG3 the characters didn't seem to decide if they have a ticking bomb in their heads or not. 

But that would essentially put the game on rails. You have this amount of time and you need to do it by then. Anything that obviously forces a player to play the game a certain way is bad, at least from my point of view. You should, of course, guide the player to what you think the gameplay is, but it should not be forceful or easily spotted and worst of all you shouldn't correct it after the fact, especially if the players enjoy it and it doesn't damage the intended gameplay route.

I think there needs to be some suspension of disbelief, overall that dissonance between the story and gameplay in such a complex and nonlinear game is to be expected. If you start picking it apart you will find a lot of examples of said dissonance. At the end of the day, when creating a game you should pray at the altar of Fun, not Balance, Harmony or Realism. Those should always be means to and end, which is FUN gameplay.

Were that to be done in such a large game with so much side content, I would think that it was the developers way of forcing the player to reply their game if he wants to experience all the content and that would just be a very negative feeling.

Edited 11 hours ago by Sarex

[Humanoid]

19 minutes ago, Wormerine said:

To me Baldur's Gate3 was a far, far, far worse offender.

And also on the smaller scale

I just left a companion character I wasn't using anyway tied up to Bhaal's sacrificial altar for a few weeks. The funny thing is that that event is juxtaposed against an actual timed event where the newspaper would publish a defamatory article about you if you don't pay them a visit pretty much as soon as you enter town. And then, as a "good" character, I ended up slaughtering the entire editorial team after the discussion went poorly, and suffered absolutely zero negative consequences for doing so.

[HoonDing]

The less you know about Rivellon, the better.