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then what does that make ultros

This year is the 10 year anniversary of the GIRUGAMESH meme

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you’re gonna make me reach here, but maybe Mxyzptlk

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Stan Lee

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i’m still playin divinity original sin 2, though no one reads my posts in the other thread (i think because no one knows what game it is supposed to be about)

nearing the end of the second map now, i think i am starting to get the flow of this game a bit more but in actuality it probably just means i’m reaching the high-point for the area level-wise (just hit 15) so i am starting to be overleveled rather than underleveled for most encounters

i think what i like and dont like about it so far is how easy it is to just sort of get yourself fucked narratively. like for some reason i accidentally handed over some document to a magister, when i guess i should have given it to the dwarf crime boss or whatever (because magisters are cops; fuck cops), i did all this before even realizing that this dwarf dude existed on this map. then when i saw him i was able to go through the initial dialogue w him no problem, but then if i tried to talk to him again he insta-aggroed and i had to kill literally every other person in his underground crime den. so naturally i reloaded and decided… just dont talk to the dwarf man again. i think that locked me out of some additional quests though.

anyway they are right in that ‘everything is scripted’, but sometimes i wish consequences of things were telegraphed a bit better. i like that this area is kind of non linear in that you can choose which source masters to go to for your abilities. but don’t like that some of them have unavoidable negative consequences - i helped this lady deal with magisters who are trying to kill her, feel like a cool guy & hero, but then when i accept her training it leads to slaughter of innocent woodland creatures and me losing my ability to talk to animals? what the fuck.

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another odd thing about this game—i am probably breaking some kind of gamer code but i have been relying on wikis and stuff pretty extensively, just because i find the decision making patterns required to play games like this effectively to be kind of inscrutable. i guess it means i’m bad at ‘puzzles’? i don’t know.

but, because im a dirty walkthrough reader, i find it kind of charming that most of the resources for finding your way through this game are… kind of bad? like the major wiki’s have some serious gaps, and everything else takes you to a really confused series of posts on steam message boards that are like 65% misinformation. it’s an extra layer of challenge & worldbuilding.

(and yeah, every single challenging fight has some dickbag commenting: I did this at [three levels lower than seems humanly possible] on the hardest difficulty setting; git gud n00b)

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your experience tracks with mine & I feel confident in saying that even compared to its predecessor or most modern CRPGs, D:OS2 is like… actively opposed to being satisfying in the way most RPGs are satisfying. you will permanently miss stuff & rarely get the quest outcomes you want & it’s just Too Darn Bad because the DM is kind of all over the place.

for the most part I like this about it; consequences are fun and it would’ve been a massive breath of fresh air a decade ago, but for a game that is so long and mostly single player it can feel a little… ungrounded?

& this extends to the combat too, respecing is almost totally free and on higher difficulties it’s almost like you have to find a new way to break every encounter afresh to succeed

it makes sense as a sequel and also for a game that they shipped with a whole separate “DM mode”

it makes me wonder if this is the natural endpoint for a game that commits to being a picaresque series of mistakes in the way that typically only pen and paper games can achieve while remaining interesting and not alienating their audience

anyway if you’ve done the endboss of act 1 before you get the boat and the oil field in act 2 you’ve already done a couple of the most interesting encounters in the game and unless you’re playing on a difficulty below classic I feel like those are still some of the best this genre has to offer so there you go

yeah this was cool! and very scary! i wish more battles took place in areas that were that large, it has a very different feel.

i think i enjoy the comedy of errors aspect of it more within the battles themselves, where it feels more like physics (or RNG) are conspiring against you rather than just… narrative deviousness. but i think having the voiceover narrator guy kind of helps you understand what sort of tone they are going for. i think the stakes still appear superficially to be just a liiiiitle too high for them to get away with the kind of underlying message of ‘everything is unpredictable and the world is very harsh’, because ultimately it just kind of seems like i’m failing upward throughout the entire game. like no matter how much i screw up uh, i am still increasing my powers and becoming very magical, so it’s all good i suppose.

i’m a big outsider to this genre and the closest thing i have to compare it to is, weirdly, Witcher 3. i think that game has a lot of the same issues narrative wise, i never was really bowled over by the storytelling in it for some reason. and this is just more interesting for me to play, personally. i’m probably kind of alone on this.

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yeah I actually thought witcher 2 was more successful in its storytelling (and combat for that matter) but 3 does accomplish being absolutely massive and maintaining an extremely high quality of tone throughout

I think part of my problem was I went straight from Bloodborne to Witcher 3, and just in terms of how interesting it is to press the buttons to make your Man hit things, that’s a massive step down.

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I’m Wighting for the Man

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yeah this was the issue I had with the game when introducing my brother and cousins to it in co-op

they’re not used to that idea of like, “just do whatever” in that way

and it gets especially intimidating when you’re just kind of dumped into the world and told to talk to people without any real guidance as to how the world works so when they talked to people they were a little confused as to how it would actually matter or what would happen

I probably could have done a better job of priming them for it but yeah

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My gf and I played Divinity: OS 1 for the first time the other day. It’s really cool! This is… maybe the first actual CRPG I’ve ever played? I think it’s hers too, though we’ve both played D&D and Pathfinder.

The co-op works very well. We encountered the guards of the first city and our characters got into an argument over whether to teach them a lesson for being disrespectful. We ended up having a rock-paper-scissors match over it. I won, and we fought and murdered the guards in cold blood. We both felt bad about it afterwards. I thought we were just going to beat their asses, not kill them! Next time we play, we’re thinking we’ll probably reload an earlier save and not be sociopaths.

I wish I could use keyboard + mouse controls in co-op, but I get why it’s controller-only. This does mean that I have to wait for my RSI’d thumb to heal before I can safely play any more of it though.

Telegraphing decision consequences is one of those things we haven’t really moved forward on in thirty years of CRPGs; it’s still about discipline and enforcing your quest designers to playtest and question user assumptions.

Recently I really appreciated how well Witcher 3 handled this, with a consistent yet surprising world-logic to both its general world tracks and its core parenting relationship; they have a worldview and the consequences flow well enough out of it that they can use surprising quest conclusions to teach the player the moral rules of the world.

Divinity doesn’t have a strong point of view (besides going for the gag) so the quest designers have less to anchor on. Nor do they have consistent rules for magic, exacerbting the problems.

We talkin’ bout the game where a bunch of people die if you’re nice to a tree?

Yeah, they still throw surprising outcomes, but they use it to teach their underlying logic. I think it’s really impressive how consistent their worldview is across a massive writing team!

I think one thing that might make games of this nature have “choices” that feel more “meaningful” is to implement a last ditch negotiation function after you go down a dialogue tree to the point where it makes people turn hostile against you. Like, this has become a standard outcome of what happens when you are caught stealing in any of these games, you typically get the option to bribe or negotiate your way out. But I feel like, tonally, there should be another stopgap after you’ve entered combat as a result of a conversation gone wrong. Like, after you’ve taken out a couple of the random guards or whatever it should be possible to talk again to see if they have changed their mind. It just kind of does something weird to immersion where you will have a dialogue tree that is not devoid of nuance, but then after that a switch is flipped and everyone just turns into an unreasoning destroy-bot who will fight you to the death regardless of the circumstances. Like, in the aforementioned scene where I accidentally pissed off the Dwarf godfather, it is narratively ludicrous that every single denizen of this underground lair would just mindlessly attack me, even after I have slaughtered like a dozen of their friends or whatever. But it just seems like once “storytelling mode” ends and “combat mode” begins, the only option ever is just to kill everything that moves.

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A few things make it tricky (but not necessarily unsolveable!)

Discovering player intent can be tough. In an action context, games need to have instant feedback that a player-initiated negotiation is successful or not, and players need to have enough of a guarantee of safety that they feel comfortable trying it. Since the reaction on success needs to be an instant ‘stop fighting’, this gets tricky with an enemy party engaged in swinging and attacking; it’s tough to cancel their anims on a soft action like dialogue.

Another possibility is to have the NPC force the renegotiation on the player, interrupting the combat. Again, this is really nasty in an action game context - the player is likely in the midst of an emotionally intense action moment, and the game yanks them into another context. It’s like being woken up in the middle of REM sleep.

Finally, in the RPG paradigm, having enemies flee or surrender denies the player of their loot. We’ve worked ourselves to XP for ‘encounters’ rather than kills, so this can be worked around, by adding ‘steal from defeated enemies’ actions or moving loot to storage boxes owned by people who live nearby.

I imagine in your scenario, ‘his friends become your mortal enemies’ is a reasonable answer, and the reasonable way to back out is, ‘leave their home’. And the game supports that, but as the action isn’t ‘recognized’ by the game, it feels unsatisfying.

There’s nothing terribly difficult about scripting combat so that characters surrender or flee at thresholds, but it is normally considered emotionally unsatisfying, as you’re denying the player the ability to perform a skill you’re incentivizing them to be competent in. I think you’d want a strong roleplaying aspect to make up – if you can play to your characters merciful or judicial nature, you will satisfy a different need and make up for it.

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there’s at least two fights in torment 2 that you can spend your turn action talking people down from after the battle starts

it’s probably the least clunky thing you do in that combat system

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