KS: Divinity: Original Sin by Larian Studios LLC

Necuno

Necuno

The Piper
..Saw this over at Torment: Tides of Numenera's comment section:



KS: Divinity: Original Sin by Larian Studios LLC

Original sin in a nutshell

"Picture a modern version of a world not unlike that of Ultima VII, that can be explored either alone or with a friend, that sees you engage adversaries in tactical turn-based combat reminiscent of the great turn-based RPGs of the past. A world that is filled to the brim with choice and consequence situations, reactive NPCs, and a considerable amount of surprises. A world that captures the feeling of playing pen and paper RPGs with our friends. Then add the new stuff..." - Vision statement for Divinity: Original Sin

When making large-scale epic RPGs it often helps to summarise what you are trying to make in a couple of lines, just to ensure you don't lose focus during development. You can spend a lot of time trying to come up with these vision statements, but when we started making Divinity: Original Sin, it didn't take us long to come up with the one above. It's simply what we've always wanted to do. The only reason we haven't made this game before was that the following list never made it past the marketing departments of many a known publisher. Now that we are self-funding and self-publishing, we can get away with features like the following.

  • Divinity:Original Sin is an Isometric cRPG.
  • You can play in single player mode but also in cooperative multiplayer mode
  • It's a real epic CRPG so even in multiplayer, you're engaging in much more than just combat and item fever. A nifty cooperative dialog system, a highly reactive world, a deep character development system and plenty of choice and consequence situations see to that.
  • You can create your own RPG adventures with our powerful RPG editor and share or play them with friends
  • Combat is very tactical. It is turn-based and features things like skill and spell combos, attacks of opportunity, action points and much more.
  • Exploration is greatly rewarded.
  • You can develop your character(s) to fit your playstyle using our classless skill and stats system.
  • There are countless item interactions and item combinations waiting to be discovered.
  • No Divinity game is complete without music composed by the brilliant Kirill Pokrovsky.


At the end of 2010, in no small part thanks to the success of the previous Divinity games, we finally earned sufficient money to start working on our brainchild on our own, and we decided to become a self-publishing studio.

Fast-forward two years (big RPGs take time to make). Today we are nearing the end of our development cycle and when we look at what we've created so far, we think that we have in our hands the best RPG Larian Studios has ever created. But, we also have the feeling that our job isn't done yet. The game systems we put in place have a lot of potential and because it took us quite some time to create them, we haven't been able to use them to their fullest yet.

That's why we're looking to increase the size of our development team. And because our budget is finite, we decided to come to Kickstarter to ask for your help.
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Yes immediate buyin from me - Took the tier that gave me Dragon Commander as well (which hopefully be quite impressive).Now I feel like playing Divine Divinity again...
 
Graal said:
I'm a bit surprised at the move to turn-based, but I generally prefer TB games anyway.
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There's a whole abundance of action based isometric/top down RPGs these days , all Diablo clones. So it kinda makes sense to have a turned based RPG again. Closest we got to this in the last few years were Bioware and Bethesda's "pause" system , but they've thrown out all the RPG in favor of having a 3rd person view.

Even Baldur's Gate was technically turned based. However what i distinctly remember of the Divinity games were the crazy amount of interaction and stuff you could do in the game. Similar to Fallout 2, i remember how you could interact with almost any object, you could combine stuff, build stuff, and there were so many ways of completing quests it was insane. It almost felt like i was cheating when i discovered entrances to places you thought you were not suppose to get into, but it was all part of the game.

Anyway these guys also tried to pull a Dragon Age 2 with their last game, Divinity 2: Ego Draconis, which imho lost all the charm of their original Divinities (there were 2 isometric games before Divinity 2 i believe). Similar to going from Baldur's Gate to Dragon Age 2, if you know what i mean. It does seem Divinity 2 didn't fare all that bad after all the expansions and fixes.

So it's good to see them going back to their roots. I am however not so sure why they need a Kickstarter for this, i mean it's like Blizzard doing a Kickstarter. They never struck me quite as an "indie" developer, although they only want 400k , which isn't alot compared to other games on Kickstarter.

EDIT: I see they actually mention they have been developing the game since 2010, and the kickstarter is to get more devs to finish it.

At least we know these guys can deliver.
 
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Blind Faith said:
Added myself as a backer. See where this goes...
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Heh, yea i backed too, since this game is actually coming out later this year and i mean pre-ordering the game for $25 it's a bargain either way. I see it's now on 360k , with all the attention on Torment and Shroud of the Avatar (8 hours left) now gone, this might actually get some side attention methinks.
 
diabolus said:
Heh, yea i backed too, since this game is actually coming out later this year and i mean pre-ordering the game for $25 it's a bargain either way. I see it's now on 360k , with all the attention on Torment and Shroud of the Avatar (8 hours left) now gone, this might actually get some side attention methinks.
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Agreed.

It does however seem that both Divinity's and the Shroud backers are a bit laid back into getting funding up compared to torment's drive. I still think that divinity can do with better tiers compared to StarCitizen, Torment and Shroud. I went with 32usd being game + art.
 
...Added a few weir sheep to my pledge:

You want to help the funding of Larian's fine new RPG Divinity: Original Sin a bit more than you've already done and spread the word about it at the same time?

Well, here's your chance: Join the Weresheep of Original Sin (WOOS), a bunch of die-hard fans of Divinity fans in the KS comment section!

How to become a member? It's quite simple: Upgrade your pledge by 6 $ and you're in. Yes, it's really that simple. You don't have to pass a test, you don't have to choose a specific tier. The cult of the Weresheep of Original Sin is open to everyone as long as s/he adds this small fee of 6 $. If you've done so simply expand your Kickstarter-Username with "- Weresheep of Sin" or "WOOS" and start commenting on Kickstarter. Proudly demonstrate your membership to this very special cult of the most devoted Divinity fans and help spreading the word about our movement among all backers of Original Sin and other projects on KS!

Why exactly 6 $? Well, it's the diabolic number and as we're weresheep we considered the number quite appropriate. And as the weresheep infection spreads over Rivellon and your addiction to Divinity gets bigger you may decide for yourself to even up your contribution to 11 $, the number of elemental sin and evilness.

What do you get in return? Nothing apart from the feeling of being a special fan amongst some already extraordinary people. Yes, it's a matter of fandom, passion and love. There is no physical or digital reward in it. Don't feel impelled to do so, this is just our way to demonstrate our love for that kind of CRPGs and to support the funding of Divinity: Original Sin.
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KS @ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/larianstudios/divinity-original-sin
 
Looks like they are going to make the 400k easily, i hope they get that 800k stretch goal, would be awesome to have the companions thing, kinda like Dragon Age 1 .
 
Matt Chat 189: Swen Vincke on Divinity: Original Sin


Chat highlights:

(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 (from CDV). 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.

[Update #9 · Apr 8, 2013]
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KS @ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/larianstudios/divinity-original-sin
 
Yea, i like the way they talk about quests. Divine Divinity also had this thing where you felt you were "exploring" and finding things out yourself, even though you were actually completing the game. So i can do with an RPG that doesn't give me a clear a glowy trail where i should be going and allow me to discover it by myself. The first Gothics also used to be like that.

Is Beyond Divinity the one where you had the 2 characters, the one being some sort of "alter ego" ? Kinda like an evil version of yourself? I remember playing Beyond Divinity, but i also remember i didn't enjoy it as much as Divine Divinity.

I still think the turn based combat is going to make everything alot more interesting. The problem with all the action RPGs these days are they dumb everything down. Turn based implies more time to think and strategize, which also means these guys have to create alot more interactivity during combat. I already saw the whole ice block -> melt into water -> electrify all the mobs standing in it thing, i hope there's more things like that.

I dunno why everyone is always going nuts for more playable races? As they rightfully say, if you don't change the entire game to interact with each race uniquely, then there's little point other than cosmetics. Alot of RPGs of late takes a lot of shortcuts with this for the sake of adding more races. Trust me after 5 minutes you don't care whether you're a dwarf or an orc, because if the script/game does not treat you differently then why does it matter? So i assume the fact that Larian talks about races in this fashion that the ones that are available will be uniquely treated as such by the NPCs etc.
 
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And they're funded, now for the stretch goals:

Thank you!!!! You are the best!!!!

Wow! Funded in less than a fortnight! You are amazing!

And what a great community you are too. You have no idea how much ideas you gave us already by posting your question and feedback in the comments section and on our forum pages. Your belief in our ability to deliver is extremely motivating for us, and we will do our utter best not to disappoint you.
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══════════════=====>
LIKE @ https://www.facebook.com/LarianStudios :love:
Up your pledge with $6 and get a WOOSâ„¢ :D
Spread the word about Divinity: Original Sin :)

KS @ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/larianstudios/divinity-original-sin

══════════════=====>

Well, here's your chance: Join the Weresheep of Original Sin (WOOS), a bunch of die-hard fans of Divinity fans in the KS comment section!

How to become a member? It's quite simple: Upgrade your pledge by 6 $ and you're in. Yes, it's really that simple. You don't have to pass a test, you don't have to choose a specific tier. The cult of the Weresheep of Original Sin is open to everyone as long as s/he adds this small fee of 6 $. If you've done so simply expand your Kickstarter-Username with "- Weresheep of Sin" or "WOOS" and start commenting on Kickstarter. Proudly demonstrate your membership to this very special cult of the most devoted Divinity fans and help spreading the word about our movement among all backers of Original Sin and other projects on KS!
 
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