Larian Saturdays

There isn’t much news related to Larian Studios this week, although there is a fairly lengthy interview at Gaming Bolt with Divinity: Original Sin producer David Walgrave.

Original Sin, you’ll all hopefully recall, is Larian Studios’ attempt at making a homage to Ultima 7; they are striving to achieve similar levels of sandboxiness and world interactivity as said classic Origin Systems game. And based, at least, on Walgrave’s description of magic and crafting in the game, it sounds like they are on the right track:

At the moment, we are planning lots of different weapon types, but I don’t want to give a list, because that can still change in the course of production. Let’s just say we’re not stopping at swords, bows and axes.

Magic has six “schools” at the moment: earth, wind, fire, water, warrior and survivor. The four first schools are elemental magic schools, and those spells interact with each other and the world as you would expect. For instance, water puts out fire. So there’s a bit of a rock-paper-scissors game going on between the different spells, and you’ll be able to use that against enemies that have similar powers, and against and in combination with things in the world that are susceptible to the elements.

Item combinations, there’s dozens and dozens of different ones, and we still come up with new ones every day. It’s simple stuff such as creating your own potions (empty jar + the right ingredient), enhancing potions (healing potion + apple = detox potion), storing bottles of poison (empty jar + poisonous ingredient), enhancing weapons (weapon + poison). But also more complex and more intricate creations such as voodoo dolls, which is not just a two step process.

6 Responses

  1. Sanctimonia says:

    As much as I appreciate studios paying homage to Ultima, I don’t like shortcuts involving inexplicable teleportation, such as the interface in Divinity: Original Sin. Is it really too much to ask to have your player be near an object before picking it up or otherwise interacting with it?

    Straw man: “Oh, it’s too hard…I actually have to move around to do shit.” Ragequit and play something less cerebral, then.

    Ultima VII made that mistake as well. “Convenience” is a brand of bandage used to obscure bad interface design (play control). Wish they’d change that and make it less “clickey”. Mouse and keyboard are good for old Ultima games, not new ones.

    • Micro Magic says:

      I guess there’s two ways to look at it.

      1. Immersion breaking, since you don’t have to move your character close to an item to pick it up.

      2. Or more immersive, since you don’t get into a situation where you’re 2 inches too far away from an item to pick it up.

      You could always imagine you actually walked around the room to steal all the items. Or you could imagine your character is a cyclops with no depth perception.

      I dunno, I prefered the u7 way of doing things as opposed to SI. Although, it didn’t break SI for me, it did ruin u8 for me. My brief u8 experiences were filled with multiple steps to position myself in front of doors and items.

      *Avatar leans over as far as he can* “Awe man! I almost fell over! I can’t believe that keeps happening to me! Why is it I can’t tell how far away things are?” says the Champion of Virtue, whence his fingers lightly graze a door knob.

      Actually, if there was a falling down graphic when you were slightly too far from an object, I’d probably love u8.

      • Sanctimonia says:

        The Ultima VIII stuff was just poorly executed. All your points about it are valid. There are an infinite number of ways to execute object interaction mechanics properly, some easier than others for the developer to implement and the player to perform. Here’s an example off the top of my head:

        The player sees an item out of grasp and clicks on it. The game executes stage one of a two-stage pathfinding algorithm. Stage one looks for a “civilized” route to the item. If found, it moves the player automatically and picks up the item. If not, stage two executes, which considers options such as pushing objects out of the way (chairs) or climbing over things (table). Convenient with no tedium for the player and the immersion not only isn’t broken, but enhanced. These people get paid salaries to think about these things and I deliver pizza. Something’s wrong with that picture.

        “*Avatar leans over as far as he can* “Awe man! I almost fell over! I can’t believe that keeps happening to me! Why is it I can’t tell how far away things are?” says the Champion of Virtue, whence his fingers lightly graze a door knob.”

        That’s pretty funny. 🙂

      • Micro Magic says:

        Good point. I could never figure out why path finding is so hard to implement in games. It’s like, u6o has better path finding than Red Alert 3.

        Perhaps Original Sin has a pause mechanic, like in u7 when you open a bag. Well, I guess path finding bugs are one thing they don’t have to worry about.

      • Sanctimonia says:

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm

        Apparently the devs at Larian are as dumb as me, as my initial attempts to comprehend this were largely unfruitful. It would work well for Ultima-like pathfinding, including leaping over tables and knocking aside chairs.

  2. Sanctimonia says:

    Edit: Unless it’s an Underworld game, in which case it should support both traditional FPS mouse and keyboard controls as well as console FPS dual-analog gamepad controls.