Divinity: Original Sin II – Definitive Edition Interview

Larian Studios’ Definitive Edition of Divinity: Original Sin II should be launching on August 31, 2018 for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 and as a free PC update. And if you’d like to learn a few things about the Definitive Edition, Larian’s partnership with Bandai Namco Entertainment, the game’s new features and improvements, then you should check out this RPG Site interview with Larian’s publishing director Michael Douse. An excerpt:

RPG Site: Why is Divinity: Original Sin II a fit for Bandai Namco to publish on consoles?

Michael Douse: While Namco didn’t publish Original Sin I, they do have experience working with games like Witcher 2 and Dark Souls, games that are also very much their own things. Just like those games, we saw this an opportunity to bring those experiences to more people, even though it might be slightly unfamiliar to Namco’s usual catalog.

RPG Site: When I personally sit down to play an (isometric) game like Divinity, I feel most comfortable with a mouse and keyboard. For a console version, not only do you play with a controller, but also on a larger screen from further away. What changes have been made in the Definitive Edition with respect to how the game looks and plays with this in mind?

Michael Douse: Well, when the game launched on PC, you could already play with a controller on a couch, so a lot of the things are actually the same, but we’ve made them better. For instance, the Definitive Edition will include the Party Inventory system, which will allow players to manage their party from one screen instead of having to move from character to character.

[…]

RPG Site: What was the most positive piece of feedback you’ve received from Feedback Billy so far?

Michael Douse: The most positive feedback we’ve found is that people seem to enjoy the quality of the content, and feel like whatever they find in Divinity, nothing feels like filler.

RPG Site: And the most negative?

Michael Douse: We had a lot of players mention that they felt that Act II of the game had too many enemies with both physical and magical armor, and found that really frustrating so in the Definitive Edition, we’ve made a concentrated effort to rebalance things like that.

RPG Site: One of my few personal hangups was that I felt that game, especially later on, had so many overlapping spell effects and battlefields would end up ‘swampy’ with fields and fire and smoke here and ice there. Is this something that’s been addressed at all?

Michael Douse: We didn’t specifically target that issue, but we did go through every encounter in the game to try to rebalance the fights based on how players actually played each of the game’s battles. We have a ‘heat map’ of sorts that shows us how players ended up playing the maps, and we made tweaks to every encounter to adjust for this instead of the assumptions we made about how the battles would be played.