Divinity: Original Sin II Update #11: New Studio and Single Player Depth

In the 11th update to reach the Divinity: Original Sin II Kickstarter campaign, we learn about (and hear from) Larian’s new Canadian studio, find out about a Reddit AMA they’re hosting, take in some new information about their plans to ensure the game is both single player- and multiplayer friendly, and more. First, the accompanying video:

And then on to the single player/multiplayer dynamic:

Since we’ve launched the campaign, one of the biggest questions that we’ve been getting is “will the single-player experience will be as in-depth and interesting as multiplayer?”. The answer is – of course 🙂

We know it can be hard to get four friends together to regularly play through something as long and in-depth as a Divinity game. So, while we’ve been spending a lot of time talking about the multiplayer experience, we haven’t forgotten that it’s important that the single player game is just as engaging and fun.

The secret we discovered with Divinity: Original Sin 1 is that allowing for cooperative multiplayer in the manner we do it enriches the single player experience tremendously.

Every time we try to wrap our heads around the different possibilities of a quest designed for multiplayer, we’re able to go and feed all of that extra content back into the world, which means it’s all right there for you when you walk up with a single player party.

It also adds a huge amount of roleplaying to the world. Thanks to the multiplayer effort, each of your companions can interact with the world as if they were your main character with dialog options that correspond with their origin story. So if you have an elf in your party, it might be more interesting to interact with an elven ancestor tree using your elf rather than your dwarven warrior. But if you interact with your dwarven warrior, you will get different reactions.

While this is all very cool, we did make sure that your main character still remains special. If the advanced relationship system gets in, then you’ll be able to roleplay the relationship options from the viewpoint of your main character, but not from the viewpoint of your companions. That ensures your relationship decisions feel weighty and that you can’t manipulate your companions.

The same goes for persuasion. Persuasion dialogs pop up whenever members of the party have different opinions. We obviously have a large range of persuasion options available in multiplayer and each party member will have its say. In single player however these options will not appear. Instead, the companions will state what they they think is the right course of action depending on their own beliefs and perhaps also the relationship with the main character.

With regards to competitive questing, it’s not so that your companions will go off on their own. There’s a number of PVP things that will be limited to multiplayer and that won’t pop up in single player. However, the fact that we have competitive questing ensures that there’s a broad spectrum of options available to your party in single player, more so than would ordinarily be the case.