Michael Douse: Not characters, but the major changes are things like Arx (a location found late in the game) which has been completely remade. Will the Definitive Edition have any sort of content-like additions in a similar manner? RPG Site: Original Sin I eventually saw the inclusion of new party members and the like, but in II, the party works a little bit differently. ![]() 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. 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. Is this something that's been addressed at all? 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. 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. 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: What was the most positive piece of feedback you've received from Feedback Billy so far? Michael Douse: Well, that's because we invented it! And people engage with that more because it's fun and funny, you know? RPG Site: I did run into Feedback Billy (an NPC) when I was playing through the game on the show floor, that's an interesting thing that I hadn't seen before. Unless we get a lot of feedback through tools like Game Preview, which is a great tool to have for something like this. Michael Douse: On PC you can actually toggle between the two versions of the game completely, journal and all. RPG Site: On PC will I be able to swap back to the old version of the journal, or is it a switchover? So you don't have to read reams of text for the same amount of information. Michael Douse: It's the same style of writing, but mainly we've made it shorter. RPG Site: So is it more task-oriented, or bulleted? The current journal oftentimes gives you hints or implies what needs to be done, without telling you what exactly needs to be done. We wanted to make it a lot easier to understand. On PC, let's call the journal a mess, there were a lot of words and a lot of text and it was very difficult to follow. One of the other ones we wanted to fix was the Journal system. 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. 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. What changes have been made in the Definitive Edition with respect to how the game looks and plays with this in mind? For a console version, not only do you play with a controller, but also on a larger screen from further away. RPG Site: When I personally sit down to play an (isometric) game like Divinity, I feel most comfortable with a mouse and keyboard. ![]() 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. 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. RPG Site: Why is Divinity: Original Sin II a fit for Bandai Namco to publish on consoles? At E3 2018, we had a chance to talk to Larian Publishing Director Micheal Douse about bringing the 2017 RPG of the Year contender to Playstation 4 and Xbox One, and also about the partnership with Bandai Namco for this project.
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