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Divinity: Original Sin 2 |OT| Dragons & Dungeon Mastering

O

Orcastar

Member
I'm sure the game itself will be great, but Larian have completely botched the delivery of the non-KS collector's editions. It's release day, we're 6 hours away from the game unlocking on Steam and the collector's edition that I ordered several weeks ago still hasn't even been shipped, which means that I won't be able to play the game before sometime next week at the earliest.

At this point I'm considering just buying the game on Steam and putting the CE up on eBay when it arrives, whenever that might be.
 
S

Sarcasm

Member
Orcastar said:
I'm sure the game itself will be great, but Larian have completely botched the delivery of the non-KS collector's editions. It's release day, we're 6 hours away from the game unlocking on Steam and the collector's edition that I ordered several weeks ago still hasn't even been shipped, which means that I won't be able to play the game before sometime next week at the earliest.

At this point I'm considering just buying the game on Steam and putting the CE up on eBay when it arrives, whenever that might be.
Click to expand...

SellGive it to a friend.

Cause Dungeon Master Modeee.

But yea that sucks, but did you buy it directly from Larian?
 
H

HiddenWings

Member
Orcastar said:
I'm sure the game itself will be great, but Larian have completely botched the delivery of the non-KS collector's editions. It's release day, we're 6 hours away from the game unlocking on Steam and the collector's edition that I ordered several weeks ago still hasn't even been shipped, which means that I won't be able to play the game before sometime next week at the earliest.

At this point I'm considering just buying the game on Steam and putting the CE up on eBay when it arrives, whenever that might be.
Click to expand...

I was under the impression that the CE box didn't actually contain a key. I would have expected them to just give a key out with the orders on this one.
 
Sevenfold

Sevenfold

Member
^
Correct. old build until later this afternoon.

Nothing in Larian Vault Orcastar? I'm not sure how it works for non KS CE editions.
 
G

gocubs

Member
Orcastar said:
I'm sure the game itself will be great, but Larian have completely botched the delivery of the non-KS collector's editions. It's release day, we're 6 hours away from the game unlocking on Steam and the collector's edition that I ordered several weeks ago still hasn't even been shipped, which means that I won't be able to play the game before sometime next week at the earliest.

At this point I'm considering just buying the game on Steam and putting the CE up on eBay when it arrives, whenever that might be.
Click to expand...

Larian has said that they wouldn't ship until today. I got a email yesterday day say look for shipping info on Thursday. Should be getting a email today with shipping info.
 
S

Shahadan

Member
I'm so nervous.
I know that I'll be stuck for hours at the character creation screen, then make a choice, then play for half an hour before thinking "oh I should have done differently" and start over lmao

Decisions in games like this are so stressful.
 
D

Dandy Lyin

Member
Shahadan said:
I'm so nervous.
I know that I'll be stuck for hours at the character creation screen, then make a choice, then play for half an hour before thinking "oh I should have done differently" and start over lmao

Decisions in games like this are so stressful.
Click to expand...
You are not alone in feeling this way.
 
G

gocubs

Member
Well shit the town of Gent (the main hq of Larian Studios) has lost power to a quarter of the city. I'm guessing that includes the studio. Hopefully the release isn't set back to much today.
 
K

kionedrik

Member
Shahadan said:
I'm so nervous.
I know that I'll be stuck for hours at the character creation screen, then make a choice, then play for half an hour before thinking "oh I should have done differently" and start over lmao

Decisions in games like this are so stressful.
Click to expand...

Is there any other way to play a RPG?
 
L

Lady Siara

Member
Really excited to jump into this later today but my group of 5 is trying to figure out how we're going to divide playing this when we all have different schedules.

Time to have 5 different co-op saves I guess!
 
A

aravuus

Member
Managed to get two work mates interested in the game, hope we'll be able to match our comings and goings and play some coop soon.

But a question on coop: everyone creates just one character when they start their playthrough, and they'll use that character whenever they play online, right? If I'm 10 hours into the game with a level 5 character and 3 random henchmen and a friend has just started, can they join me with their level 1 character? I assume they'll just replace a random henchman in this case.

And if I play local coop, will my local coop friend also create a new character or will they just control a henchman?
 
J

JustSomeone

Member
gocubs said:
Well shit the town of Gent (the main hq of Larian Studios) has lost power to a quarter of the city. I'm guessing that includes the studio. Hopefully the release isn't set back to much today.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure they send the files to valve\GOG long before the game is released.
Even if not, they most likely keep their data on servers that aren't on site,so they can upload the game from there
 
S

Sarcasm

Member
aravuus said:
Managed to get two work mates interested in the game, hope we'll be able to match our comings and goings and play some coop soon.

But a question on coop: everyone creates just one character when they start their playthrough, and they'll use that character whenever they play online, right? If I'm 10 hours into the game with a level 5 character and 3 random henchmen and a friend has just started, can they join me with their level 1 character? I assume they'll just replace a random henchman in this case.
Click to expand...

No. One person starts an Online Game. While in Character creation they join. I don't know about a third person as the first it was two characters you start off with.

You basically take over the hosts extra (that they can assign to players) and the only way for one of you to create a character is by joining the host in a new game started online and in character creation screen.
 
L

Lady Siara

Member
aravuus said:
Managed to get two work mates interested in the game, hope we'll be able to match our comings and goings and play some coop soon.

But a question on coop: everyone creates just one character when they start their playthrough, and they'll use that character whenever they play online, right? If I'm 10 hours into the game with a level 5 character and 3 random henchmen and a friend has just started, can they join me with their level 1 character? I assume they'll just replace a random henchman in this case.

And if I play local coop, will my local coop friend also create a new character or will they just control a henchman?
Click to expand...

From my understanding, co-op works like this:

One player is the host and saves it locally to their PC. If your friends join you at the start during character creation, they can make their own character. Co-op is then how you would expect.

However, if they don't join during character creation, they'll take over the AI you've recruited or other characters you've made. You can also progress on your save with their characters so that's something to watch out for.
 
A

aravuus

Member
Sarcasm said:
No. One person starts an Online Game. While in Character creation they join. I don't know about a third person as the first it was two characters you start off with.

You basically take over the hosts extra (that they can assign to players) and the only way for one of you to create a character is by joining the host in a new game started online and in character creation screen.
Click to expand...

Ah, I see. Well that's fine, probably better actually. People can play as much or as little single player as they want without being over or underpowered in coop if we're just playing as one same playthrough's party members.
 
O

Orcastar

Member
Sarcasm said:
But yea that sucks, but did you buy it directly from Larian?
Click to expand...
I did.

HiddenWings said:
I was under the impression that the CE box didn't actually contain a key. I would have expected them to just give a key out with the orders on this one.
Click to expand...

The KS CEs don't contain a Steam key since backers already have their keys. The non-KS CEs come with the Steam key inside the box.

gocubs said:
Larian has said that they wouldn't ship until today. I got a email yesterday day say look for shipping info on Thursday. Should be getting a email today with shipping info.
Click to expand...
Yeah, it does say that on the store page, but I assumed that it meant that they would be shipped in time for release. Doesn't make any sense to me for the CEs to be shipped on release day.
 
C

Chance Hale

Member
Will reviews be coming along soon or have they had access to the game? While I have no doubts of the general quality I found the first game unfunny most of the time and I'm hoping the talk of a changed tone is accurate.
 
L

Lady Siara

Member
Chance Hale said:
Will reviews be coming along soon or have they had access to the game? While I have no doubts of the general quality I found the first game unfunny most of the time and I'm hoping the talk of a changed tone is accurate.
Click to expand...

Chris Avellone is on board with the writing team this time so I'm expecting greatness.

His pedigree speaks for itself.
 
H

His Majesty

Banned
gocubs said:
Well shit the town of Gent (the main hq of Larian Studios) has lost power to a quarter of the city. I'm guessing that includes the studio. Hopefully the release isn't set back to much today.
Click to expand...

Funny enough it's similar to what happened with the release of Beyond Divinity. Swen once wrote a blogpost about it, certainly worth reading what a major clusterfuck that was.

https://twitter.com/forktong?ref_sr...io/iframe/twitter.min.html#908251446608580608

If there’s one memory that stands out from the development of Beyond Divinity, then it’s the end of the process. The amount of things that went wrong in the last weeks was astounding. It all started with an email from our German distributor, telling us that the game had to ship before the end of the first quarter of 2004, or the consequences would be bad. They didn’t tell us what ‘bad’ meant in this case, but we needed their money, so we decided not to find out. Of course, we weren’t ready, so suddenly a development process that was going smooth, became a rush job

And there were a lot of environmental circumstances that conspired against us.

Notes from a diary written about the going gold process:

---

Friday

We get a letter from the electricity provider. “On Monday morning, we will cut off the electricity in this street for the entire day. We apologize for this inconvenience”. Of course, Monday is the day that we have to deliver our German master CD’s to the factory.

After some cursing, we find a firm who can install a diesel generator to provide the office with power. Luckily we find one quickly. They will install it on Saturday.

Saturday

All looks smooth. We have to burn a lot of midnight oil while fixing the last bugs, but we’re managing. The generator is installed and we get instructions on how to switch it on. We are told explicitly not to put the generator on while we still have normal power. If we do so, boom. The boom scares us a bit, and we make sure that the boom candidates (those that might cause a boom) in the office are told in excruciating detail what a boom would mean for them physically. They seem to understand.

Sunday

Sleep is a sparse commodity, but we’re nearly there. I think to myself, the generator won’t be necessary after all. The last thing to do is to write the installers and apply the copy protection. We spot a boom candidate in the vicinity of the generator. We scare him away.

Later that day the first of a series of previously unseen crash bugs shows up. We attack the bugs.

Christophe, our producer, arrives to help testing and will drive at 6:00 am in the morning to the factory to deliver the CD’s. They need to be there before 10:00am. It’s a 2 hour drive if there’s no traffic, otherwise it’s 3 hours.

Monday

We had to redo the installers seven times or so because of all kinds of bugs. Yann, the install guru, is having a hard time and hits himself each time the installer goes wrong. Time is ticking and it looks like we’ll be a couple of hours late delivering the CD’s to the factory. Still, we assume they have a buffer, so there’s no real panic.

I prepare to switch on the generator and in doing so, draw a crowd of tired developers. The problem is, I don’t remember which button I was supposed to switch on first. I think of boom. I push the button that seems to be the most logical. Good user interface design as it’s the correct one.

Our lead QA needs to test the gold master version. Instead of copying the files from the fileserver to his HD, he erases them from the fileserver. He’s pretty tired and has been working very hard, so nobody blames him. Could’ve happened to any of us. We wake ourselves up and restart the build process. An installer needs to be rewritten because Kirill absolutely wants one final music update.

The installers seem to have one final small little problem. The start menu link doesn’t work. It turns out that the copy protected executable doesn’t like its shortcut. It’s afternoon when we figure that out.

Christophe reports that the highway to the factory is closed. There’s been an accident.

Seeing that the day is conspiring against us, I call the factory and tell them that they’ll have to be creative and flexible. If they won’t, I assure them I’ll find other flexible and creative factories. They agree.

I tell the guys we have gained an extra day. Most of go to sleep with the plan of waking up in the evening, and then focus on making a perfect version. Fabrice, the programmer in charge of the copy protection says he’ll continue to talk to the copy protection people until a solution is found for the install problem.

Tuesday

We arrive shortly after midnight and to our dismay find no mail from Fabrice. I hesitate as I don’t want to wake him up, but ultimately find myself with no choice but calling him. We get a small heart rhythm failure when we hear Fabrice’s mobile phone. Then it starts to dawn on us that maybe he’s still in the office. Sure enough, we find him upstairs sleeping. He has slept two hours when we find him. He has solved all the problems and earns a lot of gratitude from us. We start building the final installers and take the extra time to solve a few bugs which David has discovered.

Christophe arrives at 6:00 am, ready to go to the factory. We’re having problems with the installer. We forgot a couple of files. We rebuild the installers.

We test the game. Sometimes it goes very slow and occasionally it hangs. We don’t know what is happening. It turns out it’s one of the copy protection routines which was added at the last moment. We change the code, rebuild the installers, burn the CD’s.

In the afternoon the copy protection people tell us that the game CD had to be of a very specific size. The CD we delivered was not of that size. We have to redo everything. Since it’s too late to give the updated version to the factory, we use the extra time to do a few tweaks. By now a number of CD burners have stopped working, plenty of the strangest bugs have popped up and a German and an English version have been mixed up.

Wednesday

At 6 am Christophe drives to the factory. Everything seems to work so we happily commence working on the English master. We declare the German version gold though we decide not to make it public until they are actually printing the damned things.

Thursday

The factory calls. There are problems with the glass masters and the copy protection. The install CD doesn’t work on their systems and when running the game, it says it’s a crack. We call the copy protection people. They say it’s the fault of the factory. The factory says it’s the fault of the copy protection people. Then they look at us and say it’s our fault.

I call a few other developers who used the same copy protection. They all had the same misery but they did all manage in the end. It seems that in their experience it was the fault of the both the factory and the copy protection people.

Ultimately, it turns out to be the fault of the factory. They declared the install CD invalid though we were able to install it on 17 CDROM drives of various makes in our office. They also managed to mess up the copy protection. They do manage to send an invoice for their extra services.

We start rebuilding everything, writing the CD’s at one speed on the highest possible quality CD’s we can find with the best burner we can get. We prepare a machine with a burner and prep Christophe and Fabrice to go to the factory armed with 5 masters on different CD’s. We further arm them with a big hammer with explicit instructions to make it very clear to the factory that nobody’s going to mess with us. We’re a crew of very tired angry developers who want their game to go into production.

In the end, it turns out that one of the masters was good enough and the game can officially be declared gold.

---

One week after this, frustration strikes. Hard. Obviously, given the rush job, there were issues with the release so we needed to release a patch, but the copy protection, the very thing that caused so much problems, prevented us from doing so.

The type of protection we used relied on encrypting the data that the engine needed to run the game. In the case of Beyond Divinity, we had about 600Mb of such data, and in theory that meant that cracks should also be at least 600Mb in size.

For ourselves, we had a special tool, which allowed us to make small patches. Except that it didn’t work. Meaning that we either had to release a 600Mb patch (unthinkable at the time), or find a way around it. After a lot of cursing, we came up with a pretty elegant solution, which boiled down to us cracking our own game.

We released a patch that used a loophole to first unencrypt all of the data, and then recompressed it without the copy protection active. We never really told people why it took so long to install the patch, nor did we tell them that installing the patch effectively meant that the copy protection was removed, but it did save the day.

For ourselves, we learned that we didn’t like DRM one bit.

Beyond Divinity went on to sell a decent amount of units, but it was nowhere near the success that Divine Divinity had been. However, this time around, we did earn money with it and Larian was officially declared saved.

It was time to set our sights on bigger things… yet it took us three years before we finally got to work.
Click to expand...
 
N

Naito

Member
Lady Siara said:
From my understanding, co-op works like this:

One player is the host and saves it locally to their PC. If your friends join you at the start during character creation, they can make their own character. Co-op is then how you would expect.

However, if they don't join during character creation, they'll take over the AI you've recruited or other characters you've made. You can also progress on your save with their characters so that's something to watch out for.
Click to expand...

That is correct.

You might be used to a typical multiplayer coop where you drop-in/drop-out with your character. D:OS 2 has drop-in/drop-out, but it is more akin to joining someone's game, so you play in her game, with her character. I detailed a post some time ago in the EA thread, but that Siara's post covers all bases.
 
J

J4g3r

Member
NABzUd1.png
Click to expand...

https://twitter.com/LarAtLarian/status/908277064591200258
 
L

LurkerPrime

Member
His Majesty said:
Funny enough it's similar to what happened with the release of Beyond Divinity. Swen once wrote a blogpost about it, certainly worth reading what a major clusterfuck that was.

https://twitter.com/forktong?ref_sr...io/iframe/twitter.min.html#908251446608580608
Click to expand...

Damn, this is an amazing recollection.

The physical version DRM is apparently StarForce, which I've never heard a single good thing about. It has always sounded so draconian that I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
 
C

codswallop

Member
His Majesty said:
Funny enough it's similar to what happened with the release of Beyond Divinity. Swen once wrote a blogpost about it, certainly worth reading what a major clusterfuck that was.
Click to expand...
OK, so I've been responsible for rolling out upgraded enterprise software this week and have had a ton of problems that never cropped up in months of testing. I've done a bunch of similar things before but this one for some reason has been extremely frustrating.

Reading this makes me feel somewhat better about my experiences this week, so thanks.
 
R

Reani

Member
"13 years ago we rented a diesel generator to get Beyond Divinity out of the door. Today we are looking for a diesel generator for DOS2."

its actually an amazing misfortune
 
Sevenfold

Sevenfold

Member
So the Steam codes that appear on my Larian Vault page are ones I have to gift right? It's been that long since I redeemed them I can't remember if one of them is my copy of the game.

WAwGS6sl.png
 
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