Larian's learnt a lot from Baldur's Gate 3 going into Divinity, including the fact that hand-crafted loot is probably better: 'Randomization did not save us much time'

Larian's next game, Divinity, is gonna have some big changes to the usual Original Sin formula—and it's thanks to Baldur's Gate 3, so sayeth a Larian lead in a recent Reddit AMA. Nick Pechenin, head of design at the studio, said that its take on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset informed a lot of how Divinity's shaping up.

"We went through our original ideas for DoS1 and DoS2," Pechenin writes, "Looked again at how they worked out in practice, picked up some inspirations from our BG3 EA and post-release journey, consulted the star charts to see what we need to do to stay competitive—and cooked a new action economy and character progression system."

As for what that action economy and character progression system looks like, I can only make guesses at this point. Which is fair, works in progress are, indeed, works in progress. It'll really depend on which direction Larian swings the needle—D&D's action economy has a heavy reliance on crowd control, given you only have one action per turn (alongside a bonus action and movement).

While DoS2 was also crowd-control heavy, you also had a bunch of action points to spend—which, via certain abilities, could be refreshed, allowing for some pretty drawn-out turns. While you started each turn with four, you could have six total, including some Action Points banked from your prior turn: So not having something to do wasn't all that punishing.

Contrast this to D&D 5e, where whiffing your one attack leaves you with your pants down unless you're built around having more. If I were to soothsay a bit, I reckon the sentence: "We hope that both fans of BG3 and fans of DoS2 will find the new system intuitive but deep" suggest a balance between the two. Maybe something like Pathfinder 2e's three-action system? A guy can dream.

In another reply, Pechenin re-affirms something I feel like everyone's felt playing DoS2. That being, the surfaces can sometimes get a bit much: "It is cool to have alternative versions of elemental surfaces that change how you have to play around them. We maybe went too far last time with giving every surface a cursed and a blessed variant. Few people immediately guessed the function of blessed oil for example.

"The duration of combat encounters is also on our mind. [The] Oilfield fight directly inspired the tech we showcased in BG3 that allows multiple simple enemies to move and attack at the same time, cutting down waiting by the player. We also try to avoid monsters crawling around veeery slooowly."

The biggest of Pechenin's reveals, though, is a veer away from randomised loot, inspired by D&D's magic item system. While Baldur's Gate 3 was far more madcap than the TTRPG, allowing you to equip an entire MMO character's worth of magic gubbins (rather than D&D's limit of three attuned magic items), it was still a far cry from randomised loot, given the stricter ruleset.

"The BG3 approach of handcrafting every magic item worked well, and it's something we've always wanted to do for DOS2," Pechenin explains. "Something we realized when working on randomized loot for DoS1 and DoS2 is that fully random loot is frequently confusing, so we added more and more rules and pre-made patterns to make it feel more intentional."

And yet, did this actually save time when compared to just hand-crafting things? Not really, no: "In the end randomization did not save us much time." Sometimes it's just easier to do it yourself.