#you can ofc make your whole team custom-characters by starting the game 4 times on your own

[racke7]

Roleplaying in DOS2

As is known by now, I have a lot of opinions about Divinity 2. Both its story and its combat-mechanics.

But it occurred to me today that one of the big reasons I just can't get into the roleplaying-part of this game is that... it's romance-based.

Oh, you don't have to seduce your companions, but it's still working on that same affection-meter you might expect from a dating-sim. Except now it's set in a world where there are way more important things to worry about.

See, when a VN you play has romance in it? That's not between "you" and the "target", it's between the "main-character" and the "target". They often already have a long and complicated history together, and at best you're just kind of there as a peeping-tom and an excellent wing-man.

The main-character is so clearly defined in the text, that projecting yourself onto them is a bit like projecting yourself onto a random rock you found on the ground. You can maybe do it, but like... why.

In a more open-world RPG? This isn't really the case anymore. You're a blank-slate (even if you play an origin-character, the complete freedom from their "original" selves just sends you back to being a blank-slate).

You create this character, and you decide on what it should be considering "important".

(This is a lot harder in DOS2 than Skyrim, because it's a lot more rail-roaded. So you can't just "opt out" of interacting with things that "don't apply" to your character.)

And you do this by playing the game and picking dialogue-options that don't contradict them too much. Except, with how Divinity works as an open-world game where you're basically doing all of the quests and then murdering all of the quest-givers for a few more slivers of EXP?

It's blatantly obvious to anyone that the main thing on the main-character's mind? It's murder.

They might be delighting in it, or they might just be trying to murder people for money and loot, or you might be trying to help people out a bit on your way to divinity. But at the end of the day, the character you're playing as is mostly concerned about killing or not-killing people.

Romance? The world is under siege, people are dying every minute, you need to figure out if this person is more useful to you dead or alive, how can you get strong enough to survive the onslaught-...

You have priorities, is what I'm saying. And then the game wants you to listen to the emotional opinions about a bunch of people whose opinions of you is the only thing keeping them from becoming an active obstacle to you.

It's a fucking dating-sim, is what I'm saying. And even if it's simplistic, the result is that your companions are always teetering on the edge of becoming inconvenient, in a world and situation where you're actively murdering everyone who isn't convenient.

So, whereas in Skyrim I can roleplay as a mercenary, or a thief, or a mage almost entirely through gameplay alone? In DOS2 I'm mainly limited in roleplaying about if I want to fuck a skeleton, or an elf, or if I want to be a racist-lizard's side-piece.

Now, this isn't true if you discard the origin-characters and play with a friend (or friends), because then your main goal can be about saving the world, or claiming the power of Divinity all to yourself, or about trying to scam your friends out of as much cash as you can manage, or even something patently ridiculous like "collect all cheese in the world" (because your friends will be the one forcing the story to progress, and you're just following them around for more cheese-opportunities).

But for recruiting a bunch of origin-characters? It always circles back to romance, and it's-...

Look, I get that this is fine for a lot of people? DOS2 comes from a culture where "I roll to seduce" is a common approach, but like... there's a reason that I've only ever gotten married once in all of my Skyrim-playthroughs (and I immediately went from "married" to "settled down enough that there's no point in playing as them anymore").

Romance in an RPG? Miss me with that shit, let me be a crazy roving band of murder-hobos in peace.

So yeah, these feelings? I'm pretty sure that this plays a very big part in why I find it so difficult to actually get deep into this game. I don't want to seduce anyone, I don't want to sit back and watch from a distance how an origin-character has a deep character-evolving chat with some quest-npc.

I just want to make decisions about life-or-death in an endless quest for power.