Lessons learned from previous titles are being directly applied to the development of the next franchise installment.
The Divinity development team recently held a community Q&A session. During the discussion, one fan inquired about the specific mechanics governing the game’s loot system.
Nick, the Lead Designer at Larian Studios, confirmed that the team plans to adopt a strategy similar to the one used in Baldur’s Gate 3:
The handcrafted approach to magical items in BG3 worked brilliantly. It is actually the exact system we had originally hoped to implement for Divinity: Original Sin 2.
The designer further elaborated that while they initially used randomized loot to save development time, the experiment ultimately proved counterproductive:
When we utilized randomized loot in the original Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel, we realized that total randomness often led to incoherent results. We had to keep adding more rules and curated templates to make the system feel deliberate. In the end, the randomization process didn’t actually save us much time at all.
Source: iXBT.games