I've seen that for sure. The flare case is interesting because there is a flare spell as well. Going to check the blitz bolt/lightning bolt case later.
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Divinity: Original Sin |OT| Sandbox RPG. Co-Op friendly. Bread.
- Thread starter Casimir
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I've seen that for sure. The flare case is interesting because there is a flare spell as well. Going to check the blitz bolt/lightning bolt case later.
I assume we can open up more of these rooms if we didn't pick it?
I outright hate the trial of burdens in the immaculate trial. Yes, the games tells you to weigh the balances, but leaves it up to you to guess the weights needed.I really dont think the idea of the switch size conveying the weight works too well. I managed to brute force it, but holy shit I really think the puzzle was terrible.
Dominic_Shade
Member
110% success rate means 110 is the difficulty check the enemy must pass. If the enemy has a Bodybuilding score of 60, that means they must roll greater than 110 - 60 to avoid being knocked down.
Thus, it will always pay off to continue increasing your character's primary offensive stats, whether it be Strength, Dexterity, or Intelligence, if only to make it harder for your enemies to succeed in their saving rolls.
I think you can eventually unlock all four.
Pickpocket is worthless, although go ahead and steal all paintings everywhere, not sure if you need level 1 to do that (I have it at level 1). Sneak is awesome once it is level 5 so it requires only 1 AP (I have +3 sneak gear). Combo it with Guerrilla trait and Glass Cannon for a ranger or rogue. I use it on a ranger and sneak before every shot.
Pickpocketing is worthless, there is a 'value' cap (as in the max gold value you can steal) based on your stats, and even with 5 pickpocketing it's only 1000 gold, which is worthless.
The damage bonus from backstabbing while sneaking is high (with the pre-requisite talents), I usually found the action point cost to be not worth it, at least with daggers equipped.
It's pretty worthless, but you can get some gear with it to add an easy 3 points.
Sneaking is pretty great. Have it on my rangery rogue to do either a sweet guerilla backstab or open with a poisoncloud arrow to combo with my pyro witch
I have the exact opposite opinion. Pickpocketing is good if you don't want to pay for items. Sneaking is a waste of time. It takes less time to dispatch enemies with AOE spell combos and Special arrows. So far, melee rogues are a poor imitation of a two handed melee warrior.
Confusion Illusion
Banned
Don't know if I should get this on Steam or GOG, but I intend to join the party.
The gold value of pickpocketing becomes utterly useless once you leave Cyseal. The gold cap is super low. I mean if I could pickpocket that 30k gold helm I want, that'd be awesome, but I can't.
My melee rogue does a lot of damage, I just don't mess around with that whole sneaking thing in combat (didn't take either sneaking feat). 50% increase damage on tripped opponents + 50% increase damage witchcraft spell + backstabs with a dagger that only take 2 ap = the hurt.
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
Anyone else getting shit frame rate drops?
I did until I lowered some graphical settings. Otherwise, PC would get hot and the fans went crazy on top of the frame drops.
Only ones I've seen (and I haven't played with many of the skills) is a poison arrow, or geo's boulder which leaves poison on the ground (no cloud). Think geo might have a mist one too, should look into their skills.
Damn.
The problem for me is that enemies and the area around them are being bombarded by fire/ground spells, and or end up slowed, on fire, poisoned, or shocked if they haven't already been felled by my Knight. Movement takes up too much ap and it's not optimal to continually be casting heal on someone who isn't contributing damage to multiple units and isn't a tank. The latter of which is guaranteed if I use Glass Cannon to up the AP to reasonable levels.
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
I mean, I tried playing three times today, but the frame rates just got so shitty.
There's no new update, so I don't know what is going on.
One of the ways i made my melee rogue more efficient is using tactical retreat to more efficiently move around. It's honestly pretty hilarious
Haste and Leech solve both those issues for me.
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
You're the second person that has confirmed the sudden onset of frame rate issues. Let's hope they fix this right quick.
I've noticed it more since yesterday too. Have frame rate limit locked at 60 fps with v sync enabled, had been running great. Now alternates between a sub 30 (variable) and locked 60. Not sure what's causing it.
Same happening to me.
Been having this since day 1. Frame-rate is good for the most part but certain things make it drop instantly to 30 FPS.
Haha, nice strategy. Mine was a faceroll Braccus Rex with Madora (and this was before I had rage). I ended up having two party members die, but none at BR's hand himself, his minion did me in. I res'd everyone up before I finished him off. One thing I love about this game is how status effect ACTUALLY FUCKING WORK. Yeah, they might have crazy high saves sometimes, but there's usually a way around that as well.
My rex fight went weird. We had tried a couple times, getting destroyed. Then one try Rex decides he's going to run outside the chamber. We have an ice elemental follow him, and he just keeps running away from it. Gave us ample time to kill everything without him interfering.. Eventually rex wanders back in after we were done and it was a beatdown.
Well I think I've collected my thoughts enough to write about it. Excuse the awkward English from a spanish-speaking guy yada-yada.Touchdown! (5-6 hours of those were probably idling)
I don't even know what to say, but the fact that this was done over a single week should say enough for now.
Expectations and Background:
I wasn't even aware of this game's existence before the Summer Sale, so you don't get any better situation than this for starting a new game. No hype or expectations, just a few positive impressions to go on by. No information on the game's development history or features other than a video explaining the combat system right at the start of the game. No knowledge about the developer's output either, other than being mildly interested in Divinity: Dragon Commander, but never having the courage to cough up the cash for it. I've not played any games on the Divinity series, the only one I even know by name or footage is the other one I mentioned.
My experience with cRPGs tends to be just about the most important ones from the late '95-'05 years. I'm not old enough to have played the Ultima games, which seems like the most appropriate series for comparisons to Divinity: OS. Fallout 2 is probably my favorite, despite its problems when compared to the predecessor. I have 7 separate folders of saves containing 14 different characters that I played with, three of them even being the same character build because it was just that fun to play.
Gameplay:
Combat:
From my whole experience with the game, the combat has to have been the most satisfying part by far. It was designed from the start to be a non-balanced broken chaotic mess for both enemies and players, and it comes out on top being fantastic for that. If this was real-time without pause, it would probably be unplayable. It's already hard enough to be aware of everything that's going on in the environment in turn-based. This is no P&P system thrown in the game and trying to adapt it to be a video-game like the Infinity Engine stuff. Certainly nothing as awkward as Arcanum was with its design, which seemed undecided of what battle style to even use in the first place.
People might get turned off by the idea of turn-based combat being slow in this case, but I'd argue this is probably some of the quickest fights you've ever seen in an RPG. Everyone's squishy as hell and tends to be easily affected by most status attacks. Ever ignored status effects for anything else than boss battles in RPGs? You'll be using them constantly here to try to get the upper hand, unless they do it to your own characters first. Environment effects can get overpowered as hell if you mix the right elements and end groups of enemies in a single turn. Affecting the surfaces of the combat area is a valid form of crowd control as well, even if it doesn't actually hit the enemies at first.
How do they balance giving you that many tools of control? By making all encounters as unfair as possible. While the balance of this tends to get weaker towards the end of the game, I think Cyseal (1st map) is the best example of this kind of design. You'll get ambushed and outnumbered plenty of times, but they give you enough tools to deal with them. Expo-skeletons teach you how important it is to pay attention to the environment, and how easy it is to turn it against the enemy group. The ambush with the skeletons on the northern part of the map up the hill shows you how important line of sight and positioning on the map can be to disable your enemies. In that fight you can just hug the wall to take cover from the archers while handling the group of fighters/mages below. That battle is a perfect example of how much of a difference it makes to try to approach encounters differently and not give up the first time.
There's a few dodgy decisions when it comes to some status effects being a bit too harsh and having no better way of preventing them than being completely immune to them or hurting yourself, ultimately coming down to RNG or maxing out Willpower/Bodybuilding as much as possible. As harsh as they may be, it ends up resulting in a constant power struggle of enemies using those attacks on your players, trying to recover from them as efficiently as possible, and repaying them in the same manner.
My only complaint is that either I was too efficient on dealing with encounters on the late-game, or enemies just didn't have as many resources/good AI to fight back. Elemental resistance is everywhere on gear later, so a lot of their attacks are very inefficient. They seem unable to change their attacks to accommodate for this as well. The power explosion from the players around level
14
Customization:
Going away from class restrictions is great for new players not familiar with whatever rule-set the game might have. If you feel like you screwed up a bit your point-spending early on, it doesn't really matter because the game will make up for it for giving you many more points to spend on the later levels. It didn't really matter in the end that my Mage had a few weird points in other skill types that she never ended up using, that never prevented her from using Pyrokinetic spells at their full potential. Whatever worries you might have about re-rolling your character, you're much better off just not doing that. Hardly did I ever consider any of the characters "useless". While my fighter/cleric was not able to do much significant damage, his ability to crowd control and just go right in the middle of battle with his massive HP was really helpful.
Pet Talker is an amazing talent and should not be missed by anyone. RP Talents tend to be my favorites, and I wish more games implemented them instead of just combat-oriented ones. Entire side-quests are enabled by it, which shows the effort that went into making sure it was worth picking up.
With the lack of restrictions, I'm sure we'll see a lot of fun & overpowered combinations pop-up on the long run, especially coming from Lone Wolf players. I don't have much else to say here until I experiment with other types of characters in my 2nd (co-op) play-through.
Dungeons & Puzzles:
Both the highlight and the downside of the game for me. For every brilliantly simple puzzle or moments that make you think you're breaking the game with a dodgy solution, there's a shitty button hidden behind a bookshelf that you can't even see until you tilt the camera in a particular way. Whoever has so much love for the buttons at Larian probably opens/locks his office with a bunch of tiny buttons hidden behind the lamps. There really needs to be a change when it comes to these, probably in the way of perception checks just to make them much more visible. While most of the puzzles are easily solved by paying attention and trying to inspect most of what's available on the dungeons, I can't get behind the decision of the button puzzles. I hope any fan modules don't take this kind of design by example, or at least make the buttons twice the size they currently are.
The dungeons themselves are very nicely themed to whoever owned them and have plenty of fun encounters to do. M
aradino
Loot:
Pretty controversial discussion point. I think the only point where loot is not randomized is just the items hand-placed around the world itself. All containers have randomized loot, all items apart from a few unique items have randomized stats and names, and shop-keepers randomize their wares every level or so. This makes it a bit frustrating to plan ahead any sort of build with the gear you might want, because almost no gear is guaranteed to drop other than a few special weapons. I think some aspects of the randomized loot should be kept, since the game already embraces very well the approach of "use what you have and experiment with it to solve problems", but it was very disappointing to be raiding end-game dungeons and be given level 5 loot. It seems like some of the randomization is not properly tweaked in several areas, and it can be tempting to save-scum to try to get better loot from the containers. The only way to fix that would be to randomize the keys for all containers right from the start of the game and keep them on the save file. A bit more care could've went into the rewards of places like Unique bosses or chests at the end of dungeons. It's a bit weird to open some important-looking containers (B
raccu
Magical Chest
Apart from that, there's a pretty good progression curve to the sort of stuff that you can find, and it's completely viable to use old gear for quite a few levels until you find something better. This isn't as extreme as say, South Park: SoT, where any loot that is more than 2-3 levels old is completely useless. The only complaint about the item progression, as I previously mentioned, is the power creep of elemental resistances on the end-game. Since they're mostly percentages and don't have linear progression as something like armor, once they get to the higher tiers they make elemental attacks from the enemies insignificant (or even beneficial).
Graphics:
The perfect example of a small budget used very efficiently. The game looks stunning almost everywhere and is really visually pleasing. Some of these places look as good as pre-rendered backgrounds I'd say, especially in L
uculla Fores
Audio:
I love the music and how it's used in certain places, except for one battle song (which I can't seem to find) that seems to get a bit too excited with its "epicness". I'd absolutely love to listen to more tracks in the style of Dance of Death, since I think it fits the style of the game very well. Here's hoping custom songs can be easily added in the future, since dealing with modding Wwise stuff can get fairly annoying. Adding custom battle music into the playlist would be wonderful. There's some very good use of Ambient Music as well, like the first encounter with the W
hite Witc
While I like the audio design and most of the stuff they chose, there's just a few standouts that might need to be tweaked volume-wise.
- The Healing Effect sounds really loud to me, although it's debatable.
- I think everyone will agree the Fireball traps can get annoying as hell, to the point where I had to take off my headphones when traversing certain dungeons (or a little certain house in Cyseal). Larian pls.
- People say the NPC Chatter was even more often than it already is in the beta? I can't even imagine how annoying that must've been considering they're barely there from crossing into annoying in the current version. I think it could stand to be just a bit less, since many have been the occasions in H
e where the dialogue from NPCs would overlap special events that were currently happening. (unter's Edg)Grutilda punishing the lovers or Rat Catcher for example
Engine:
I love this engine and how capable it is. I hope people have lots of fun making fan modules, because it looks and plays amazing. I'll just quote my previous post on how impressive the programming of this game is to me.
Man, there's quite a lot of well-done programming in this game that constantly impresses me:
- Very seamless terrain streaming: The performance is still being optimized, but I've never seen terrain popping in except for the northern part of Cyseal. If there's multiple LOD levels I can't really tell, all I've seen so far is just it loading the higher quality textures.
- Pathfinding: Can walk from one edge of the map to the other while avoiding already-detected traps and hazards without ever getting stuck in a wall so far. This is kinda expected since the older games had to implement quite a few hacky workarounds to pathfinding AI so the performance was good in older systems, but I'm still really surprised at how good it works here. Navigating an area like Black Cove completely unharmed after the whole place was secured is just really impressive to me.
- I have no idea how huge these save-files must be, because they save literally everything. I haven't been able to break the game at all yet by reloading while doing anything, and all the corpses and items scattered across the world are all still in their spots. I heard some people broke NPCs scripting, but I've tried saving/reloading during lots of scripted sequences and I couldn't get them to break either. It puts it into perspective quite a bit when lots of AAA games lately are afraid of giving you anything else than Autosaves or checkpoint-based systems.
- A vector-based combat system with AI that works well with it and with terrain as complex as this is no small feat.
These aren't really anything ground-breaking, but the polish and attention to detail on these aspects help the game shine a lot.
TL;DR; I'm surprised a cRPG actually works as intended for more than 90% of the time.
My only complaints about the engine is that the interface, while well implemented from a programming standpoint, is lacking in a few options by design. Inventories not being restricted to a max limit calls for the need to categorize or even search for items in different ways (maybe name filters?), especially considering most of their icons look similar to each other. Shops are quite clunky to use and don't show item comparisons for all party members, only the one that's currently talking. Being unable to pool various items from the party members into a single offer is a restriction I don't understand. The lack of a shared gold pool between the party is a bit surprising as well. Crafting can get a bit infuriating if you have many ingredients, as you need to slowly scroll and drag the items you wanted to merge. There's plenty of ways to get around all of this, but it seems like extra busywork that I'm surprised they didn't fix in the beta, considering the attention to detail to almost everything else.
In combat I think the "Delay your Turn" option could be much improved if you could just drag your portraits on the Battle Order to be after the character you want. I had to tweak a bit the initiative orders of my party manually with items to make sure Madora's turn would be right after she was buffed. Being able to undo non-harmful movement would be sweet as well in case of accidental clicks.
Conclusion:
This game couldn't have come out at a better time for me, after having been a bit sad with how one of my favorite genres was going (and pretty much disappeared). I got a bit jaded and cynical after Fallout 3, and I was wondering if I was just probably being too harsh on new games or too nostalgia-driven for not being as fun as I remember. This game made me feel in the way those classics did, and showed me that there's still a lot of cool and new stuff to try out in the genre. I hope Larian finds a lot of great success for this game, they really deserve it. PoE and Torment have lots of expectations to live up to right now, but hopefully in the stuff they excel at. I hope Divinity stays as a mechanics-focused series, because I think even the writing style and the plot worked very well with how goofy and hilarious the combat can turn out to be. Patch some of those issues and I'll call this game perfect for what it does. No game needs to excel in every area, but a few QoL improvements would be very welcome.
Also this is probably the only game that I liked so much that I actually wanted to write a long-ass post about, so this is a first for me. Do not wait for a sale if you have any interest on this, Larian very much deserves the full price for the amount of effort that went into this game. Those 60 hours of playtime I got weren't ever boring, and very much worth the price, and that's just one play-through.
Bonus favorite screenshots (heavy spoilers):
*Insert shot of Troll with his son asking for toll here*
Haha that's actually the only track in the game that I actively dislike.
You're not the only person I saw that said that actually.
The combat playlist seems like quite the mixed bag, with different styles thrown in.MickeyKnox
Member
I am sooo far down the rabbit hole with this game.
Picked it up on early access way back and messed around with enough to figure out I liked what they were doing and went on black out until release. Best decision I could have made.
Picked it up on early access way back and messed around with enough to figure out I liked what they were doing and went on black out until release. Best decision I could have made.
You're not the only person I saw that said that actually.
I read in an interview that apparently the composer for the game got sick during development or something, and only completed 50 tracks for the game. Apparently they managed to fill the rest of the music with unreleased tracks he did for previous Divinity games, so maybe that's why?
So here's my current issue:
I can no longer get into a combat, once I do shortly there after my computer will crash, black screen, sound loops, and have to hard reset.
There is only two fights I have left to do in Cyseal
and it happens in both of them, no matter who intiates combat, or who is hosting or even in single player.
I have frame limit and vsync enabled, my GPU fan is at max, and we've tried over LAN and online, as well as hamachi out of desperation, nothing works.
I can no longer get into a combat, once I do shortly there after my computer will crash, black screen, sound loops, and have to hard reset.
There is only two fights I have left to do in Cyseal
Zombie Troll and Braccus
I have frame limit and vsync enabled, my GPU fan is at max, and we've tried over LAN and online, as well as hamachi out of desperation, nothing works.
For anyone interested, the producer of Divinity: Original Sin was on the DLC podcast (by 5x5) this morning. Also up for download on Itunes. More info and link to download here:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=855247
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=855247
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
Every single level, a new attribute book.
Yeah i figured, wish i opened it up sooner.
I've heard that as well, I can't remember if that's something that they will go back and change later or not.
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
The frame rate issue pan out for anyone yet?
Am I the only one that accidently skip conversations when using the keyboard?
I noticed that if I press 1 on the keyboard for example to pick a conversation choice sometimes it will go instantly through another option withou giving me the time to read it.
I'm wondering if it's an issue with the game or with my keyboard...
I noticed that if I press 1 on the keyboard for example to pick a conversation choice sometimes it will go instantly through another option withou giving me the time to read it.
I'm wondering if it's an issue with the game or with my keyboard...
I loved doing that though!