People of Larian, please allow me these clear words:

I very much liked the add on. There were a few minor things that are bit annoying but all in all it was a very fun experience and I liked all the quests you added.

But, in all honesty, your final mission SUCKS. It stinks. It's no fun. It's tedious and pretty annoying to still try to get through, yet your stupid decoy you have to protect is already a bit too low on health.

I even ask myself: Did you even play it yourself once? Did any of the beta-testers actually have playing through it fun (I'm not saying if they beat it or if it was easy or hard to them, I ask if they had *fun*)?

And yes, I am very aware of the irony I complained about too little dragon flight a bit below. It's like you took the worst of the flying fortresses and added one of those ALWAYS super annoying escort missions.

If you want some suggestion: Patch this horrible accident of a task out of the game before most players reach it or at least make it somewhat fun. Cut the need to protect the zeppelin, give the dragon another upgrade (twice as much health and a much faster reload of the super-weapon) or whatever. You do everyone and yourself a favour.

Right now, I'd give the AddOn 5/10 or max 6/10 - without this crappy mission (on my personal scale) you surely would hit 8 without any question. I'm not entirely sure what would be worse: This mission or the game just ending with the lame line "Thanks for playing, you win!".

I'll retry now but I feel I already wasted enough time on this on two attempts. I'm sorry for these harsh words, especially after you made this outstanding Divinity 2 and the pretty nice AddOn which I enjoyed very much to this point. On the other hand... what did you think?

You liked very much the add-on and you give a 5 or 6 because of the last mission?? You cut 2 points because 1 mission sucks for you when there is 29 that were fun?
I think they shouldnt patch something based only in a few opinions... maybe the beta testers liked
the mission. maybe i will like it. I like escort missions

Dont be so harsh! Creating a game that pleases everyone in the same way is hard.

the best

The mission has one main problem imo and that is that the stupid guy on the zeppelin tells you not to get too far away which is exactly the wrong way to play it. Just fly as far away and as deep into the enemies as possible and kill everything, long before the zeppelin arrives and it will not even be hurt at the point when the final event triggers.
Only downside is he will be constantly complaining and annoying you about being too far away.

I'm sorry to hear you didn't like it - we actually played it many times and rather enjoyed the challenge of it. We did figure out that for some people it might be too challenging, and we should've included something to cater to them - we'll aim to do something about that but MasterOfSteel is right, it's very hard to create a game that pleases everyone, especially if you mix multiple styles of gameplay.

lar_q a question, if your listed as owner, what exactly is your job in the creation process?
just curious

Heheh, I should remove that tag - a programmer who's no longer with us once put it there and I have no clue how to get rid of it To answer your question, I actually wouldn't know how to describe my job - I'm a bit old-school in that I'm involved in most things, though typically in a small (hopefully contributing) manner. I guess game director would cover most of it. I set out the general goals, pretend to know what I'm talking about and take most of the shitty decisions - the team in general reserves the fun decisions for themselves

thanks for answering that... so if not you who actually is majority shareholder

As far as I understood it, Lar founded Larian Studios.

But that's so long ago I don't remember it anymore ... Oh, the past ...

Lar
Lar_q

Which one?
Also, if Lar_q is the founder then he is the Swen as well.

Jereth;
He didn't say he wasn't the owner, he said he should remove that tag...
Larian was named after his dog, Lar. During the development of Divine Divinity, the programmers sneaked in a dog called Lar to see if they could get it past unnoticed (IIRC it was a bet beforehand). In one of the inns you could find a dwarf, and with appropriate dialog choices could get him to leave the room (allowing you to get a scroll off the table). If you left and returned later, there would be a dog named Lar there.


Kein;
Both accounts are the same person. When the new forum software was installed and everything transferred over / imported, there was a problem with the 'Lar' account. Since that was the only one affected (something about being the first account after a couple test accounts that had been deleted), it was easier and probably much faster to create another account than to track down and fix the problem.

I have seen only one "Lar" at the office.

well if hes responsible for the horrendous number of hours ive sunk into divinity games i have one thing to say..


THANK YOU

It has to be Swen. The status updates remind me a lot of the awesome openings in their manuals.

I just hope stuff like that does not lead to more people being annoyed with you and this "We are so elite and now stop whining about our cool, totally unbalanced final fights that take 10 attempts and lots of frustration to complete" attitude (you also did it in Divinity 2 where you just put some final boss there that did 10 times more damage than anyone else and thought it was a cool, thrilling thing).

I really do not get how people who make such awesome games (I really mean this!) can be so bad about balancing them. Balance has been an issue in Divine Divinity, Divinity 2 (the beginning super hard, near the end way too easy to the point where the enemies in the last 20% of the game could not even damage you anymore!), and now this (or the respawn rates, ...). I'm plainly not getting it.

The only viable explanation that comes to my mind is that the dog mentioned earlier is responsible for the balance.

With DD I was actually looking forward to the challenge of that opponent, as the end section of the game was relatively easy, but I didn't have any problems at all and it was a disappointingly quick fight (even if it wasn't, there are lots of effective techniques and exploits in the game).

I can not comment about the end of FoV, but Lar said it was balanced to be challenging, that they should have added something to allow for people who found it too tough and they would look at fixing that. How does that become 'We are so elite and now stop whining'???
There are people who find D2:ED too hard on easy difficulty and not hard enough on hard, so comments about the difficulty balancing a game are accurate.

You could still be right about the dog, though...

Actually the last mission we are talking about here has quite different problems from the ones you described in the main game. While varying difficulty is of course a problem it is on one side hard to avoid because of all the freedom a rpg grants, and on the other side kinda self regulated by that (leveling up elsewhere, better equipment, potions).

However this mission we are talking about here is played as dragon and with afaik predefined spells. You cannot do much before that point to make this easier. Now the second problem si that you are not responsible for yourself anymore because it is an escort mission.
This leads to a quite unrpg like situation where it is really all about some skill you have or do not have in this situation and that makes it quite hard for the people that do not have this particular skillset but rather a different one. This however in my mind makes it very hard for larian to change the mission in a way that does not make it ridiculous. I mean it is the fight against the invasion of damian, so even with the challange they put there, story wise I kinda thought... "If that's really all... why even bother with the main quest. As dragon I could have killed everything of that invasion force alone, all the time..."

We've decided to replace the easy difficulty level of the game with a casual mode which does a number of changes that should allow everybody who's having problems with certain parts of the game to get through (within reason). You can swap between casual/normal difficulty level whenever you want, and that should ease the problems some people seem to be having.

Normal mode - how it was balanced by the designers (intentionally challenging)
Casual mode - enemies are nerfed to make hard battles easier (intentionally easy without removing all challenge)

Some of the things affected by casual mode: The zeppelin survives a lot longer, your creature is stronger, you receive less damage and the enemies are easier to defeat.

Perfect choice.

I hope you will keep the respawn as well on Normal/Hard.

Ok, you get your 8/10. I just beat the final mission and if you do it "right", it's really a piece of cake:
Fly ahead and ignore the spammy comments that call you back. Only use the fireball (first attack) and the nuke. Nuke big stuff, take out other stuff. The zeppelin made it with like more than 95% of its health. If I had not complained about it being too hard, I had said the opposite if I had tried the mission first with this approach.

I'm still not entirely sure what to make of this. Either (based on what you try to do, for example if you think it'd be cool to use your dragon-breath more) it's too hard, probably next to impossible or a real piece of cake. My suggestion would be to tone the defenses down somewhat or tone the offense of your dragon up but really force the dragon to stay near the zeppelin (like it gets shot down quickly if you move too far away). That way, you have to defend the flying thing but can destroy the buildings fast enough before they shoot down the zeppelin.

On the other hand it's a really tricky thing to balance and to get right and I also have to admit I never saw, in over 20 years of gaming, a truly working and fun escort mission.

If you promise to leave escort missions out next time I'd pre-order Divinity 3 tomorrow. Or some other Dragon-Knight-Add-On would also be nice (with more dragon flying, please). Any plans for that?

As for respawns: Maybe you can make it that you set them as different settings? Like a difficulty and a seperate "respawn rate" bar.

I made a movie of me playing it in a way that works really well, which can be seen here, if anyone needs a guide:


Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

To my mind it cannot be a problem for anyone if he plays it like that but of course you also have to want to play stuff like that. I could imagine that people just are annoyed by such things...

Anyway respawn with ingame option is pretty crazy in terms of xp gain imo. I personally would ahve preffered a more lore like ingame solution where it stops in the town once you kill the engineer for example...

And maybe in the academy it should take a little longer for the enemies to spawn because it takes all the fun out of exploring - which is doubled complex there with the helmet - with enemies that kill you all the time.

How's the end fight?

I read the following on another forum:

More challenging than the other fights I would say but not too hard. Her AI is not really amazing... She is immune to cursing though whihc I find incredibly annoying. Nothing I hate more than cheating bosses.

Personally I love this type of "balance" I like to feel all my hard work has payed off and that my character truly has become stronger then any other. It makes more sense to me then starting off strong and still being beat down at the end after all that experience. If you think about it logically the "boss" is sitting around eating cake telling his lackeys to get things done all the while you are on a quest to become strong enough to beat not only him but the many forces he commands.

"The only viable explanation that comes to my mind is that the dog mentioned earlier is responsible for the balance."

Literally ROFL I had actually read over that one.

And he was, in more ways than you can imagine.

You can find some of the origins of Larian here: http://web.archive.org/web/19981205212704/http://www.larian.com/

ok. so i am a bit disapointed in the final batle. I was hoping to fight an extraordinary large demon Damian. but thats that. and it didn't show were damian had gone to and what is he planing. about the rest....... AN EXELENT MADE GAME.

virumor what happened to u means that u don't know how to play this game. meaning if u are a fighter u invest the most in strenght and melee resistence and so on. and being a mage or an archer u have to keep distance or u are dead before it even starts. I made the final batle in 1 shot. i only tried it 1 time and I won.

Well, just finished FoV here, and I have to say the entire expansion was very well made.

About the final mission, though...Played through and finished it my very first try on the normal difficulty.



As for the final fight, it was really the only fight that could hurt my character in foV. But even then once I stopped being perma-stunned by magic blast/polymorph i was able to finish the fight in about 5 seconds. Of course, my character was about level 43, had 100 strength and vit, and was using the Tiger Bite sword with a legendary shield. I crammed the sword with +100 physical and magical damage enchantments as well as a +9% critical rate enchantment on it.

Overkill? Yes. But after the final fight in the original ED I didn't want to take any chances

Seriously, the difficulty level went from pretty easy to wow this is pretty tough....but only for that last mission.


The thing is this; that single mission (my only deaths of the entire expansion) is drastically over-tuned. It seems to me that you guys may have approached the calibration of the mission from an odd perspective. Focusing on that mission as the crowning moment of an epic quest to save your world (and the end of a pretty kick-ass gaming experience) from the player's perspective may have led you to loosen it up a bit.

You have the cutscene that begins the mission; it is a really sweet visual. From there it jumps to level 8 of super mario brothers and I find myself in a fight that is at least five times as difficult as any other in the game (seriously, I played a ranger and didn't even have to strafe in the expansion).

I was in a mood to glide into the finish while enjoying the culmination of the past 60 hours spent playing the saga, and reconciling my thoughts on the ending. An RPG is at its core a story. you guys did plot really well I thought. I have some complaints, but nothing game-breaking.


Bottom line: I felt the difficulty level of the final mission detracted from the game in a way that ultimately affected how I feel about the game as a whole. At least it wasn't another heart-wrenching twist like Ego though. You guys do so many things really well, but you need to seriously rethink your approach to ending sequences.

A 60-hour rpg is not like a 2-hour movie drama where people are given to appreciating endings where the creator says "except you had everything wrong and were actually on the side of evil for the past 40 hours." and then "you wanted to kick our ass so bad after the first part....why don't you save it for the last 10 mins."

To each their own, I guess. Some people are saying there are too many enemies in the final mission, yet I found it pretty obvious what to do. Maybe on hard/upcoming nightmare difficulty it's tougher, but on normal it's not that bad.

i didnt think she was too hard at all. (played on normal difficulty throughout entire game) she certainly didnt hurt me much (maybe down to 50% health at times) it was her heal that was annoying.

i had more trouble against the 3 black ring members that spawned from a teleporter in crows nest. all 3 healing themselves constantly made that battle last for ages.

ygerna only healed herself about 4 times and my pet and myself were whittling her down.

nothing major in my stats or skills.

maxed whirlwind
maxed magic missile
maxed firewall
maxed life leech
maxed regen
maxed reflect

all which i used extensively during the fight.

str, int and vit above 60. others in 40-60 range.

lvl45

========


edit - as for the dragon mission. didnt die once. i thought it was straightfoward and obvious that you should nuke everything infront of you as quickly as possible to make way for the zeppelin. i didnt bother waiting for the thing.

started by summoning wyvern to take some flack away. then just barreled headlong towards each ballista and strafed around whilst firebreathing them all. only things i used the super-fireball on were clusters of lightning cannons or nests.
i didnt even bother taking out aerial enemies, but i did nuke nests before anything else so they couldnt spawn all the time.


what i found odd was that near the end of that section i got a message saying 'we're taking too much damage, we'll never make it back again' and the zeppelins health bar had only lost about 3 pixels off it.
poor scripting there.

The final mission was hard, but not TOO hard. I did die the first time though, and the Zeppelin was losing a lot of health.

After dying, I went back to before triggering the final mission and made Ultimate Rejuvenation potions until I had over 100, then I retrieved all my Dragon Armor from the coffer, because the default stuff doesn't have any bonuses on it, and I really needed the extra health. Also, being in the crystal must have nerfed the dragon a bit, because before FoV, I had 100 Intelligence, and my Dragon Form could firebreath indefinitely faster than my mana could drain, so I had infinite mana, but in this last mission, it went to zero really fast, although it came back fast enough after I stopped breathing fire.


As soon as the mission started, I paused and remapped the hotkeys because I was used to having Healing on "4". I don't know why the Dragon form was locked out of the skill menu, but at least I could remap the hotkeys by right-clicking them.

I flew ahead, and I mostly used the firebreath on the towers, and the nuke whenever the cooldown ended. I never was far enough ahead for the zeppelin to complain that I was too far away. I mostly ignored the flyers, I tossed Fire Sphere's their way occasionally.

The zeppelin was still at full health when it started complaining about taking "too much damage", but soon after that it reached the point where there were too many towers for me to prevent damage happening, so I'm glad the mission ended when it did.

Ygerna was an ok boss. My Demon distracted her very well, and when it died, I turned invisible and summoned my creature until my demon cooldown wore off.

I finished at level 46.

Awesome game, great ending.

I failed a couple of times, but it wasn't THAT hard. You just have to clear the path much before the zeppelin arrives, and use the area explosion on those large groups of towers as often as possible, and don't forget to summon the wyvern. When they start yelling that they're not going to make it, save the game (if the Zeppelin isn't near-dead, of course). It doesn't take much longer in that part, but it's exactly when the zeppelin can end up blowing up in a few seconds if you're not careful.

I finished Ygerna with 10-20 hits. (medium)

sword of rhode with +100 magical en melee damage (980 melee damage 680 magic damage)
a lot of equipment charmed with melee damage
100 vitality
100 strength
level 15 regeneration, whirlwind, critical strike,

made it real easy

Sword of Rhode?

Ygerna took me about 3 minutes with 99 Intelligence and Fireball, Way of the battlemage, magic missile & magic blast all maxed. I suppose she has very high magic resistance since my fireball did 2414 damage to her, while it one-shotted every other enemy in the expansion with 6000+ damage. She seems much easier for a melee character.

I had to watch out for her charge attack and she could do a lot of melee damage.

I found this mission to easy, played it on hard. All that was needed was nuke everything and the ship ended up at 90% HP when I was done, on first try. I agree that it could have been hard if you jumped into combat without experience but you get plenty of it main game at the flying fortresses. As for Ygerna part of it also to easy because of enchants.

In fact I think the entire game was to easy thanks to the enchants. I like the idea of enchants but with them you can become invincible and 1-2 shoot everything. I had to remove any kinda +damage modifier on weapons to even get a challenge, but even after that I couldn't die anyway as my HP regen was 2,7% per second and I had 1500 HP and life leeched 400 HP every time it procced.

Depends on class, I guess. I had a pure mage (INT maxed, spirit around 80) and sometimes it was a bit hard to kill crowds of skeletons 2-3 levels above, since my shields are pretty low. Yeah, it took usually 3 shots to kill the guy, but when there were multiple enemies, I had some challenge. As for bosses, well... I just jump and shot. When I grew tire of this, I jumped on tall rock or something like that and all enemies stopped, trying to calculate the shortest way to me on the plain ground, which actually doesn't exist.

As for the last mission, it DOES suck and boring, but easy if you fly AHEAD of the ship and fireball towers.

I massacred Ygerna the first try lol
I had

lvl 13 Dual Weild
lvl 13 Magic Missile
lvl 15 bleed
lvl 15 Death blow
lvl 10 whirlwind
lvl 15 Rush attack
lvl 15 heal
lvl 5 regen (as my armour gave me more than enough lol)
lvl 3 Fire wall (lvl 5 with my armour & accessorys)
Lvl 5 mana Efficiency ( All from my Armour & Accessorys lol)
lvl 5 Way of the Battle Mage (again from my armour & accessorys)

all my stats were above 50 lowest was Dex at 55 str 82 vit 78 int 71 spt 71

Melee Res 61% Ranged res 56% Magic res 52%

Conditioned Bady 75% Hightened Reflexes 55% Indomitable will 75%

she did'nt stand a chance lol

If you fail to clear an area.The Zeppelin just run into it and get pummelled.That when i though
-Wow this is stupid.

So what could have been better?You have to defend the Zepp and you have to clear the passage for the Zepp . But not both at the same time.So the Zepp could simply wait until the ares is cleared.or you have to protect the Zepp for single incoming attack.But the Zepp running through an army of ballista?That a bit extreme.

Well you're a dragon and can't really talk but anyway..
I have some question for Larian ...

How can i hear the captain of the Zeppelin?Does my dragon have a talkie-Walkie or something?Telepathy ?

i had a rather *paladin spec* board and shield.I was basicly a walking behemoth of regeneration.Unkillable.

of course it proberbly Telepathy

you can read minds in human form so why not a more powerfull version of it in dragon form. After all your dragon form is a lot more powerfull than human form so telepathy or some form of magic otherwise how is it you end up hearing Zandalor lol

Is there any chance you could make a wimp mode for this mission? I would just like to get past it.

I have tried to complete it more than a dozen times, it doesn't matter how quickly I destroy the towers my zeppelin still crashes, it is so frustrating.

Paris, make sure you:

- Take down all towers systematically from island to island. Use a combination of Fire Breath and Fire Sphere on the Ballista Towers.
- Use the Wrath of the Patriarch skill to clear clusters like Lightning or Nest Towers surrounded by Ballistas. Use this skill as many times as you can: once the cooldown is over, immediately pick a cluster of towers and go wham, bam, thank you ma'am.
- Dragon Burst can also take down buildings and cools down rather quickly, so it's a great skill to use when there are multiple high end targets you need to take down that are too scattered to effectively use Wrath of the Patriarch for - by that I mean the line of Nest Daises.
- Don't stay close to the zeppelin, but head out and clear its path. Never mind when the captain shouts 'Where are you going?'. Just blast everything as rapidly as you can.
Do this and you're sure to make it. On the final battle!

I did exactly as you told me Macbeth, it took me four try's but on the forth I made it.

Thank you.

You're welcome! Glad you made it

WOOHOO Congrats Paris

Thank you. I have to admit, completing DKS made me feel on top of the world.
I think I shall take a walk in the sunlight.

I found the last mission incredibly easy, almost saddeningly so. I was miles ahead of the zeppelin and had destroyed every single platform then sat around for a couple of minutes while the thing caught up and started the cinematic.

I have to admit, it was tedious for that reason.

i think u haven't used the eye of the patriach good enough, becouse in my game it didn'T take any damage at all...

glad i found this thread, i never even knew there was a casual setting.. final mission was boring and tedious until i found that, rofl. Hate 'escort' missions.. especially in a RPG where you build your character to how you want and then are forced into a role (Dragon Form) that you haven't played since the first game ages ago, and are given zero control over your skills/stats in said form.

Am very grateful to everyone for their suggestions/videos etc. and I've tried, I really have but even on casual mode I can't get to the point where the final event happens which gets me past this flying dragon thing. It's getting to be a bit like "Risen", where I loved the RPG but it turned into an action game at the end. I never buy action games because I know I can't do them. Risen remains unfinished to this day. I would very much like to finish FoV. It's been a brilliant game (and, incidentally, tech support has been exemplary)and I''d like a sense of closure.

Even though it's not my main character, I was hoping that someone might have a savegame from the "final event" moment that they could PM me?

Thank you

The whole escort thing was a bit tedious. The final battle though wasn't really hard. Just slashing through Ygerna was enough with no creatures on the table. So I set the difficulty to hard and tried again. My hp went down a reasonable amount this time, but not really enough to make me want to dodge any of the attacks. I started experimenting skills on her like fatality and thousand strikes... I really expected more though. More opponents, more challenge.

I'd like to address the game as a whole. You've got very neat skills and a huge boost you can get from equipment, not to mention an excess of stat/skill points if you manage to pick all of them. The problem is... none of these are vital to complete the game as you could just click kill enemies with your weapon.

I was mainly disappointed that I didn't get to lay the smackdown on Damian, and I'm kind of with Uncontested on the escort missions thing.

That and I was looking forward to taunting Rhode some more. Or possibly using her as a coat-rack. That works too.

The final mission is definitely the weakest point of the whole game.

We should be rewarded with:


A) Big [ground] boss
B) Semi-strategic fight (if u played darksiders u know what I mean)
C) Epic loot
D) Closing story.
E) Freeroam after u finished the game, to enjoy the new loot from last boss and test it on monsters u skipped in this playthrough


That would be indeed epic ending.

Instead I got 2000000 towers throwing shit at me.

So I just thought - ok, how about I just watch the ending on youtube instead of shifting through 2000000 towers.


U guys did it right in Divine Divinity.

I have no idea why u decided to came up with this flying nonsense.

I have to agree with this. I loved the game overall, I think it was superb; but the final mission rather undermined that. Mainly because I absolutely loathe escort missions.

I don't think I've met a gamer who likes escort missions. I know of plenty who absolutely despise them, though, and I'm one of them. Most are merely annoying, many are difficult, and no small number are very difficult. But not difficult in a good way: not the sort of challenge that makes me want to pit my wits against the game. It's the sort of "difficult" that makes me want to stab myself in the eyes with blunt pencils.

I'd really wanted to finish FoV because it's been an awful lot of fun, and it's only recently I'd returned to playing Divinity 2 after giving up when protecting Zandalor The Slow got to be too much about six months back. Fortunately with the revamped difficulty it was a breeze this time, but the escort mission, not so much.

Please, Larian chaps, take on board my heartfelt plea of no more escort missions. Please. I know there seems to be some unwritten rule that all RPGs and action games have at least one escort mission but be daring and break that rule, eh?



Taken me about a dozen attempts so far and I still can't complete it. I know I'm not much good at combat, which is why I avoid games that are mostly action, but it's depressing when a key stage is basically impossible.

Hmm, potions, someone mentioned: that's something I've always neglected in dragon form because... I dunno, really. Maybe it's time I gave the somewhat neglected Barbatos a visit and stocked up likewise so I didn't waste so much time backing off. And using some decent dragon armour from the start, as I only realised halfway through that my previous armour had been unequipped and replaced with a set that was utterly useless...

But maybe later. I haven't finished gnashing my teeth yet.

Definitely replace the default armor. I wore a chest that gave me an extra 40% health, because for some reason dragon health doesn't regenerate, but mana does. I wore legs that gave me 40% to offense because I wanted to destroy things as quickly as possible. I'm not sure the rest mattered because the game seemed to preset my skills.

Use your wyvern friend, which doesn't seem to last very long so repeated summons are necessary. Use your dragon spirit to keep health topped up.

Other than that, keep trying. It is frustrating and I couldn't do it without several tries on casual difficulty. It doesn't help that the nuke skill is poorly described so that I wasn't sure what it was for; I wasn't even using it on my first try as I'd associated it with Bellegar's device and thought I should save it for the end of the mission.

For the most part, ignore the zeppelin and focus on your own health and welfare, and just keep destroying as much as you can, as quickly as you can.

Hopefully Larian will avoid escort missions in future endeavors.

Oh and the argument that we had lots of practice with fortresses isn't entirely valid for the escort mission: yes I destroyed ballistae, nests, and so on, but I did it at my own pace with only my own welfare to worry about. My pace is much slower than that of the escort mission.

I think those of us having the most trouble are finding dragon form to be weaker than human form. As a human I can one-shot most enemies with powerful magic, but my dragon has to work at it. As a human I survive better against groups of enemies, but my dragon has to hope his cooldowns are reset, or fly away and heal up. ED's Well Cave battle and FoV's escort mission highlight these differences.

Overall I give patched DKS a 9/10 rating because I thoroughly enjoy the rest of the game. (I played from beginning to end last week while I had some time off from work.)

I don't agree the end sucks, the end is perfect and the last mission in dragon form was the perfect way to end the game.

Still, the last thing to do was not to crash into the castle, then you had to beat the sense out of Ygerna ;P

I'm just mulling over this--it saves me going and trying again, which I can't face doing at the moment! Anyway, my mulling concluded that it's probably something that people who are good at multi-tasking find easier, and people who struggle to be observant or attentive struggle with. I think to get through easily, you need to be observant and methodical to spot the ballistas and so on that need to be taken out; you need to use the new weapon thingy to take out clusters and keep an eye on its cooldown; you need to use the "summon friend" and keep an eye on both its continued existence and cooldown; you need to alternate between fireball (and its cooldown) and dragon breath; you need to keep an eye on your health, the Zeppelin's health and its position; and in doing so you need to remember to use the heal spell and potions and keep an eye on their respective cooldowns; you need to remember to use decent armour instead of the "placeholder" set it gives you; and a bunch of other stuff I can't even remember.

Given my difficulty concentrating on one thing let alone several and the impracticality of looking around and taking stock, I suppose it's not really surprising that I've yet to complete this section successfully.

I wish they'd given an alternative means of completion so I didn't have to do this, however, because even if I do complete it I won't have enjoyed it. I believe I mentioned that I hate escort quests!

So please, Larian, give us an alternative means of doing this stage at some point. Or at least give us a Zeppelin with thrice the hitpoints!

But the evidence of a good or great game is one that SCALES.

Hate to harp, but the ratio in Oblivion in difficulties went from -1000 to normal to +1000. That's a 1:1 million ratio difference that they allowed for. Are you even at 2:1?

Hell, if you count the fact that they gave you direct console access complete with built-in help so you could mod your character anyway you want -- can you even begin to say that you tried?

While the graphic detail is better here, the quests and lack of a guide book make a complete walkthrough and/or wiki essential. Some of us really don't get off on 20 question type games, or "guess what the writer was thinking" type games. I gave up on Adventure type games years ago. Myst absolutely sucked for me. didn't get anywhere. I like story, progression, sensuality & relationships (maybe sexuality), and fighting (lots on that).

But the worst is when progression stops and nothing is happening -- that's what happens when people get hung up. As a story teller, as any entertainer -- you've lost most the audience at that point. You can't hang people up -- not for any length of time -- there need to be hints and progression, not senseless beating of the head against the wall.

These are all OLD tenants of game play that each new studio/developer, seems to have to learn from scratch, because none of this stuff is taught or handed down. It may be in books -- but they are in ones that just don't get read.

By the time people learn the basics, they are out of the industry or too old to be employable -- especially in the game companies that expect 60 hour weeks (60 is average in the US). Those companies don't understand that creativity doesn't come out of exhaustion. If they had had 1.8x as many programmers @ 80% of the benefits that only worked 32 hour weeks (8 hours for self-project time), and allowed 20% more in the schedule, they'd get much better results, not burn out employees, and thus get more experienced staff over the long run.

Of course, it can't happen in the US, where next quarter's results are paramount, but the US's model of business seems to be doomed without business corporations running/owning government -- oh wait, that's what's happening in the US...er....
nevermind...on that...who knows what will happen there.

why not keep easy and Add casual?

Why reduce options?

IIRC, Oblivion's difficulty was 6:1 in favour of the player on the easiest setting (i.e. enemies dealt a sixth of the damage; not sure if this was just enemies or all other actors) to 6:1 in favour of enemies at the hardest, i.e. they dealt six times your damage.

I normally left it in the middle which seemed balanced enough except for the "difficult teen" levels where I had to move it halfway to the easy end. Though as I've said before, I'm not terribly good at combat.

Of course once FCOM came along all bets were off! Though that was nothing to do with difficulty but rather levelling.

Hurrah! Finally finished after only 185,282 attempts. Only just, though: I think my Led Zeppelin had <5% health by the time I reached the tower. Then I flicked Ygerna's bum and she died. Teh end.


Edit: to be marginally less obtuse, I actually quite liked the ending. Of course part of me sympathises with the "but there should've been more!" but I'd think that whatever we were presented with. It was good enough for me, and as long as there's a Divinity III on the cards...

After two days of following all the advice here to get the zeppelin through I've still not had any luck and have gone from this is the most amazing RPG on the Xbox ever to never recommending this game and I can't wait to trade it in for a FUN game, not one that ends in frustration and tears. Games are supposed to be fun - how could you make such a non-fun ending to this? To the point the game can't be finished??

I dont know if i missed anything in this post but i dont see what the problem is with the last mission its not bad at all I never got the zepplin there is one piece but the pilot does crash it into the tower and destroying it to me thats mission complete. one tip that I did was kept all my dragon armor on my toon and used the better pieces I had rather than the default ones they give you . There are some buggs in the game but nothing that would change my mind about this game which is a very awesome game .

I don't know if your actual character build influences what you get as a dragon but in dragon form my fire sphere ability was 15 and took so little mana that it was regenerated by the time it was ready for use again. Fire breath on the other hand was practically worthless . Used all of my magic within 2 seconds and took longer to breath something to death than it did to simply hit it twice with fire spheres.

So, assuming you get the same build regardless of your character, use nothing but fire spehere during that last mission and go from island to island in a straight line. The zepplin's going to be moving pretty much straight through the blockade of enemies (not the smartest zepplin pilot ever -_-) so minimize damage to it by killing everything in it's path long before it gets there. None of the enemies will attack the zepplin from behind nor will they fly ahead to attack the it so as long as you clear the area before the zepplin gets there it should be safe. Using only fire sphere may seem to be slower than a combination of skills but, again assuming the build is the same regardless of character, I got the Zepplin through with more than 70% of it's health remaining and it only began taking damage around the end when it approached the some half a dozen+ islands of ballistas, nests and lightning towers clustered tightly together. Plus fire sphere has a blast radius so it generally kills several flyers in one hit as well (even indirectly when attacking the nests.)

Spoiler
If we're being honest I lost it the first time and had to replay it a second but I was a bit disappointed with the forced crashing of the zepplin because when the pilot actually started to say "we can't make it back, we're too damage" he still had 90% of his health -_-.

What can I say? Loved the game, intensely disliked the final mission. First, I am in the "I hate escort missions in any way, shape or form" camp. They are never good (and I can tell -- after 20 years of gaming). Second, this particular escort mission is tedious and idiotic beyond reason. Why wouldn't the zeppelin wait until the path is clear? Wouldn't that make more sense? Why is the dragon skills screen unavailable? Why the hell is mana being burned within 3 seconds? I am lvl 43 now but my dragon became much weaker than it was at lvl 27. Mystery. Also, why is that pilot so annoying? Make him shut up for the love of god, he drove me crazy.

Don't get me wrong, I like challenge. I played DD2 on normal/hard difficulty when everybody complained how "hard" it was on easy and I breezed through all the flying fortresses without much effort and had lots of fun with that part of the game. But this... yeah, huge disappointment. Won't replay.

5/10

I just finished the game, final escort mission for me was pretty easy. I just go long distance before zeppelin, destroying every balista , towers and nest. Only right before cutscene there was hard when zeppeling quickly lost healt, from 80% to 5% in less that 30!.

And Ygerna,pff, that was disappointing, way of ther ranger+ splitting arrows+close distance= her death. In less that minute.

I had a lot of fun with the end and I'm not a challenge whore. Max firebreath, and fireball were the only skills I needed. Well, summoning a Wryven probably helped decoy things a little too. Also, the patriarch nuke spell was extremely satisfying. I didn't even know I had the spell at first. The fireball doesn't recharge fast enough, so you really have to rely on the breathing to get 80% of the work down. (less if you make smart use of the patriarch nukes). I could definitely see problems if I didn't go in with max firebreath. That skill is the workhorse, and I'm not sure how I would beat it without that skill.

I am sure the final mission can be completed - I only tried once and was put off with it - but the problem is it is not enjoyable from RPG point of view.

I could tolerate no skills, no special armour (started afresh) - but why does my escort have to be such a tactical moron!??

This mission would be tolerable if the zeppelin actually cooperated with the dragon but why does it just fly on to be so obviously fodder to the cannons?

I really do not mind challenge, hey I persited with Divenine Divinity after missing the dungean at the first village which made the it REALLY hard for a while - but I hate "single option blast your way" solutions that require a very specific tactis and game play.

Maybe the dragon form had to be used, but I found it so mechanical and uniternactive compared to the human form I hated every dragon from mission.

Meanwhile, I do, in total, love Divinity series, and very much look fwd to the next one!

As I said earlier: