Larian Studios Forums Beyond Divinity (English) Suggestions Beyond Divinity Demo Suggestions

I really enjoyed playing the Beyond Divinity demo. I looks like it will be a great RPG.

I do have some comments:

1. My very first impression of the Death Knight was bad. Big scary dude with a wimpy little voice. The voice is okay for the rest of the game, but maybe his first speech at least should make his voice a little deeper/tougher?

2. I found it annoying that the camera doesn't track around with the characters after I've moved it. I understand from reading other posts that there may be a way to reattach the camera, but it wasn't evident to me how to do this, and I think this should be automatic. How about an "Automatically reattach camera when player walks near edge of screen" option that is on by default, and can be turned off if someone likes the current behavior.

3. When the camera does track, rather than put the characters smack dab in the middle of the screen, while not have a small bias towards the direction they are walking? For example, if you're walking to the right, then the camera will automatically put 60% of the screen space to the right of your character to give you a better heads-up as to what you can expect.

4. The fighting movements seems like they're in slow motion.

5. If I die, and try and load the game, it asks me each and every time if I'm sure I want to lose the current unsaved game. Of course I do! I'm dead!

6. Is there a quick save button? Quick saves are vital to not loose the pace of the game and still feel like I can back up my work every minute or two.

7. If I click the little potion button next to my character portrait, and I have 3 potions, it has a "(3)" by the potion to let me know how many I have. However, if I drink a couple, it still confusingly says "(3)" until I unclick the potion button and click it again. In other words, I have to refresh that manually.

8. I don't mind that the two party members have separate inventories. In a way, this can help you organize things. However, I do think it would be convenient if gold wasn't shown in the individual inventories, but rather just added to the common gold number. At the moment, the gold number only shows the gold carried by the currently selected character, not the whole party. Similarly, it would be convenient if food was just hidden away in another common number "food rations".

9. As a new player I clicked a few of the items and when I clicked on some food it vanished, with a comment that there's nowhere to sleep, or any verification window saying what will happen. So the game just let me waste my food?

10. There's a guy that begs you for water at one point in the demo. Listen to his voice files again, cause his voice sounds terrible, like the file was messed up or something.

Reading other posts I noticed someone requested an "Alt" key that highlights all the items in the scene. Actually, I'd rather that you didn't do this. I actually like that you need to be clever enough to spot, say, those little keys lying around, or that you need to move your mouse to find there are cracks in the wall. It keeps you sharp and thinking, and helps it be more than just a hack and slash.

Keep up the good work in the final stretch!

Atlas

welcome to the forum!!! wow we're getting a lot of bright new people with great ideas from this demo thingy!







#1. yes, i agree there, the first speech should sound tougher. (is that a word, heheh)

#2 yes, but its not to hard to move the most arouind, is it???

#3 ok

#4 no, theyre not. it just takes a bit to raise up a heavy sword and swing it down on someones head, dont you think??? I dont think its like a gun you just do it in rapid fire, its heavy!!

#5 yes, i think thats a precaution for people when they havn't died, to make sur theyre doing it on purpose, or have saved. its easier to just do it all the time. *though id like the ability not to be able to quicksave when i die, screwed me up bad in <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/div.gif" alt="" /> *

# 6. quicksave? i think there will be one in the final game, there was in divinity.

# 7, hmm, didn't do that to me, maybe it did, i didn't pay attemtopn, but i dont think so, it does go grey when you run out though. and i just remember how many i have. i dont have like 500 of them like im <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/div.gif" alt="" /> yet. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

# 8 . good idea. like how the potions are allowed for either to use?? (though maybe all potions??)

# 9
weird.


# 10. not sure why, but i think this might be on perpose. vocoder. his voice.

The food is in your inventory I think. When you get to a sleeping place you can use it.

Ctrl-S and Ctrl-L are the default hotkeys for quick save / load.

The alt key is already in BD, as it was in Divinity, though there is no requirement to use it.

The potion count was updated properly for me. You can not drink a health potion if you are already at full hit points.

Assuming that there is a problem with 9800 series Radeons or ATI cards in general:

There need to be a fix for ATI cards. The game's running extremely slow on my system, and it's definitely exceeding the requirements. I'd love to play the game demo more in-depth, but I can't until I can get the game to run smoothly.

On another note, the voices do need a little work. The voices for DD were great in general so I was a little surprised to find the weaker acting in some parts of the demo. However, this is more of a minor quibble than anything.

However, from what I can see, the game looks really really good and it seems like it'll be a worthy successor to DD.

I have a Radeon 9600 XT, and didn't have any problems.

I agree with the money. I agree with the characters seemed like they were moving awfully slow as well. I don't know what's up with the food. I am not sure if one isn't supposed to not be able to pick up rotten food, but I thought I heard that one could. I couldn't.

Hi everyone,

Yes, I liked the BD demo. I am damn sure going to buy the game, even if the few gripes I have with it aren't fixed (they're really not big enough to turn me off about this game, its potential is awesome as far as I can see).

That said, the few gripes I have are:

1. Voice acting. It's terrible. I agree that the Death Knight sounds like a regular guy in a bad mood, although I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt to see whether his voice suits the context of the rest of the game. I truly hope he shows himself to be more of a chaotic, evil [nocando] than he was in the demo. I also hope there is belligerent, unforgiving conflict between him and my hero in the full game and not the grudging respect that I suspect is to come. He's a [nocando], not a pussycat.

2. I don't know if it's my hardware setup, but when I break open a barrel to see what's inside there is a delay between hitting it and the sound of it breaking playing. I am running WinXP SP1 with a SBLive! Value, an AMD XP 2400+, 512mb of DDR333 RAM, and the latest SBLive! drivers. Anyone else having this problem?

3. The game doesn't automatically unpause when I click on an enemy during combat like it did in DD. I assume this is to accomodate giving orders to a party and not just one main character? If this is the case, then I have no problem with it. Perhaps it will just take some getting used to.

4. The main character runs like a dork. Sorry.

5. The interface doesn't feel as streamlined as it did in DD, but then the context of the game has changed, hasn't it? It's no longer one man/woman against the world, there are others to consider now. The inventory management system in particular bugs me a little in that while I can open two separate inventory windows, they both appear on top of each other and unless I drag the second one off the first, it appears to be the same window at first glance. Perhaps a cascaded window style would be a little more appropriate? Also the arrows that allow me to switch between characters feel a little clumsy compared to an interface with individual pictures of my party members on it, but then again I assume this was done on purpose and the devs have taken things into consideration that haven't occurred to me (or which I will encounter in the full game with a larger party).

Other than these minor gripes, I am really very happy with the demo. I was a little concerned that the transition to 3D characters would leave something to be desired, but I am happy to say that the character graphics are only slightly uglier than DD's and not grotesque in comparison. I understand that making the characters 3D gave the artists more leeway to create more animations faster and easier than in DD, so I can forgive the devs their transgressions. I thought DD's character gfx were excellent but apparently they were a TON of work, so moving on to 3D was an obvious choice.

As for possible delays while Larian fix the few problems we've reported back to them, my opinion is that if it takes them a little longer than anticipated to get BD onto store shelves, then so be it. We've waited 2 years to play in the DD universe again, what's another month or two, right? I'd rather they release a game they are 100% happy with than release it prematurely and catch all sorts of flak for giving us incomplete, unpolished code.

And that's my feedback for the moment. I will be sure to replay the demo a number of times this weekend and let you all know if I find anything else that could use a change before BD goes gold.

One last thing - Larian, you are my new Sierra. They made quality games with heart back in the day, and it is more than good to find another developer with a similar attitude towards their games and their fans. Keep up the good work!

Cheers

Deon du Plessis

Found something I'd like to add to my previous post:

The writing that pops up whenever a character is hit that details the damage done does not freeze on-screen when I hit the pause key as it did in DD. I would really like it not to disappear as quickly as it does, I got such a kick out of seeing exactly how much damage I was doing as the Divine One and was hoping that would carry over to BD.

That's it!

Cheers

i also have SBLive value & even when on the menu i suffered stuttered audio. clicking each thing & yes, even when customising characters i suffered the same thing.

i wonder if it's sound hardware acceleration problem?

2. I found it annoying that the camera doesn't track around with the characters after I've moved it. I understand from reading other posts that there may be a way to reattach the camera, but it wasn't evident to me how to do this, and I think this should be automatic. How about an "Automatically reattach camera when player walks near edge of screen" option that is on by default, and can be turned off if someone likes the current behavior.

I totaly agree!!!! like in DD u have to hold the shift button to be able to move past the screen (wtih char in middle) why carnt BD be like that again????

btw isnt it double click on the char portrait to make the camera follow him/her??

To make the camera track the main characer, hold down the left mouse button for about a second. Isn't that handy-dandy?

Maybe I just couldn't figure out how, but if I had multiple potions in my inventory I couldn't give just one or two to the DK I had to give all of them to him, and vice versa. That annoyed me and made it harder to survive.

you don't need to pass them to each other. you automatically share potions. click on the potions button my the avatars to reach them. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />

HM, I have the same soundcard, but not such problems ... have you got the latest driver for that ?

By the way, I have Win98SE.

Wait, I remember in the character creation screen I had this, too ... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/think.gif" alt="" />

yes i had/have that too.....

Confirming the audio stuttering problem as well! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" />
Especially when the game was loading something.

Soundcard and Harddisk usually have separate IRQs. Well, nowadays Soundcards not always, IRQ-sharing is everywhere. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />

From this assumption on I'd say that there is a slight conflict between the operating system's work with both IRQs at nearly the same time (loading -> access to harddisk , music -> soundcard). Could be Directx also.

could be Dx also?
i thought....this version was ok v9b... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/think.gif" alt="" />

I have 9b, too. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />