Hello everyone!

Thank you for sending us so much feedback! We're happy to release our first major update with plenty of new features and fixes.

If you want to continue playing with your old savegames, this version is not compatible with your previous savegames, but you can always switch your Steam game to branch ea_version_1

To switch to this old version, simply follow these steps:

1. In your Steam library, right click the game Divinity: Original Sin 2 and select Properties
2. In the Properties screen, click on the tab BETAS
3. In BETAS, click the arrow to open the dropdown
4. Choose the branch ea_version_1 - For saves with version 2.0.165.341 and click Close

If you're interested in more behind the scenes footage, check out our Kickstarter update:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/larianstudios/divinity-original-sin-2/posts/1712732

And here's the list of all changes. It's a whopper!

Gameplay

- Repair hammer and identifying glasses are now consumed when used.
- Made switching to inactive characters in combat possible (not for combat action but for inspecting/inventory/...).
- AI can now find cover if it finds itself teleported to a place where it can’t escape
- Fixed wizard AI scripts where they would run towards the enemy but not attack.
- "Stolen" item tag gets removed when you put in the 'Your offer' tab while trading.
- "Stolen" item tag gets removed when their original owner dies.
- Tutorial tweaks.
- No longer showing invisible enemies when player clicks on their icon with a character-backstabber.
- Tactical Retreat no longer allows jumping outside the skill range.
- Party members are now blue, default circles for Arena, turn/status console use relationship based colors.
- When you have the Zombie talent, necromancer lifesteal no longer damages you.
- Added special warning when your movement speed is 0 from a status.
- Character will no longer start dialog unless close enough.
- Weapon-based skills now use elemental bonuses on the weapon.
- Hail Strike now creates 3 projectiles (down from 4), costs 2 AP (up from 1AP).
- Rage now lasts 1 turn (down from 2), reduces resistances by -100% (down from -25%).
- Levitate is now a Stealth skill (doesn't break sneaking or invisibility).
- Shields now provide Magic Armour in addition to Physical Armour.
- Statuses Bless and Curse no longer bless\curse surfaces that the affected character walks into. (Skills Bless and Curse will still affect surface once.)
- Wet, Chilled and Frozen now remove Holy Fire.
- Fixed irst Aid not healing character when it removes negative status.
- Decreased damage of Crippling Blow.
- Decaying Touch damage slightly buffed.
- New item combinations for empty flasks and mushrooms
- Assigned new 3D objects and icons to potions.
- Added a lot of new item names to item generation.
- Fixed flags and properties of a lot of roots (e.g. you can now interact with desks and books).
- Made some roots stackable.
- Updated/fixed descriptions for some roots.
- Created some new descriptions for roots.
- Removed abundance of items in an area (e.g. axes or hammers all over the place in one small area, etc).
- Removed some placed armour pieces because they didn't belong there.
- Reassigned treasure tables on items and characters.
- Reassigned levels on corpses, items and characters.
- Placed items now have a unique name and description.
- Created unique knife for Griff.
- Fixed value of valuable items (e.g. pearls).
- Increased level of Ancient Sword because by the time you reach it, you are not level 3 anymore.
- Treasure table updates:
- more containers now use the same distribution (refer to GenericContainer) which makes balancing easier;
- generic container was dropping junk too often;
- generic container was not dropping enough gold;
- fixed: generic enemy was not dropping armor;
- junk will be dropping a BIT more gold ;
- junk was referring to the TOOL category twice;
- stacks and sacks should not always contain something;
- redistributed RewardTiny table;
- junk should drop less cloth armor;
- FTJ specific reward could select gold twice.

Usability and polish

- Added lifetime and damage to Surface tooltips.
- Fixed toggling contextmenu in the world.
- Various climbing and teleporting fixes.
- Disabled tooltips when dragging character in character creation.
- Combat messages will no longer show on the screen of far away characters (also in multiplayer)
- Allow people to reconnect to a lobby.
- Now no longer hiding lobbies that are in progress.
- Prevent tutorial boxes on endturn of enemies.
- Arena mode: added tooltips to skills in Hero Select screen
- Difficulty bonuses are now described in tooltips.
- Added dynamically animated paintings to the main menu.
- The application's icon will now blink and show progress bar in the Windows taskbar.
- Added party tab to local chat.
- Made chat messages persistent between different UIs.
- Chat improvements in serverlist panel.
- Added Surface sound events.
- Fixed paperdoll frame to fit Female Lizards.
- Game camera now keeps Items in dialog/combat into account.
- Active characters in combat have a different combat icon in player portraits now.
- Show connectivity window in Arena Lobby UI on small diamond click.
- When in combat and the active entity is unassigned, hide the turn notice.
- Improved lighting on paperdoll.
- Reskin and implementation of the new skill selection in character creation.

Art

- Updated textures on chainmail armour (all races).
- Updated textures on leather armour (dwarves and humans).
- Updated textures on plate armour (elves).
- Replaced Braccus statue.
- Added building signs.
- Menuscreen improvements.

Animation

- Dwarves have improved talk animations.
- Lizards, dwarves and elves have improved sit and lying animations.
- Lizards, humans and elves have improved skill animations.
- Various monsters received an additional polish pass on their animations.

Effects

- Grenade effects received a visual upgrade.
- Player skill effects received various improvements.

Sound

- Sounds for main menu screen.
- Sounds for UIs.

Crash fixes

- Fixed a crash that could happen when requesting a character icon in a dialog.
- Fix crash when the status Fear was set on an item.
- Fixed a crash that happened when changing certain graphical settings while the paperdoll was showing (e.g. toggle between shadow rendering).
- Fixed crash for items in source surfaces.

Bug fixes

- Fixed multiplayer character creation exploit making it possible to start with higher stats.
- Character creation now resets class skills when resetting ability points.
- Fixed permanent potions getting reapplied on reload.
- Fixed damage from Decaying Touch being applied twice.
- Fixed Dodging not receiving bonuses from armor.
- Fixed UI showing wrong range for arrow based weapons.
- Fix for invalid "Target is out of sight" notification when targeting big characters.
- Fix for valid characters not highlighting for some skills.
- Fixed character playing fast animations after using the skill Battering Ram.
- Fixed Rush skills finishing their rotation before executing the action.
- When another player's inventory is locked, you can no longer take items from them by swapping.
- Fixed map markers sometimes disappearing when playing a 4 player multiplayer game.
- Fixed item actions through context menu sometimes not working.
- Fixed stuck turn order and combat animation after fleeing.
- Fixed Take All shortcut (space).
- Fixed bottombar activating skills while typing numbers in chat.
- Fixed clicking through the bottombar.
- Fixed Voidwoken turtle overlays not showing from certain angles.
- Fixed issue with visuals resetting when going back from third step to second step in character creation.
- Fixed destroyed objects getting targeted in cone skills.
- Fixed not returning to lobby after Arena match.
- Fixed showing cooldown warning twice.
- Fixed issues with electrified cursed surfaces.
- Fixed uniques having a chance of dropping more than once.
- Fixed issues with source skills from equipped items.
- Fixed missing textkeys on player attack animations.
- Fixed looping Rhalic dialog.
- Fixed paperdoll skewed camera (causing broken shadows).
- Fixed paperdoll not resizing when resizing the window.
- Fixed turn notification animation playing between characters.
- Fix for corpses becoming unlootable when switching characters.
- Fix for items ticking in realtime in arena.

Engine

- Fixed rotation scale check in transforming objects.
- Fixed character rotation speed not resetting correctly in character creation.
- Split up sight and shroud PP shader to fix rendering order with outlines.
- Improved Outline rendering:
- Don't use depth testing: fixes the outline being split into a lot of small pieces when behind foliage + allows to see occluded jects better.
- Added fill color to occluded parts of outline objects.
- Animation editor can now select sound resource for sound textkey.
- Added fading overlay to FxOverlayMaterial.
- Added overlay priority support.
- Made effects fade when they are attached to a fading object.
- Increased colour list capacity from 7 to 127.
- Fixed AI Bound code issues.
- Fixed exporting lightprobe into level or importing lightprobe from level template.
- Datahash fix for savegames.

Good news, but it's a pain to read this, because I'm still waiting for my GOG key ((

Great update, can't wait to try it out.

The quest log got fixed?
The part when it doesnt update even after the quest has been finished.
My main problem was the never updating quest log. The weird black cat and the fact that the dog kept barking at this cat while its no longer with me.

awesome, keep up the good work guys!

So, Warlord, Rage, 2handed-Warfare-Warrior will be still pretty broken? Rage got a nerf aswell as Hail strike and Cripple, but the main issue Warlord didn't get adressed it seems. Also Winterblast still seems to offer eternal Stunlock.

Also not sure, what do think about identifying consuming identifying glasses...

But overall most things look fine, some are hard to understand. Not sure what roots and Paperdolls exactly mean for example.

Every single items in the game has "a root" to the game. It's the term we use to describe any items

Dwut? There's a whole thread of people talking about how much they dislike repairs already and it was made worse... XD

Thank you for the explanation, norD.

And yes, I thought the same Killroy

I'm curious if Luck will be more desirable with the loot/treasure changes.

Lots of nice changes albeit most of them aren't feedback from users here, but nice to see all those fixes and minor adjustments. I didn't see anything about the main camera's default position being too zoomed in fixed, that was a big complaint from all of us.

Seconded

Running a Geomancer fighter with swords feels so bad now.. I get melted by ranged characters so quick. Feels tough to place a melee character already because of mages (Arches are not too bad.). Oh well..

Can you elaborate on what you think changed to make it worse? Not hating, just genuinely curious.

It's nice to see that using the space bar to quickly loot and close a container works now, not in the patch notes that I can see though.

@Kalrakh the paperdoll is the view of your character in the inventory window showing how your character looks when you change armour. Reminiscent of paper cut-out figures that you can add cut-out clothes with fold-able tabs to dress them up, like this:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/fa/af/1d/faaf1da6c935ee347ac82ffafe04ea06.jpg

A couple of quick notes:

-An EA patch is not a reflection of where we stand with development but rather a list of things that were cherry picked because they are ready enough to be tried out. We try to avoid including things that are broken because they are being worked on. That doesn't mean we're not working on them. E.G. We have a development track running which fundamentally changes everything related to the camera but it's going to take some time before that's ready.
-A lot of the feedback on stats systems has already been incorporated but aren't part of this patch - they should be in the next one though. We're now play testing to see how it feels. There are quite some radical changes in there.
-The repair consumables are a try-out & you'll see us try a few others ideas in that area. We want repair in there to associate a cost with bashing in things etc... A consumable equates it to a gold investment. The idea has sufficient merit to try out.
-It took us quite some time to get this one ready, more than we actually wanted but that had lot to do with us changing our entire server infrastructure . We'll try to shorten the patch release cycle in the future.

With comments like this, I hope I hear you speak more in the forums. XD

This addresses almost all the issues I have with the game at the moment.

Good job.

I like that you give us the complete list of things that were changed. For example in Pillars of Eternity they said that patch 123.666 fixed this, that "and many other minor bug fixes". Later the forum was full of posts like "did they fix bug xyz?".

Regarding the first point: In the last version repair hammers were consumed on use, but tongs could be used to repair things without being consumed. I hope that has been fixed.
Personally I would remove durability completely. In DD and D:OS1 it was more annoying than fun. D2 did not have it and I did not miss it.


I really like to see changes in the stat system and some skills. Lets see what the next patch brings.

I assume that the next patch which changes the stat systems will be save-game incompatible with this version? Right. Yes. Of course it will be. In that case, I think I'll wait for radical changes.

I don't want to play too much and burn out.

***

I do wonder though if using Bedrolls no longer outright kills players with the Zombie talent, and while Zombies are no longer harmed by the Necromancer passive, I also wonder if they are now healed by it properly.

Thanks for that clarification, should have been said initially but now we all know. Looking forward to shorter bursts of patches, it helps with giving feedback quickly to see how well they work against other parts of the game.

In DOS EE I had to spend go through each character repairing after each fight. If I have to not only do this but also buy (I don't care about the cost it is the hassle) disposable hammers it will be just horrible.

Penalising bashing something by default is a good idea for sure - but why not make it just tiresome to do it. If someone has to spend an hour and a half to bash open a chest or door they don't have a key for then good luck to them. It is still a cost (of their time). Or increase the damage chests do to weapons.

Or let me buy extra repair hammers out of the ether. I don't want to trudge back to town to buy a hammer because I only brought 7 instead of 8 and I can't repair my third party members gloves - it is silly.

And magnifying glasses?? That is bizarre. I don't know if you ever watch antique roadshow TV programs but the experts don't tend to hit things with their identifying glasses. They just look through them and presumably spend on loremaster skills (perhaps through student loans) instead.

Anyway - will try it and see. Perhaps it just sounds even worse

I find this to be extremely strange also, especially since their justification for the repairs is cost for not having "rogue" skills.

With that train of thought the glasses should actually be scrolls used by parties who don't have a loremaster. Perhaps change the glasses back and add scrolls that break but identify items without a loremaster? I think that fits much better with the design philosophy they have expressed elsewhere.

The latest patch is a curious beast. Great improvements all round - then one-use identifying glasses and repair hammers??? Er... I think I'll be waiting out another patch or two before a replay, so.

The identifying aspect didn't seem to necessitate such a harsh overhaul. In hindsight, I actually like the 'Christmas wrapper' mechanic behind it: wait for the wrapping removal before the present is revealed. Seemed to be fine the way it was, with its main cost coming from point investment in loremaster.

Any update on the dual screen gamepad controlling?

Yep, there's lots of discussion elsewhere about how to fix the terrible repair/identification mechanics. I'm hoping for one-click repair/automatic identification myself.
We'll see in the next patch.

To be honest I'm really disappointed of the latest patch.

Very few new things, and instead of fixing bugged old stuff, it was just removed. (how much value do all the charts have if almost nothing is available to compare it...)
Also... one use identifying glasses...? Hell, no.

Right now the games loses integrity with every patch, exactly the opposite of why I backed the game.

The devs hear you, and these will be fixed if enough people don't like it. At least I think so. Thank god this is just the early alpha though.

Haven't played this patch yet, but it seems overall very promising! Except for the aforementioned identifications, of course. Are there even enough identifying glasses in the game to make up for all the loot you need to identify?

It's cheap to just have vendors ID the items, and most of the uncommon items you discover do not require any identifying at all.

Yeah, I usually do that anyway.

Totally missed the point here. What do student loans have to do with antique expertise or any programs?

Time to re-read the source:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/larianstudios/divinity-original-sin-2/posts/1712732 domyhomework4me.onl