Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) General Just got the game.

Generally what I've heard about it sounds good, I'm d/ling the patch right now and don't have high hopes for it. Which is good becuse I know it will be fun and surprise me by being good.

Anyway, my one peeve would be the dialogue. I have no qualms with the name, but from screenshots and biased opinions (from idiots who think the game is a Diablo clone), the dialogue looks a little shallow. Also, considering it was created by a Larian studios, which is not an English company, how good is the dialogue? The smith on the game's cover has the following options:

What do yuo have for sale my good merchant?
Farewell.

Now, those options in themselves are fine, but they are the only two. It'd be good if they had some topics of interest or gossip you could discuss with them. What's it like for the rest of the game and with the other NPCs?

Oh, and why is HTML enabled? Hasn't anyone used it for malevolent purposes? If not, that's good.

BTW: I don't want and hints, tips, tricks or spoilers in this thread. I LIKE restartign a character 50 or so times. Part of the fun.

One thing, though: Are the skills like Diablo 2 where they can be essentially wasted? For example: you'd be a fool or a newbie to put skill points on Holy Bolt in Diablo 2.

If the answer is yes, but by a certain level you will have them all maxed anyway, essentially negating this, tell me also.

EDIT: Looks like HTML is disabled afterall.

You won't have many skill points to throw them away.
BTW, wellcome to the forum...

Search around the forum to find out which skills are buggy. There about 6 of them that don't work right, including specialization in Spear, Axe, Crossbow, and True Shot.

Plan to find swords being the best weapons, but bows are very nice too and you can make use of other weapons, but think twice between spending points on them.

Trader skill is a waste since merchants run out of money and you end up with items you cant sell until you find a new merchant. Store the items in a chest and sell them later. You will soon have 1000s of gold as you near level 10 and nothing to spend it on until later.

Identify level 1 and 2 can be useful in the early levels, because spending 150 for a merchant to ID is costly, until that point where you have 8,000 gold or so at level 13 and wont care as much. Still, there are some valuable 10,000-50,000 gp priced items, you may want eventually, so

Ranger sight is a poor choice when you can get Elven Sight for same cost. "Sight" lets you target creatures further away, they literrally wont appear until 1/2 across screen unles you have Sight items (not hard to find) and the skill. Use the CTRL key to auto-target the closest monster. This is very useful when your Sight skill extends to the edge of the screen and past it, since you wouldnt know a monster was there without CTRL.
Sight is not being able to see better in dark places. There is nothing Ive found that increases your vision other than tweaking in-game gama correction. This is a must as the game is TOO DARK! Increase the Shadows slider bar to 50, as this seems to help too.

Some magic skills are better than others. I dont recommend Deadly Disks, as creatures tend to take less damage (by 50% or worse) than the listed amount on the skill. Resists of monsters will determine the effects of spells, so when not using weapons, its good to have 2 ways of doing magic damage, i.e. an unresistable spell (like hell spikes) and Meteor or Lightning, or one of the other elemental skills. Freeze is a great skill, and quite possible too good when its on a weapon. If you want to make the game easy, use a Frost weapon.

Spiritual Resistance is the stat for resisting magic, from Liches and the like. It's important to raise this, along with you other resists, but you wont need it in the early game. Also the spiritual resists of creature will allow them to be Frozen, or not. There are some times of magics that seem to be unresistable such as Blindness curse, which I have not tried yet, but Ive heard can severely diminish the effectiveness of monsters after its been trained a few times. The traps skills can also be over-powered for its small cost, if you use the Death Scorpians. So beware of using Frost, Blind, Scorpians, as they tend to trivialize some of the game's challenge. However, there are "boss" variety monsters (like Diablo) that may require using these power skills unless you are particually skilled and patient to find other ways.

If you quickly find the game is too easy, pause key is kinda required but easy to take advantage of, you should restart on Hard level. I am enjoying the added difficulty and it does not take long to catch up to the progress of your first game since you know where stuff is now.

Plan to play this game a couple times at least and have fun. There are few "bad choices" in skill training, and there is a skill point editor floating around that will let you change points around later if you have to.

The dialogue is very limited. I agree that its still not really a roleplaying game, as there only tends to be one choice if you want the quest, and the other choice tends to be to piss the person off or kill them or something (foolish unless you just want to roleplay evil). I think most times it wont matter what dialgue choice you take, as you get the quest anyway, but may lose faction with the NPC. Not really a lot of good roleplaying, but its a lot better than Diablo 2, and I expect some Divinity NPCs will offer more choices than others. I like this style enough, that I consider it to be a bonus, rather than a penalty. Its a good thing Divinity has that other games do not.

Remembering that NWN was only halfway translated into german - the rest remained english - I don't consider this thing too important.

I have seen games translated very crappy, so I don't bother that much (apart from the fact that I won't forgive the translaters for not fully translate NWN).

Still we here get games that are not translated, supposed to buy them.

If I would use these thoughts with games coming from other countries ("considering Black Isle studios, which is not a german company, how good is the dialogue ?" <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/badsmile2.gif" alt="" /> ) , the number of released games here in germany would be much smaller, that's what I think.

For skills, if you're not sure about one, save and try it out, or wait until you need it. There are not enough traps or monsters in the game which turn invisible to make the Evade Trap or True Sight skills worth it, IMO. As a warrior, I ended up with 10 un-used skill points, and maxed a few skills I didn't need; mage / survivor characters tend to need more skill points.

The expertise skills with a damage range bonus (rather than percent) are fixed, but True Shot is still broke, I believe.
Game still buggy, when do the next patch come?

The only thing I have seen, or have used, HTML for is tables.

It's not a chatty game, but the dialog adjusts to the situation and is fun without being pedantic. The translations are good, I think. Overall, dialog is functional and has charm. Some parts are better than others, and the beginning of the game is the worst, so don't judge the game it.

Don't worry. It's a good game, and you'll have fun playing it.

Dont forget to check out all the sign posts some of them make me LOL! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />