Larian Studios Forums General Suggestions Just finished. A downbeat (but positive) review.

While I've tried to avoid major spoilers, someone who hasn't played the game should not read this, if they want their gameplay to be unaffected by noticing my own grumbles. I also discuss some of the unique aspects of the game, so if you want to be surprised by these, move on!

I am in no position to grumble about the game. Sure, I paid for it, but until I've written something better, I certainly shouldn't badmouth it. I've only worked on fairly casual games, so I am in no position to comment from any position of authority as a game designer or programmer. But still, I offer my 2c-plus-sales-tax for anyone who's interested, as a casual game dev, as a QA lead, but mostly as a fanatical game player

I've been playing it on my below-min-spec laptop (Lenovo 3000 N200 with 32bit Vista, 2GB mem, Intel dual-core 1.66GHz, Nvidia GeForce Go 7300), so there were a number of visual bugs, as was to be expected. Destroyed buildings would be visible even though they should be gone, destroyed items would show in cutscenes, objects with transparency (hair, plants) would show as semitransparent grey boxes instead of full transparency, and so on. I have no grumbles there: that it runs at all on this machine is an unexpected blessing of Nvidia releasing some new drivers. I reckon it's safe for the reader to assume that these were all glitches due to my machine being below the minimum spec in terms of both videocard and CPU, and having a mobile videocard to boot.

I'm playing an archer, which is a profession that requires high resolution, long draw distance, and high frame rate, to hit moving targets. My system can't do ANY of these. But it's still playable. The final fight was near-impossible at about 3FPS, using a trackpad, as an archer, but pausing between every action and handling it very tactically saw me through in the end. Though I had to crank the difficulty down to "low"


The good:

Obviously the best thing for me was that it ran, and playably, on my machine

The story's very good, the game-play's fun, the game overall is great. What few grumbles I have are probably mostly issues forced by the multiplatform nature of the game.

The ending is absolutely stellar, but I imagine many will not appreciate it.

The game is unpolished in places, but it's nothing like as unfinished as, say, Dungeon Lords. It has some polish, and I've not come across any blatantly incomplete stuff like sub-quest stubs that led nowhere because they'd run out of time, or anything like that.

Level design is beautiful, even on my below-spec machine, with no HDR or other fancy filters or decent textures: the level layouts themselves were beautiful and really suited the perspectives you could get with the flight system, flapping up a waterfall, diving down a ravine, gliding along the coast and so on. On a high-end system, it'd be utterly gorgeous, I'm sure.

Clutter containers (barrels, baskets, pots) are destructible, to you can just blast them all to pieces from range with a bow, rather than check them individually, and then you just pick up any loot that spawns when they smash. This is nice and tactile and time-saving.

Even on my machine, load times are reasonably short, especially when you're reloading the same area you were already playing. Definitely better than, say, STALKER.

If you fire an arrow at distant people, they will (sometimes) notice you and start to run towards you, which is a nice touch.

For those who dislike micromanaging inventory (i.e. me): weight seemed to be based on how many slots you used up, rather than actual weight. Stackable items only took up one slot (well, different stackable items have limits of 10, 50, etc, but this was not normally a significant issue), and there is infinite ammo, so archers aren't at the usual disadvantage to that they are in most games.

When you select an item in your inventory, it not only highlights in red/green (sorry, colourblind people!) which of your stats will be affected up/down by equipping it, but it also shows you the stats of that item beside those of your currently equipped version in an overlay (which pleasantly, can be clicked through, though for large descriptions, they can annoyingly hide the display of your own stats)

Most harvestable items (chests, clutter containers, plants) show their harvesting state: plants disappear once harvested, chests are opened, etc. A few, like bodies, gold pouches, some chests, etc don't. However, looking in the direction of any nearby container shows you whether it's empty, Fallout3/Oblivion style, so that's not a huge issue.

There are some innovations, like "Mind Reading", which is a lovely idea, albeit poorly implemented; and the dragon form, which... yeah, same. And the cost for mind reading being an "XP debt" is a lovely idea, too. I ended up just mind-reading everyone, and this may, eventually, have led to my losing maybe one level in total. I'm fine with that: the exploration advantages you get are worth it.

I found there to be a good difficulty balance on medium (though I've a feeling that on subsequent playthroughs, I'd "know better" and find it much easier: but I doubt I'll replay this anyway). Most of the time it was pretty easy, occasionally it would be "hey where's my ass? Oh there it is, being handed to me on a plate" hard, but I never needed to crank the difficulty down until the final battle, and even then, only because I got bored: another dozen tries and I might've made it on medium.

Semi-sandboxy: I really like sandbox ("open world, non-linear") games, but I also like to be told a story. There's a fairly good balance in this game between "sandbox" and "linear storytelling". The majority of the outside world is theoretically available to you from the moment you leave the training level. In practise, you get to see maybe a third to a half of it, because if you go beyond that, you'll get your ass kicked by mobs you're probably not even damaging, and by being unable to fly, you are unable to reach the higher reaches, to turn off some force fields. For a console game, the outside areas are really quite large: while it's no Oblivion/Fallout3/GTA, this is certainly no Thief or Deus Ex! There are load screens, but these are mostly when passing into internal areas (which is normal in sandbox games: inside areas not only have different meshes, textures and sounds, they also have their own environmental lighting and sound settings, so would be near-impossible to make contiguous with today's hardware). The outside world itself is split into just two areas, and even that seems like a decision based on having radically different environmental settings and plot-related issues.

The main problem with linear storytelling is "gating": opening up new areas to players only after they have accomplished a certain defined set of activities. Done badly, this becomes incredibly railroaded and linear: Half-Life style. However, I really can't complain too much about the gating in this game. It's very well done.

The sandbox limits are quite good: the sea in one direction (with invisible walls preventing you getting further, natch), and the mountains in the others. I'd have preferred a more gradual tail-off of the dragon's ability to get higher, rather than an invisible ceiling, but I did feel that the mountains worked much better than invisible walls would have. The ability to just fly over some notches in the inner mountains was nice, too.

Enemies don't respawn. Not even trivial "scenery" stuff like ducks and rabbits. I reallllllly like that. A lot.

Containers/loot drops also stay there forever, containing whatever they had the last time you looked at them, and also don't respawn. It can mean that the world runs out of mission-critical items, but this will only break very minor sidequests (bunny, blind man).

Because there's no spawning, just tailor-placed mobs, there's also no auto-scaling to your level, which can make some areas much harder or easier than you expect: again, I like this. It feels much more like there's character progress than where everything's scaled to my abilities, and it means I'm meeting critters that look RIGHT in the right places, It's also a decent way to be able to give a certain amount of sandboxiness, and yet channel the user into not doing some areas too soon, just because the hardness of some areas makes them stay away until later.

You can reallocate skill points in the later game, so allocating skill points to stuff that you find you never use isn't fatal. Though the cost for doing it doubles every time, so rapidly becomes insane.

Halfway through the game, everything that was available to you previously, is no longer available. Well, apart from one quest that you can do in either half. This was a real pain, but I put it in the "Good" anyway. I think it was a brave move, and it really helped the story. while I would much prefer it were my choices that changed the world, rather than story-rails, I do really like seeing my actions change the world.

The bad:

User Interface - what everyone notices.

My biggest grumble (after platforms, perhaps), is the user interface.

Take death. An annoying thing to happen even with the best behaved game.

You're just about to die, so you stab the quickload button. But that doesn't load the last game you quicksaved. Oh no. It loads the last game that you quicksaved and then loaded from the load menu. So, some quicksave from hours ago, that you've overwritten long since, and no longer has any files for the save on the drive: it drags that out of memory, and loads it. Since that could be (and for me, usually is) in a completely different area, you'll be looking at the load screen a good long while, as it unloads the area you were just in, and loads up an area you have no interest in. But maybe that's just a bug on my system.

So you go to the load menu, and explicitly load your most recent quicksave, and watch the load screen for a long while, as it loads the right area back in. From now until you load another one, that quicksave will be the one that loads for you, and loads will be much faster. You play again, and... die again.

So as you see yourself plunging toward the lava, you hit the "quickload" button. But, you were too slow! You die. If you die, saving and quicksaving is (very sensibly) disabled. As it should be,

But for no apparent reason, it also disables quickloading, and even slow loading, and the escape menu. You have to wait for the death scream and writhing to end, and wait a bit longer as the screen fades out, and after a bit, it pops up a dialog box letting you know you've died (really? I'd never have guessed!).

Of course, you still can't quickload here, that would be too friendly. But at least the enter key works to select the "load game" button on this dialog (or escape takes you back to the main menu, though this is one of the random few dialogs where right-click doesn't work like escape), so you can go to the load menu without using the mouse.

You then use the cursors to select the quicksave slot. No you don't, because the cursors don't work for selection in any lists or other UI elements, anywhere in the game.

You can use the scrollbar to scroll the list, but it doesn't work like a normal scrollbar: you can't scroll by one screenful by clicking the scrollbar to either side of the grab-handle. You only get to click the up/down arrows at the end of the scrollbar, or drag the grab-handle: both of which are smaller than is comfortable. Fortunately, on this list (but few others in the game, e.g. inventory) the mouse wheel actually works.

Once you have the quicksave visible (and fortunately, it's second from the top, below the autosave slot, regardless of when it was saved, so you don't even need to scroll), you doubleclick it to load it. OK, that doesn't work. In fact, doubleclicking doesn't work anywhere in the game that I can remember.

So you highlight it and hit enter. Nope, no joy there: this is one of the majority of dialogs where the enter and escape keys do nothing. So you click the load button instead.

Then, when it's loaded, just to annoy you one more time, it pops up a dialog to tell you it's loaded. I wouldn't have guessed! Enter works for the OK button, so you hit that and you're back and playing. [Actually, once the message didn't appear: in fact, I died before the loading screen had even disappeared. And in the final fight, I really appreciated the "game loaded" dialog since it let me hit OK and then pause immediately to plan tactics. So, maybe I shouldn't grumble about it.]

Because of all this, though, there are some places, particularly annoying platform-over-lava levels, where you're spending longer in the "load" UI than you are in the game!

There are other UI non-polishednesses, like drag-drop has a strange pause before dropping (though I think that might just be my machine), you can't rotate or zoom the 3D paper-doll, etc. Minor, very minor nitpicks, though.

Consoleyness - it's like a Wii port!

My second biggest grumble is the "console-ness" of it all. It's like it took all the clunky from MMOs and consoles, and put it in a PC game.

When you destroy something or kill something, the destroyed/killed thing disappears instantly (why? They don't respawn, so leaving no-clip or draggable clutter/debris harms nothing)

You don't shoot at what you're aiming at: you aim at the nearest enemy. So you can't hit that high-DPS wizard in the background who's kicking your ass, until you've taken out the low-DPS grunts in the foreground. Oh, sure, there's probably some console way to target specific people, but why? Why not just shoot where I'm pointing?

Ranged attacks also suffer the console-ness of range: beyond a certain same-for-all-weapons distance (the distance at which the console-targeting system selects the victim, displays its hit counter and name, and puts a little yellow arrow over its head to let you know you're shooting it), bows do no damage.

Spells require you to target an individual. Even area effect spells, unless they are centred on you. You can't just fire a fireball because it looks cool, or to attract the attention of distant foes.

You can fire at clutter containers, to destroy them. But only if you're using a bow or hand-to-hand weapon, and only if there's no foe within range to get auto-targeted instead.

Nobody (you or your enemies) can damage "friendly" NPCs. I don't have a problem with that too much: I like being able to avoid friendly fire with area attacks. But there are some strange decisions there. Ducks, chickens, rabbits: enemies. All larger animals: friends. So, you can't hunt deer, pigs, or sheep.

You can't target or damage flying enemies if you're a human, unless they attack you first. Normally, they don't, though. You can't target or damage (or even SEE) ground-based foes if you're a dragon. This is arbitrary, stupid, and fucked up. You become a dragon after working your way through half the game and... all you can use your awesome breath weapon against is certain special buildings, and flying things.

You can use candles. Two candles, fixed in place, in the whole game, just to prove you can. All other candles and light sources? Nope. Not usable.

Level design - some very unfortunate decisions.

Mobs tend to be very uniform. Given their placement is completely custom, you'd have expected some variety in it, but instead, you get the same group of three bad guys attacking you again and again through an area, separated by exactly one aggro-distance (approximately 1.5 targeting-distances). If you run on through one clump, you'll aggro other clumps and be fighting six or more, but normally you run back instead of through your foes. This makes it very easy for the level designer to know that you can deal with the area, but also makes the monsters seem as boring as procedurally generated ones, and the task of beating them a boring procedure in itself: kill this clump; move on to kill the next clump; repeat.

The main reason the mobs are tedious is that they typically have no reason whatever to be there. Sure, they're sometimes near a campsite or village. But the paths in Ordubas Fords in particular are just an ant-trail of goblin clumps, just standing, waiting for you to approach and kill them.

The scale tends to be too large, like they decided the areas they'd made were just too small to move around in comfortably, so they just scaled them to 200% and called it a day. In some areas it is so badly off that your character's head is below the doorknobs. Which would be fine in a vast temple or something, but this is in an inn.

There are often multiple ways to solve an issue (accessing the bunker is a good example), but this is far from being the rule, which is a shame in a sandboxy game. Often the only way to do something is to mind-read someone, or find the right key, or do the right sequence of actions in the right order. It's obvious that they didn't have the same policy of companies like Looking Glass, Origin, Bethesda et al, where they take every task, no matter how small, and ask "what other ways could this be completed?" and not be satisfied until they have found at least two, preferably more. This damages replay value, and encourages platformer and lever puzzles and other nastiness.

As a rule of thumb, square levitating platforms over lava, that need you to jump between them, disappear or drop a moment after stepping on them or creating them, that move in a repetitive way, have fireballs going by them, and require you to solve the platform puzzle in a limited time or start over from scratch... are signs of incredibly poor level design. They are lazy, stupid, tedious and show an abject disrespect for the player. Nobody on earth enjoys these. They are a lazy cop-out for a bad level designer.

Lever puzzles are also pretty naff, though not usually so bad as platformer puzzles. There are none of these immediately obvious, though there's a book puzzle that is really just a lever puzzle in disguise, and was actually almost not annoying at all.

Fortunately, the main quest has neither of these annoyances, but a number of the side quest dungeons have them as their main feature.

Invisible walls are an unutterable evil, even in normal games, like STALKER or Fallout3. In this game, where you can FLY, they are even worse. And there is no rhyme or reason behind many of them: they're there to "help" you by preventing you falling off a ledge... but the game has no falling damage, and that's the shortest route! In some places, where the plot requires you to backtrack, there's a clear path made with rocks so that you can jump up and over a barrier, to take a shortcut: it appears deliberate... but instead of rewarding the observant explorer with a faster route, there's an invisible wall waiting at the top of the barrier to slap him in the face!

The invisible ceiling is an understandable game design decision. Sure, it might have been better to do as Oblivion did, and make the ground fade away into mist, before stopping the player from rising up too far. Or start giving them "thin air" behaviour (laboured breathing, slower flapping and rising, etc, maybe eventually health loss). Give them a reason to stop WANTING to go up, rather than slam their head on the ceiling. But, it really wouldn't have been an issue at all, had the designers not chosen to repeatedly rub the noses of the player in the issue by having stuff just out of reach. There's a tower with no roof in one place, which has an infuriating, pointless and illogical-in-the-setting jump-puzzle to get to the top of, but would be trivial to fly onto. It's in an area where dragons are well-regarded, so having something reachable only by dragons would make logical sense, would fit well in the setting, and would add to the realism of the world. However, the level designers instead opted to make the jump puzzle the only way to get there, by having the top of the tower walls exactly reach the invisible ceiling. Dragons can flap up to the edge of the tower, but cannot reach a claw over the wall. That is appalling level design.

The last level doesn't let you change form. In a game where it's all about that, this seems a really, really messed up decision to take. Instead, in a room which would have been great to explore and fly around, they trap you in human form behind invisible walls; and then force a change to dragon and give you a level that would have been fun to explore on foot; and so on.

Gameplay - nitpicks, mostly.

Changing to a dragon is impossible if there's not enough space... which is fair enough. But "not enough space" is very rigidly defined. If you just need to scoot away from the cliff a bit, then the game should probably do that for you, and let the dragon appear a little to the side. But that's no huge grumble.

Much of the scenery seems designed to catch, snag, and trap you as you move around in combat. I grew to hate a certain type of spiky pillar in particular.

Pots are containers, and are completely destructible. Slightly damaged pots (which aren't containers, but look identical from some angles) are not: they're just static scenery.

Some crates and bags are destructible: others, visually identical, are not containers, and are not destructible. All barrels are destructible, too. But when you destroy them, stuff stacked on top of them doesn't automatically get affected by the PhysX physics. They'll hang in the air until you bump into them. In fact, a couple of places, static stuff which isn't even PhysX enabled (e.g. chests) was placed on top of crates. So, you destroy the crates, and you've got a levitating chest or candle or whatever for the rest of the game.

You can't remove things from your inventory and drop them to the ground. You can't put stuff from your inventory into a container you are looting, like a chest. Even though chests always have at most maybe four items in, but have over a dozen slots sitting there invitingly for you to fill, if you only could. All you can do is destroy stuff in your inventory. Halfway through the game, you eventually get one chest you can store stuff into, just to prove they could have done it all along. And as a bonus, you get the ability to teleport stuff in your inventory directly into that chest. This instantly renders near-useless all those advancement points you'd spent on improving your carrying capacity.

You can't push items, crouch, swim underwater, pickpocket, grab ledges.

You can't use a weapon while swimming, or even when standing in the water, deeper than puddle.

Jumping is fiddly, because you jump a long way, while somersaulting, which makes it very tricky to jump up onto small ledges - you have to move JUST the right distance away, or you leap right over them and off the edge of a cliff to your doom. Except, in some areas, you don't somersault. Seems to be on a per-map basis: I've not found a way to choose which to do yourself.

You can't jump if you're sliding: but this is in most games. An anti-mountain-scaling kludge, but understandable.

Mind-reading is very shallowly implemented: for most people, you get to read one idea per person. For some special people, you get to read more ideas from them in later conversations: I think there's someone you can mind-read three times, but I wasn't really counting. Basically, mind-reading is a button that's the same as having a conversation option "what's on your mind?" that guarantees a truthful response. However, often when you mind-read people, items appear that would otherwise not have existed in the game: chests and keys and so on. So, many's the time when I've had to go back to a place I'd already searched, to get the item that appeared. To me, this feels unrealistic: the items should either always exist, and mind-reading should only reveal their locations, or passwords (which were, to be fair, also heavily used in the game, even overused to the point where your character jokes about it once).

Cut-scenes - look great, but bad UI.

In common with depressingly many games, the cut-scenes are badly implemented. There are three types:

Prerendered videos: these are mostly used for scenes that don't contain the player, so it's not jarring seeing yourself in the wrong clothes. There's no way to replay them, pause them, or skip them. Gamers apparently don't have real lives or wives who are talking to them, and never need to reload and watch a tedious cut-scene multiple times. Quickload/save keys are disabled, as are all others, so you must watch the entire sequence once you have triggered it.

Dynamically rendered: this is where it shows the normal game world, but with the player's controls disabled (even quickload/save and menus!), and the camera moved by a script. These are usually well signalled, by changing the camera angle, but if you have to watch them multiple times, are frustrating: they suffer all the problems of the prerendered videos. Strangely, they even suffer the problems where they don't show changes that the player makes to the world (destroying clutter, moving items, etc). I found this out when a chest was shown appearing by some barrels in an otherwise nondescript field, and I spent ages trying to find some barrels I hadn't destroyed yet... when in fact, it appeared where there ONCE WERE barrels. This is even the case where the player is shown in the scene, so it's not because there was any prerendering.

Conversation: this is where you have the familiar conversation tree. Once again, the normal player controls are removed, and you don't get to quit until the game designer decides to give you a "goodbye" option. There is at least the ability to prevent them speaking the entire line out loud: select the next conversation option. You can even do this with the keyboard (where there are 9 or fewer options) by hitting the relevant number. You can just WHIZ through conversations if you just want to skip them and get to the load screen, by holding down the 1 key (not remappable). You'll select the first option at each branch, but meh, you don't care, you're reloading). If course, if you're used to doing this in normal play, then you need to be sure to have hot key slot 1 filled with a targetable spell or other thing you'll be unlikely to be able to activate after a conversation (i.e. not a potion or something), otherwise you might end up quaffing it when you come out of the conversation.

In some places, if you're going to a new area, they have it a positive action on the part of the player: it prompts "To you want to go to Such-N-Such?" Or it pops up a list of teleport destinations and lets you choose one, or cancel. Or whatever. But other times, you can just be walking around in a cave and suddenly POW, loading screen. In the worst case, the game drags you without any warning from the casual selection of a conversation option, into a few minutes' worth of inability to reload: a level load, a prerendered video, and multiple conversations and dynamically rendered cut-scenes, all before you ever get the controls returned to you and can cancel out and reload. All the time you're going "Crap crap crap, I didn't want to play this cut-scene yet! STOP THE SPOILERS! NO! I don't want to go to this area! NO! Let me quit! Escape, Ctrl-C, awwww damnitt!" - which entirely destroys the little play that the designers put on for you. A single pop-up would have fixed that. And they had those pop-ups in other places!

AI - cursory at best.

The loading-screen tips claim you should try to figure out their strategies, but they seemed to have only two: run in and beat you, or try to remain at a distance for ranged attacks. There was no use of cover, no trying to get to vantage points they couldn't be hit from, nothing like that. If you fired at a mêlée weapon user from an inaccessible spot, they normally just stood there, but sometimes ran off (which I felt was a good idea) until you hopped down off your perch, when they'd run towards you again. Rinse, repeat, until you'd shot them all in their retreating backs.

Flying-critter AI seemed better, but that's probably because I'm unused to flying games, so don't know the normal routines. I found it hard to track my attackers and keep firing at them, so they dodged and jinked at least well enough to avoid a newbie on a low-framerate machine using a trackpad.

If you're being attacked, nobody will run to help. Even Dungeon Lords had better AI than that.

Replay value - none.

There feels like little or no replay value. Sure, I could go again as a magic user or a mêlée warrior, but the game will basically be the same. Sure, I could go again as an evil guy, but the game... sorry, but I don't believe any of your moral decisions have any impact on the game whatever. This was something I argued for strongly when it was in development, and all we get is lip-service to morality. What moral choices were there in this game? One place where you get better rewards by being hardcore good or evil, a couple of places where you only get a benefit by screwing people over (and where I chose to not screw them), but even then, the difference only affects what loot you get from that subquest: it doesn't affect anything in the world at all, one jot.

Not even the single, shallow moral dilemma in the game, of your minion selection, affects much, other than the faces you'll be talking to in the end. There's no fallout from your decisions. You don't have any kind of reputation, can't attack innocents even if they are not critical to the main quest (a deer? A pig? these are not essential characters!), have no factions that your behaviour will appease or annoy, nobody will hunt you down for your actions, and no choice you make in any quest affects any other quest, other than that selecting minions affects which quests they give you. You can play as utterly evil or utterly good or utterly mercenary and it will not affect the game in any noticeable way at the end of the day.

If I played it again, as evil, then the only difference I'd get is I'd talk my way out of a few less fights, and so get a few more XP; and I'd get different minion missions. But the fight solution is not extra gameplay: I've already had fights, I know how they go. And eight different missions isn't worth replaying the game for. I feel I've thoroughly sucked the game dry of all possibilities it had, particularly since I tend to play through the "evil" fork of a quest, just to see what it's like, then reload and play the "good" one as the "real" version.

The main reason there's so little replay value, though, is that there's no way (that I know of) to mod the game. If one's released, I'll probably be back and modding it. To remove the platforms, for a start. Perhaps I'd replace them with moral dilemmas...


In summary:

I've looked forward to this game for a couple of years, and was very happy to finally get a copy a week ago.

I liked, even loved this game. It could have been better polished, and there's no replay value to speak of, but that doesn't detract from the fact that it is a great game, that I have recommended to my friends. It pushed the envelope with some of its innovations (flight, mindreading, base, minions), it was beautiful, it told a good story, and it definitely earned its place in my Steam collection. While it has no immediate replay value, I might come back to it in years to come.

Compared to some other first-person games I've played, I'd rank it above "Thief: Deadly Shadows", "Dungeon Lords: Collectors Edition", "Ultima 9", "Bioshock", "FALLOUT", Unreal, Deus Ex 2, and basically all FPSs.

I guess I'd rank it approximately level with Okami. Better in some ways, worse in others.

I'd rank it below Oblivion, Morrowind, GTA3&4, Fallout3, Deus Ex 1 and the Ultima Underworlds, though I'd likely rank it among them if it had a dev kit for modders. Which is impressive company to be in, for (other than some isometric ones) that's pretty much a complete list of all the games I love.

All in all, this was a fun way to spend a week's vacation, but it's not got any stickiness to make me stay. I'm unsure about buying other games from the Divinity series. I probably will, but I'll check before buying whether there are people grumbling about platforms.

I'm unsure about buying other games from the Divinity series. I probably will, but I'll check before buying whether there are people grumbling about platforms.

Apart from the fact they are very good, they are isometric, so you shouldnt have a problem with platforms

Hehe - Ultima 8 players discovered that even iso-RPGs can be destroyed by platforms. Introducing platform puzzles into any RPG after Ultima 8's reception is a very brave move.

But, no, I meant later games, such as Flames of Vengeance.

Divine Divinity's already firmly on my "must buy" list, as I've read so much good about it here. But you speak in the plural: are there others in the series?

Yes, afaik there are only two though, Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity, I highly recommend them both, I'm not sure why Divinity Two is so called, as I figure it to be the third in the series.

BD on its release in some region/s was accompanied by a novel written by Rhianna Pratchett, who also contributed to the script of D2.

Anyway, hope you manage to get a copy of either and enjoy them

You can buy DD and BD via steam on the site of GOG.com, the last version 1.005A of DD. For BD I don't know which version it is on steam.

BD is a secuel (hope I spell it right?), not the second Divinity game

Sorry, I don't agree with this !!

There're MORE reasons to replay a RPG besides of "moral decisions" etc ... I find, for example, a RPG replayble because of having fun to play it again, simply to have a fun time and hear the music, laugh with the tons of humor in this game, etc ...
And also to choose other Skills next time or another class (or combination of classes!) or ....

Oh, sure, there's probably some console way to target specific people, but why? Why not just shoot where I'm pointing?

Possibly because then minor changes in position could have you switching targets, so it would be harder to take out one opponent before moving on to the next. I've also found it helpful a couple times to Rush Attack ranger or mages attacking from an unknown direction, after I've finished off a melee opponent (not that it would be hard to pause and look around if I was taking a lot of damage).

Playing the Xbox version, I can only mention the console way to switch targets: right stick (when paused for greater control).


You can't target or damage (or even SEE) ground-based foes if you're a dragon. This is arbitrary, stupid, and

The game was originally designed to allow the dragon form to attack ground opponents, but it required too much memory and had too much of a frame rate hit; see Lar's post in the topic Design ideas for Divinity 3 (mostly for Larian).


You can't push items

You can move crates and barrels around, though the procedure is a little crude to be called pushing.


Jumping is fiddly, because you jump a long way, while somersaulting, which makes it very tricky to jump up onto small ledges - you have to move JUST the right distance away

You can adjust your direction and horizontal speed during a jump or fall.



The download version of Beyond Divinity is the same as the latest disk version; no changes or updates were made. BD was more of a spin-off than a sequel, and set in another realm (where Damian was banished) rather than Rivellon, so Larian went with '2' for D2:ED.

The BD novella is included in the fansite kit (17.7MB) with a summary here (and throughout Beyond Divinity). The fansite kit also includes the background story to DD, covering the previous war with the Lord of Chaos.

Someone pointed out in Skype that I'd never mentioned WHY I wrote that huge spiel above :P

As an aspiring (read: amateur and crappy) game designer, I tend to make notes as I play through games, about the game-design lessons I learn. Really the "review" above is just a reformetted collection of these notes. I usually notice more "bad" than "good": we humans recognise things "out of place" far more than things being "right and proper", for obvious evolutionary reasons! This doesn't mean there's more bad than good in the game: it's just what I wrote most notes on.

So, yah: I shared my notes as a review in case they might be of interest to people, but do not mean to say "this is the way it is": rather "these are the things that I, personally, was thinking, as I made my way through the game."



Sequel (like "sequence" and "consequence", rather than "second" or "secession": I think English is evil, and it's my first language.)



I sort of agree - which is why I said I might revisit it in years to come. Long-term replayability comes from good memories of a great game, and wanting to re-live those memories Ask me in a few years whether the game has that :P

I was speaking more of immediate, short-term replayability. Few people can read a book, then turn it over and read it again. So, short-term replayability hinges on being able to have a different game, or at least, a radically different angle on the same story.

Larian certainly tried for that, in several ways.

[*] They made the character very customisable, so you could try different approaches. but this only affects combat.

[*] They offered alternative tower minions, with alternative platform upgrade quests. But while extremely cool, this choice was the only significant choice in the game.

[*] They gave a plethora of sidequests, such that unless you're extremely OCD, you're probably not going to find them all, by yourself, in a single playthrough. But... I am that kind of OCD :P

[*] They made quests so that the outcomes were contradictory: you could save one person or another, but not both, etc. But it was trivial to play both paths by reloading, since consequences were rarely more than five minutes away.

Other than the tower minions, they didn't have whole quest trees that you had to choose between. And they didn't have how you play affect the game whatsoever. If you play as a warrior, a mage, a ranger, this only makes a difference to how you fight. If you play as good or evil, there's only a difference in the quest rewards. No different greetings, quests, endings, or longterm effects whatever.

That's not a bad thing. It makes complete economic sense from a game-design perspective. The vast majority of buyers will not finish the game even once. Of those that finish it, the vast majority will not play it a second time.

So for that small proportion of a small proportion who DO play through it a second time, after already had their money's worth from a full play-through, it's just not worth the expenditure of developer and QA time to craft alternative stories for a second play-through. It's far better economics to focus your developer time on making a single story that is very well-tested, well fleshed out, lengthy, detailed, and so on.

I get the feeling Larian is small, almost "Indie". That matters to me. As a game by a large publishing house, Ego Draconis is merely an OK game: Bethesda would have been panned for bringing it out, because they've set the bar for themselves pretty darn high. But as the product of a smaller development house, it's frankly a stellar game.

So, while I marked the lack of significant replay value as a "bad thing", that doesn't mean that I think (as with any of the "bad things" I listed) that they should have spent time addressing them: in most cases, developer time - the most precious of resources - was certainly better spent elsewhere, in making the story and the world great.

Well, except for the levitating, moving platforms: for that, there's just no excuse :P

On the PC version it's [Edit, oops, forgot to write this. The last three keys in the keymap are "Acquire/Cycle target lock" (Pause), "Cancel Target lock" (SysRq) and "QuickLock" (Del). These weren't needed though: shooting the nearest thing was usually the best tactic in early combat, "kill everything at once with an area effect attack" usually worked for the last levels, and if finesse was ever needed, pausing made all targetable spells be properly targetable with the mouse anyway: handy in the final battle.]

One of the things I appreciated, but didn't mention, was the ability in the settings to turn off some of the console-itis. You could turn off the floating hitpoints bubbling up off people's heads, for example. I liked that: the fewer unrealistic game mechanics being thrust into my face, the better, as far as I'm concerned. Couldn't find any way to turn off targeting and loot-bags, but that's what a modding tool would give us, I guess.

Interestingly, when I run AutoUpdate.exe in the Steam version, it tells me there's an update available, even though Steam didn't install one: I might try that to see what it does.

.

If it's for a good reason like that... it sucks, but I can feel their pain at having to cut it.



Yeah, you can sort of kick them, sometimes, but not others. I think the PhysX may not kick in all the time, but this may well be an issue with my system (software PhysX on a CPU below min spec means I can reasonably expect a few physics quirks, I think!)



True, I noticed that, but didn't alt-tab to note. I personally feel that's essential for any game that allows jumping, to compensate for the fact that jumping is fiddly on a keyboard.

Even so... it wasn't enough. If I walk up to a small pillar and hit jump, I want to end up... on the pillar. Not twenty feet past the pillar.

Getting a WASD+jump+duck system working is surprisingly complex. I didn't realise just how much work is involved in it until I'd tried it myself, and it took me a few days to get something I was properly happy with. Jump in particular is surprisingly difficult to get to feel "right". I think it was found by platformer games in the '70s that a jump felt wrong unless it lasted... ack, I forget, I think it was 0.7 seconds give or take about a tenth, but I don't have my books in this country to check. That number probably won't be universal (though it seemed to be, back in the platformer days), but there will be a sweet spot for each game, outside of which the jump feels wrong and awkward.

I suspect it might also depend on frame rate. So it may be that my low-fps system felt wrong, but everyone else's feels fine, since they can react to correct their jump in time. I don't know

DD and BD also listed the damage done onscreen (or experience gained), so that wasn't a console influence. I rarely noticed it, in any of the games, unless I was specifically looking to see what the damage values were.

Even on the Xbox sometimes gravity doesn't work, and you can have crates or other items hang in mid air if a crate they were sitting on is destroyed (sometimes they fall properly).

Playing Psychonauts on PC I started with the keyboard and mouse, but then had to switch to a gamepad for anything requiring coordinated or timed jumping. In general I don't care for platforms, but didn't have any real problems in D2:ED.

When you became a Dragon Knight you've gain the ability of "Supra-Dragon-Jump". It's a little hard to take in hand but with experience you can block yourself (with a wall or something like that) or take a 360° rotation for go in a platform. Normally everything in Divinity 2 is accessible with a jump... If you can't after some tries (ten or twenty...) and if it don't seem to be created for that, stop trying immediately ! It's the surest way for stay blocked between two rocks or something like that.

The jumps and falls are good in a special way:
-It's playable, you can change your direction and speed.
-It's realistic, you can't go ahead or go back like you're "flying" before touch the ground. Just like in real life... But in real life you can't change the direction before crash yourself and die... Or just touch the ground.

Divinity 2 don't really need a specific-good-playable-but-realistic-jump because jumping is not the main way for finish the game (ok for Mario but for divinity...). You actually can jump everywhere you need (a lot of peoples finished the game already and even me, finished all the quests). So "Impossible" don't exist for now, just "challenging" and sometimes "optional"... What more can we ask?

You can. I'm became a specialist for killing the wyverns in the sentinel island. Ok you must have a bow or magic and a lot of time.
Just try to see the wyvern, follow here and wait for her to come closer. When you see her name/life just shoot... And repeat until she's dead. (Be careful it's hard, not fun and ... Deadly) The crosshair help much too if you play with.
You can also try in the flying fortress too. The creature is really deadly against flying things (if you give her a "gobelin's head" or a "dragon-elf's head"). So that's not really a problem.

But I'm ok for something: The gravity doesn't work every-time... When a hammer is on the top of a barrel and you crush the barrel... You've 75% chances to see the "flying-hammer" in action, but in truth... I don't really care, if hammers or candle or others want to fly it's not my problem because that's not block me in my way so I keep up and thats all.

I imagine that on any reasonable machine the jumping puzzles would just have been lazy, unimaginative, illogical, and pointless, without also being endlessly frustrating because the whole puzzle was timed and had to be done in about 8 frames.

At least, unlike some games, the "magic technology" displayed in the platforms was shown being used elsewhere in the game for fairly "cheap" purposes (levitating rocks in flying fortresses, disappearing rocks in secret walls, no reason you can't combine them), so they're not AS insanely out of place as they could have been.

To a game designer nowadays, a floating platform puzzle is the equivalent of the Wilhelm scream, or any other overused-to-the-point-of-pain thematic trope. Speaking of which, I giggled at the big stack of crates right by the start. StC for this game is about 0.5: you need to turn around to see them. Though it could arguably be negative: there's a bag in the character creation screen background, and a basket in one of the intro movies.

Which reminds me a couple of other things I loved, and forgot to mention, and something that annoyed me of course

The annoyance first: you could only get out of the water if you were standing up. Climbing out of water was impossible if you were swimming, no matter how low the ledge. Heck, the ledge could be under water and you still couldn't climb onto it, unless it went low enough that you could walk on it.

The first thing I loved was that they had taken enough care in the level design and playtesting to ensure that it was near-impossible to get stuck anywhere, and *almost* every single piece of water had a ledge to get out, nearby. And *almost* everywhere they missed it, there was enough space to turn into a dragon.

But there was one pool I fell in, in a goblin village, which had no walkable ledge to get out, and it was within an anti-dragon field.

And that's where the other thing I loved came in. After getting your tower, everywhere you go in the game, you can escape from, up until the hall of echoes. you carry your own personal teleporter around with you, so I never needed to feel scared to jump around even though the game had no console to turn clipping off. Really nice feature. I only ever needed it that once, but I was so glad for it then!

You can. I'm became a specialist for killing the wyverns in the sentinel island. Ok you must have a bow or magic and a lot of time.

Yeah, you can, you're right. They need to be really close, and having a magic-using Creature helps a lot, yeah. I used this a bit in the flying fortresses, but forgot to update my notes. My error

I understand.
It's really boring to do... Long, deadly and not fun at all... But that give experience ! There is no respawn and you're limited in experience... Mind-reading is expensive in that condition and that's great. In that game you don't have "unlimited experience" so you must be careful with the mind-reading and the reward. My warrior was level 35... I killed everything, train in farglow arena until level 3 (after the level 3 you didn't gain more experience with the gobelins but you can take "wisdom") and merely never used the mind reading (only for the most useful)... Level 35, more than three days of game in the deepest way it can be played just for experience... Never a game make me do something like that and hesitate so much on something like "I read her mind or not? The weapon will be good enough or can I find a better soon? Experience or money?"

So in this conditions... Wyverns Must Die for your sake... Even if you take something like two hours on it. (They seem to respawn... I'm not sure of it but sometimes there some even if you killed all of them)

Heh - yep.
I liked the limited and fixed amount of experience you got from the game.

You got 0 XP from summoned creatures, but what about flying things spawned from the nests in flying towers? I never checked, but I assume you get none for them either, otherwise that'd be infinite XP right there, just by wiping out all ballista towers and all nests but one, then kill the wyverns all day.

Or maybe there's a limit to the number of wyverns each nest can spawn?

If nest XP is fixed, then it feels like it should be possible to calculate the absolute max number of XP a min-maxing playthrough could generate, assuming the player by done all fixed-XP stuff at the last moment possible (handing in quests, destroying ballistas), and did sliding-scale-XP stuff as early as possible, always selected those quest options which gave the most XP in the reward, reloading many times to get magic items of +1 Wis from chests/quests, etc. There'd need to be fine tuning to ensure that critters were killed in the right order (eg ducks should be killed last, since they're a fixed XP reward: but rabbits, while fixed, should possibly be killed as soon as you're able to damage a level 20 creature fast enough). There might also be tradeoffs like "handing in the Creature quest early to get better damage means you get higher DPS and so can kill more powerful creatures earlier".

Competitively Minmaxing XP could be something that could make for replayability: it'd add a new challenge

Enemies spawned from nests are the same as summoned creatures and give 0 EXP.

But you're limited by a ratio enemy's level/your level. So do that is good for pay a mind-read debt or gain some level but it's limited.

Yeah, indeed
Also this: play the game WITHOUT any reloads for better gear etc !! Play it HARDcore !
That's also a extra challenge !! I go do this when the Dragon Knight Saga comes out on Xbox. Then I play the whole game, from Farglow to exploring whole Aleroth ... without any reloads for better stuf or another dialogoption (making mistakes isn't a shame, it's just a GAME ) and if I die, I must begin again my last playsession, no matter how many hours I played that session.

Also : mindreading ALL possible NPC's, choose by Quest-rewards always money and never extra XP... The wishing Well I must NOT take extra 5000 XP. I may NOT kill a duck or rabbit, ...

And then there's speedrunning it, and so on. But all these are player-imposed challenges, and aren't what I'd count as "designed-in replay value": they're more "emergent replay value". They're challenges the player has to set themselves, because simply redoing the story again isn't entertaining any more.

But there was one pool I fell in, in a goblin village, which had no walkable ledge to get out, and it was within an anti-dragon field.

I don't know if all the pools in the Red Hammer tribe goblin area had the same design, but I jumped into one that took me awhile to find the spot to get out.

The game was a little too helpful getting my character 'unstuck' several times, teleporting her to 'safety' when I was trying to jump into or onto places that were apparently not suppose to be accessible.


Personally, if I were a mage I would have a floating castle, if only as a second home to use when traveling or vacationing, and I would use floating platforms for dramatic effect (staircases, observation platforms, etc). I would not make floating platforms integral to my defenses, but then game enemies are not suppose to have great security.