Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Divinity II - The Dragon Knight Saga I'm an Ego Draconis veteran...

Flames of Vengeance retroactively applies many changes which are introduced in DKS also to Ego Draconis. Most engine changes for instance are immediately present in Ego Draconis. To maintain compatibility with existing savegames however, there are a number of things which aren't changed when you install FOV. These are:

Enemy placement and balancing (massive overhaul)
Loot and set-items (complete overhaul)
Story and scripting changes (e.g. in DKS flying fortress gameplay is very different to ED)
Art changes in Ego Draconis (though you do get the advantage of better lighting & shading)

In general, if you played or finished Ego Draconis and don't want to start over again, get FOV.

If you don't mind starting over again, get DKS, in which the total gameplay experience is in my opinion much more stream-lined.

There's no big differences between the FOV content in DKS and the FOV content applied to ED.

Ok, let's me try again - it's pretty clear when you play it but somehow I find it very hard to write it down:

The Dragon Knight Saga has been approached as if it were an entire new game from the point of view of the core item-fever & hack and slash parts of the gameplay as well as getting rid of those areas that we considered to be "boring" in Ego Draconis. We've upgraded the engine, upgrade the graphics, upgraded the audio, changed the levels, changed the balancing, modified several features and where possible applied those changes to both Ego Draconis and Flames Of Vengeance. Additionally, on the 360, we changed almost the entire interface, modified the levels and gameplay to increase performance, changed the camera system/controls, and made sure the 360 has its a different balancing than the PC version as both platforms play differently. If on PC it plays more "streamlined", on 360 it's almost as if it's a different (and better) game.

Since its a pretty big redesign of several parts of Ego Draconis, it's impossible to convert Ego Draconis in The Dragon Knight Saga with just a patch - for that there are too many changes - but those areas of the game that we can change, without affecting the existing savegames, we've tried to change through the upcoming patch. For instance, if you install FOV, you get a better-looking Ego Draconis, and also the engine improvements. A patch which would bring ED to DKS would consist of replacing almost every single file, and it's guarnateed that you wouldn't be able to play any of your previous saves.

So D2:ED + FoV (which includes patch) does not equal DKS, but it's as close as we can get it without destroying the save-games.

For people who don't buy FOV, we'll provide a D2:ED patch, but I need to add that it's up to the various publishers to release it.

The intended audience of DKS consists primarily of people who didn't buy D2:ED, but in the same breath I have to say that I think that all the changes done make the entire experience more fun and I wished we could've launched DKS as ED.

I hope you can still follow and this makes sense to you

You can download FoV, though, and not install it until you are ready to continue with a character into the add-on, or want to see the changes in D2:ED.

Currently FoV still needs to be activated online, and if you log into your Larian Vault account you can find the key. When Securom was removed from DKS there were publisher issues which prevented FoV from being updated, but that is no longer the case. I'm not sure about a timeline, but you may want to hold off downloading the add-on for awhile, if you're not going to install it right away.

I don't think so. I downloaded FoV and was able to continue my game unmolested; it wasn't until I downloaded the patch to update the whole ensemble to DKS that I had to restart from the beginning, though I think the difficulty of DKS was better balanced overall.

Overall DKS is a little easier, but a harder difficulty level was added to compensate.

In D2:ED there was a strong character level effect to combat, so opponents more than a few levels above you were impossible, and more than a few below could not hurt you (making for boring combat). In DKS the effect was reduced, so that higher level opponents were tough but not invulnerable, and groups of weak opponents could still be a bit of a threat.

There were some changes made to quest experience in DKS to make levelling a little easier at the start of the game (to address the difficulty spike when getting access to the full Broken Valley) and opponents at the start of the fjords were changed and the experience increased to help with the difficulty increase then (though not nearly as many people had trouble there), etc.
In D2:ED, for example, I got access to the full Broken Valley on level 6 (after doing everything I could), and a couple of the opponents in the dragon sequence brought me up to level 7; In DKS I got to level 7 just after the dragon sequence, but with lots of quests left to turn in.

There were additional sets and lots of unique equipment added in DKS, which can make the game a little easier. Playing a ranger, once I got the first unique bow available I never saw random loot that came close to being a replacement. Some of the ranger skills were made less effective, though (not sure how overpowered they were in D2:ED, since I played a warrior).

There were additional sets and lots of unique equipment added in DKS, which can make the game a little easier. Playing a ranger, once I got the first unique bow available I never saw random loot that came close to being a replacement. Some of the ranger skills were made less effective, though (not sure how overpowered they were in D2:ED, since I played a warrior).

[quote=Raze] I don't think I've ever died quite as often in a video game as I did in Ego Draconis.