Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Changelist Beta v1.0.80

Hello everybody,

It's only been 12 days since our last big update, but we're in overdrive at Larian so there's lots to share already.

The big ones

-AI Personalities part 1 is there. If you feel up to the challenge, you can give your main protagonists a will of their own, and they'll make their own choices, just like another player would in multiplayer. Currently only random personalities are activated, but it makes for a very different game. Do try it out, it's a lot of fun.
-Primary stats now affect your skill values. This is the next step in the changes we decided to do to improve the amount of class free builds you can make. The tooltips contain all you need to know.
-The system powering the treasure generation has been refined. Loot balancing has been further improved. Disarm trap kits for instance now actually drop.

The other features you'll notice right away

-We did several modifications to the tutorial dungeon, including a new encounter.
-Surfaces & clouds now have their own level
-The hint system is now operational
-The credits screen now works
-You can now differentiate between stacking items or wanting to craft quantities of items
-Weapons that do elemental damage now have fancy fx
-We Added rotate buttons to character creation screen
-Surfaces have sound now
-You can now select your starting skills during character creation (still a few issues)
-Projectiles have an offset above the ground causing less terrain/projectile interference
-We added the Stabbey waypoint in Cyseal
-A lot of effort was done on improving the tooltips (ongoing)

Some fixes have been done explicitly for the Mac version

[Mac] To rotate camera on trackpad use Apple built-in rotation gesture
[Mac] Crashes on game exiting (free() issue mentioned in crash log) are fixed
[Mac] All physics related crashes (when dragging items around) are fixed
[Mac] 善ink issue is fixed for good. Users of GT120/130/8600 and other cards that previously saw only pink background will be able to play. Most of them however are targets of shadows bug. See below.
[Mac] Shadows lockups are fixed but for now are on manual apply. See below
[Mac] Multiple video cards in same Mac are handled more correctly now
[Mac] Exploding 素ire effect has been fixed
[Mac] International symbols input won稚 cause issues in the game
[Mac] Mac and Windows are now fully save game compatible

And here are the fixes and balancing changes that you may not notice but which will improve your gameplay

Dragging of items to equipmentslots (from world or inventory) fixed to correctly use AP in combat
Fix for NPC's not being able to pick up items
Fix for invisible character being visible on minimap/worldmap
Tooltips are cleared now when opening journal
Stop using chairs will not place you behind walls anymore
Fix for not being able to drag containers into an inventory when opening inventory first.
Fix for joining multiplayer in combat, resulting in an empty skillbar
Fixed orientation and scale of target hit effect
Fixed mouse cursor being trapped in the window in windowed mode when changing display settings
Fixed window always being topmost window after switching from fullscreen to windowed/fake fullscreen
Possible fix for having no resolution options in the dropdown (and always starting in 800x600)
Fix for skilltree not updating correctly when switching characters
Change for hearing range and sight range affecting the minimap
Fixed previews for queued paths
Fixed animation jitter for moving NPCs
Fixed healing effect not being destroyed when finished
Invisible characters can be hovered now
Don't show attitude changes for enemies in combatlog/overhead
Objects will react to surface changes underneath them without moving first
Fixed Pathfinding for stairs - can't reach
Fixed Visiting the church before Evelyn's lair -> Jake doesnt appear -> stuck in questline
Fixed In the specified places there is a long delay during the change of turn which blocks gameplay
Fixed Game crashed during exit
Fixed Multiple Summon when using pyramids while summoning
Fixed Issue when using teleporter pyramid from inventory while not having character selected
Fixed Tombstone has no icon (Cyseal)
Fixed Teller of Secrets (Homestead) has the same model & portrait as Evelyn, a antagonist in Cyseal
Fixed Short (Orc) Sword = oversized when worn - found in Dark Forest
Fixed Char Cust Screen - If a lot of times "turn around" button is pressed, then model is distorted; sometimes model twitches slightly
Fixed [gameplay] attitude going down for no reason
Fixed In stat's/ability's tooltips, where value of base was written, now says "Blinded!"
Fixed Can't reach bookcase in Cyseal
Fixed The secret tab doesn't show any secret description
Fixed Region border in Homestead, 1st room unlock (Astarte room) has no bounds
Fixed Encourage\Inspire have same effect, but different description
Fixed Large Perception Potion no tooltip\can't be used
Fixed summon was at 0 0 0 after clicking on skill icon a lot - player char started doing animation without a target
Fixed Multiplayer - Player1 doesn't see player2's answer in dual dialog
Fixed Can see invisible enemies (friendlies) on the mini-map
Fixed Summons their timer does not count down during real-time gameplay
Fixed overwriting existing dual dialog between players , plays the teleport effect on player - not clear
Fixed Poison from item's "Inflict poison on contact" is permanent
Fixed Using torches set off "theft" dialog, they probably should not?
Fixed Hasted enemies visual bug
Fixed Winterblast does not leave behind an ice surface, it should
Fixed (balance) Farseer skill does nothing
Fixed Divine Light is useless right now (balance)
Fixed Winterblast spell book has an air icon, rather than water
Fixed Cant reach Thelyron's bookcase, Cyseal
Fixed Can't reach balista west exit cysel
Fixed Squares are observed during "Nullify Resistances" and "Lower Resistances" animation
Fixed The weaver of time animation
Fixed Shield Specialist still uses its old values (+5% block per level, instead of +10% as mentioned in tooltip)
Fixed When lying on matrasses the visual shows player lying with feet at the head resting area
Fixed Reputation value doesn't update to reflect the +20 from the "Altruistic" Talent
Fixed Cannot read Treasure Maps, no option given in contextmenu
Fixed Dug up a "Voodoo Doll Level 3" item in Cyseal
Fixed Currently Equipped tooltip is closer to the item, than actual item's tooltip
Fixed Leadership is incorrectly called "character" in the "Damage" tooltip (e.g. "From character: +10%")
Fixed Can walk into Jake's coffin at Cyseal graveyard
Fixed Zombie Jake has standard sheathe mechanic dialog (Cyseal)
Fixed Formations behaviour at the start of the fight
Fixed Character who was second in char cust screen becomes the first in the game
Fixed Cyseal: Burning Ship trigger happens too soon
Fixed When you enter the Cyseal graveyard, the AD about "The dog is trying to tell us something?" should appear
Fixed Cyseal_Tutorial area - Fragments of chest are not on floor, and hang in air
Fixed In the specified place if the character goes through it, animation of water appears though there is no water
Fixed The 3 guys you can possibly save in the Sparkmaster 5000 quest (Cyseal) are nowhere to be seen in town afterwards
Potion colour fixes on 3D visuals
Potion colour fixes on Stat objects
Luck table improved
Exploration bonus xp improved
Exploration bonus xp triggers fixed
Tweaked position of hatch in Mirror Players' lairs
Removed to 1H 2H thing under title of item, should not be here, we will do it in description
Lowered Daggers damage penalty
Junius and Bibius now have drunk status
Fixes to Item Descriptions, Stacking, Stats
Fixed Ranger trainer offering Rogue skillbooks
improved the Cyseal burning boat's texture
More vitality for vitality boosts
Updated the perception distance of the mines
Added a check to make sure Dietmar isn't CHARMED when he calls for help
Witchcraft Skilltrainers now sell vampiric touch
Some characters may loot potions from the battlefield
Remove trade for evelyn in vault
Updated the Voodoo Doll names
Fixed scrolls for ranger and warrior that did not have stats
Rearranged Bickies in garden scene, equipped & gave spells to Gardener
Changed requirements on Talents
Gave preset chars new Talents
Removed the "AP bonus on daggers" talent and all daggers are now 2AP by default
All presets that have something magical in them, such as the wayfarer and shadowblade, now have staff of magus & have a staff in their inventory when they start
Removed APDagger talent because all daggers will autom. cost 2AP
Flanking talent removes ALL flanking penalty now
Gave starting dagger another visual that looks more like a dagger instead of a butterknife
Rogue now starts with razorsedge instead of venomous strike because Cyseal is full of undead
Changed some projectile skills so that they take surfaces and AoE into account
Description for backpack
Disarm kit in trader
Immunity skills are now available before Shield skills because it makes a lot more sense that way
All zombie creatures have the zombie talent, ie. they now heal from poison and take damage from normal healing
Made zombies slower because they're zombies...
West Gate near beach is now called South West Gate
Updated some TUT messages and changed some timings
Skillbooks now mention what stat improves the skill
Fixed some arrow combinations that gave you the wrong arrow
Updated willpower and bodybuilding values for characters
Updated the player comments regarding the furnace and the whetstone wheel
Fixed icon and visual of winterbreath skillbook
Divine Light decreases Willpower AND Bodybuilding now, and costs only 3 AP
Farsight gives CTH bonus now
Earth skill poison arrow and poison dart have new and different icons now
Food stuff gives more healing now
Mass Weakness skill has new icon
Fixed all buffs, debuffs, potions and effects that should give an armour boost or penalty
Fixed tooltips of Skill that would show Bodybuilding +0 instead of actual effect
If anyone is hit with silver arrow, status icon is shown
Traders ignore level diff when generating items
All sizes of Poison flasks now work with combos
Changed the treasures of the TUT chests to RewardTiny
Shorter skilldata tooltips
Arrow seller sells arrows again
Loot for Traders
Less drops from chests
Orc sword has a name, stats and is no longer oversized
Being wet gives you 10% fire resistance
Changed targeting snap of AoE spells
Tweaked damages dealt by burning, bleeding, poisoned and surfaces and clouds
Shovel is no longer a weapon, only for digging
Chars only loot potions in combat in turn
Fixed inspire vs encourage (inspire did not do what it said it did)
Updated the WPShrine location at the blacksmith house


Have fun and as always, thank you for all the feedback! We still do read it all.

AI Personalities! Yes!
Selectable starting skills! Also yes!




:p Yes, I know I was rather vocal about it. I won't apologize.

These look great.

The barter skill (for one update period) used to display exactly how much money it saved a character on each item at a vendor. But the next update removed it and it's been gone ever since. Is there any chance of it making a return? I thought it was a handy little feature that really made me consider the value of investing in barter.

Actually, it should, shouldn't it?

I'm assuming you're talking about the "Would you mind not touching that, I like things as they are" (paraphrasing) dialogue that pops up when you turn off a light source, correct? I feel that is a perfectly acceptable reaction.

Since light hampers sneaking, and sneaking allows easy stealing, I would hope the NPCs would object to someone walking around their house turning off all the light sources to make sneaking easier.

"Well, that's odd.. you're turning off all the lights. And now you're slipping into that shadow and hiding. How peculiar, and yet not at all worrisome. Has anyone seen where my silverware ran off to?"

Very nice, things should be much smoother now and my fire thread can sink into abyss.



Awesome. Some offensive abilities for our healing spells.



Interesting.


Excellent.


Plus loot rearrangements and less of it.

And many more, all great.

[Mac]

Shadows issue:

On a number of video cards your game might lock up on start with barely visible background. Examples of such cards are:

GeForce 320/330
GeForce 8600/8800/9600/120/130/Quadro FX 5600

If you experience such lockup, please open Terminal and type exactly this line:

defaults write com.larian.dos EnableBrokenShadows -bool true

this will enable workaround for shadows rendering. All shadows options are still valid and correctly working.

We will provide auto-detection of shadows issue in next builds.

Since the new update, I have been unable to load any of my save games. Any ideas on a solution to this? I'd hate to start a new game.

The game is still in beta with new things being added, so the patches always break saves.

The little I've played, Character Creation options looking good. Damage #'s down, seems better.

I- love the changes to the tutorial, very good stuff. The boss fight is especially awesome. It looks great and plays great.

- Nice new healing animation.

- I like that the burning ship looks suitably charred.

- Ooh, the telescope works, neat. That's definitely some kind of sight.


That said, some issues:

(I'll probably cross-post these to another thread later on)

- Right now, your partner answers randomly to the Companion recruitment question, because they have a random personality. When they have fixed personalities, they will presumably answer the same way each time, yes? Does this mean that if you give your partner certain personalities, certain Companions will never be recruitable?

- You can injure your companions and they will get annoyed and lose disposition with you. That痴 fine, but is there any way to restore disposition?

- Currently, points into attributes make spells more effective. Points into abilities just give more slots. Okay it is early so I may change my mind later, but right now I am not entirely sold on this, because it means that a Wizard who gets Fire 5 and an Enchanter who picks up Fire 1 (assuming equal levels and points into INT) can use the highest quality fire spells equally well.

Ya sad to see the skill system the same but loving chosing my starting skills lol

Nice surprise, but being a work night... can't do much with it. Staying up until 2a.m. is rough enough on the weekend let alone when I gotta go and work.

I did run into some bugs though...

Initial cut-scene lags quite a bit now. Before there was one pause very early on, now there are quite a few pauses.

Wasn't able to rotate the characters during char creation.

Wasn't able to select what skill for them to learn (no such interface ever came up). I chose a Battle Mage and Witch.

Accidentally got my male character burned to death, resurrected him, ate some food I found and he mysteriously died. I had water all over the place so I know it wasn't fire.

Tutorial Dungeon still doesn't auto-save making someone have to go threw the initial cut-scene if they don't survive the tutorial.

Instead of "dungeon" call it a Tutorial Crypt as it really isn't a dungeon. Dungeon is so over-used in RPGs these days that some games even call caves dungeons.

But... but... I wanted to play my warrior with a bucket as helmet and a shovel as weapon

Just kidding, everything is great. We can choose skills !

There are two new icons on each side of the character legs now - approximately. Try using those.


Click on the + to the right of the skills.


It was fire. Water from barrels doesnt entirely extinguish fire surface, for some reason.


Its an old generic term for basically any internal space in RPGs that contains any sort of enemy or tasks, puzzles, obstacles or problems to solve. Leftover from the days of yore, PnP sessions of adventuring.
Just learn to live with it.

I'm so confused... Somehow each beta patch seems to make the game WORSE for me. Tried to actually play the game and hope that the hanging on saves problem was fixed (its not by the way) and now it took me 3 attempts to even get the game to start after the character creation. This game is supposed to be coming out in like a month right? IMO that doesn't feel like enough time if I've been having the same game breaking bug for the last 2 patches.

I've read a bit about this, about cherry picking the best spells. What I've found is almost all spells are situational to some point. What may be the biggest damage dealer may not always be what is needed. Since we also have elementals, a big fireball spell now heals fire based enemies. Another reason not to go big is space. The single hitters have all been comparable, so then you take the best situational one at the time if you have those. Then there are buffs/debuffs/CC's which all have a place. Not sure this is as big an issue as talked about.

A mage with 3 spells out of ervery single element will be way mor versatile than any mage that just focuses on 1 or 2 element with no real drawback. This just does not feel right.

1 rank each in fire. water, wind, earth and witchcraft = 5 ability points for 15 spell slots. Just for 5 points, thats almost free when compared what is required to get a single element to level 5 (which does not even give more effective spell slots unless there are more that 15 available spells for a given element).

Another important change that seems to have missed the changelog: the skillbooks used to require level 1, level 2, level 3, and so forth. We have now grouped the skills together more. So at level 1, you can now choose from A LOT of different skillbooks, and that level is the only requirement.

Skillbooks are grouped into the following groups:

Require level 1: 34 skills
Require level 4: 22 skills
Require level 7: 26 skills
Require level 10: 23 skills
Require level 13: 11 skills
Require level 16: 12 skills
Require level 18: 6 skills

Everyone can learn these, as long as you have at least one ability point in the corresponding "discipline".

So your mage can learn Whirlwind, and your warrior can learn Fireball, like a real classless system. It is however so that wizard skills are improved by higher INT scores and warrior skillsl are improved by higher STR.

Skills you can learn early on in the game, do not expect very high values in these stats, so the more points you put in for instance INT, the better these early spells get.

Skills you learn later on in the game, expect a bit of investment in these stats. So even if your warrior can learn Fireball (a "Requires Level 4" skill), if his INT is only 5, he will take penalties on its damage and its chance to inflict burning, but he is still able to actually learn it and cast it.

The same goes for your wizard learning whirlwind. He will be able to learn and execute that skill, but his damage output will be less than a warrior with high STR.

So when you go skill-shopping or ability-point-spending, don't think in classes. Don't just look at warrior skills if you are a warrior.

I do think this opens up possibilities and insane "character builds"

Ive noticed that level requirements for several skills were lowered from the previous version, which is a good decision for those specific skills and spells. They were rated too high previously at 9 or 10 levels. Now most of those are available at around level 7 which is much better.


As for whirlwind example, i am running a sort of very edited shadowblade, which is based around dexterity weapons, man at arms, ranger and air magic skills.

I took the whirlwind and i am using a dexterity based weapon - the damege seems really low.
I am at level 3 only so that may be the reason for it.

Im not complaining abut it either, its fine - But i do wonder is the fact that im using dexterity based weapons properly calculated in? (i do put points into dexterity - though the points are spread between that, Int and Speed, of course)

Ah, that looks like a nice refinement of the previous system. I like it on paper, and look forward to trying it!