Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Finished the game - A read for devs

I just finished the game. It's been a frustratingly difficult but awesome ride. I haven't seen this level of difficulty in a game since Baldur's Gate 2, or perhaps Ultima VII.
I have some feedback though, and hope some Larian devs out there will at least read this:



I believe the following items needs work:

- The crafting system is, well, I can't really sugarcoat this... it's a mess. Recipes aren't working (water arrows to name one) and certain items do not have a function (strong sinew for one).
This really needs to be straightened out.

To add, I think it's not very enjoyable to shuffle inventory items over one another in order to find something useful.
Some recipe books help you out, but most recipes would remain a mystery to people who don't want to spend hours staring in their inventory screens. Perhaps others consider this nitpicking, but I felt no enjoyment here at all.
Maybe add more recipes to the existing recipe books?

- It'd be nice if similar items were removed. There are two types of sinew, rat tails, chicken feet, tusks etc. There are already so many items in the game, it's driving me nuts. I don't know if some of these have different functions in crafting, but it seems to me that they just make the whole crafting system more complicated.

- Tenebrium weapons can't be upgraded like their normal counterparts. For example: I can't use my bow string on a Tenebrium bow or a sword on a grinding wheel. In my opinion this doesn't make sense and should be made possible.

- Tenebrium weapons should not be their own weapon type. If one is skilled in the use of Tenebrium, he suddenly knows how to use all forms of bows and melee weapons? This doesn't make sense and needs to be changed.
Just have the 1-handed, 2-handed, bow and crossbow types be the same for tenebrium weapons and change the tenebrium skill to influence the amount of tenebrium damage one does if a weapon is a tenebrium weapon or a regular weapon treated with tenebrium. Just a thought.

- Certain items refuse to stack together. Rubies, pearls, empty potion bottles, arrows of the same type, skulls of the same type, apples and so on. At the end of the game I got double, triple and even quadruple stacks of same items that refused to be stacked.

- Lockpicks should only break when failing a lockpicking attempt. Also, right now they're even used up when the lock I'm trying to pick isn't pickable. Why punish the player for trying?

- Vendors should rotate their inventory all the time, not just on a level up. I am a bit confused why Larian kept this system they introduced in Divinity 2. (Perhaps Divine Divinity functioned like that as well. Can't remember. Been a while since I played that one.)
Right now there's a potential low chance for people to get their hands on specific high level items, especially with loot drops being so random.
If inventories would constantly refresh, it'd give people the chance to hunt for better items or get their hands on that evasive piece of crafting material.
3 out of my 4 characters were still wearing several junk items near the end of the game. In Divinity 2 you could avoid wearing junk items by spending tons of money on unique items with a fixed level. I'd really like to see this in D:OS.

- Shops should sell unique items which always have the same level, just like in Divinity 2. This way unlucky people or people who dislike all those random blue and greens have a chance of equipping their characters properly.

- I'd also like to see bosses drop specific items instead of random stuff. D:OS doesn't feel like it should be a game with so much random loot. It doesn't have infinite monsters like Diablo-type games have.
Why not give certain items a guarantee to drop from bosses or have them found in special containers?

- It'd be very nice to be able to level up items to your current level. Perhaps with a recipe or a large cost.
This way people can keep using the items they're attached to.

- Zandalor's hat! Where is it?!? You can't have a Divinity game without Zandalor... and without his hat!
Okay, I am nitpicking here... but I did miss that hat. ;_;



Bugs:

- Although most dialogue was fine, there were instances where dialogue was missing or contained spelling errors. There's not a screenshot key in the game (gog.com version) or I'd have made screenshots of these instances.
I hope these will be fixed later on.

- Source temple: Door to 'locked air door' looked open but was still locked according to the mouse cursor. I couldn't pass through the door, even though it appeared open.
Seems that people can do some sequence wrong/different in this maze, which might cause this.

- Some quests didn't disappear from my questbook/were unsolvable:

War of the Stones:
I checked the whole town, every basement and attic, Zandalor's house and the road to the dungeon where those giant statues reside, and as far as I know I killed every last one of them.

Goblin Trouble:
I let Lawrence be killed by the angry mob, so I couldn't talk to Lawrence about this quest anymore. Please have the game remove quests when the quest giver is dead.

The Captives in the Crystals:
- I freed Arroka.
- I freed Haizea, although he was killed during the fight.
- I freed Antzigar.
- I got my hands on the Winter Ring.
I am sure there aren't any other captives to be freed.

- It'd be nice to have the secrets log update itself whenever you find one of the secret chests.



Immersion breakers:

Random quotes tree - I know, I know, there's crazy humour in this game, just like in previous Divinity games. I've grown to love it and don't consider any of that stuff immersion breaking.
The sudden popup of random quotes was a different matter though. It felt improper and unneeded to me.
It would have been a better idea to turn this into an easter egg, hidden from sight.


I hope most of these things will be addressed. It'd make the game so much better, even though it's already a good game right now.

Regards,

Gotcha!

Nice feedback.

I agree. I appreciate that the crafting system is so realistic that you can wood into chips, chips into mush, mush into paper, paper into scrolls, and scrolls into books. But the system is so byzantine that I have no idea what to keep and what to throw away.
The easiest solution is having a sort option on your Homestead chest. That way you can dump everything there, and sort through it later instead of massive amounts of scrolling and scanning by eye. Especially when things do not stack.
I agree.
I agree.
I agree. If you go for Tenebrium weapons then there is currently no reason to ever invest in normal weapon skills.
I agree. This is very strange and I literally have a backpack with 30+ pixie dust and not a single one of them stack.
The same is true for Bone Dust for me.If the lock is not pickable, you still made the attempt so it makes sense to expend a lockpick.
Then the game would not be Rogue-like.
This experience is normal for a Rogue-like.
Then the game would not be Rogue-like.
This would be nice if the cost was sufficiently high. It would also step on the Rogue-like theme, but it would be dramatically more fun.
I agree! We got Zombie Jake, where is Zandalor's Hat?

@Jacob Marner: You have my thanks.
@Incendax: I highly doubt D:OS qualifies as a rogue-like game.

I'd like to add one more thing to the list:

- I was fooling around in the character generator just now and I realized I forgot to mention the lack of portraits.
I'm a bit perplexed why there wasn't a system chosen where character portraits are automatically generated from chosen character details.
The variety of character options is very okay in my book, but I feel that I can't pick most of the options available because there's not a compatible character portrait.
It feels one has to choose a portrait first, and then customize his character accordingly.

If automatic portrait generation would be impossible, please, at least add a lot more portraits to the game, especially portraits for all hair and hair colour types.