Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Friend Play Responses: Need more dirrection

Ok after playing this with several friends who have played it for the first time and honestly even my own experiences.

The start of the game definitely needs more direction. While I certainly had more of an idea of what I was doing it was vastly enhanced by watching a stream and being told "You need to escape".

Yet none of my friends had any idea of what to do even when I told them "you need to escape the island"... They just mindlessly wandered, spoke to everyone, and kind of turned up empty (especially finding enemies weak enough to fight... until I did a few extra quests.) and made it rather painfully obvious to me how much displeasure they were receiving from this early game.

It was no better between the ones who played DOS1 and those who didn't.

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While I certainly don't want a game to handhold you... Unfortunately in this case perhaps having a bit of a starting lead beyond Dennis (who is kind of meh, "ohh no she killed someone!")

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Idea... with huge spoilers...






Perhaps that Elf in the Trial... should instead be a named character who joins you early on... perhaps being another prisoner on the ship. Gives you an idea of what to do and a person to talk to...

BUT gets sent to trial very early upon entering the town.

It also benefits by having the whole... Trial thing be more tragic.

I don't necessarily agree with the lack of direction (mainly as my normal playing style is bumbling about discovering what there is to discover; and it does kind of fit with the story, I figure) but I do like the idea of giving a bit more background to the elf in question. I already thought it was pretty tragic and went to some lengths to avoid further unpleasantness (well, for what it was worth, which probably wasn't anything) but making it a bit more personal would add to the impact of the real nastiness going on behind the scenes. As it was, playing through a second time and seeing various people naively assuming their loved ones had been "cured" was somewhat harrowing.

It wasn't something I agreed with either... But needing to coach people away from just giving up on the game or saying it is bad for the initial part of the game (Before you get into the fort itself) has kind of told me otherwise.

tl;dr friends sound like lazy gamers who want a skyrim game to hold their hand as they become "the big dick hero" without any true effort on their part.

Or i'm just an asshole. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not everyone can magically see and understand everything and connect the dots as fast as others so maybe I'm wrong and the game doesn't properly inform you, not for me to decide though.

DoS1 had a more straight forward story, you were on the hunt for a murderer. The story was right there in your face and you knew it right away.

DoS2 is just a different start, you aren't supposed to know the whole story right off the bat and we might still not be getting it all because they want to keep what is maybe the tutorial hidden for now, which would contain more context.

But I think they don't need to straight up tell you that you need to escape the island, if they did that it ruins the story of Fort Joy. You are clearly not in a great position when you start, if you don't guess prisoner real fast than frankly there isn't much hope for ya.

From the start you walk up to the camp, the two magisters spot you and you learn that someone named Dallis is up ahead and pissed off, you get there and clearly you can tell she is very powerful and someone important, if you read the text between her and atusa you can see that atusa doesn't agree with what is happening on the island and she is killed for it and you can see that she is also a magister just like the others you see.

So that tells you that something bad is happening here and that begins giving you the thought that maybe you should get outa there, the how though requires you to really pay attention to some npcs like Gawin who will inform you of the teleportation gloves of which you can use to get inside the castle and escape by sneaking out, or killing kniles, etc and as you explore the fort you can see what they are really doing and why you should escape or why the idea of you escaping is a good one.

Then what do you suggest? It really seems like a trend for players to feel lost and confused not knowing what to do.

A trend in what? Larian games or games in general?

The game does give you a direction. The only way to really get lost in it is that you ignore everything that is going around in town along with all the dialogue and quests.

-Random Spoilers warning-

For example, from the start, you get to see Elondi battling.
If you take part in that, Elondi tells you to follow her to the cave and tells your Saheilla is their leader.
On your way to the cave, you will see the caged Elf dude

If the player bother to talk to Saheila, she will ask you to help the elf.
And if you do help the Elf, you get one way to enter the Fort.
and if you bother to help the guy on the floor in the prison, he tells you about how to leave this place through the boat with Hans.

There's also the option when you get approached by Gawain for The Teleporter
This will then lead you to the same spot, the prison fight, if you choose to do it.

Or if you try to do the Arena, the game will give you the "brute force" option.

But if you do not and run around exploring the fort, you will meet the boss fight escape option.

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The directions are there but people are so used to automated GPS tracker in modern games that have very linear progression line. The game requires you to think and analyze the enviroment and dialogue so you have your own general direction on what to do next, which will lead to the actual game direction.

The one thing we can do to help new players, is to introduce "Beginner mode" or something where EXP is increased by 50%, items are cheaper, gold are easier to get and enemies have less stat (like -33%). Some of the path are actually much more difficult and only used by experienced players, which is why people avoid them or never notice them. With the Beginnier Mode, inexperienced players can still try to tackle quests that are normally tackled at much higher level, clear it and arrive at one of the game possible path anyway.

The problem ONLY exists at the start of the game.

Usually the "What am I doing? What am I supposed to do?" wears off once you get to the "Inside the fortress" section of the game.

I am not suggesting that the game needs to coddle or handhold these players. It just REALLY needs to give them a push, a much stronger push then the game currently gives.

1st Game: You are a Source Hunter after a criminal! You crash landed and need to go into the city to find the criminal! BOOM your on track right at the start.

This Game: You were on a shipwreck... and you are on an island... Some monsters... and it turns out it is a prison I think it isn't really clear... and uhh... you can do stuff. Ohh and there was a murder by some loser with really cool guards... ok they are gone... Ok I am talking to more people... I am not getting anywhere... Not getting anywhere... not getting anywhere... Ohh I stumbled upon the path. On track!

Heck you don't even come across a real reason why you should escape until long after it would have mattered... the rest are just rumors.

Heck the guards aren't even abusive and let you do whatever the heck you want. The Inmates do more to antagonize you than anyone else.

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Yes "We" can infer what we are supposed to do and take on the clues. Yet we are tuned in.

The thing is that even these players could infer this information as well, they just don't know what the game is telling them or trying to tell them.

The reason I think the game needs a NPC right from the getgo who explains some of this is to tune the players into what the game is trying to convey.

This is why the start is so horrible for so many players (almost all the ones I end up playing with... and heck even me a few times) and why the game suddenly becomes entertaining once the ball is rolling.

Why not start the game rolling?

Heck as silly as it is there are other ways to do it then having someone from the ship to answer a few questions for you and give a few tips to start you out...

-Start the game at your trial.
-Have that starting piece of paper in your inventory the developers said would be there.
-Have that kid at the beach have more to say then pretty much nothing

I don't get this antagonism towards just cluing people in. If it really was just a bunch of lazy people (and not a mix between noobs and vets and people who played the first) then maybe... But we aren't talking about including waypoints.

I'd have to agree with Neonivek here. The very beginning (going from the shipwreck to the fort) is kind of an absolute mess. When my friend and I started playing we started and our first impressions were "alright we were in a shipwreck, but why do we have these collars?" We quickly inferred we are fugitives but that's it. If the two of us had not played the first game we wouldn't have had as good a grasp for things. I think it is really weak to have the game start as you were shipwrecked have fun, instead have the game start with some party dialogue saying something along the lines of maybe we should head to the fort or something.

I admit that on my playthrough of the new patch, I actually did feel lost for a little while - even knowing what my goal was. I had answered wrong to a child in the grotto and failed to learn about the secret tunnel to Withermoore, and at level 1 I wasn't strong enough to fight the crocodiles for the gloves. (I had failed to assist Elohdi immediately. In the first patch you could assist her later. In this patch she dies if you go elsewhere first. So long to that XP)

I did eventually find a way by turning Stingtail over to Griff to reach level 2. (I didn't have any choice but to turn him over because I had no chance in a fight at level 1 vs level 3's.) The newly-freed elf told me about the secret tunnel into the prison and marked it on the map.

So that did resolve my problem, but again - even knowing that tunnel existed and knowing about the teleport gloves and knowing about Withermoore who tells you about the secret tunnel - I still felt lost for direction. I don't blame new players at all for being lost.

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My complaint about the beginning pre-fort is that the lands before the fort (not counting the hidden alcove) are not only barren of enemies to get much-needed XP, but also anything else of interest, there aren't even many containers to open and discover they're empty.

Although that's not really related to a lack of direction.

I think many here are quite jaded to the starting experience because they've already done it. I played this game with some friends and we could work through it easily enough, most of them don't care about story so it was easy to just get through the beginning by talking and initiating combats randomly, or choosing options of aggression.


My wife, on the other hand, was plopped into this game without having that same sort of aggression, and was left puzzled 100% by what to do when you get in the town with tons and tons of people to talk to. You don't need to have a "GPS Tracker" as some point it to have a better framing to the start of the game. Yes, you -can- infer lots and lots of information from the beginning about what happened. But a little framing to the beginning of the game is not so horrible. We started playing the D:OS1 and she's been loving it. It certainly doesn't hold your hand at all, either, but the short animation in the beginning; the tutorial dungeon to set expectations. We are extremely early on in the game, level 3, maybe? And she's been way more receptive to it. She's trying to craft, despite it being very difficult in the first.

This game offers none of that, and I'm fairly sure its because its still EA, which is what I've told her. Even the beginning of DOS1 was developed further when it came to the Enhanced Edition. So I think its fair many people are expressing a concern about the intro to the game.

As furthering with my wife as an example. She didn't talk to the elf in the beginning, she missed her entirely by going the other direction. Everyone she talked to moved to be aggressive - something she didn't know was going to happen and we got thrown into constant fighting in the town. (I put it on explorer mode, because she's not tactical in her games - despite that I've done the EA in classic mode already with not much trouble.) But from her perspective, it doesn't feel like we've accomplished anything but just fighting people in the town, who are also slaves like us, for no reason.


This is a bit counter intuitive, as people who don't care about story (My friends) are fairing better than someone who does care about story (my wife). She looks at things from a general direction of what she we do, vs. most of my friends looking at it from the "what are we strong enough to kill" perspective. I think that needs a little toning up.

Nobody here is asking for something to hold our hands, but the characters expressing their interest at the start of the game would give us a better goal and something to look for. I think much of this just has not been developed out by Larian yet.

The open-endedness needs to continue, and the routes of getting there are good to keep hidden, but I think it needs a little bit of framework in the beginning section of the game. Everything post-fort is great, and hell, once you get INTO the fort it gets pretty damn good and exploratory too.

After reading @firegod's post I do see better what the people who say it needs more direction are saying.

tl;dr larian explain better, better balancing on environmental effects, less aggressive outcomes from dialogue and more peaceful approaches, don't experience starve us from the start due to making "the peaceful choice into the wrong choice"

For experienced players of this game, the previous and rpgs in general it is a far easier experience for us and for people who just want to kill things like his friends do.

I do believe that there is a tutorial on the mentioned ship that they have just not released yet to EA or won't release in EA as it is merely a tutorial, not much testing needed there by us players I'd think.

But if the case comes that there is NOT a tutorial on the mentioned ship at that point there would need to be a vast improvement in the beach area as a makeshift tutorial area.

There is Tam near the shrine statue to give away the whole "we are sourcerers and were being imprisoned here and the divine order is "healing" us", the problem with Tam is that he is out of the way, sure you can see there is a statue and stairs leading to it, but most players just want to move forward and probably won't even notice Tam's existence.

The biggest problem I can see, even as someone who's sunk a lot of hours just into the EA of this game and pretty much got Act 1 figured out, is for sure the over aggressiveness of the inmates of Fort Joy, it is understandable that from the perspective of your character that they'd all be pissed and violent a bit since most are intelligent enough to know what is really happening and know that they are prisoners not patients, but that doesn't really justify throwing huge fights at new players who have no chance of winning, the biggest one being Griff's gang, who is unbeatable before you reach their level and even at their level are incredibly difficult to take on with your small, under-geared party. To go along with that the whole fact that you can't peacefully resolve the issue of the stolen cargo is really bad writing or design or whatever you'd call it and yes you can save Stingtail and not fight with Griff's party, but as I've mentioned before in other places and I believe in a post above, who in the world is going to figure that out without already having knowledge of it.

We are experience starved early on and though the theme is "a desperate and broke prisoner with nothing of their own", it is just too much for new players or players like Firegod's wife who aren't tactical, who can't see an oil barrel and think "i should re-position this and use it against this group before the fight starts" because they either just don't think like that or because Larian made a seemingly neutral or even positive sounding dialogue turn into a 7 on 4 battle out of nowhere.

That kind of design forces players who can't play like that into the easiest difficulty, which isn't a bad thing if they just want the story, but they should be able to at least have a chance to play on normal difficulty without bluntly being told "git gud scrub" or worse causing them to stop playing the game.

Some other things I would hope they could implement for helping new players is how environmental things like water puddles or barrels interact with battles, which at the moment I think also need some tuning as a lot of them are far too overpowered and underpowered, an example would be fire and poison I think as there are so many times those combine and you never could have planned for it and when it happens it is already too late and you have to load from earlier as it has completely wiped out your party or another fan favorite I think is how Contamination works...it is awful..using it is like sentencing your whole party to death since there is nearly ALWAYS a blood or water puddle nearby and it poisons your whole party and some asshole throws fire and its game over and I don't know about everyone else but it also seems to spread a little oddly, like more than it should, I could swear I've seen poison spread over bare land where it shouldn't be going..

Too add onto the whole fire poison crap, I think we need more damage options for other types of magic only because fire interacts with so many things and it is almost always a bad idea to use it due to oil spread or poison spread, for damage casters it seems like you HAVE to go Pyro, yet pyro punishes your own team more often than it does the enemy. I mean hell I don't even want a tank or melee person(s) in my party because now I can't throw a fireball or searing daggers because I'll hit them and wipe them off the face of the planet in the process, it is just a little absurd I think.

Old post, but I definitely agree about the feeling lost issue.

Basically, I recommend that Vissar approach you almost immediately after the Dallis encounter at the beginning of the game and basically say "Dallis has been getting increasingly more violent. Everyone is on edge. We need to find a way to escape."

Or have Vissar literally ask you what your goal is now that you're at Fort Joy, allowing you to respond with a multiple choice thing like "I plan to escape this place as soon as I can" or "I'm going to ask around town, and figure out what is going on here". Then Vissar can specifically tell you to talk to people around town to get some leads.

Because that's what is missing. It doesn't tell you that you should wander around and talk to everyone. It just assumes you already know that, because you're a gamer. But it would give the game more direction if an NPC literally tells you to talk to people around town.

Very new player here. I didn't feel lost so much as completely overwhelmed combat wise. At the very beginning you are under equipped and pretty weak. So for a good portion of the first few hours I was just trying to avoid any fight where I was outnumbered or outmatched.

The problem is that's most of the fights in the beginning... Griff, Houndmaster, Flenser,

I basically fought almost no one until I was already outside of the fort, only fighting those I had to along the way. From there I had more breathing room to level and gear up then back-tracked to fight the things I skipped earlier.

Personally? I like that I'm not hand-held and can just explore and feel like I'm actually playing a tabletop, where I have to figure stuff out on my own and explore and ask around to figure things out.

Hand holding is what completely kills immersion in games. I remember the old EQ days of having to actually read and follow quest to figure ithem out. Things felt so much more rewarding than when I played WOW and just followed the golden path and spam clicking through the quest dialog because it didnt matter if I read it or not.

I honestly don't seenhow anyone could get lost unless they aren't talking to people or looking at the journal.

There is expkorer mode for people who want to eaee into combat. I haven't played it because it sounded less fun to me but I assume combat is easier just incase regular isnt already easy enough.

What's the point of having writers and building a story to then just put magic dots on the map for you to follow.

The only thing I got lost on was spending 20 minutes on those same ship doors at the end but I figured it out and was glad the game didn't just tell me what to do.

I'm just reminded of Punabi in Morrowind. Or maybe it was Sulipund, just across the road from it, but the point remains the same: I spent literally hours searching for the bloody place, and all the while a bunch of bastardy cliff-racers queued up to take turns to annoy me the whole time.

Argh.

Larian: classic mode is overall fine. Help new users in Explorer mode if that is required.

Explorer and Classic mode are how tough the actual math and tactics are.

To lock "Direction" behind the easiest mode and telling people who actually are good at tactics but who JUST bought the game to play on Explorer mode is immediately telling that there is something wrong with the game.

I think the latest version's journal outright tells you to escape from the Prison... Though it still doesn't REALLY give a reason why. You are just supposed to sort of want to.

It's a prison, is that not reason enough to escape?

While you try to escape you will even discover better reason, why you don't want to stay as their prisoner.