Larian Studios Forums Beyond Divinity (English) General My thoughts on Beyond Divinity

First of all the game looks pretty slick and with much more varied and vibrant colors, making the gameworld come alive. But ive noted some strong issues that leaves much to be desired for the final version.

My biggest beef is the utterly horrible targetting, its practically impossible to target enemies on the fly in real time mode. 9/10 times you will miss and run to the other side of the enemies. You have to pause the game EACH time you want to target an enemy. And yet, even when targetting, the hero often just stands there, doing nothing. But my deathknight companion rushes at foes to hack them down with ease. I am guessing that the enemies have way too small targetting boxes, making it easy to miss them with the mouse, if you dont click dead right in the center.

The camera, i dont know whats up with it, but it have a tendency to come loose if you move the mouse to the edge of the screen, and having hard to snap back on the heroes. Make the camera home on the active hero with the home button.
And please make the camera moveable with the arrow buttons, if i remember right, you could do that in Divine Divinity.

Finally, please make a function so that you can highlight all interactable items on the screen. With perhaps the alt button. Such as there was in diablo 2 to highlight loot and make it easier to pick up. As it is now, its quite easy to miss something, because its tiny like a key.

Elsewhise it looks to have potential to be a great game.

I can agree with you LucianDK. The targetting isn't easy at all. Let's hope Larian will change that (if its possible)... The highlighting isn't a very good idea in my opinion, because a big part of the searching and looking into the details (I thing that's a mark of RPG's) will be gone, not a very good idea. Not?

You have a point there about the highligting. But perhaps it should only be visible items that can be highlighted?

Yes, but do you mean items like food and keys of triggers to open a door (for example)?

yes

Hmms, you can highlight items like food, dropped equipment and keys for example with the alt-key. Isn't that what you meaned?

I tried various buttons, such as shift, alt and tab, none seemed to do anything for me.

Strange... Sure there were any items that you could pick up? I also used this button for a several times and it worked (just like in Divine Divinity)...

Greetings

Doesn't holding down the Ctrl key target the nearest enemy?

Yes I think so! You can find it by the configuration of your keys (in the game-menu)

No. Who would be the attacker? DK or hero?

Furthermore, DK rushes off at enemies because his script is set to "Aggressive" (right click DK portrait). You can put hero to aggressive as well, if you want him to attack enemies automatically.

Holding down Ctrl does work. And the attacker will be the person you have selected, but you can select both if you want. (press tab, select all)

Well I certainly never expected to be hugely disappointed with this demo. So far this is a huge step backward from Divinity 1. I'm not one to care about the voice acting, but man did it get bad. The main problems with the game are the following:

1.) Stamina runs out in about 1 second and you're walking at a snails pace.
2.) Combat is so slow it looks like it's happening in slow motion.
3.) You can't scroll around the map using specified keys (wasd would be nice).
4.) Related to above: Very annoying to have to move mouse cursor to scroll. I found myself hitting wasd (opening automap a lot) trying to scroll around the map.
5.) Selecting and attacking enemies was way easier in Divinity. After setting my characters to aggressive they went off and attacked on their own, but I had some issues getting my main character to attack when on normal mode.
6.) Why can't I bind a key to select all units?

Overall it seems pretty half-assed so far, hopefully it's just a poor demo.

Post deleted by DoritoOfDeath

Another slight problem. It used to be very easy to grab things like food/chests etc and move them across the screen. Now it works maybe one out of every 10 attempts. I highlight the junk, click and try to move it. Instead my character moves. arggg..I'm ready to break something haha. Eventually I get it to work but it's REALLY inconsistent with when it decides to actually pick up the junk and move it.

One other thing, the move to 3D in games such as this is a Bad Idea for anything other than spell effects. Take a look at a female characters bare feet zoomed in haha... I much prefer my rpg-type games in 2d (somehow Spellforce did 3d well..not sure how)

UPDATE: I switched down to 1280x960 resolution and the grabbing/moving if items is like it should be. I was playing on 1600x1200 (over 70 fps) so I'm not sure what the problem was on the higher res. Also the game moves a bit faster in 1280x960 so at least it feels a bit better.

Yes, the switch to 3d is often difficult. I remember every jerk whining that the Infinity Engine was going old... Bioware decided to switch to 3d with NWN. When I saw the game, I was dissapointed: it lacked... the Feel, if you know what I mean.
Spellforce's graphics were excellent, albeit the sys requirements were twice of BD.

If the demo is really as bad as you guys say, I'd vote that the Larian push the release date untill July but get the problems fixed. Do we need a poll for that?

I'm currently playing spellforce on 1600x1200 8x anustrophnic filtering and little slowdown when I have an army of like 80 units. I'm not sure why items were hard to move at 1600x1200 in BD, but going down to 1280x960 fixed it. Also the game feels a bit better at the lower res, I'm not sure what the problem is at 1600x1200. I'll test that out more when I get home as my home machine is a bit beefier (3.06ghz/fx 5900 vid) than my work machine (2.8c/fx 5200). Then I'll be able to tell if the problems with 1600 were due to the weaker video card or just a problem with the game.

I'll play some more and see if I can work through some of my issues with the game. I'd really like to be able to scroll around the map using WASD instead of mousing to the sides.

I take that back. Apparently it's just garbage that's difficult to move. Barrels move fine. I guess that didn't have anything to do with 1600.

Ohh. I have a p3 666mhz computer with a Geforce 2 GTS card, so BD's requirements are closer to me than Spellforce. The demo of SF ran VERY choppy here.

Click 1-2x on char, switches back at once (2x if char is not leading)

Combat works with targeting if you use CTRL and see the enemy's bar. I could just look at portrait icons then to see if I have to pause and let them take a potion. "Agressive" mode is a bit dangerous at the beginning if you fight the ghosts, they're level 5 after all - and I only reached lvl 4 at the end.

Interface is a bit more complicated. Try using seperate mode to open a door and lure an enemy out and "select all" after you've placed your ranged/weaker char a bit aside. It's not a normal hack'n slash game - specially not in the beginning when the chars are very weak. The Larians already said => lesser enemies but stronger ones. Choose what primary/secondary skill is - mind that secondary skill in magic requires that char leading - so switch back and forth - tactic. I had to practice this until I got a hunch on how it will work.