Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Divinity II - The Dragon Knight Saga Dragon Knight Saga 360: First Impressions

Unfortunately, I am sorry to report that my first impressions are not really positive.

VISUALS
The visuals are somewhat sharper. It's not groundbreaking nor spectacular though. It doesn't even begin to approach the PC screenshots posted by the publisher, but I'll take it. The game appears to be darker on the default setting, the lighting effects seem more pronounced.


A big bulletpoint during the promo campaign for this game was the changes brought to the 360 version in terms of accessibility.
However, upon actually playing the game, I found these tweaks to have been way, way overrated.

MENU DESIGN AND USER FRIENDLINESS
Given the amount of flak the 360 version of Ego Draconis took for its clunky interface, and the way Larian hyped the tweaks to make it smoother, very little redesign has actually been done.
There is now a way to compare an item with the one that is currently equipped, which I don't remember being in the original version. That's obviously good.
But other than that...

Basically, the biggest thing you did is shuffling the order of the categories in the main menu.
Saving is way down the list now, far from Inventory.
The least you could have done was to provide a wheel menu.
RPG always demand a good bit of micromanagement and frequent saves, and in this context the main menu's long vertical list just doesn't cut it on a console. On PC you just point and click so it's no big deal. But with a gamepad, you have to scroll up or down through every option on the list between the one you're at and the one you want to get to, every time.

On the one hand, the main menu accessed with Start is cluttered with many elements and an annoyance to navigate back and forth.

On the other hand, the Back menu is underused and only takes you to the map and nothing else. Besides, it doesn't seem to memorize the level of zoom you apply to a map which I found cumbersome when I am exploring a dungeon and need to consult the map repeatedly.
You could at least have assigned both the quest journal and the map to the Back menu, and allow us to toggle between the two with the triggers.
Instead of that, the triggers appear to remain unused in the Back menu.

In the inventory, you assigned the item comparison function to the Right Trigger.
I think the triggers could have been used much better to ease transition between general categories of the main menu.

I'm not sold on the concept of having to equip a weapon in the inventory first, before it appears in the list of weapons available to be assigned to a shortcut.

I also think that the point and click aspect of the interface is still too rigid for a gamepad. You have to point exactly at the box or chest you want to open or it just won't work.
A 360 pad is not a mouse. There should be an extended area around the object where, if you point your crosshairs towards that direction, the action will register too.

With one year of additional development time, and considering the criticism of the original's interface, honestly it stings.

CAMERA
The original version had a camera that sometimes made it hard to see your character while performing a dodge. This has been alleviated. But there remain issues to stay aware of your environment when locked on enemies because the camera is close. Overall it's OK though.

LOAD TIMES
I must say that this was the real surprise for me.
I run the game from my 360's hard drive, which usually helps performance.
Maybe it's me, and if it is I apologize for badmouthing the game. But honestly I don't see what I could have done wrong here. All my games run fine from the hard drive.
Despite that, the load times appear way longer than in the original. And the original already dragged on quite a bit.
Loading the valley's outdoor section takes me 40 seconds, and that's when you get out of every building.
I popped the original game for a quick test, and found that the same section took 12/15 seconds less to load, and that's from the DVD - not the hard drive.


So overall, I am not convinced that a true work of optimization, other than a few visual enhancements, has been done.
The game would have needed a more extensive redesign in the interface department and elsewhere, to truly make sense as a console release - especially on a second try.