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.

Greetings, new to this forum and all that.

I was lucky enough to have received my copy a day early and have been playing for quite a few hours now. Enjoying it so far but I have two issues with the interface.

1) Every time I turn the game on I have to re-set my brightness setting in the options menu (the game does not seem to save my choice after I turn off the game).

2) There are no options to move the mini map and action menus further out to accomodate wide screen displays. It looks messy.

I'm wondering if I'm just over looking the options to tinker with these things, or if it's possible that there can be a patch later on to have these options included? Hopefully it wouldn't be such a monumental task.

Other than that I'm really really enjoying the game, but my experience could be enhanced further with just some alterations

(I moved this post from the other thread as it seems more appropriate here).

@Masa2009:

I'm sorry to hear you find the improvements we did on X360 insufficient. I can assure you that really a lot of work was put into it and find it therefore surprising that you find the changes minimal:

In terms of accessibility, the entire inventory system was revamped for instance and you now don't need to navigate separately anymore between an equipment screen, a stats screen and an inventory screen to boost your character. Considering the amount of things you can do, I personally thought it was quite a cool that the team managed to cram it all in one screen while still finding room for the paperdoll and keeping things readable. In terms of navigation, there's always going to be something that one player prefers over another player, and we tweaked it in function of the feedback we got from play-testers, which obviously is often conflicting, so we know we can't please all there. But to say that we only changed the menu, that's going a bit far I think.

Regarding the targeting cursor, we actually tried the system you described, but on balance, players seemed to prefer more exact control because an approximative system has the problem that when items are close, it's hard to pick the right one. But we do realize that it's also an area where you can't please everyone.

I'm glad to read you appreciate the changes in visuals and camera, and I hope you will find more changes towards the positive as you progress throughout the game.

Regarding the optimizations, you should find that performance has increased and that the game feels more fluid (at least it does to us). The load times it turns out are very dependent on the region of the game and the language you play because of the way the lay-out on DVD works (some things take longer to load) Putting it on HDD should mean an improvement, so I'm not too sure about what the problem is there, except that it can take a bit longer because the game now tries to make sure it has all visual assets in memory after loading prior to rendering the first image. This to prevent those instances where half the art assets were only available at low levels of detail after loading.

The hype around the X360 version we've been posting was based on observing play-testers, some of which had already played the original game, and who reported considerably more positive impressions, but opinions of course differ. In the same breath I'll agree that there's always room for improvement and posts like yours do help us learn what people expect.

I'd also like to add that on a 60+ hours RPG it's pretty easy for a developer to make the wrong choices from time to time

I would suggest clearing the Xbox 360s cache if you experience long loading times from the HDD. For some games it can implement an improvement.

Lar_q, thanks for your prompt answer.

I do like some of the stuff you did with the console interface.
I like the freeze of the action with the right stick and the shortcut to the item selection with the bumpers.
I like the way you can modify shortcuts without going to the inventory.
So I acknowledge that some work has been put into delivering a good console RPG experience, especially on the part a fairly small development team. Sorry if I sounded harsh.


However, I do think that the main menu is an issue, you just don't see main menus done this way in console RPGs nowadays, with so much stuff grouped into a vertical section from the save/load to the inventory to the quest journal. Looks like a PC thing.

I know you get that type of request every time, but could the main menu get a different layout through a patch? It would help tremendously given the amount of time you spend navigating between saving, quests and weapons over the course of a playthrough.
Not even changing the options themselves or anything, but just changing the layout of that menu to a wheel motif would make a large difference.


At the risk of sounding very pretentious, I even think what follows could work:

If you push the Left Stick towards for example the "Inventory" section of the wheel, you could either:
-press A to actually enter the Inventory
-press Right Bumper to make Inventory your preferred option at the center of the wheel.

This way from now on, when you press Start, you just have to click A to arrive to your favorite destination "Inventory" without even pushing the Left Stick in any direction.
But if you prefer, you can also push the Left Stick in the "Save" direction and press RB to have "Save" now be the center of the wheel.
This could make things like quick saving or inventory access a breeze compared to the current situation, and in my opinion would truly benefit the action RPG experience that is Divinity II.

Even if that "Press RB to put at the center of the wheel" thing is not do-able, just a basic wheel layout would do a world of good.


Thanks for your attention.

Sounds like you want a layout similar to Sacred 2.

It seems that most console RPGs these days try to alleviate the problems of repeatedly scrolling through long lists and use wheel menus to a certain extent.
I am not very familiar with Sacred 2, but I remember reading reviews praising the game for its user friendliness when the console port was released.

The new Fallout tweaked the ally NPC interactions from Fallout 3 by adding a wheel, too.
I think I read an interview with the guys from Two Worlds II and they said the game was going to feature them extensively as well.

Sacred 2 had a good layout, though it wasn't perfect and took some getting used to. Personally menus don't really bother me as long as I know where I'm going to get to what I need.

I'm with Lar on this one, it's just personal opinion, though it doesn't make your opinion any less valid.