Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Divinity II - Flames of Vengeance I mad

Adding alt key that shows stuff lying on the ground wouldn't hurt tho.

Bah! markers, really. I have played games were markers are all over, if I wanted to play connect the dots, I'd go sit down and pull out my sons drawing books.

..But in all seriousness, It's a rather small confined space making markers overkill. Part of the game should be the thinking, searching, banging head-to-keyboard, go to sleep , wake up going...AHHH that's it..That for me is a game worth my time and money. What's the point of spending your well earned cash on a completely easy, no challenge game?

happy hunting

Actually, this is a big issue for us - personally, I prefer not having too much hand holding, but we have figured out by now that there's a lot of players (and critics for that matter) out there who demand it. But you need to realize that it takes development effort which means you can't use that same development effort on something else, like content for instance. I think that for our next games we'll probably offer more "hand holding" options (and I don't mean that in a negative way because I think it's more to do with the accelerating speed of media consumption ) because that seems to be the trend and we need to adapt, but at the same time, old school & that, I find it a pity that it's become a must as, especially for most small teams like ours, it comes at a hefty price in terms of experimentation.

I you are going to do that, please make it also possible to turn off such features in the settings menu. Stuff like that kills any exploration. For all it's faults the one (and probably only) thing Arcania did right, was the option to turn off most of the handholding ui elements.

Agree with Rain Koor

Quest markers for every single thing turn a game into follow the dot, do that, follow another dot, do this, blah and so on.

Plenty of times during DKS I was thinking "what the --, where the hell is it? And occasionally it sprang to mind that it wouldn't be a good idea to play the Larian team at poker.

But that helped keep the game interesting and made you explore every nook and cranny which, while you maybe didn't find what you were looking for straight away, meant that you found other things that were of use to you or that were needed for other quests etc, people don't seem to realise that the Larian team did a rather good job of tying things together.

So yeh, as Rain Koor says, please if possible make quest markers switchable for those hunter seeker types among us who like to achieve things for ourselves.


Methinks these days of sat nav etc has turned some of us into a generation of people that would get lost in an elevator.

This game has quest markers. Not for EVERYTHING, but I definitely noticed quest markers.

Lar_q: When I was doing the Bandit Camp quest I actually thought the game was broken for not telling me exactly where to locate the Bandit Camp - that's just how much of a staple Quest Markers have become for the industry. They are not a bad thing. Yes, it speeds players through content, but if your goal is to deliver a tight, streamlined experience, that's the idea. If the goal is to deliver an open-ended world of exploration and discovery, you can still have quest markers, the world just needs to be much more open than in DKS (which I didn't feel had that much for exploration or discovery, even without Quest Markers everywhere).

There's also fast travel in the form of the statues, and later Dragon Form... which is mainly used to explore the linear corridor that is the Fjord. We also have the ability to respec, a storage chest that we can send items directly to from the field so we don't have to fuss with tedious inventory management, and skill-less hack and slash combat.

I'm not sure why it would be *against* Larian's beliefs to provide more/improve upon current methods of player guidance, when they already employ many methods in DKS. Guidance and hand-holding are two seperate things - Guidance says "This quest wants you to eventually go here, the area of interest mentioned by the NPC you just spoke to is here" etc., and hand-holding says "Here is a breadcrumb trail that leads you there, here is a flashing point and it is the boss' weakspot).

tl;dr Guidance = Good, Hand-holding = Bad

Indeed, some people today must always take their satellite navigator ON in the car for going to the supermarket (just kidding, of course, everybody may take use of the newest navigation systems, so NO offense about this)...

For me the same, give possibility to set OFF questmarkers or whatever of guidance you make for the player

Hand-holding is indeed for me not welcome ... but I don't think Larian should do something, that's not their style.

I love it when I start a rpg and I totally don't know where to go ... but discover on my own the "what, where, how, who's" while exploring new areas is simply great !! It makes my day a superday and give so much self-confidence !
For example in DD: the quests to heal both sick man (Verlat and Simon) in Aleroth. Great quest!! Only the "I don't know the how many turns" I play DD I found how to make a duplicate of the healing gem !

Thank you. In many ways I hold Divinity II up to the standard of -gasp- Divinity I, and Divine Divinity did not have hand holding either. It was extremely rewarding to find and discover and figure out quests and secrets.

I also agree with the option to turn quest markers, compass pointers, big question marks over people's heads and the like OFF. Surely, if you're going to be forced to create these things anyway, it couldn't sap that much more time or energy to let us "old-school" gamers (wow, never thought I'd be applying that term to myself) toggle them off and feel the enjoyment of exploring and questing?

Side-note: Someone should write a full review of D2 discussing whether it lived up to the first game and fulfilled the series, not how it stacks up to Oblivion and such shite. I think that someone...shall be me.

Just as a side note,

I have a mate thats been here to visit me about 7 times since we moved here 2 years ago, he still cant get here without his sat nav, he dropped and broke the damned thing a couple of weeks ago so tried to get here last weekend without it, he phoned me sometime later and I had to jump in the car and go and rescue him, he was even in a diffrent town, 11 miles away.


So on that note, some people obviously need their hands held and some dont. I believe switchable quest markers is the way to go.

I rather enjoyed the lack of quest markers, the only real problem i had(in both the expansion and maingame) Were some levers hidden in a dark corner nearly impossible to find for someone who's color blind.

Besides the last puzzle(the clue's that were saved upon your log were rather vague)

I loved the puzzles and the lack of direction. One thing i would have liked though was a description of where npc's i had finished quests for were located. I don't want gps arrows and i don't need them marked on my map, i would like a like line of text in my journal though. For example "I found the sword john was looking for, i should return it to him at the red dragon inn." Not just "I should find john and return it."

This was not a huge issue for me, but there were a couple of npcs i just couldn't for the life of me remember where i had met. I ran around quite a bit in aleroth trying to find some npc's, since there were so many there.

I'm with Lar; old school is best. Alas, it's bound to go the way of 1920x1200 displays and dinosaurs.

Sure some of the puzzles are a bit frustrating; had to brute force the colored hand puzzle last night, but I solved it and wrote the combination down to save myself the effort next time. Felt good about solving it too.

Game worlds are already feeling rather vacuous because of all the "hand holding" measures developers have to spend time on. Pretty soon we'll be back to Pong (in 3D with DX11 shaders!) because nobody will want games requiring anything more than motor control.

It's ironic because in the 1980s people flocked to desktop computer games (and thus PC gaming was born) because they offered complexities to challenge minds, while coin-op and console systems of the day only required quick reflexes and good concentration.

I remember not having a clue when I first played Zork, and running around lost in the relatively huge world of Britannia in Ultima IV.

For the next game I'd like more complex puzzles. Something like the crossword puzzle from "The Dark Heart of Uukrul", the riddle puzzles from "Amberstar" and the press buttons, pressure plates and crazy spinners from "Bloodwych".

Those were the times!

it's a mixed bag for me......I use them,or i don't. in DV2 I found that too many markers tend to make them run into each other, making them hard to read. I only put markers on areas where i couldn't open the chests, so i could go back to them later on.