Hi all! This post is intended to provide a complete feedback to the game (with minor spoilers). I'm new to the forums, registered just to write this post. I've been lurking around while playing, though.

While this post is mainly aimed at providing constructive criticism, I do want to say some good words about the game first. I'm one of those RPG old-timers, who has played dozens of the best games in the genre, starting with 90's and till this day. Therefore I'm pretty picky, and my tastes can be old-fashioned. As of late, I find myself more and more often throwing away a game without finishing it when I don't like it, so the fact that I did finish DKS (despite admittedly being close to throwing it away several times) is a significant praise to the game.

What I mostly liked about the game was the great storyline, voice acting and atmosphere. Also, most of the maps are beautiful, and don't bore you with countless repetitions of the same dungeon, unlike some other games *cough* Oblivion *cough*. When comparing to Oblivion, another positive difference that catches the eye is that NPCs don't respawn or grow in level together with you. The game also favorably distinguishes itself by its outstanding sense of humor, which is so rare and hard to find these days. The countless pop-culture references were also a great joy. The whole dragon mode thing had a lot of promise - most of it was unfortunately wasted, but I still enjoyed flying around at great speed and exploring the world from high altitude.

On the technical side, the game made several good decisions, but also many bad ones (detailed below). I really liked the very usable log book (conversation log!) and weapon/armor comparison hints on rollover.

That said, there was a large number of things that irritated me in DKS and game decisions with which I disagree. The list (in the order of decreasing importance) is going to be long and detailed, so I want to say in advance that it's not intended as bashing, but rather as an honest feedback for the developers, so that their next game can avoid these mistakes.

1. Performance. This is by far the worst one, I considered dropping the game more than once because of it. My machine is an overclocked core2duo 2.6 GHz, 6 GB of DDR2 870 MHz RAM, Win7 x64 (fresh install), overclocked HD3850 with 256 MB, all newest drivers, playing at 1600x1200. This configuration is able to deal with most of the new games I throw at it (albeit with modest video settings - no AA or HDR, etc), and certainly with all the older ones. Still, I have not managed to find the right configuration for DKS. The main issue I'm encountering is periodic (about 1-2 seconds apart) stuttering, which manifests itself in sudden, for a fraction of second, sluggishness of all movement on the screen, which is then followed by fast-forward recovery (as in a stuttering movie). I tried setting everything to low (completely disabling shadows, etc). Also tried everything I could find on this forum and elsewhere. From what I've seen, the severity of the issue is random - sometimes it's awful, other times tolerable, and in some areas non-existant. Also, perhaps it sometimes only starts occurring after a while in the game. One common thing more likely to cause it is a lot of fire on the screen. All scenes that have a lot of vibrating air are certain to cause abysmal performance. FPS is bad, too: with everything disabled, set to low, etc (except detail set to high), I get constant 25 FPS when standing in the battle tower near Kirill.

2. Camera. This game really should have gone with the first-person view, there are no reasons for over-the-shoulder camera. The camera as it is is bad in every way:
- when you change the angle, it gets closer/farther from the ground; this makes aiming and exploration difficult (see below)
- hard to evaluate distance; even close to the endgame, I often couldn't hit containers on the first attempt; matters are even worse with moving objects, such as enemies
- because the camera is far from the character, you can't adequately react to close encounters with the enemies (this would screw up fine melee mechanics, had there been any such mechanics in the first place)
- when the character moves uphill, there is no comfortable way of controlling the camera: if you keep the view angle you are used to, it will reduce the visible surface ahead; if you rotate the camera backward, it will change the distance from it to the surface and make the character model obscure a larger area. Moving downhill is even worse: in attempt to see more detail you rotate the camera forward... which actually increases distance to the surface.
- the character obscures part of the view
- shallow roof and various objects that stand in camera's way cause the camera to zoom in/out unpredictably, which is very distracting and sometimes gets in the way of seeing parts of the surface by obscuring it with the character's back; this is the typical problem of the third-person camera, whose only (still unpleasant) solution is to render the obscuring objects invisible
- the first-person view gives greater immersion in the game reality (e.g., you can use the third-person camera to look around the corner - not very realistic)
- thousand strikes skill causes the camera to be rotated, further disorienting the player; this is a classic example of a special effect destroying gameplay; it looks cool the first time, but is clearly a nuisance from then on; when you pause the game in the middle of thousand strikes, the camera would spin wildly for a couple of seconds after unpause (this is obviously a bug)

Overall, there's no reason for anything but first-person view in a game where you control a single character.

3. Combat/movement mechanics are, mildly put, upsetting in comparison to other action-RPG games:
- no melee mechanics to speak of. Instead, everything happens in a semi-automatic way. Click-click-click - that's all you need to know about melee combat. No blocking! No user-controlled maneuvers! Worse: there are some automatic maneuvers, and different maneuvers result in different lag, which you can not predict.
- bad responsiveness, made worse by sluggishness. The fastest way of killing an enemy is spamming the mouse or shortcut button: if instead of spamming you try to perform the next action upon previous action's completion, you can barely reach a half of that speed. Therefore, you always try to have the next action stacked, which means that you can't react to unexpected events on the battlefield and usually waste time performing another hit after killing an enemy.
- sometimes a "stacked" action (which you triggered while previous action was being performed) would be performed, and sometimes not. So you end up dumbly clicking the mouse or spell shortcut over and over to avoid missing the moment when the lag of the previous maneuver/action ends.
- strafes, strafe rolls and jumps are useless in close encounters, as you can not adequately react to events (strafing is only useful for avoiding projectiles, strafe rolls are only useful for... fast traveling)
- arrows, melee hits and magic projectiles all fly through friendly characters, so you can't tactically cover yourself from enemy fire by standing behind another enemy
- rush attack (or whatever it's called) works through obstacles and irrespective of height differences, e.g. skeleton wizards without any apparent climbing gear are able to rush up or even through a 5-meter wall (I never used this skill myself, so not sure if it also works for the player)
- projectiles' speed seems to increase with level of the skill? e.g., closer to the endgame it's impossible to intentionally dodge enemy arrows and often difficult to dodge fireballs, so you have to constantly move from place to place, thus reducing your own firing speed
- AI is pretty bad. Obvious things: NPCs never use jumping, they often stand without doing anything in the middle of the battle and they tend to return to their original spot after giving up on following you, in which case you can easily run after them and kick them in the back without any retaliation. This is true both for hostile and friendly NPCs.
- enemies heavily prefer to target the player and not your friendly NPCs, especially when you do anything other than running around (e.g. fight); the demon summoning spell says he taunts the enemies, but I didn't see that happening
- no target locking in the pause mode; this limits the usability of target locking, because often enemies are close to one another, and you have to either carefully aim at the one you want to lock on, or cycle through targets, which takes time
- half of the time, movement won't work after unpausing; e.g., you pause the game, press (and keep pressed) the forward button, unpause... and the character doesn't move until you release the button and press it again

4. Many technical nuisances.
- unskippable cut scenes, sometimes followed by a crash. I had a crash after the final fight's cut scene!
- sluggish cursor movement in the menu (duh, 30 FPS)
- the game heavily depends on saving a lot, but saving is slow
- cut scenes in the middle of the battle

5. The game seems to encourage munchkin/cheating behavior instead of restricting it. Many things give you better result when you save/reload, and there is often no way of achieving the same result by honest means. The game is random where it shouldn't be and is non-random where it should be.
- mind reading's cost in XP is a clever idea, but it works against honest players. I ended up choosing this option every time, but I couldn't help thinking that I would be much better off saving and reloading in case the information was useless.
- random loot in chests, generated at the time of opening; would be easy to fix by generating loot in all chests when the game is started
- limited supply of malachite gems and their random distribution in veins, one-time encounter with that trader who offers you to buy the gem (I met him before I knew anything about usefulness of malachite gems, so I didn't buy it)
- endless hidden buttons and secret areas encourage a kind of pixel hunting
- a Lovis quest, where you have to choose the correct answers, which I personally had no idea about (and I'm a heavy RPG player: I pick up and read all books, explore all conversation options, etc.). The only way to get the answers right is to try it repeatedly, which breaks the illusion, because in the game world, you supposedly *say* your answers, not choose one predefined option. The right way to handle this would be to make sure the player has the required information before they start the quest and shuffle the questions and answer options randomly.
- Orobas chest!!!

All said, one thing DKS got right: the ability to easily reset the skillpoint distribution. This encourages experimentation.

6. The role-playing aspect has a lot of blunders.
- the dragon mode - a great idea - is basically wasted, because the dragon can't fight ground enemies. Also, the inability to rise higher than certain altitude or fly over mountains is a severe hindrance.
- there is no character alignment (good/evil, order/chaos), all the usual consequences of alignment are lacking, too
- every area's map is completely revealed as soon as you enter the area, including hidden chambers, which makes the exploration process feel very unnatural
- nearly everyone is thinking of their hidden treasures or some other stuff that is obviously intended for you to rob. That is usually the only thought that passes through their head, because you can't mindread most of the characters more than once. I think a little more creativity and diversity in NPC's thoughts would make mind reading much more interesting.
- lockpick skill should be accompanied by pickpocket
- while I appreciate the possibilities you get by mixing different classes, I still think it's wrong from the RPG perspective; generally, I think the correct way to do mixing is to force the player to choose an initial specialization and then allow other specializations to be unlocked as quest rewards or for a price, and/or make the other classes' skills cost higher than the native skills
- citizens and guards do not react to you robbing their stuff
- skeletons can heal and be healed

7. Story/world blunders:
- enemy NPCs are interspersed with friendly NPCs, all at a distance of 50 meters from each other. In some cases, the friendly NPCs stand in a place to which they obviously couldn't get in any other way than passing through an enemy camp. I had more than one encounter, where enemies walked by friends, without friends even paying attention.
- all NPCs are either friendly or hostile, you can't attack a friendly NPC, except as part of a quest
- stains of blood on the floor next to a long-dead skeleton
- lots of corpses everywhere you go, and nearly no survivors; some of the corpses are in places long inhabited by hostile creatures (why haven't they rotten or been eaten during this time?)
- every peasant and their dog has a secret storage locked by a talking magical device
- *SPOILER* the critical component of the storyline is silly. I'm talking about the part, where you're being told that resurrecting Ygerna would kill Damian; disregarding the fact that it's a lie, the idea itself doesn't hold water: so you resurrect Ygerna, Damian dies... then she commits suicide and resurrects Damian *SPOILER*
- NPCs behave way too silly for the dire situation they are facing. E.g., no one in Orobas Fjords seems to notice *some* (to avoid spoiling) changes that happened in the Broken Valley
- too much strange/magical things are unexplained, such as the debris flying around the battle tower, the Dragon Stone, antidragon zones, flying fortresses, etc. (maybe some of them were explained in Divinity I, which I didn't play)
- some areas are just too dark, you can't even see the opposite wall of a passway. If the game has dark areas, give the player a flare or a lantern.
- too many NPCs share same faces

Last edited by neatfires; 15/02/11 08:38 AM.