Originally Posted by DocSmith59
A few constructive thoughts, if you're going to make a game as long as DKS there needs to be more plot, more dialogue, more interaction with other characters. A lot of RPG's present the player with this odd situation where you're this super powerful character on a great mission but you seem unusually concerned with doing petty little odd jobs for every minor NPC you encounter. You're a great dragon knight but you spend an awful lot of time helping someone recover a few pigs, delivering a letter, etc. Seriously, does all that require the time and attention of a dragon knight ?


For me this mean "kill the Larian works", just to point something, in the Divinity there is always something strange and simply focused on the irony, this is why I love the Larin works, otherwise I'll play a regular copy-paste RPG with some side quest made it to start at point A and end with kill/rescue at point B with some epic congratulation in the dialogue, I'm full of this "classic" and "eroic" situation after a lot of RPG games.

Originally Posted by DocSmith59

Also, one of the things that distinguishes a great RPG is memorable individual boss fights. DA:O is a great example of that.Broodmother, Father Kolgrim, Arl Howe, etc. But in DKS the bosses pretty much look the same and act the same as everyone else, just more hit points and more power. Black Ring Generals look just like every other Black Ring character and all of those characters are pretty much identical. Same with demons, goblins etc. And boss fights tend to be distinguished just by throwing huge numbers of minor minions at you while you run around trying to do something gimmicky like pulling a couple of levers.


Maybe because the flying fortess generals are an Order just like the Black Knights, the Lizard/Dragon Riders/Knights or the Death Knigths? For me this is coherent, BioWare had always done the same work since Never Winter Night, the games are planty of the same models with some variation of textures, in DA: O the boss fights are all the same, there is a tank that is under the boss, a DPS, a Priest and so on just like all the party RPGs or MMORPG, and also there are just few variation of "wereable objects", for example in NVW there're just 12 kind of swords with a lot of texture variation, good fantasy bah..
To return at this game, DKS have some orginal boss fights, the deamon in the well for example or the flying goblin, they're fine battles at high difficulty, but if they return to the origins, this will be great, just an example in Divine Divinity there is an interesting dragon/lizard knights hunting, or some strange/original boss fight with a special reward..

The Sword in the stone quest..


And so on.

Originally Posted by DocSmith59

And you need larger areas to explore and more variety of areas. Orobas Fjords isn't really a coherent map, it's a series of relatively small disconnected areas. And a lot of those areas are similar. Taking out one flying fortress is interesting, by the fourth one I'm really wanting something different.


It's a part of a continent not the entire continent, so why I must have a lot of variation in a small region of the entire world? o.o
For the next Divinity capter i want to see the oldest area, the Black forest, the dwarf city and other locations.

Originally Posted by DocSmith59

There are other issues, particularly having to do with gameplay, but I think it all comes down to a basic sort of issue.According to a doc I saw, much was cut from DKS because the original plan was over-ambitious. So in the long run a less ambitious plan might result in a more focused, more polished final game. Quantity of time spent playing the game is not a measure of quality. DKS could have used some editing, the sort of creative attitude it expresses would stand out more if it was more focused.I say this as a fan of the game who has played it twice and spent over 250 hours on it. And I think that there is a great game to be made by the people at Larian but DKS has the feel of a work in progress, a work that was considerably modified over the course of a long period of development, with those modifications coming about because of problems with potential publishers, time and budget constraints. etc. I would like to see a great game come out of that but I think that has more to do with refining what was original and attractive in DKS than with going off on other tangents.


Maybe it's true or maybe not, depend of what kind of game each of us want, for me it's good enough if i think that they had a lot of trouble and used the Gamebryo as game engine better then Bethesda did with her engine for Oblivion, you call yourself a fan of the saga, but you ignore the lore resulting to the past Divinity games and make comparisions with DA:O with that sentence "Also, one of the things that distinguishes a great RPG is memorable individual boss fights. DA:O is a great example of that", they're so different and it's true that is a matter of taste, but you contradict yourself;
Even if my words sound contrasting, I've fear to see an evolution of Larian to the mainstream users/market, why that? Because there are alot of rpgs offering the same things from years, same serious/stories storys, same gamplay and I don't want to see the Divinity lore destruction for that :\