[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.
I don't see any reason why side quests can't be better connected to the main quest. Side quests should help to develop the character and the games broader themes.A long RPG should be more than the standard thing where you are the mighty chosen one who will defeat the great evil threatening the land after you get through 40 hours of XP grinding. The game needs additional and more complex themes, not just "let's stop the plot for twenty hours while the hero runs around mowing every lawn in Rivellon,helping every NPC get his cat out of a tree, etc." None of these kinds of quests develops the character or any larger theme, it's mainly just time-filling, OK for a while but monotonous after youv'e run back and forth around the same area numerous times.
... 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..
In DKS by about two thirds of the way in I had masses of weapons, armor and jewellery items, most of which were of little use. There wasn't any point in selling them either because I amassed so much gold, and because there aren't a lot of merchants in the game and little to buy. I would generally find one good weapon and stick with it, the Wild Dwellers bow, the Bow of Orobas, the Bow of the Leopard, etc. Beyond a certain point in DKS I was sending pretty much everything to my Battle Tower storage chest, never to be seen again, and after a while I wasn't even bothering to loot much at all. The loot aspect of the game didn't work that well, what's the point of gathering fifty weapons when youv'e found one good one that works for you ? And at least in Neverwinter Nights my limited set of weapons did some serious elemental damage.
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
Because you aren't going to ever see much of the continent, it's just an abstract concept. So from the point of view of the player the areas you are confined to
are the world. In DKS the caves, fortresses, etc. are all very similar. I really liked Dragon Age 2 and did two playthroughs of it but one of the things it was criticized by so many people for, justifiably, was it's copy/paste, endlessly recycled environments. So if you just have a series of unconnected small areas I think that you need to try and inject as much variety as possible.
...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;...
It's true that you can't realistically compare the two things given the differences in resources between Bioware and Larian but Larian did originally start out with a pretty ambitious concept, then had to scale that back quite a bit. It was they who had to sit down and seriously consider the differences between a game like DA:O and the kind of game they could create with their more limited resources. But large or small, a lot of the same basics apply. A good boss fight should be an exam on everything we've learned about the game up to that point. And the boss should be a more distinctive character who may be of the same order as others but who clearly stands out, like Legate Lanius in Fallout: New Vegas, one of the toughest boss fights I've ever encountered.
I do understand what your'e saying but I don't see these kinds of suggestions as making the Larian games more mainstream, just more accessible and engaging. I'm not a big fan of Two Worlds 2 but it was an improvement over the first one. And in DA 2 the combat was improved a lot over the first game with faster, more well-animated spellcasting, amongst other things. My point is that a Divinty 3 should improve on the earlier games rather than looking to go off in new directions, like RTS.
