Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta General Feedback Thread

Thanks ! And I will, I don't see cats the same way ever since !

Something new

-Tried a new save, entered the king crab tavern, and when I talked twice to lord freod or something, asking him about esmeralda and him, and... The tavern attacked me. The whole tavern, even the guys talkking among themselves, and who probably didn't like the guy anyway. So I killed everyone (Yay !), and when I tried to open the door to the crime scene, well the legionnaire (who now laid dead at my feet) tried to stop me... Just saying, there's probably something wrong here^^

Three things about Esmerelda:

1) The big thing of hanging meat over Esmerelda's counter is well-modelled, but it makes actually trying to talk to her a pain. She's hidden by it most of the time, and it doesn't do the transparency thing when you walk behind it.

2) Her dialogue is also odd. Merely ask her about her husband's murder and she acts as if that it was an accusation. Okay, I understand that everyone else in town thinks she did it and she's a bit sensitive, but it still comes across a bit too strong for the thing we said.

3) Spoilers for the Jake's Murder quest:


- It's hard to click on rats and chickens because they almost never stop moving. That makes it hard to talk to them, or nail one with a spell or arrow.

- Is there some way to reset vendor inventories? If they don't have a thing you want, then there's nothing you can do.

- Are there any more Ranger/Warrior skills in the game other than the starting ones and Lockpick/Unlock?

Heh, I even have the same experience when I'm trying to talk to certain NPCs, like some survivor after I killed the ordcs landing on the beach early on. Perhaps such creatures ought to freeze in their animation if you mouse over them (in non-combat situations)?

Telekinesis and wizards are overpowered.

Which is good.

One thing I really hate, particularly when it comes to fantasy RPGs, is this moronic notion that equitable balance is both preferred and necessary, so I absolutely do not want to see magic or telekinesis nerfed--especially considering how those complex systems represent the "core" of the DOS experience.

I don't think anyone is going to play the game without a magic-user, and if anyone does, they'll be playing the game wrong, wrong, WRONG. Well, outside of intentional challenges I suppose.

The ideal fantasy combat system would use a asymmetric balance. The guy who says "I can hit things with a club. Hard." should always be a less valuable combat asset next to the guy who says, "I can explode anything. With my mind."

An good example of asymmetric balance is Baldur's Gate II, where magic-users are--by far--the most powerful damage-dealers in the game, but are balanced by the Vancian magic system and extremely defensive capabilities--making them glass cannons, or glass nukes (at higher levels). They're further balanced by being extremely weak for a long time (until they advance far enough to memorize a fair number of higher level spells).

Alternatively, a good example of equitable balance is Skyrim. Remember how magic is implemented in Skyrim? No? That's okay--you probably never used it after the first few tries. Essentially, magic was nerfed (to an insane degree) to "balance" with melee skills, to the point where tossing a fireball at a magical creature conjured out of ice would do the same amount of damage as hitting it with a club, and where basic melee often dealt significantly BETTER damage than magic against everything.

....

So, how does all this apply to DOS?

I'm saying I don't think the versatility or potency of the magic or abilities needs to be changed. Any balancing that occurs (and some balancing should occur) should be focused on the cooldown timers. I'd suggest increasing fireball cooldown by 50%, for example.

A couple ideas of what more could be done with cooldowns:

-Cooldowns could "pause" at the end of combat and "resume" at the start of the next combat action. That way, instead of being able to use the most powerful spell at the start of every encounter, players would be encouraged to think more carefully and use their magic more sparingly--lest they find themselves in a difficult battle with no powerful spells to use (right away), because they wasted them burning crabs.

-Cooldowns could persist in the non-combat mode. It would achieve a similar effect to the first idea, but would also effect how players just mess around with the world. Telekinesis, for example, would become an ability that could only be used sparingly, instead of the constantly-ready tool of mischief it is now.

........

Also, as for the difficulty in clicking on NPCs or chickens... DOS needs a pause button. Every top-down RPG needs a pause button, IMHO, where you can issue commands w/ the game world frozen in time. Makes things a lot simpler.

Arsene: Nice ideas there!

A pause button would certainly help. And balance to the point of everything being equal is something to be shunned. However, it should take skill to use those better class and skill combos. Also, most class and skill combos should at least be viable, and such a thing takes loads and loads of testing and finetuning - hence, alpha and beta!

I do not like the end of the kitty love quest or the dialogue choices. It seems we want to look at cats and their actions as if they are human in the game and no mention of how it might be different for non-humans.

For a moment, I thought that you were on to something with the "cooldowns pause after combat ends" idea, but that means that you won't be able to use spells indefinitely until you get into a fight. I'm not sure how workable that idea is - especially since there are limited spawns and therefore limited fights you can get into. Here's an example:

I entered the Black cove with an Archer and Mage and reached a point I couldn't pass:



Cooldowns DO persist in the real-time world, it's just that a round is so short that they don't last long in real-time. I am in favour of longer cooldowns.

You can click on chickens, the problem is that they remain in motion, so you either go to where they are or shoot at where they were, meanwhile they've moved on farther away. A pause button won't do anything for that.


While I am likely to make most of my classes at least magic-using hybrids, I disagree with your idea that anyone who plays a warrior in Original Sin is playing the game wrong. That's almost suggesting that Larian remove the class entirely. I'm sure there's some meeting ground between "Warriors are useless" and "Mages are useless".

Finally got to play two hours and really love the game so far. So much to explore and see. The dialogs are engaging and funny. Even on my old laptop on the lowest settings the game looks kind of nice. Only the shadows looks really bad on the lowest settings so i think that it would be good idea if you could turn them off.

Same here (Win 7 i5/GTX650Ti)

the door 5 right after the first fight with crabs has weird limits but maybe it's just a limit for the alpha.

Thank you Larian for this alpha !!

The inventory looks quite promising, but what it really needs and I hope that it will be implemented later is a sort button. Right now items in the inventory are all over the place.

That's the idea! The tabs on the side of the inventory are already there, but the functionality is not. I'm sure we'll get round to fixing that though
This means that you'll have your armour pieces in the armour tab, weapons in the weapons tab, etc.

Yep, we just have to wait for those tabs to work in a future patch . Then, inventory will look quite similar to the first "Risen" title (haven't played the second one).

Not only tabs but the basic automatic sorting of items in one tab, by their name, for example. Right now when I have many items and move them from one character to the other or sell them - they leave empty spaces and I have to scroll down to look for the needed item down below. Better to make them automatically sort themselves (or make a sort btton) starting from upper left corner of the tab.
Also, I'm thinking there should be a button to switch between characters' inventories in the barter window - it's annoying to move all items from one character to the other who has the barter skill.

Crates can be destroyed while you have their inventory open on screen. After you destroy them you can still drop stuff into them and drag stuff out of them. Perhaps a sort of "close-on-destruction" trigger might be something?

The soundtrack is just godly.

Here's some positive feedback: I like how the stealth system is implemented in the game. The walking bush animation is hilarious, your partner automatically waits (even if they're normally following you), and making everything go greyscale and leaving the colouted parts as the area where you will be detected is a great idea and makes it easier to tell if you will be detected or not.

I have not tested it yet, I don't know if this is in or is planned to be in, but hopefully more points into Sneaking will increase the distance you can move per AP when sneaking in combat.


P.S. Larian, please add a wearable barrel as armour. That would be a blast.

Hi guys!

Well, I have another issue with savegame loading, i'm sorry if it was mentionned before:

After a load, Roderick seems to lost all his melee weapons, except for the beginning sword... It has happened with a single hand mace, a two-hand axe, and a two hand sword. I had reloaded the savegame several times, but it was always the same.

No need the say that it makes Roderick a bit useless :p (and nobody likes to lose their loot )

Never happened to me before the patch.

If I try to cook twice on the mobile kitchen the game crashes.

Not very useful of me, but I do have to quote all this for truth.