Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Suggestion: Optional Friendly Fire.

I was meant to make this thread a while ago and forgot, so apologies if somebody else has since.

My suggestion is simply. Make friendly fire an optional thing, not a forced choice.

The reason is that I can see already how frustrating that will be for solo players who want to get through the game with little to no people dying and/or haver not saved in a while, and will also cause untold amounts of arguments/fights between co-op players every time it happens.

It should be a forced choice on the hardest difficulty, but an optional one on all others. Oh, and I don't mean friendly fire simply between PC toons, but also NPCs as well. You only need to play Skyrim for a while to quickly see how infuriating it is when your attacks hit a commoner/guard (and you get a bounty for it, no less...) because they decided to play dumbass and get right in your way.

Yes, but no.
DoS have turn based combat, so you cannot blame the NPC, it won't move in your turn. You must see it as another obstacle in your way if you want to avoid hitting it, it's all.

I get that it wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem it is in Skyrim (and holy hell is it a problem in Skyrim), but it would still be a problem as you don't always know what an NPC is gonna do, and I'm assuming that you will eventually get spells/abilities that take more than one turn to power up/charge (ie. your individual character's unique/special move).

I was once doing a dungeon in Skyrim and had a follower. Follower gets killed because he runs right in front of me while I'm fighting (as in, he pushes the enemy out of the way to stand in front of me). I ressed him with console commands but he left my service, so I reloaded only to find I hadn't saved since the beginning of that entire section. Needless to say my follower got a second helping from my mace.

At least the AI should clever enough to avoid AOE Effects. Mostly my (friendly) NPC run straight trough my AOEs and get killed...

Yeah, that's what I'm on about. It's beyond infuriating when NPCs insist on getting right in your way. I dunno enough about coding to know if that is avoidable, but making friendly fire optional would certainly make things better.

as you control every character you do not have to face stupid AI so far

So far. And you don't control NPCs.

Have you played alpha?

obviously not ... or i have missed to take over control of the NPCs...

Yes, I have, I just posted this in the wrong forum is all. And what are you talking about, I've not found any way to control anybody except my party members during a battle.

i think the postings was a reply to Chaotica, cause he mentioned to control the NPCs

I am playing the alpha but the henchmen were not implemented so far so I do not know if you can control them or not.

but then you know, you can't control the NPCs in the open combat (cause we are not allowed to spoiler, i can only say there are several in the Alpha an your interactions can lead to one big fight...)

at least than, the AI has some problems...

If you played th alpha then this thread needs to be moved.

I notified the mods regarding it.

People can easily discus friendly fire in general, or optionally based on some of the gameplay videos shown during the kickstarter, without getting into any spoilers. Any specific examples, of course, should be discussed in the alpha forum... but is the topic headed in that direction? (or does anyone want it to?)

So you want to be able to hit a huge fireball in the midst of a bunch of enemies, where your fighters are hacking away at them, without hitting your fighters? That doesn't really sound like an RPG to me. If any mage in any RPG shouts "I'VE GOT AN IDEA! FIREBALL!", everyone knows they had better run.

What I'm trying to say is: on the battlefield, it's a tactical choice. Get your guys out of there before you wanna do area damage stuff. In a town square: just don't hit people, don't pull the trigger and no one gets hurt.

I don't see why FF should be optional. It's not about hardcore or not. It's about rules.

Henchmen and summons: you control them.
Friendly people joining fights: you don't control them cause they didn't join your party, they joined the fight. If you want to take their lives into account, don't fireball.

Yeah. As long as the range indicators are clear for what's in the damage radius (which they aren't always at this stage), then I have no problem with Friendly fire making things more tactically challenging.

Aaaaaaaah you mean the ones that asks you to help them, who cares? If they are too stupid to live... (joking of course ^^) but ya I really like what ForkTong said about it




so if you hit your own man that is your entire fault, and about the IA you have to cope with it, it is the same in classical RPG (like D&D)




ya, but I think the problem is not that you cannot evaluate the "collateral damages" it is more that you cannot control the NPC who stupidly stand into your fireball range^^

hahahahaha THIS is why you must NOT disable friendly fire :
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-01-10-divinity-original-sin-preview

I didn't say disable, I said make it optional.