Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Feedback after playing Beta 1.0.288

This should make a good general feedback thread.

I've got some now:

I like the overall improvements, the UI looks much better now.


Tutorial
I know the Tutorial is a work in progress. It is a neat area to explore, but I do have to agree that it feels mandatory to do for every character - not necessarily because of the experience you get there, but because of all the items you can find. All those vases produce a lot of stuff that's too tempting to pass up.

It also does nothing at all to explain the mechanics of the turn-based combat. I had a ranger, and killed all three skeletons at the start on the first turn with the arc-of-arrows skill. It was strange, because during the Q&A video, that combat seemed to last a few turns, but my ranger ended it immediately, which doesn't really help make it work as a tutorial. Inside there's only one combat encounter (which doubles as the stealth tutorial and triples as the use surfaces in combat tutorial).

There's a spot where crafting could be explained, there's a side room with arrow shafts and arrowheads, but you can't craft those with Crafting 1. Maybe if there was a Stunning Arrowhead in the pile - you can do that one at Crafting 1.

I don't completely agree that it needs to go over the mechanics of spending skill points, that seems like a really obvious thing, but then again, maybe it isn't.

The tomb is a nice place to explore, but one of the reasons I suggested a Source Hunter's Academy tutorial is because you could gain no XP and lose all the items you get there, and then it could truly be an optional tutorial. An optional dungeon full of free loot is essentially impossible to pass up.


"Rock-Paper-Scissors" dialogue minigame
I’m not sure that minigame is fully implemented yet, because I’m a little confused. It says “choose your weapon.” Should I be picking something? It seems to be playing itself. Even if I could pick something, it's rock-paper-scissors, so does it really matter what I pick anyway? Right now, this is not an improvement over the mere dice roll, it just takes up a bunch of time (way too much time) for no good reason.


Way of the Ranger required
Only three of the "Way of the Ranger" skills actually require you to have ranged weapon. For the rest - the majority of the skills - what weapon you have is irrelevant. Requiring you to have points in Way of the Ranger to use them is an issue, because three-to-four of the five Way of the Ranger's bonuses are basically only good for those who use Ranged Weapons.


The Observatory
Using the telescope will actually SHOW you something strange and fantastical in the final, right? Just saying you saw it somehow doesn’t quite work. It should be awe-inspiring, not a paragraph of text. "Show, don't tell."


The Crime Scene, Sourcery, and Source Hunters
The boards over the window outside the King Crab are nice, but put some more on there because you can still clearly see that the window which the murderer escaped through is completely intact.

I still would like the evidence of Sourcery to be changed from a generic burning patch to something much more unusual. That's not screaming "black magic" to me, it's saying "it's a burning patch". My recommendation are strange and bizarre runes, possibly written in blood. As a bonus you can use those runes again and again in the lairs of Sourcerers as a shorthand and to make the connection clearer.

Along those lines, even though I am playing a Source Hunter, there is a problem: I do not know what the Source is, why it is bad, what the signs of it are, etc. I lack this knowledge, and yet my characters walk around saying things like "yep, that's Source Magic all right", and "that looks like the murder weapon", when I'm just confused. It's like I'm an actor shoved out onto the stage of a play, without being told what part I'm playing or what my lines are, and everyone is staring at me expecting me to perform. I am stuck outside their heads, and it is making me feel disconnected from the characters I'm controlling. That is not a good thing. Give us the "Source Hunter's Manual" in our inventory so we can understand who we are, what we're doing, and why we're doing it. (Maybe this is already coming, but I just want to emphasize that it's really important.)