Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta I hope you guys are doing MAJOR balance work...

That doesn't mean you know WHAT you will find wink To put it simply, exploration as I see it is more a matter of [i]what[i] than a matter of [i]where[i].
Side not, you forgot to close the balises, like [/ i]...

I agree with you on this one. DOS experience so far is like crossing the exact same persons at the same place and at the same time when you go to work in the morning. There are pros and cons, although more cons than pros in a fantasy RPG imho.

This is very funny, but not for the reasons you think.

Let me see, let's take the example Ultima V (working purely from 20+ yr old memory here, so...)

Shamino - start the game with him on 5hp
Iolo - at the start?
Gwenno - Iolo's shop in Britain
Julia - under Yew [requires Resistance password]
Mariah - Lyceum [requires ship or Moongate]
Dupre + Sentri - Bordermarch [requires grappling hook, special item]
Sajud - LB's Castle [would attack you in next combat if not member of Oppression / required Oppression password]
Julia + Toshi - Empath Abbey
Katrina - New Magincia [requires ship or moongate]
Geoffry - Buc's Den [requires ship]
Maxwell - Serpent's Hold [requires ship]
Captain John - Underworld [requires high level to reach]
Gorn - Blackthorn's Castle [requires ship + high level + potentially losing a companion permanently]

There's 8 cities, 10+ towns and so on, with 300+ NPCs for you to manually type keywords & make notes on before you find all of those. Still, going to the nearest inn / center of civilian life in D:OS requires a "lot of exploration".


One of the issues atm is that there's not enough choice in companions! I shudder to think of how difficult you'd have found getting the stone of valor in Ultima VI, when you needed to recruit a mouse who was the only NPC who could enter the holes!



TL;DR

Obviously never played any of the 'golden age' RPGs - I'd suggest the remakes of U5 - Lazarus (http://www.u5lazarus.com/) and Ultima VI (http://u6project.com/) for an education. Both run on the Dungeon Siege I engine. Obviously, do not expect the graphical candyland that is D:OS, but do expect large, well built, hugely immersive worlds with thousands of NPCs / quests etc.

Hint: both are about x4-6 times the size of D:OS, and require a lot of time / effort. Well worth it though.

@Cutter: maybe i got yo wrong but...there is 360° map rotation already in D:OS.

Look @

http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=489119&an=

and enjoy. I m using it, and its great.
Just read the whole thread, there are changes to the initial post.

Have fun

We've got about 20% of D:OS yet... so giving an estimate how much bigger other games would be would be... premature?

I'm pretty sure that there will be more companions coming in the first city for people to choose instead of taking the only 2 (or so I think), and agree that the notion that they are hard to find is pretty ridicilous...

Companions: As it stands there's no indication of where they might be found and no indication that there might even be some to find. A generic Cysealean dialogue option to ask after possible hirelings might be helpful here, and it wouldn't break the fourth wall in the process. Failing that, some "gossip" lines about the hirelings would also work. (As it stands, no one in town even seems to be aware of their existence, despite one of them having a rather attention-getting personality...)

Leaving Town: It's true that you'll get a dialogue warning if you head out of the eastern or northern gates, but heading out the western gate (or exiting the city by way of secret tunnels) still allows you to wander over to those areas with no warning of what you're about to get into. The only solution to this that I can think of would be for the PCs themselves to pop up a dialogue about the area ahead looking like it's more trouble than they can handle right now.

I agree. Rumors to indicate the existence could help.

One comment I heard against that was that "you'd have to code checks into the NPC dialogue to make sure you haven't picked the companion up already", although I think you could get away with that if you worded the NPC dialogue carefully.




Or just have the harbour gate do the same thing as the city gates. There is some dialogue - when you get close to orc tracks, the source hunters comment, indicating that there seems to be danger ahead.

"I hear there's some insanely paranoid fighter in the Inn" works fine.

Bonus points if the NPC in question can respond to the NPC civilian