Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Stabbey's General comments and criticism

STORY / WORLD - LUCULLA HIGH PLAINS


40) Maradino's Study Ambush Too Obvious
Maradinos study. The fact that you can see the level and red outline and red markers on the map kinda seems to spoil the surprise about the ambush there. Try and avoid the interface blatantly giving things away like that. - At ;east, that was my first though. Upon seeing that it was supposed to be obvious to lure you into a false sense of security makes this well done.


41) Maradino not afraid of Spiders
You can find a journal in which Maradino expresses a phobia of spiders. In the battle I tried to exploit that by summoning a Spider, but he ignored it. He should have had a chance to be Feared when attacked by the Spider.


42) Maradino takes too long to summon his allies
He doesn't do anything but summon ghostly allies for four or five turns. That's more than enough time for a player who's trying to use CC on him. Maybe he should summon two per turn?



GAMEPLAY

43) Pixel Hunting not great gameplay.

I will give some examples


1) The Immaculates Initiation Temple. The first time I played it, I was playing ahead to see if I was really expected to be a certain level before going there, so I went at level 11. There is a room with the weighted plates. That puzzle was clever, it took a while to figure out, track down the items and work out which went where.

The second time I came back much later at like level 13, when I was supposed to. This time I knew what weights went where, but I absolutely could not figure out how to get to one of them. It was aggravating. I eventually consulted a walkthrough and learned that there was a tiny button I needed to press. On the first time, I was paying attention to the screen the button was on, but the second time, I was probably moving my characters around on different screens, and I did not see or remember about the damn button when it first appeared, and afterwards when I was trying to find out what to do, it was so tiny that I missed it.


2) Another case is to get into Boreas treasure room. I beat him, saw the force field and could not see any way to get in. I explored some more and solved the puzzle near the wishing well, which gave a Royal Guard Talisman. That, I guessed, would be the key to getting in. It was not.

The actual key to getting in was to click on a non-descript statue that looks like background detail unless you mouse over it, AND you need to have memorized the name of the Earth Elemental who appears once for thirty seconds at the forge who knows how many ages ago.

What?!

Neither part of that is intuitive. Having to get the Royal Guard Talisman to enter the vault makes much, much, more sense than the stupid way you need to do to get in currently.


3) The Temple near Sacred Stone
I went in there a couple times and it dead-ended at a pit where the stairs were gone. I looked around but couldn't see anything I missed. I looked again a second time later. It turns out that I needed to light the braziers. Okay, those are larger than a pixel, but it's not something that we do very often in the game. By this time, I am used to seeing the Braziers only as decorations, not as important items.

4) The basement of the Temple near Sacred Stone
That damn 4th button.


44) Teleport/Freefall spell BADLY CODED

The teleport spell has been in the game in its current form since the alpha. That form looks rather like a slapdash "just to get a basic teleport working" alpha version. It does not work in an intuitive way that a PROPER teleport should. (I know I mentioned this a couple of times during the alpha/beta.)


It can only teleport objects that are in a direct walking line of sight from the target. This means if an enemy is in the way, you cannot teleport the target behind the enemy. The code only seems to check "is it possible to walk there". It also only uses the target's line-of-sight as the center of the radius. This has the odd effect of a max range teleport being able to move the target 15 m past the casters normal max limit.

A proper teleport SHOULD NOT CARE IF YOU CAN WALK DIRECTLY THERE. It should care "is the destination an acceptable landing site", and maybe "can the CASTER (not the TARGET) see the destination" - although you can cast a lot of direct spells on targets the caster can't see.

It is just weird that the one casting the spell doesn't have to see where the target lands, but the one BEING teleported DOES.



STORY / WORLD - GENERAL


45) Maradino's Fate

Really? The Great Maradino was killed by a Troll? A Troll. Trolls, whose king cannot count past eight? Kinda underwhelming for all the fuss raised about him.


46) BUG/INCONSISTENCY: Zixzax's warning gives directions in the wrong place

At a certain point, you will wander into an area where Zixzax will pop in and give you a warning about an invasion, and tell you about three possible paths you need to take to reach the source.

The problem is that there are three possible locations you get this warning: in the north of Luculla, in the Dark Forest by the Sacred Stone bridge, and the Dark Forest by the Goblin Village bridge AND THE DIRECTIONS ARE THE SAME FOR EACH.

They cannot all possibly be right. That is just confusing. I THINK it is supposed to be only referring to the spot in Luculla forest, but if that is the case then Zixzax should not be giving the same directions if you enter the Dark Forest! Fix this!


47) The Wishing Brother

The "wish" you get for 1500 gold is ridiculously crappy. It is three magic items, MAYBE a rare or two are mixed in. In order to finish that quest at all, you need to have beaten King Boreas, AND get into his treasure room. By that time you should be swimming in rares and more than a few legendaries. If you're not going to offer a choice, A BETTER reward would be 2 Ability points for each party member.

Sure they'll probably sell for more than 1500, but that's not the whole point. It's a quest you solved for a wishing well, it should give something better or more unique than a random chest.