Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Please remove psychic knowledge from guards

It is actually possible to use Sneak to escape the prison of Fort Joy completely undetected. However, if you return, any of the guards you see will now attack you on sight. It doesn't matter if you're still wearing your collar.

This is because they have psychic knowledge that you had left the prison. Even though the fort, the docks, the jail cells, Flenserville, and other areas are off-limits and would normally lead to guards arresting you, they do not use their psychic knowledge to do anything about this unless you step outside the prison bounds.

This is actually apparently completely intended by the developers.

I honestly do not understand what the point of setting that flag is.

The game is okay with you sneaking out undetected. It's okay with letting you walk around in front of guards armed to the teeth (as long as you haven't left the prison grounds). It's okay with letting you fight the mayor of Flenserville and leaving through the sewer. It's okay with letting you start a fight and murdering the toughest gang in prison. It's okay with letting you kill all the prisoners. It's okay with letting you kill all the guards.

So I don't see the problem with letting the players come and go from the Hollow Marshes to the prison which is solved by having the guards psychically know that despite you being in the prison at this moment wearing your collar, you are actually an escaped criminal who... came back.

I just genuinely don't see any useful purpose the psychic guards serve.

+1 Flenserville... hehehe

I really hope they change this, because Yarrow and Migo attacked me for literally no reason. The dogs who I made friends with inside the prison also attacked me, despite me being friends with Buddy and Emmie, just because I decided to leave the prison for a moment (the party still had their source collars on). Also if someone attacks someone off in a distance lager from 10 meters like in this video, then no one else should know about it, and the town shouldn't suddenly be trying to murder the entire party (especially considering everyone was off at different parts of the map doing their own thing). https://youtu.be/NJNuP9Ifp6E?t=23m16s

There should be some sort of system in place where if someone sees you murder someone out in the open brazenly, without being provoked, and there are witnesses then the witnesses should go up to a guard and put everyone on high alert (but only for the murderer).

There should also be a system in place for yielding, provided the thing you are yielding to actually has the possibility of letting you go like a guard, civilian, or a non void woken animal(which could give more uses to pet pal). Yielding could also only be possible if you haven't already killed one of the people in combat with you, so that its not abused.

Yep, it's especially jarring after their quest, where you have a character who essentially just stated "Fuck our people. Thank you for showing me how rotten we are. I hate our commanders now"... And then they *still* attack you on sight if you are flagged as someone who left the Fort.

Yup, that's why I pretty much flagged that as a bug. There's no logical reason for them to attack you in any way.

I decided to test something. I left The Red Prince and Sebille standing in front of the entrance guards while my Rogue and Lhose made their escape by falling off the broken ladder in the southeast tower. Nothing happened the The Red Prince or Sebille.

So I activated the waypoint, and had Sebille go into the underground tunnel, then teleport outside, then back inside. When I approached the gate guards, they triggered combat with both Sebille and the Red Prince.

Not only has Sebille apparently done nothing to warrant being attacked - at least, nothing the guards should have any awareness of - but the Red Prince CERTAINLY has not. He was standing right there in plain sight the whole time, doing nothing. That's apparently a death sentence all of a sudden.

This has possible negative implications for competitive questing as well. Why should the Red Prince get dragged into a fight when he did nothing wrong?

I had him flee combat, and after Sebille was dead, the guards still hated him, even though he didn't attack them and did nothing worse than pulling out his weapon when the guards attacked him with no provocation, and want a bribe to talk to him again.

***

Look, if you're going to have a psychic flag, it should not be set until you come into contact with magisters who live. This means the guys at the armory, and even then that should only set the flag if you convince them to withdraw.

("Hey guys, we withdrew after that magister undercover with the prisoners warned us about an army of seekers attacking."
"...What 'undercover magister'?"
"Err..."
"Prisoner headcount - NOW!"

The only other place would be the final fight, but even then that probably doesn't make sense.

I agree, it would be nice if guards actually had to spot you outside or notice something wrong about you like not having a collar.

On a side note I'm kinda hoping the tension system will also get a little tweak. If you oneshot someone with snipe (from stealth), when noone else is looking, other NPCs do not notice right away, but after a while they do notice and start searching for the killer.
At first however I thought this was because they spotted the dead body. But when I started examining this system by killing someone in the kichen when no one saw or was around, and then teleported the body all the way to the beach behind a rock to hide it the result was the same. At first other NPCs in the kitchen didn't react, but then after a minute or so they all suddenly started screaming about murder.
It would be really cool and a fun mechanic if they didn't notice nless they actually saw the act or any evidence of the act. Perhaps after a while they could raise tension level because they notice someone has gone missing, but without drawing the conclusion that there is a murderer on the lose.

I wonder if larian will actually read these posts. Because this will suck if this is in the final release

They read all the posts, but they don't reply often.

Psychic guards are still in. I expected that, but I'm still petitioning for their removal.

There is no good reason for the guards to instantly know you have escaped Fort Joy, and no good reason to prevent the player from returning to the prison after they escape.

Saying "The guards keep tabs on the prisoners" is a bullshit excuse which makes no sense. It's bullshit because the guards clearly do not keep a close eye on the prisoners, nor do they give a rats ass what happens to the prisoners. Slaughter Griff and his whole kitchen? The guard who walks through there doesn't care. Go hang out on the beach near where you start? Guards don't care. Teleport to a waypoint outside the shrine for 3 seconds then teleport back in - KILL ON SIGHT.

Agree with this. Sadly this inconsistency doesn't end there. I hope they'll tackle these things later.

Not only are the guards psychic, each and every NPC seems to possess the mystical ability of divining what is happening meanwhile, elsewhere. For example, being caught while pickpocketing the spying magister up on the cliff next to the Rallying Point will cause the Seekers to rally up in arms in indignation; how dare this Sourcerer steal from a Magister? They were, of course, in telepathical communication with the spying magister and simply couldn't accept theft on moral grounds, so I guess they became allies then.

Really, though, the system doesn't seem to work based on visual detection but rather a series of code flags that go off independent of line of sight or any other *intuitive* gameplay mechanics.

Just an update: Psychic guards remain in effect.

I took my beach-landed Polymorpher Bruno and snuck him out of the fort, without being seen, then teleported him immediately back to the underground shrine and up and out. The guards aggroed on him for no reason.

Bruno woke up on the beach and entered the fort. No one ever made him register or put his name in a book. In fact, given the side ladder, I believe it's actually completely possible for no guards to EVER catch sight of Bruno. What do you want to bet that even then if Bruno has never been seen by a guard, they'll attack him on sight if he leaves the fort for three seconds and then comes back?


I don't know what "problem" Larian is trying to solve, but having the guards aggro on people who have left Fort Joy makes LESS sense than them NOT.

The guards do not care at all what happens to the prisoners. At all. Prisoners fight and kill each other all the time. Guards do nothing. Prisoners can come and go out the west gate so I'm not even sure what those guards are there for. Four guards guard the main gate. One guard with a dog patrols a small area of the camp. At least half the prisoners are out of sight of guards at all times. You can spend tons of time out of sight of guards.

And yet step outside the camp for a few seconds and somehow all guards know you escaped. It's not that the collars are tracking devices, because you can have free reign of the restricted areas in the fort and no one goes to stop you, and no one goes to track you down outside the fort either.

There is no sensible reason why leaving the fort unseen should trigger magic switches to make all guards attack you on sight. Guards have been shown to have no interest in keeping track of prisoners.

I totally support this topic, but I guess same goes often with their ability to know, that you stole the Book of Rain lying in a tent, where never ever anyone looks in or so ^^

i've had that trigger for me a few times but it got less consistent in the most recent update.

Just read it on the spot. It is a hillarious way to steal skill books.

Well, it would be interesting if source callers WERE tracking beacons somehow, though in that case it would be immediately obvious if you disabled one. I guess the logic of the guards not caring all that much about the prisoners is that there's no way to escape from the island except through the swamp, so who cares what the prisoners do as long as they don't go that way. Though then again logically a prisoner could easily swim around the fort, so that's a bit silly.

It would be nice to have some explanation for how the guards would know you'd escaped though, or remove the auto-hostile from that. Would be awesome if they had some kind of tall watchtower where they could see all escape routes, and you'd be warned about that watchtower. However, if you climbed the watchtower and killed the guard (maybe a mini-boss) without being seen otherwise, maybe you could escape without drawing attention.

Always doing it, but they still try to check me.

I loaded up my Dwarf-on-the-beach game and tried to sneak out of Fort Joy without ever having been seen by any guards EVER. That still makes them instantly hostile.

Would be interesting of the Collars were tracking but the impression I get is one of the few reasons that make this prison viable is that the tracking collars are in fact incredibly cheap to make (Who knew it was that easy?).

It is interesting that there is a LOT more production capacity going into the fortress itself then the actual prison part (In fact... I don't even know if the prison even supplies food or if it is left to the prisoners to russet it up themselves)

Then again it makes sense if you actually visit the fort... (Prisons that basically let the prisoners do whatever they want... do exist... They typically aren't good prisons)