Larian Studios Forums Divinity General Discussion Easing new players into the setting

I played D:OS2 when it came out, and one of the biggest issues I had with it was that I found it difficult to understand everything that was going on in the world around me. My character would understand these concepts, but I didn't experience that they were explained very well. I essentially would've liked a BioWare-style Investigate menu at times, and felt this was missing.

When I played BG3, I never had this issue. But I've also played D&D for some 20 years, and I didn't realise just how much that helped me until I brought some friends with me into BG3 and I kept having to explain what githyanki were, why there seemed to be tensions with the tieflings, why Shadowheart turning out to be a Shar worshipper was a big deal etc.

Now maybe me and my friends are just bad at picking up organic world-building. But I'd love if Divinity did a better job making me feel that I as a player can understand what my character is understanding and that I'm allowed to ask "wait a sec, what are you talking about" when concepts are first mentioned, to a higher degree than we could in D:OS2 and BG3 any way.

BG3 didn't do things much better. In fact, it is far worse than many other D&D video games at properly introducing many of its concepts.

Like, in Path of the Righteous, you have plenty of dialogue with Woljif and his entire backstory to explore the issues regarding Tieflings as a race. Yet BG3 provides absolutely no context as to why everyone are massive jerks to the Tieflings.

This new game should hopefully do a bit better in that regard, given statements about wanting the game to appeal to new fans who haven't played prior titles.

One thing that tends to help is the sort of thing that various games, such as Pillars of Eternity, do. Which is having key concepts that appear in dialogue being things that can be moused over to provide the information regarding it (As well as a Codex of some description that can be referenced to read about such things)

Such a thing allows newer players to get more information about the world, without awkward conversations where you're standing around in immediate peril and grilling someone on basic world concepts that everyone in the world should know, which is typical for plenty of games.

I'm a huge fan of the Pillar of Eternity mouse over links, yes! Dragon Age 2 does this in another interesting way in that you can select to ask about a concept, and Hawke will technically ask about something else but the conversation will tell you what you wanted to know without making your character ask what their home town is. That requires a voiced protagonist though and I'd imagine we're staying as a text-based protagonist in Divinity.