Larian Studios Forums Beyond Divinity (English) Help/Tips/Tricks Finished

Well I finished the game this past weekend. I have to say I am glad it is over. I know most of my thoughts will not set well here, but I have to be honest. Just remember these are my opinions about a game I had thought would be at least as awesome as Divine Divinity was.

The Good:
Very nice voices (when they worked).

The music was good enough that I did not see a real need to use alternate music.

Nice Graphics.

Great backgrounds.

Loved the story, but quickly became bored do to ease which killed most of the story for me.

Nice quests (except the battlefields).

I loved the way they worked the puzzles into the game.

After game battlefields. I would never play them, but I can see them as being good for many people.

The Bad:
Playing at its default level (normal or whatever word they used) this was an incredibly easy game with only one challenging fight in the entire game. For those interested it was the first fight with multiple skeleton mages.

The real game was way to short. Had I not played the in game battlefields I would have finished it in a few days.

The in game battlefields. They have nothing to do with the game other then masking the shortness of the real game.

Instant kill traps. No one likes these so why do some game makers insist on adding them?

Battlefield quests were very bad to say the least. Actually they could have been dealt with differently and then made the good column (see sugestions).

The Ugly:
Battlefield exits. Random is of course going to be blamed for this, but there is nothing random about the dungeon layouts. The game is picking from x number of predetermined layouts. Maybe the exits could be predetermined to be somewhere we could find?

Voice problems. Many times part way through a conversation the voices would die and I would have to start reading. Since part of the conversation was voice I know it was not one of those I should have had to read.

Picklock. It does not work. Need I say more?

Massive game ending bugs. Many people do not even get to finish these game do to its bugs. I know one person having these problems, and even tech support has not solved her problems. After dealing with this for a couple of weeks she gave up, and will never bother again.

Suggestions:
In my humble opinion I believe the following could have made this a great game.

Remove the ingame battlefields, or at least scale the difficulty of the game based on the assumption that people will play them.

It would be to obvious to say fix the bugs, but...... Fix the bugs.

Use set battlefield dungeons vs. quests. By that I mean if you have to have 4 battlefield merchants, and they all have quests. Then make each one always give a quest for dungeon number x. That way every dungeon has a quest at the end every time. So five merchants means 5 dungeons every act, and every after game battlefield.

Add more acts whether the battlefields exist or not. The story is way to short, and expecting players to play the battlefields is not fair.


Anyway I think that sums up my thoughts for the good, the bad, or the ugly.

I'm sorry to say I agree for the most (especially for the battlefields)...

just one thing i totally disagree is about the easy side...

one of the most interesting thing about this game is that you can make it a quite difficult game in hardcore mod (or even in tactical mod) if you don't attribuate all the skills'points and if you config the party for that (at least the game let you do it)...

well for the bugs that's quite obvious as you said it, but i must say i never encounter a real serious bug, so that is possible too...

err... for the larian attitude for help... No offenses intended but are you sure you know all the story about that? I don't even know for sure if you refer to some posts in this forum, but if it's the case i think that's something that needs a bit more caution... I don't intent to open a new public argument on this, though...

Picklock. It does not work. Need I say more?

Yes: pickpocket doesn't work, either. The idea that your character can add a point or two of skill in this and remove 5-10 large items from anybody's possession is remarkable, to say the least.

You didn't mention the interface. Frankly, I think that was one of the major drawbacks to the game. It's a mess, as is the transfer of materials between your characters. Of course, others may differ in their opinions on this.

sorry, i've just understood this was probably very unfair... so forget it, please!

sadly it is possible that larian tech support can't solve some probs...
computer science is not and can't be an exact science (at least for some decades from now) (and trust me I know what I'm saying there, well this is off topic but I've just said this afternoon to a customer that he could never use the database he has bought last month so it is something that exists not only with Larian and not only with games industry... and believe me the price of a good spatial database is not the BD price... well use is not the same either!)
Back to topic: well that's not a reason for bugs but anyway the "percent" (percentage?) of persons that definitly can't play because of bugs is probably quite low and actually negligeable...

well i'm not saying that they're wrong to be upset, it is sad for them, but unfortunately it is not really avoidable...

i still think that although it is true that there is too much bugs in BD and that some could be easely fixed most of them are not so important ones...well gamers will play and even have fun with the game, anyway, for the most...