Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Divinity II - The Dragon Knight Saga Dragon Knight Saga: How long did it take you?

I finally bought Divinity 2: Dragon Knight Saga after seeing it go on special on Steam and also that the DRM (SecuRom *spit*) was removed (yay, Larian!).

Well, truth be told, I first bought the Anthology on GOG and THEN saw it was on special on Steam. And then three hours into it, I went a little crazy and bought it up for a small army too.

Long story short: I love Divinity 2 (and loved Divine and Beyond Divinity as well).

But I was expecting an epic saga that would last "100+ hours." 35-hours later and I'm done with the Ego Draconis portion of the game and I did everything.

I would be merrily raging away in Flames of Vengeance right now, but unfortunately I get the 'black screen of death' immediately after the cutscene; so I can't carry my character over and I really have no intention of starting Flames of Vengeance with a new character.

But I was wondering... How long did it take you guys to finish Divinity 2: Dragon Knight Saga?

35-hours is really

How long did it take you to finish Dragon Knight Saga? single choice
	0 - 20 hours
	21 - 30 hours
	31 - 40 hours
	41 - 50 hours
	51 - 60 hours
	61 - 70 hours
	71 - 80 hours
	81 - 90 hours
	91 - 100 hours
	101+ hours
Votes accepted starting: 16/10/12 09:41 AM
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Some people had a problem entering FoV which could be resolved by updating an audio codec.

[PC] Support FAQ - The Dragon Knight Saga


What difficulty level are you playing on? That can make a significant different.

Anyone Played For 100 Hours?

Apparently (as in, according to the conversation log) 30 hours for ED and 10 for FoV. Strange, I thought it was longer than that: if I'd been asked without checking, I'd have said up to twice as much! I think I padded it out a bit with my adventure into modding the game a bit (I mean in addition to the time I mentioned), and I imagine in my first play-through I probably played a bit longer as I explored everywhere probably multiple times. Even though there was still stuff I missed, as it turns out.

According to Steam counter, Ego Draconis 84 hours and DKS with trying to find everything 107 hours. Some of that time may have been when the game was sat on the menu screen whilst I answered the phone, made some food etc and came back to it later.

Yeah, Steam's not very intelligent about counting game time, I've found: I thought I'd clocked up some surprising playing times until I realised it even counted the time it was sat minimised overnight, which you'd think it would check for...

The time in the conversation log may not reflect the actual playtime. At least in the Xbox version there was a bug with some of the cutscenes which could be triggered if an excessive amount of playtime was taken to get to that point (40 hours to get to the battle tower, for example). The solution (at least with MS' very restrictive patch policies in the Xbox) was to change how the game kept track of time.

Thanks, Raze, but yeah, I spent about two hours last night trying to get it to work and Googling myself silly. I've tried updating the codecs and pretty much every other solution I could come across... Nothing helped

I always play games at normal difficulty. I figure it's "as the devs intended."



I like to think of myself as a completionist of sorts. I like to enjoy games, explore every nook and cranny, chat up every NPC, kill everything in sight, etc and clear my quest log before proceeding with main quests.

I have no idea how much more time Flames of Vengeance would add, but I've read marketing gobbledygook claiming that it adds 20-hours of content. Assuming I believe that, it will still only bring my total playtime to 55-hours.

I'm still really hoping I can figure out why I can't get Flames of Vengeance to work... Bloody irritating.



haha... Yeah, I'm terribly anal about my game time. If I have to go AFK, I quit. I like those statistics to be as accurate and as relevant to me as possible (long live OCD!).

85-hours is good though. I'd be happy with 85-hours for a single playthrough.

I think my biggest gripe is that I was expecting so much more content only to sort of... feel like it ran out much too soon.

I really loved Divinity 2 though. I was amazed by what Larian did with it. It still felt like the original Divine Divinity, that same "old school" RPG feel, the same humour (I loved the existential skeletons reference :D). And while it felt unbelievably short, the amount of padding, polish and content in every area was fantastic.

I loved talking to NPCs, I loved the mindreading ability, I loved the combat. I WANT MORE, DAMNIT!



Steam tracks time like every other game tracker out there (Raptr, XFire, etc) and simply tracks how long the process (i.e. Divinity2.exe) runs. Which is essentially the best effort such a service can do.

Its accuracy, however, depends largely on you and alt-tabbing/minimising certainly doesn't end the process :p

I'm not sure if the 10 hours my chat log suggests is correct (I'm on the PC, for the record) but it certainly felt like a decent expansion. I mean as opposed to those for certain other games I won't mention.

Good luck getting it to work.


True, the only way Steam would know otherwise is if the application actually tells it it's in a menu or something, and I'm not even sure there's a mechanism for doing that; I thought it might be able to tell if the game's not even running in the foreground, though...

Thanks. I keep trying but it keeps black-screening me

I think I'll probably just have to start over with a new character in the end, but I'll have to work myself up for that. Right now the idea of a "new character" bugs me after all the TLC I gave my proper one (who happens to have hit level 37, in case anyone was wondering).

Also, I don't doubt that it's a decent expansion. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm just all frustrated out about the black screen issue right now.

Will probably get around to it soon enough. I must find out what happens next!

On a semi-related note, I'm actually pretty surprised that Larian is going back to isometric after this one. They did a really fantastic job and I have to admit that I hoped that they'd keep at it.

What I was trying to say earlier (but my train of thought totally ended up derailed) is that I found it amazing what Larian did with Divinity 2.

To elaborate, if you look at many old isometric games that become "modernised" they lose a lot of their charm because of all sorts of excuses hinging mostly off of the fact that they're too resource intensive.

But Larian still kept the feel of the original Divinity in Divinity 2. I love that. And the best part is that they're largely an "unknown" developer and certainly not a triple-A developer (not the same marketing or development budget) but they have by large pulled off a triple-A quality title and that in itself is astounding.

It really makes you look at developers like BioWare and wonder... They have a massive budget (we're talking in excess of $10,000,000 USD here) and most of that goes to paying "famous" voice actors, composers, etc and the cost is that the games are far less detailed and have far less content than that same amount of money would otherwise have bought.

My point is that I just found it so breath-taking that Divinity 2 managed to be so detailed and still managed to keep that nostalgic feel of its predecessors without sacrificing too much. Sure, you can argue that the world was much smaller than it could've been and that it was far shorter than its predecessors but they did so much with what they had.

Apart from my infuriating end-game bug, I really am hugely impressed with Divinity 2. As an old school gamer, it really managed to give me that special "I can't put this down!" feeling that I crave. Which is why I went on a "MUST BUY IT FOR EVERYONE" spree that my bank account now totally regrets

Oh well... I'm just in a rant mode. I want more. Lots more.

I agree with pretty much everything you say there. I think there's a certain nostalgic view of isometric games which has brought them back into vogue; I'm not sure how much of a good idea it is when considering the average gamer, but I think that's the thing about Larian, they're not afraid to take risks, which is why their games work so well, I think. There's been a few major-league AAA releases in the past year where the developer (or publisher) has played it a bit too safe and I think they've suffered as a result. I'd rather see more companies do what Larian does even if it means that not everything is to my personal taste.

Divinity 2 does have a real sort of "handmade" charm to it which is why I think I've enjoyed it so much and it hasn't become old and tired with multiple play-throughs. They also have a really good attitude to their customers: how many of the big developers can you email about a particular problem you've found and have someone get back to you quickly with an idea, a solution and sometimes even a patch?

I completely agree with you.

I'm very sad that I didn't support Divinity 2 from day one, but when I see "SecuRom" I switch off to a game completely; same thing happened with every single one of Ubisoft's games when they tried to force permanent internet connectivity. Screw that. I refuse to be treated like a bloody criminal >.<'

See? This is how I go off on a tangent.

I like risks, I like "new" and I like "original." I miss the days of gems like Planescape: Torment. The ones that have so much spirit, charm and "specialness" to them.

Divinity 2 really had that for me, it's really "up there" in terms of games I have a soft spot for.



That it does. I don't know if I'll replay it any time soon. I did everything there was to do and explored every nook and cranny. Well, I lie, I missed the bit with the white bunny and the creature mage in Broken Valley (my significant other was kind enough to point that out for me :p).

But it'll be a while before I replay it. I have to admit that it doesn't strike me as having much replayability in the sense that the content is unlikely to change significantly depending on your choices. It'll definitely be a game I play again though, just not any time soon.

Put it this way, as long as Larian keeps their DRM in future games limited to Steam (gimme Steam achievements!) I'll be happy to support them from day one every time

I just saw this now. Woops... I didn't realise that there was a Dragon Knight Saga section...

In my defence, my head is totally in the clouds lately -.-'

No problem

You're welcome

Thanks

GUESS WHAT?!

It worked! It took four-billion tries and I can pretty much recite the end cutscene by heart but it finally went through and loaded up Flames of Vengeance!

I'm back, baby!

WOOHOO!

Will be back to vote when I'm done. Here's hoping it'll be a long while

Congratulations.

I was going to offer to try your save when D2:DC is released in a couple days, if you hadn't gotten it resolved.

For those who are interested in keeping track of how much time you are spending on a particular game, I use a freeware program called Manic Time that's easy to use and keeps track of everything you do on your computer. It provides a detailed breakdown of time spent on every application, document, etc.

When I compare my times as recorded in Steam as opposed to the actual times recorded by the time tracker I find that Steam is not accurate but not that far off either. Steam says my time spent on my 2nd playthrough of DKS is 120 hours, actually it's 117 hours. In both cases that includes time AFK.

Honestly, it felt a little short for me but for good reason.

It made me look forward for the sequel, and I was DESPERATE for a sequel after such a horrifyingly awesome ending.



I think it took me about 40-50 hours for my first playthrough... (Ego Draconis, not including Flames of Vengeance.)

Oh, and I think it also depends on how you play, difficulty level, how much time you spend just bouncing mindlessly all over the place, etc.

I can finish the game much quicker with my original mage build or dark-knight build, but since I began with a tank this time, it is proving to be quite the hell during the very early stages of the game, yet slowly gets easier and easier as I become more and more invincible. Who knows how long it'll take me this time.

I seriously doubt you did "everything" in only 35 hours. I've played this game 4 times, for a total of 332 hours, and it took about 60 hours each time for me to do everything. Plus, almost every quest has more than one solution, so there is definitely more than 100 hours worth of game here.

Yes, definitely. This is one of the things that makes the game awesome.