Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback The fight or flight response

So we finally did it. A seven hour session to start the game.
4 friends, 2 TVs.
My friends are not exactly the most hardcore players, nor very witty when it comes to interacting with npcs, still, they're an average bunch.

(What follows may spoil a little, not that much I assume)

This morning, when my friend and I are roaming around Fort Joy, we're left with a bitter impression. In french it would go like this "C'est vite parti en sucette", which translates to "It went lollipop", which, let's face it, is why word-to-word translation is no good. A similar saying (minus the lollipop, which, let's also face it, makes it less good) in english would be : "Well, that escalated quickly".
And so it did. This morning we're counting the bodies and ... there's a lot. And the thing is, we all have the impression of not having particularily wanted to initiate fights.
But we're :
Fane : If he removes its mask or speak about the fact that he wants to create a certain mask gets attacked.
Loshe : Yeah, we did actually like the "Kill the elf, kill the elf, kill the elf" conversation shenanigan, although didn't really get at which point we could have avoided that bloodbath that ensued.
Red Prince : apparently everybody wants this guy dead and he has quite a temper (I liked looking at the wiki and see : there's this vendor for warfare, oh but be careful, you could easily kill him if Red Prince is around).
Sybille : She was okay, well, apart a small moment where she was torturing people but there was no fight there, so I guess we're good.

So we're this morning, after this binging session, trying to slow things up, scoring skills scrolls and such, but in the previously explained process a bunch of sellers were rekt, and the nicest (and only) girl of our bunch is now stuck with her starting skills because of said escalation of events... (I know it's only Fort Joy, but it's been 7 hours and I'm thinking we're far from escaped)

Are we "that" bad, or in general, most npcs are very willing to pick a fight? Is this inherent to Fort Joy or should we expect during all the game to tiptoe around people? I never had that kind of feeling in D:OS first of its name. Hey, we did some evil things back then, but we intended it... Here, it feels sometimes a little bit forced, and we're scared everytime we're picking an answer that a fight pops up.

Its supposed to... your in a prison.. you ever meet nice prisoners in real life? act 2 is when you start to make your real choices/descisions.. act 1 is basically do whatever it takes to escape the prison.

F5 is your friend.

We did not feel like loading everytime.
Plus we were four people living our lives, it would have been a pain in the ass.

To be fair this vendor being dead is totally annoying. The vendors should not be prone to end up in fights where they're killed. We've played 10 hours now, and one of us cannot at all learn new spells.

This is honestly a shitty situation.

Did you only kill the vendors in the Fort or also in the camp outside behind the swamp? There will be more traders.

Only the fort, but I'm telling you : We've hit the 10 hours mark and just made it outside Fort Joy. A situation where a vendor is easily becoming the target of a fight is not a good thing, and to me bad design pattern in terms of making game. I know there'll another one (thank god!), but for potential future noobish players, this is not good...

I think it's more fair to say you're new to the game and still adapting than to say it's bad game design. I like the fact that there are irreversible consequences to actions. I hit lvl 5 in 4.5 hours in Tactician and left Fort Joy way before that, but I played the Alpha a whole lot, so I know my way around.

You are not "bad" you are just new, and it really helps to take your time and press F5 before initiating a dialogues and battles. Not sure what else to say, but to say it's bad game design is totally unfair to Larian.