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Belgian game site 9Lives is up with a preview of our up-coming next-gen RPG div2

Here's their conclusion:

Divinty 2: Ego Draconis is een spel van Belgische bodem dat wederom voor heel wat vernieuwing zal zorgen. Zo zal het ‘mindreading' een extra dimensie geven aan de vele conversaties die je voert, vooral omdat je er kostbare ervaringspunten voor moet afgeven. Anderzijds heb je de interactie tussen mens en draak die de speelwereld van Rivellon nog groter maakt. Tel daar bovenop nog eens een heerlijke spelervaring, een gigantische questtree en een prachtige speelwereld bij en dan weet je gewoon dat je bij Ego Draconis aan het juiste adres bent. Dat worden deze zomer weer lange nachten.


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I'll try to translate part of it for our English-speaking friends. Mind that the article is quite lengthy and I won't do all of it, but I might do the rest some other time.


(If you think anything about story and quests is spoiler - don't read this)
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Divinity 2: Ego Draconis brings us back to Rivellon, where Damian is still in the habit of causing grief, decay and destruction among the populace. It is a time where the dragons in the land are being hunted down and preferably annihilated as swiftly as possible. There are none who care for these hideous creatures, that have been terrorizing parts of Rivellon for decade upon decade. A village that dedicates itself to such draconic slaughter is Farglow, and that, my friends, is where our lengthy journey shall begin.


The call of the Dragonslayer

You start out as a young lout still immersed in the process of education, in order to become a full-fledged dragonslayer. You are quickly shown the ropes on three facets of your education: your discourse with weapons (I said weapons, that's not a weapon and you're still too young, little buddy), a few martial techniques, the ability to see ghosts and to communicate with them, and - perhaps the most interesting of all - the ability to read the minds of your fellow villager. I'll come back to the latter, of course, because how you deal with this ability determines in large part how you will be experiencing the game. First things first, we shall go through the rest of the tutorial, especially the combat system and the character-building process.

In Ego Draconis, you are not bound to a certain profession, such as Warrior, Mage or Thief. The evolution of your skills is utterly in the hands of yourself, and in that respect, there are a lot of options there for the taking. You can choose to chuck a fireball at your foe before entering into the fray with a Whirlwind Attack, sort of like Divine Divinity. What you also fully control is the appearance of your character. As such, you are able to visit an Illusionist and change your gender and facial features at any moment in the game. A nice addition for the beauty freaks among us.

To introduce you to the combat system, you are required to get rid of a few measly Goblins. These pathetic creatures aren't very strong, which gives you the chance to extensively approbate the abilities of your character. Thus, when you successfully strike a monster, you can perform a few quick combos, you can jump and rain death from above, or you can use one of your many skills like Whirlwind Attack or Fireball. As a player, you receive an extra advantage by being able to pause the game. During that pause you can take your time to choose your equipment, quaff a few potions, and queue a few skills in your interface. As soon as you decide to leave the pause menu, or activate a skill, the game will pick up where you left off. Convenient when you're in tight shoes and a short breather is welcome. We'll have to wait and see in which measure the player can keep profiting from this pause feature, but Swen promised us that the many challenges will definitely be difficult enough to get even the greatest pausiacs gasping for breath.


Mindreading

Many RPGs these days are giving the player certain choices that have an impact on the ending, such as Fallout 3. In Divinity 2: Ego Draconis, you will experience the effects of your choice far sooner, and the magnitude of your reward will depend on your chosen path. This is where mindreading comes in. To be used in appropriate and less appropriate situations. During a conversation with any character, you have the opportunity to take a gander into his thoughts, at the expense of your precious experience. A difficult choice, when you know you don't always get something worthwhile out of the bargain. You cannot go down a level, but you can get negative experience points, which will cause you to take a while longer to reach the next level. Still, it's worth trying, because only in this fashion can you earn some rewards, find other quests or complete a certain quest far more quickly.

I could go on about this option for quite a while, but you will gain more clarity on the subject if I give a few examples. Here you are, minding your own business, when you come across a treasurer who will only allow you access to his strongbox full of gold if you can rightly guess the password. Now, you can take this quest and start on a lengthy adventure, defeating various abominable creatures, OR you can choose to just read the old chap's thoughts and there you have it. The reward is a bulging moneypouch at the expense of a few experience points.

Another handy example of mindreading is to convince a soldier to hand you the food he's guarding. The loyal servant is headstrong and cannot be convinced, until you take a gander into his mind and he turns out to be madly in love with a beautiful townswoman. Quickly, you concoct an excuse, telling the guard how pathetically lonely the fair Elisabeth is, walking around town, looking for her beloved guardsman. He soon disappears and leaves the food unguarded, ready to take with you without further ado. This example becomes even more enchanting when you go back to the city; where you see that Elisabeth is being stalked by our good man, who, with surprising effort, recites a few Shakespearian poems to his love.

So far for episode one. Very interesting article.

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What to do, what to do

Divinity 2: Ego Draconis contains a very extensive quest tree. There's the main quest, which you can go through with a few curve-balls along the way, and then there's the gigantic mass of side quests that lead you further and further astray. The further you get off the beaten track, the more difficult these quests become, but also the greater their reward. As I formerly indicated, the manner in which you handle yourself to complete a certain quest is the determinate factor of which reward you are apt to receive.

In the idyllic countryside you meet a charming farming couple. The woman asks you to deliver a sealed letter to the local blacksmith. This is your first choice; to take a peek and read the letter or leave it be and deliver it. If you'd choose to read the letter, you'd find out that they are having an affair behind the farmer's back. Again you have the choice to tell the farmer, to extort his wife, or to just deliver the letter to the blacksmith. Any suggestions? Extort the wife? Eeeexactly. Unfortunately that doesn't go so well. Both farmer, farmer's wife and blacksmith are in an awful mood if you do that. On top of that, it means the blacksmith will no longer have you in his smithy, meaning you forego equipment and reward.

What, then, is the ideal solution? You use your Dragonslayer-skills to read the mind of the farmer's wife. As such, you find out that there is a secret trunk on the farm which contains evidence that her previous lover was brutally murdered by the farmer. You take this evidence to the local authorities, who come to arrest the murderer, which causes the farmer's wife and the blacksmith to live happily ever after and you get an extra discount in the smithy. Which is ample reason to be convinced that every choice you make can have immediate consequences on the gameplay. Some quests are even interwoven and only by replaying the game you have the chance to obtain the best results... or you can used the well-known save-'n-load strategy we RPG fanatics are all too familiar with.


Man to dragon, dragon to man

As you're putting the last hand to your training and right before you become a fully functional member of the Dragonslayers, these are summoned to hunt a dragon and they leave you by yourself. Running around in Farglow alone, you stand eye to eye with Talana, the dragon that's being hunted. During your fight with Talana, she curses you, causing you to become one with the spirit of the creature. Therefore you are no longer a Dragonslayer, but a Dragon Knight. This new title gives you the opportunity to change into a dragon. Alas, these fantastic creatures are not so beloved by the populace and they soon hunt you as a pack of wolves would a wayward rabbit. Thus, you are obliged to flee, and leave Farglow. You find a world in which Damian has caused untold destruction and decay and you, with your new Dragonpowers, may attempt to save the world - which is not exactly a strange purpose for the average gamer.

As a dragon you also have an entire arsenal of skills and you shall have to choose in which of those skills you invest those precious points. It's fairly obvious that you can't buy the dragon's equipment in the cornerstore. You will have to search for it, completing a number of quests to be able to protect yourself better in your dragon form. Now, you won't be able to freely fly around anywhere as a dragon. All across the world, there are different kinds of dragontraps in place that will make your life hell. You can try to avoid them or disable these traps in your human form. That way, there is an important interaction between both forms, which you'll have to use cleverly to stop Damian.

Gameplay with the dragon is mostly flying around a lot and chucking fire at your opponents. As such, you can shoot fireballs at the Wyvern you encounter - they don't cost you energy, but they take a little target practice - or you can use one of your skills and drown your enemy in a sea of flames, or launch heat-seeking fireballs at them. You can also pause the game here, choose your target, adjust your settings, and plan your attack.


The Dragon Tower

Another part of Ego Draconis is the Dragon Tower. This is your safe haven which at first, you have to be able to conquer from an evil alchemist. You can go there any time. That way you can save your hide at a moment's notice by just teleporting to your tower. In this tower you possess a number of helpful servants, that search the land at your command, for any object that you may require... such as herbs to make potions. In those quarters, you also find a large chest in which you can save a great number of objects that you can't use at the moment, but you may have a use for later on.

In another section of the tower, there's a Frankenstein look-alike. in this room, you can create a "Thing" with the help of collected limbs, and that "Thing" you can summon later in battle, when the going gets tough. Thus, the head determines the class of the thing such as warrior, archer or magician, and the other limbs have an influence on its overall stats. A nice extra that definitely will have some of us searching for the best build. Depending on your style of play, you can create a home-made supermonster, which just might be enormously convenient in battling the many foes on your path.


Flying Fortress

Consider how the official part of the presentation ended a bit sooner than appropriate, Swen obtained the permission of the PR-man present, to show us something extra. In all of Rivellon, as time runs its course, you will see a change in scenery. We go back to Farglow and don't find the cozy little town we left, but gigantic towers that give the place a very decadent, gloomy outlook. You can only reach it in your draconic form and the towers are specially built to stop these flying creatures.

One may notice that, in this part, Larian has taken some inspiration from RTS-games. Not from the point of view of the player, but that of the enemy: He has towers constantly launching demons into the air, towers that shoot arrows and lasers towards you, and towers that generate a specially designed dragonshield and so protect other towers and areas. To disable these last, you have to find a switch; which you can find in the tower itself, or somewhere on another platform. In this phase of the game, it becomes very important to switch between human form and dragon form, because a man can get past such a shield. So why doesn't one just walk past a Flying Fortress, you ask? Because the landscape is so utterly destroyed, that something like that is no longer possible, and you are obligated to fly over some obstacles.

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Impressive work, thank you swordscythe! up

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Originally Posted by swordscythe
What you also fully control is the appearance of your character. As such, you are able to visit an Illusionist and change your gender and facial features at any moment in the game. A nice addition for the beauty freaks among us.


So... grin ... we can be transsexual Dragon Knight... smile

lol

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Originally Posted by drazac
Originally Posted by swordscythe
What you also fully control is the appearance of your character. As such, you are able to visit an Illusionist and change your gender and facial features at any moment in the game. A nice addition for the beauty freaks among us.


So... grin ... we can be transsexual Dragon Knight... smile

lol

As John Lennon said: "Whatever gets you through the night 'salright, 'salright" biggrin


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Originally Posted by lynn
Impressive work, thank you swordscythe! up
You're welcome... I have too much time on my hands. heh.

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How many exp point per mind read are we talking about? (is it fixed or a %). Because if it is fixed then you ca nmind read every one once you reach a certain level?

btw : what is the average enemy count of an area? (is it a walk sim with 2 enemies every 15 min or more like The wircher with 2-5 enemies every 15 sec smile



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Thx for that swordscythe !!!

The mega-cool acronym for mindreading (which we figured out after we implemented them all) is SSS - Secrets (new quests) and Shortcuts (others ways of solving quests) for Sacrifice (your xp). The exp is related to the "quality" of the secret/shortcut and influenced by the mindreading skill (which will decrease the exp cost)

In terms of enemy count - 393.2/cm^3.

Lar

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Originally Posted by Lar_q

In terms of enemy count - 393.2/cm^3.

Lar



WOW eek

@lynn: Nice avatar, but where did you get my picture? confused


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What do you mean with your picture?

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guess he sees himself as a pig

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Ach! They call it self-knowledge! evil

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Spider pig, spider pig.. does what ever a spider pig does
Can he swing, from a web? No he can't. He's a pig

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zelfkennis is het begin van alle wijsheid lynn wink

Knowing yourself is the road to knowledge

Last edited by Morbo; 20/02/09 02:45 PM.

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wisdom wink

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There is a huge difference between knowledge and wisdom, what a mistake you made there eek wink


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It is far more easier as a wise man to act like a fool than the other way roound ( I read somewhere). wink


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