Larian Studios Forums Divinity 2 - Ego Draconis (English) Divinity 2 - Ego Draconis Questions to those playing the german release!!

So, Divinity 2 has been released in german-speaking areas, and thus, even if it may still be a bit too early, I'd like to ask some questions to those who are already playing the game.

1) How is the combat system?

2) What is the visual difference between a female dragon and a male dragon?

3) How much importance does this game give to the story?

Gamestar gave it a lengthy video review: http://www.gamestar.de/index.cfm?pid=1568&pk=12531
The combat looks quite frantic, which might be good or bad thing, depending on your personal taste.

They stated that the story is somewhat cheesy and the main character lacks emotions. It still got 83%, which is a very good rating, especially for Gamestar.

There is a text/translated version as well.

http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=366235

1)click,click,click,click,click.spam skills when there not on cooldown
2)none
3)a lot

ehm male and female dragon form do have different looks

I find that combat is often more than just mindless clicking. If you run into a camp of enemies without thinking, you're sure to die. You sometimes have to try and "pull" an enemy, and be tactical about it (e.g. get the healer first, or the one that does most damage, etc). In that aspect, it is much like Div1 combat, which also seemed "click till you drop" until later on in the game where you really had to pick your fights right.

[cynism]I guess that turi is an Action-RPG player, who forcefully tries to translate his gaming traditions onto new games ...[/cynism]

[unfortunately no irony anywhere]And i think once again you´re posting your notorious bias before thinking, Alrik![/off]

The way he´s writing this, it´s rather more than obvious that turi is not exactly overwhelmed by the fact that just continuous clicking on enemies is almost all the `trick´ behind the combat.
(as opposed to the clearly more tactical, but also more demanding fight mechanics of Gothic 1 & 2 + AddOn e.g.)
At least to me, when he´s repeating oinomatopoetic "click" term over and over and also uses "spam clicking" in his formulation. This is mockery about and not agreement with it.

Stick to what´s actually written in a text instead of what you like to read.
Fact, no fiction.
Otherwise you´ll sound quite reactionary in the end.


Ragon, The Mage

1. the combat system is actually a pleasant surprise for me. yes its primarily clicking the left mouse button. but what i noticed is distance has an effect on enemy spells where you can avoid them. also the dodge feature is very handy, i find myself trying to evade enemy attacks and judging distance to monsters quite frequently. its not as tactical as a turn based (which would bore me to death) but its tactical enough to not just be a simple diablo/titanquest clickfest (which i wouldnt mind that much actually). to sum it up i find combat fun (im a melee mage).

3. focus on story is pretty much as it is in all these types of games now (fallout, kotor, mass effect, gothic) it has an interesting dynamic, but it is standard fantasy fare. theres a lot of dialogue if thats what you're wondering.

Yes, I admit that I have one. And even worse, I don't care anymore.

Rather than swallowing it, I'm rather letting my bitterness out these days.

But to me that's also a sign that I definitively must break from the gaming indiustry, because it evolves in a way that makes me just feel bitter. I have the feeling as if the old "virtues" of good games have just gone. Everyone wants to have an fast-paces graphically excellently looking action-game - the publishers even more so - and most people (someone even voiced it out that way here) believes that turn-based things are actually a step back.

Gah !

The developments that I currently see hurt me so much that I should go away, actually.

To me it's like German TV : The "Zielgruppe" is the younger audience, meanwhile excellent movies are ONLY shown around midnight (or even after that) or are to be found only on Arte and Phoenix.

I just feel myself like kind of an alien now.

i dont think the target audience are the "young" people necessarily. i think the target audience are those that started playing games in the 90s and i wouldnt count myself as that young being 27. i demand a mature and somewhat smart storyline and dialogue, combined with easily accessible gameplay. games like this, oblivion, mass effect certainly deliver on that front. and i dont think you can argue that games have become less mature. all the gta's are a very smart parody of american culture and society. teh storylines have become more complex and interesting. and i think that is BECAUSE the audience has become older and more demanding from earlier days.

and yes on TV i primarily watch news, and nature shows on WDR, NDR, phoenix, zdf etc hehehe

Oh dear me, from what you are stating in this thread, the combat systems is AWFUL!!! I hate, HATE the click-click-click-click type of combat system that in these modern days should be left only to those stupid mind-numbing mmorpgs. Now this is a huge downside. I hope they cared to put a bit of tactica, at last? If the game's only a mindless click-click-click-click, I'm gonna get bored of its gameplay very soon...
I mean, Icewind Dale 2's combat system was mainly click-click-click, and yet, it was actually difficult and required strategy. I am hoping Divinity 2 is like that??? Or is it just like the stupid mmorpgs??




Please, can someone post screenshots of a female dragon and a male dragon, so I can finally see the visual differences??

Alrik: being an avid fan of retro PC games, I know where you're coming from. More and more games are starting to mimic the World of Warcraft system - even in games that really don't need such a system. The use of skills can be very good and add a lot of depth to combat, but it should not come at the detriment of the actual depth of the base combat itself. I want to block, punch, kick, dodge, etc. on top of having special combat moves. There's a reason one of the first mods for Oblivion was to add more depth to melee combat. When a game has a certain degree of combat, keeping it interesting should be the first priority.

Having said all this, it doesn't mean the game is bad - far from. The above is mainly criticism on how the actual game combat is getting dominated by button presses and cool down periods instead of the skill of combat which is the way it should be. The truth is that hardcore RPGs don't reach the same large public as other games and publishers often push developers into adding or removing features to try and make it easier for this larger public to get into the game. Ironically, this doesn't have that big an impact yet alienates the original audience the game would be targeting.

Case in point: Drakensang did really well for a low budget RPG and why? Because it wasn't afraid to be hardcore. You had to understand the Dark Eye rules at least partially to play the game well but this didn't make the game get poor reviews, now did it? I think publishers need to start realising that they can't keep both the hardcore audience and the more mainstream audience at the same time. By placing games in the middle (which is where Divinity II really is), you don't hit either target well enough to make a big dent in sales but you end up with a game that is simply not as good as it could have been by doing so. That's my opinion at least. Divinity II strikes what it's aiming for rather well but I can only wonder "what if" because, like the original, the combat is still lacking some fleshing out.

I agree on everyhting you said. I think developers should be more consequent when it comes to their targed audience. Trying to make a otherwise hardcore rpg more accessible by watering down the combat isn't a good idea.

They should rather focus on keeping it deep while trying to work on the accessibility.

why is this such a big issue? Even if it is click-click-click, it's the same as the original Divinity, except it's in 3rd person instead of isometric. Why don't I hear "oh, Divine Divinity had such a dreadful combat system". Would you really want to go back to Diablo-type combat systems? I agree, that it could've been done better, but don't act like this is such a horrid setback, because basically, in a single-player RPG, turn-based combat like Drakensang's would be simply excruciatingly boring! You gotta see this; different games call for different systems. You get swamped by 11 goblins, you make a hit... oh wait, you gotta wait your turn until you can start bashing on the second one. The only way to make that work is to have extremely little combat in your game, and while I wouldn't mind such a game at all, it wouldn't sell well.

I agree that the combat system could have been better (even though I think it could've been worse) but I hope everyone here can agree that a turn-based combat system for this game would not be a valid option. Ideally, it would've been something like Gothic 1&2, but that would've undermined the skill system, which those "die-hards" coming from divine divinity would probably hate to miss. I would definitely not say the combat is "watered down". It gets hard, and you gotta use your skills tactically.

You can't have it all, guys.

I HAVE heard this argument from many people actually. In fact, I've heard from a lot of people that it was DD's only real flaw and I must agree. It was obviously influenced by Diablo II and while Diablo II was a great game in its own right, I often felt that combat in DD didn't match the otherwise rich and deep world. Maybe my main gripe came from the fact that a Diablo-style combat is very hard to correctly balance and DD was pretty unbalanced in places.


You say all this but avoid the point I made in the previous post: combat itself must be strong enough and in too many games, it relies on special moves instead of smart combat.
[/quote]
I know very well the limitations of a game like Drakensang. I merely gave Drakensang as example to show that developers can still get good sales even if they went totally hardcore in design. (oh, and Drakensang was NOT turn based unless you chose it to be so - the mechanics were hidden behind the scenes).

My main point was that combat is often too basic while they go for the much-easier-to-program special/combo spamfests. If you want to incorporate a system that uses a real time combat system, I think you need to prepare to make it really worth it instead of relying on the combos.

I don't really see DD1's combat system as flawed. I think it did its job sufficiently and as a result let the story and NPC interaction take the lime light. In my opinion, the developers were wise to play to their strengths and let a solid if unspectacular combat system take a back seat to the narration. Fighting in DD games is of course inevitable but I think any over complicated combat system would break up the flow of the game too much. I suppose it depends on what you look for. Exploration was always the thing that kept me hooked in DD1.

You have to be fair though - what you said would be true IF DD didn't feature so much combat. I've just recently started replaying it and even at the start, there's tons of combat in the catacombs beneath the village. It's not like DD was a story-driven RPG which is why your argument doesn't hold any water. DD may have been heavily inspired by Ultima VII but the latter was always more focussed on the story than the combat.

This is not to say the combat was BAD. It just wasn't as good as the rest of the game. For example: if you're a mage, you have to spam the meteor spell constantly because you're too weak to do hand-to-hand combat. It takes too long before you get a different spells - or other spells that really affect combat for that matter. This is why I said it was unbalanced in places.

I do agree with you to a point. The catacombs level is quite a chore and by the end I must admit there is not much to take your mind off it apart from the anticipation of something else happening or obtaining something new to play with. However if the battle model had been more complicated and as a result more time consuming, just think how drawn out the section under Aleroth could have been. Perhaps time plays tricks on me and I have forgotten all the hours of hacking and slashing but the important thing is that the atmosphere and story is what sticks in my mind. I'm not so sure that would be the case if it had been the battle system that shone.

I agree (but thats only because you can only get the "Deadly gift" spell and scorpion traps after level 7 (After that, taking a few shadow potions while following a scorpion or 2 around, can do miracles - I cleared the entire orc camp without touching a single orc myself)

I thoroughly enjoyed DD1, after i reached level 7. I was able to concentrate on the game, and not really worry about the combat too much.

I suppose it just depends on what mood you are in at the time.... having to hack a monster appart limb by limb with a click fest, has its appeal after a long day at work (with the boss driving you mad)... Other days, i want tactical stuff, stopping short of turn-based fighting (thats just too much for me)