Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Divinity II - Flames of Vengeance Final mission sucks (spoiler of course)

People of Larian, please allow me these clear words:

I very much liked the add on. There were a few minor things that are bit annoying but all in all it was a very fun experience and I liked all the quests you added.

But, in all honesty, your final mission SUCKS. It stinks. It's no fun. It's tedious and pretty annoying to still try to get through, yet your stupid decoy you have to protect is already a bit too low on health.

I even ask myself: Did you even play it yourself once? Did any of the beta-testers actually have playing through it fun (I'm not saying if they beat it or if it was easy or hard to them, I ask if they had *fun*)?

And yes, I am very aware of the irony I complained about too little dragon flight a bit below. It's like you took the worst of the flying fortresses and added one of those ALWAYS super annoying escort missions.

If you want some suggestion: Patch this horrible accident of a task out of the game before most players reach it or at least make it somewhat fun. Cut the need to protect the zeppelin, give the dragon another upgrade (twice as much health and a much faster reload of the super-weapon) or whatever. You do everyone and yourself a favour.

Right now, I'd give the AddOn 5/10 or max 6/10 - without this crappy mission (on my personal scale) you surely would hit 8 without any question. I'm not entirely sure what would be worse: This mission or the game just ending with the lame line "Thanks for playing, you win!".

I'll retry now but I feel I already wasted enough time on this on two attempts. I'm sorry for these harsh words, especially after you made this outstanding Divinity 2 and the pretty nice AddOn which I enjoyed very much to this point. On the other hand... what did you think?

You liked very much the add-on and you give a 5 or 6 because of the last mission?? You cut 2 points because 1 mission sucks for you when there is 29 that were fun?
I think they shouldnt patch something based only in a few opinions... maybe the beta testers liked
the mission. maybe i will like it. I like escort missions

Dont be so harsh! Creating a game that pleases everyone in the same way is hard.

the best

The mission has one main problem imo and that is that the stupid guy on the zeppelin tells you not to get too far away which is exactly the wrong way to play it. Just fly as far away and as deep into the enemies as possible and kill everything, long before the zeppelin arrives and it will not even be hurt at the point when the final event triggers.
Only downside is he will be constantly complaining and annoying you about being too far away.

I'm sorry to hear you didn't like it - we actually played it many times and rather enjoyed the challenge of it. We did figure out that for some people it might be too challenging, and we should've included something to cater to them - we'll aim to do something about that but MasterOfSteel is right, it's very hard to create a game that pleases everyone, especially if you mix multiple styles of gameplay.

lar_q a question, if your listed as owner, what exactly is your job in the creation process?
just curious

Heheh, I should remove that tag - a programmer who's no longer with us once put it there and I have no clue how to get rid of it To answer your question, I actually wouldn't know how to describe my job - I'm a bit old-school in that I'm involved in most things, though typically in a small (hopefully contributing) manner. I guess game director would cover most of it. I set out the general goals, pretend to know what I'm talking about and take most of the shitty decisions - the team in general reserves the fun decisions for themselves

thanks for answering that... so if not you who actually is majority shareholder

As far as I understood it, Lar founded Larian Studios.

But that's so long ago I don't remember it anymore ... Oh, the past ...

Lar
Lar_q

Which one?
Also, if Lar_q is the founder then he is the Swen as well.

Jereth;
He didn't say he wasn't the owner, he said he should remove that tag...
Larian was named after his dog, Lar. During the development of Divine Divinity, the programmers sneaked in a dog called Lar to see if they could get it past unnoticed (IIRC it was a bet beforehand). In one of the inns you could find a dwarf, and with appropriate dialog choices could get him to leave the room (allowing you to get a scroll off the table). If you left and returned later, there would be a dog named Lar there.


Kein;
Both accounts are the same person. When the new forum software was installed and everything transferred over / imported, there was a problem with the 'Lar' account. Since that was the only one affected (something about being the first account after a couple test accounts that had been deleted), it was easier and probably much faster to create another account than to track down and fix the problem.

I have seen only one "Lar" at the office.

well if hes responsible for the horrendous number of hours ive sunk into divinity games i have one thing to say..


THANK YOU

It has to be Swen. The status updates remind me a lot of the awesome openings in their manuals.

I just hope stuff like that does not lead to more people being annoyed with you and this "We are so elite and now stop whining about our cool, totally unbalanced final fights that take 10 attempts and lots of frustration to complete" attitude (you also did it in Divinity 2 where you just put some final boss there that did 10 times more damage than anyone else and thought it was a cool, thrilling thing).

I really do not get how people who make such awesome games (I really mean this!) can be so bad about balancing them. Balance has been an issue in Divine Divinity, Divinity 2 (the beginning super hard, near the end way too easy to the point where the enemies in the last 20% of the game could not even damage you anymore!), and now this (or the respawn rates, ...). I'm plainly not getting it.

The only viable explanation that comes to my mind is that the dog mentioned earlier is responsible for the balance.

With DD I was actually looking forward to the challenge of that opponent, as the end section of the game was relatively easy, but I didn't have any problems at all and it was a disappointingly quick fight (even if it wasn't, there are lots of effective techniques and exploits in the game).

I can not comment about the end of FoV, but Lar said it was balanced to be challenging, that they should have added something to allow for people who found it too tough and they would look at fixing that. How does that become 'We are so elite and now stop whining'???
There are people who find D2:ED too hard on easy difficulty and not hard enough on hard, so comments about the difficulty balancing a game are accurate.

You could still be right about the dog, though...

Actually the last mission we are talking about here has quite different problems from the ones you described in the main game. While varying difficulty is of course a problem it is on one side hard to avoid because of all the freedom a rpg grants, and on the other side kinda self regulated by that (leveling up elsewhere, better equipment, potions).

However this mission we are talking about here is played as dragon and with afaik predefined spells. You cannot do much before that point to make this easier. Now the second problem si that you are not responsible for yourself anymore because it is an escort mission.
This leads to a quite unrpg like situation where it is really all about some skill you have or do not have in this situation and that makes it quite hard for the people that do not have this particular skillset but rather a different one. This however in my mind makes it very hard for larian to change the mission in a way that does not make it ridiculous. I mean it is the fight against the invasion of damian, so even with the challange they put there, story wise I kinda thought... "If that's really all... why even bother with the main quest. As dragon I could have killed everything of that invasion force alone, all the time..."

We've decided to replace the easy difficulty level of the game with a casual mode which does a number of changes that should allow everybody who's having problems with certain parts of the game to get through (within reason). You can swap between casual/normal difficulty level whenever you want, and that should ease the problems some people seem to be having.

Normal mode - how it was balanced by the designers (intentionally challenging)
Casual mode - enemies are nerfed to make hard battles easier (intentionally easy without removing all challenge)

Some of the things affected by casual mode: The zeppelin survives a lot longer, your creature is stronger, you receive less damage and the enemies are easier to defeat.

Perfect choice.

I hope you will keep the respawn as well on Normal/Hard.

Ok, you get your 8/10. I just beat the final mission and if you do it "right", it's really a piece of cake:
Fly ahead and ignore the spammy comments that call you back. Only use the fireball (first attack) and the nuke. Nuke big stuff, take out other stuff. The zeppelin made it with like more than 95% of its health. If I had not complained about it being too hard, I had said the opposite if I had tried the mission first with this approach.

I'm still not entirely sure what to make of this. Either (based on what you try to do, for example if you think it'd be cool to use your dragon-breath more) it's too hard, probably next to impossible or a real piece of cake. My suggestion would be to tone the defenses down somewhat or tone the offense of your dragon up but really force the dragon to stay near the zeppelin (like it gets shot down quickly if you move too far away). That way, you have to defend the flying thing but can destroy the buildings fast enough before they shoot down the zeppelin.

On the other hand it's a really tricky thing to balance and to get right and I also have to admit I never saw, in over 20 years of gaming, a truly working and fun escort mission.

If you promise to leave escort missions out next time I'd pre-order Divinity 3 tomorrow. Or some other Dragon-Knight-Add-On would also be nice (with more dragon flying, please). Any plans for that?

As for respawns: Maybe you can make it that you set them as different settings? Like a difficulty and a seperate "respawn rate" bar.

I made a movie of me playing it in a way that works really well, which can be seen here, if anyone needs a guide:


Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

To my mind it cannot be a problem for anyone if he plays it like that but of course you also have to want to play stuff like that. I could imagine that people just are annoyed by such things...

Anyway respawn with ingame option is pretty crazy in terms of xp gain imo. I personally would ahve preffered a more lore like ingame solution where it stops in the town once you kill the engineer for example...

And maybe in the academy it should take a little longer for the enemies to spawn because it takes all the fun out of exploring - which is doubled complex there with the helmet - with enemies that kill you all the time.