Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta General Feedback Thread

Here's the feedback from my first play-session. Please note that I am only really including my perceived problems with the game rather than its good points, since I think that is more beneficial at this early stage. So, if this post seems rather negative overall it doesn't necessarily mean that I do not like the game. I would also like to take this chance to thank the folks at Larian for giving us the chance to play D:OS at this early point in development and give constructive feedback that will hopefully help this game reach its full potential.

Play Session 1 (17/12/2013)

Bugs:

World

* Moving the camera is difficult and jerky with the mouse - arrow keys seem to work better.
* Moving the camera to the edge of a piece of accessible terrain produces weird cross-sections of that piece of terrain.
* PCs are to see past terrain that they shouldn't be able to see past (i.e. solid, high walls), allowing for forewarning of enemies, spellcasting (e.g. teleporting), etc.
* Able to see that a crate is empty before one of the PCs actually checks it.

Combat

* Charmed enemies surviving until the end of a combat session start a new combat session, so that all the character's action points return and order of combatant priority is re-rolled - could be exploitable to allow player to go again and kill the previously charmed enemy when it should have been its turn to attack if the combat hadn't ended.

Balance (not expected to be correct)

* Player characters created with increased hp values start game with the default 10hp rather than their maximum available hp (e.g. when taking more then 5 constitution).


Other problems/Suggestions:

Design

* Stilettos/high-heels on female protagonist's boots. This is silly & impractical (very much immersion breaking) - high-heeled female adventurers is one of my personal pet-peeves when it comes to RPG character design.

EDIT: I imagine that most of these things are probably well known to the Devs - unfortunately I didn't have much time to do a detailed play-session today...

EDIT EDIT: It was a crate, not a barrel, that I could somehow tell was empty. Not sure if barrels have the same problem...

Some items have weird requirements:


And I was able to open this chest without Telekinesis:

Loxorz, try holding down the left mouse button to control your characters and see if it helps with the camera at all.

I'll give this a try when I next get time to play again - I was trying to move the camera independently of the PCs, although now that I think of it, it doesn't make sense that you should be able to see beyond what your PCs are able to see at any given time, so the camera control method that you suggest is probably the intended one.

I also recall that there was a tooltip about this when I started a new game, but I may have accidentally skipped it... :\

This is intended behavior, because when you are selecting things in these bars, accidental scrolling would be annoying. Nevertheless I had the same remark when playtesting last Thursday.

If you disable shadows in graphicSettings.lsx you gain 20+ fps and if you disable TextureStreamingEnabled in the same file you get way smoother screen scrolling.

Devs might want to check why TextureStreamingEnabled kills the smooth scrolling and maybe add a shadows on or off in the game settings.

Game itself is actually quite stable, no giant memory leaks or shader errors. It only crashes whenyou try to do something unimplemented, like crafting or mixing.




it applies to door only? Because after loading a savegame all the items in the house marked as owned by someone else.

But there is another problem:


if you move the object from its initial position and then save game andthen reload - objects will disappear.

Another issues with savegame loading:

1. All discovered map is undiscovered again
2. Fog of war is back as well.
3. Chests/crates/barrels/etc you searched do not remember their state and appears to be restocked so you can exploit it.

Bugs:

1. I need to re-apply the "filter completed quests" quest log option repeatedly in order for completed quests not to be shown. It seems like any new quests added to the log refresh the list but don't apply the filter.

2. When the conversation options get long (say, 8-10 responses or more), sometimes you can't scroll down far enough to get the last option until you pick one of the visible ones. For instance, if there are 10 possible conversation options, you might be able to scroll down and get the ninth to show, but number 10 won't show until you click 9.

3. Character screen crash and map not persisting after area transition and loading saved games, as has been reported a number of times already.


General Feedback / Quality of Life:

1. First, thank you! It's great to start playing this and I can see already the great potential the game has. I understand fully this is an alpha, so take these QoL points with a grain of salt, I know they could already be slated to change.

2. I could not find a way to clear a UI quickslot once something was put in there. I would like to be able to make it blank again.

3. Player movement speed could be a little faster in my opinion. At the very least, I would like not to have to position my mouse so far away from characters in order to make them run versus walk.

4. It would be nice to have a chat log somewhere in the UI where you could go back and see what people said, especially with floating text messages. There were a couple of times where the inventory screen blocked the floating text that happened as a result of using an item (for instance, digging up the grave of Jake). Either that, or make the text last a little longer because I definitely missed a few floating text messages, which was disappointing.

5. Rotating objects is rather mechanically awkward with left mouse drag + wheel button. It would be a lot easier with the right mouse button to drag if we are going to use the wheel.

6. Please let us camera zoom during convos. I usually zoom out while playing but if a convo starts I like to zoom in a bit to see the person with whom I am talking. You can rotate the camera but can't zoom.

7. Seems kind of easy to aggro people. One mis-click with control and you have a blood bath on your hands. In fact, I started a fight one time simply by moving a crate too close to someone and apparently that was a hostile action. I'm going to have to be reaaally pedantic about saving frequently with the ease in which I can turn people hostile.

Ring bug:
Cannot equip a second ring on either character.
The left ring slot works, the right ring slot cannot be equipped to.

CORRECTION: all items you can pick up.

1. I am sure this is in the works, but the teleporter pyramids really need a "drop and use" and/or a "use while on the ground" functionality. If you can only teleport to the other person, it eliminates a lot of their convenience.

2. I also would like slightly faster movement speed. I do understand that it is hard to do because run speed is tied into the animation. This might be in part a performance issue, and better performance will increase the running speed. I think I've noticed a difference in run speed between click once to send a character versus holding the button down to move the character (this seems slower than one-click).

3. An item that an enemy dropped fell through the world as I was picking up another nearby item. If it helps, the spot was at x:99, y:170.

4. Scared Soldiers:


5. The higher AP and turn costs are a definite improvement, and make normal attacks more useful.

6. I thought it was supposed to be that all XP in combat is split equally between party members, but it seems like only the one who lands the killing blow gets it? Or maybe they both have to at least land one hit on it to get XP from the kill?

7. The trap is too easy to detect, and bypass at location:


8. The undead-infested zone in the north is too empty. There are 9 encounters total, including two , and large gaps where there is nothing of interest. I guess that area is supposed to be a warm-up, but I found all the encounters to be very easy.

9. The Undead Bombers now properly detonate, but I'm not sure that they actually do much damage. What are other people's thoughts on this? EDIT: Okay, they seem to do about 9 damage, which is a lot for a level 1/2 player.

10. It does not appear that extra damage for attacks done from Sneak is implemented. Even performing several successful attacks while sneaking doesn't seem to affect the base damage of the attack.

11. When spells/abilities tooltips say "not enough X skill", instead they should probably say "Requires X skill: <number>". That is more useful information.

12. I'd like to be able to read books without picking them up - especially when books are owned by someone. (This doesn't apply to spellbooks and scrolls, obviously.)

13. Things in the bathing woman's house aren't flagged as her property. She doesn't care if you take her soap. Is this deliberate?

NPC can see through wall of barrels or crates.

I killed a men by accidently letting a box fall on his head. Then the whole village attacked us.

Another big thank you for letting us play the alpha build in the first place!

I don't have many new issues this far. Rather, I'd like to underline a few that others already have mentioned, as I personally think they are important at this stage:
-Your PCs move to slow and seem sluggish to react and do their stuff
-Camera zooms during convos seem very fitting and something this game need
-Containers that have been opened should stay graphically open
-A mouse over message or some colour when highlighting items with ALT should reveal if a looted container is completely empty now
-Aggroing people should be made slightly harder. I don't know exactly how, but it's very easy and then the entire community faction goes pitchforks and torches on you, hehe
-Levelling up should be made more straight on. In most games, you have a distinct shortcut button you press in order to start the process. But here, just in Divine Divinity, you see a distinct arrow that reminds you should level up, but it doesn't lead you to the where and what of that levelling process. I think a bit more handholding in that regard is in place for once

So far I am really enjoying playing D:OS, playing around with the elements on my mages is really awesome. Setting things on fire, electrocuting stuff.

I think the ice elemental might be a bit too overpowered? His normal attack does 100+ damage on my level 3 characters where my fighter only hits for 8-10'ish.

Keep up the good work, I personally like the "not as much handholding" in this game. Sure sometimes I really feel lost but that makes the game more interesting for me because I can choose a crapload of handhold games out there but they are oh so boring.

I miss the no handholding games like Baldurs Gate etc where you actually had to figure out how quests and stuff worked. Makes for a better game experience in my opinion. (I personally hate it when you accept a quest, then there is that huge marker on the map with a quictravel point next to it and you kill your questthign and are done and fast travel back)

Eldiora: Yeah, that handholding is the worst. I love to do all that delving and exploring on my own without any exclamation marks and magically lit markers along the floors showing you the dragon's den and the treasure and all they way to the end.

If you disable shadows in graphicSettings.lsx you gain 20+ fps and if you disable TextureStreamingEnabled in the same file you get way smoother screen scrolling.

Devs might want to check why TextureStreamingEnabled kills the smooth scrolling and maybe add a shadows on or off in the game settings.

Where are these files please as the camera is driving me nuts. Thanks for any help

I can't carry more than 199 gold. Anyone else having the same problem?

Dunno if this is working as intended, but when you fight the crabs at the start, the AoE spells just stay around after the fight, you cannot progress without injury, if this is the way it's supposed to work and that will continue throughout the game, I cant see my self playing any further.