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

The Shield Bash proto-idea was kinda bad and way too overpowered. It was pointed out to me that there are already way too many stuns and disables in the game. Straight damage from a bash would probably be better.

After a reasonably frustrating session trying to play a MP game with my friend, and continual crashes/disconnects, here are some initial thoughts:

1. The multiplayer functionality needs to exist within the game itself, and not piggy back off Steam. It's too confusing and clunky as it is. I realize this may be temporary.

2. There needs to be a character select screen when initiating a MP game (creating or joining) so we can choose which character we want to play when we go in. Right now it's very confusing and unclear, and I started the first two games on a class I wasn't interested in playing as a result. Again, I realize this may be a temporary initial implementation.

3. If you drag the cursor down to the edge of the screen, it scrolls away from the viewable area and you end up lost in the dark. At one point my mouse slid down the screen when I was away from it and I had to quit the game and come back as I couldn't get back to the game area. I may be missing an easy way of getting back, but I couldn't find it. The screen should never scroll beyond the viewable area IMO. There's no need for it to ever do that.

4. Multiplayer in game chat is an absolute must! Please implement this. Not everyone wants to play with VOIP, and very often you can't for reasons of quietness. We need to be able to communicate with each other in game without Shift-tabbing to Steam constantly. I realize this may be temporary, but I'd hate for the game to ship relying so heavily on Steam because no-one said anything - and that's not going to work with more than two people anyway

5. NPC movement/action during combat is a little slow. It needs to be sped up by at least 2x IMO.

6. I miss the targeting reticules from the Kickstarter video, but they would need to align with the ground (just mentioning this as an aside - it jumped out at me when I was watching videos and deciding to buy in or not).

7. The game looks and feels good already More feedback soon...

1. I agree - especially after the poor communication about that issue regarding the GoG version of Dragon Commander. I should think Larian wouldn't make that mistake twice.

2. That'll be in eventually.

3. Press the Home key to center the camera on one your selected character.

Just a note that some keyboards don't have a home key (I haven't checked if it is bindable in the menu). Mine doesn't as I'm on a Macbook Pro in Windows.

But as I said, there is never any need to scroll off the viewable area. It should only ever stop at the edge.

Thanks for the reply!

You can double click on the leader's portrait to re-centre the screen, or single click on a non-lead character to make them leader and re-centre the screen (can also switch leaders using the F1-F4 function keys).

If you want to go to the market 3 screens away, for example, some people would find it easier to scroll the screen over and click than to scroll/click 3 times, or hold the mouse button down to direct the party to the market.

Eventually we should be able to move the screen focus somewhere from the map, which would make it much easier moving around areas that have already been cleared.

I don't know about limiting scroll distance, but there should eventually be an option added to disable scrolling with the mouse.

When I say limiting scroll distance, I mean to the "viewed" area, not the screen extent. Currently it will scroll into complete blackness - presumably indefinitely as I couldn't scroll back no matter how long I tried.

Ah... that makes more sense. I don't know why I read that as 'currently in view'.

As a related addendum to this, I would suggest that when the dialogue system is in force, that mouse cursor scroll is disabled. It's quite disconcerting if your cursor drifts to the edge of the screen and you are pulled away from the NPC to whom you are speaking.

Actually I would suggest locking the camera to the character permanently, and disabling mouse cursor screen scroll altogether. It's really problematic and unnecessary IMO. The mini and main maps are sufficient for navigation. As it is now it feels weirdly like an RTS. I know Baldur's Gate did the same thing, but it was weird then too. Why should I be able to see the state of the other side of the map when it's out of sight anyway?

I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but when casting beneficial spells (like heal, resurrect or teleport) I would really like the ability to target your characters not only on the 'battlefield' but also via their respective portraits. I often have some problems to target my characters, especially when circled by several enemies and/or corpses. And using the portraits really would really help and speed up the casting of these spells (for me at least ).

In the market are a few merchants. You have your Arrow Seller, Potion/Spellbook seller, and a fish seller. Those are fine, but there are two others that sell completely random junk, even though their banter suggests they sell cheese and vegetables. Maybe they should also sell the items they're hawking? There are several crafting recipes that use food items, so those NPC's should sell food items as well as other assorted crafting ingredients.

Also, seriously, one Branch can make a Spear, two can make a quarterstaff, but one Branch can only make one Arrow Shaft? It should be at least three to five. Along those lines, one silver bar can only make one Arrow Head? Should be three as well

Thank-you, you saved me a post

You can use the portraits in the battle queue at the top of the screen to target NPCs, most of the time.

When playing in co-op multiplayer; The need for a Conversation log is dire.
It is very hard to read the text the NPC's speak, and I can't read (hear?) my friend say his words, and if he is a fast reader, I won't have anytime at all to read what the NPC is saying.

If my friend runs into conversation on his own, I don't want the conversation log to notice, I'd rather have it role-played between characters OR partly recovered when meeting one's friend. As the information would be on hear-say only and not firsthand.

That being said, any type of conversation log would be a great improvement.

There's a pretty annoying issue with the effect where obstacles vanish as your character moves behind them.

The obstacles completely vanish, they're transparent - but they still block you from clicking on things behind them, and because they're entirely transparent, in some cases you have to end up pixel-hunting and camera swerving to try and find the spot where you can actually click on the item you can see.

One spot in particular is the isolated pinnacle in the black Cove, where the lever to escape is only clickable from a certain camera angle. Some people have confused that for "the lever is not working".

I think that there should be a slight translucency of things between the character and the camera so you can at least see the outlines and know if it's being blocked.

So does that mean it is completely out of question? I'd still like to be able to use the main portraits down the left side for friendly action targeting...

No, you should eventually be able to use the portraits to target party members.

I play on my TV and sit further away from it then you would with a monitor. I find many of the writing to be too small in the game; i have to lean forward a lot to be able to read the small text without much effort. This is especially true for tooltips, the log, books, floating combat text and UI text such as the inventory/character stats text.

I also don't like the floating combat text and the speech bubbles. The speech bubbles are quite hard to read on many lighter backgrounds. The floating combat text is very small and also hard to see on many backgrounds. It also often appears very high above the characters, making you miss it when you have the camera zoomed in. I would suggest more shadow or larger text.

So I'd like to see text options, at the very least scaling options for UI text, log and floating combat text. UI scaling would be great/necessary too (if the UI becomes too small for the text).
Last thing down the list are design options; it would be nice to be able to change text colors and fonts (especially for floating combat text and the log).

I realize it is highly likely that you have already thought of some of these options. It's just that the eye strain the text gives me right now almost forces me to play on my monitor or sit very close to the TV.

The UI isn't final yet, so there should still be improvements to readability (floating text on a light background, etc), but there will not be any font scaling (see the topic font) or colour coding options.

Thanks, now that should have been one of the Kickstarter goal rewards!
Perhaps an idea is to create a Render Quality option such as in Planetside 2. The Render quality setting effectively controls the internal resolution at which the game renders. In Planetside 2 it is often used to lower the 3D rendering resolution (<1) while running the client in the monitor's native resolution. It can also be used to increase rendering resolution (>1). So this way you could play the game at 720p, benefiting from a larger UI, but set the rendering resolution to 1.44 to have the game render at approximately 1080p.
This depends on whether the UI is rendered with the 3D world or not, i don't know if that is the case.

I think they are rendered together (in the topic I linked to I asked if it would be possible to set the game resolution and UI resolution separately).