Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Feedback after playing Beta 1.0.288

I admit that I have not made it that far in the beta, so I'm not sure how much harder the game has gotten, but I can try to help.

Alix, do you have recording software, so you can record the game and upload it to youtube or something so we can see what you're doing and offer advice?

The alternative is for one of us to record footage of us playing, while explaining what we're doing and why we're doing it.

Or perhaps you should play co-op with someone who can help guide you.

Status immunity talents. -- Since new talents are acquired quite often, I don't think it'd be much trouble to get all the status immunity talents for your warriors. Which trivializes the status effects in the game. I think they should either not give full immunity, similar to how they were in alpha, or have downsides like some of the other talents, such as the one that makes you immune to fear but prevents you from fleeing battle.

Although I do think many talents are still a little useless/redundant, there are many more status effects in-game than there are talents to offset them. Granted, there are three talents that allegedly give immunity to stun, knockdown, and mute. There are also two talents that give immunity to fear and poison, but those have pretty big downsides.

I don't really see this as being too ridiculously overpowered.

Played a few hours of the beta, very nice improvements over the alpha!

One thing however that seemed a bit clunky, was the big infodump by ZixZax the first time you meet him. Of course, since that whole sequence got redesigned, it's possible that it will change again anyway, but I feel that currently it's a bit too confusing:
You have the player investigating Jake's murder, only to be teleported away and subjected to ZixZax ramblings about Star Stones and the big evil mealstrom, neither of which has much to do with the murder (well, they likely do have, but we don't know at this point of course).
It seemes better to me to introduce the player to those concepts more gradually instead of dumping it all at once.
Furthermore, what's the point behind having both an Imp historian appointed by the gods to record history and the Weaver (appointed by who/whatever) recording history by weaving it into the big tapestry? That's a redundancy you mabye could explain a bit better, as well.

I agree with the points raised by other posters about the talents. While they do seem much better, the overall quality is still a bit mixed.
I'm also not totally convinced about the one skill point per level. While I understand it from a balancing perspective, it still means that you often will have several level-ups where you can't upgrade anything because you have to conserve your points.

I noticed two small bugs:
1) NPCs spamming "Not enough room" messages above them when doing something (not sure what, sitting maybe?)
2) My two chars had an exclamation mark stuck above them, but no conversation would trigger.
This occured after I traveled to the shelter plane and some other conversation was triggered by leaving the previous place (after the star stone thing/healing quest from Evelyn). It vanished eventually when I left the shelter plane.

The Zixzax thing is also clunky because you tend to be zapped away when you were in the middle of something, like looking at a crime scene or deciding which patient to save, and then once you're there, your characters first start talking about those things. And I'm pretty sore that no one notices that you were teleported into nowhere either.

EDIT: They do not. I was zapped away in front of Evelyn and she didn't notice.

Getting zapped away is an interesting idea, but the way it interrupts things and changes the subject essentially mid-sentence is... clunky, yeah.

You also have to talk to your partner about whatever you were going to discuss in the real world while in the Homestead, even though suddenly you have new things on your mind. If you don't, that discussion opportunity is lost when you return to Cyseal.

While this may solve the problem of "what if you don't meet Zixzax before trying to leave the Cyseal map", and "what if you activate a stone elsewhere and never leave through one of the Cyseal gates" it introduces some other problems of its own.

Well, being teleported away does underline that the stones interact with Roderick and Scarlett in a special way, so it's not completely bad.
However, as you say as well, it interupts the flow of things a bit.
So maybe a better solution would be to keep the lightning (and some comments about it by our chars) but instead of teleporting them away directly, either make ZixZax appear a bit later to look for what just happened there(after we have finished whatever we were doing) or make ZixZax teleport them away later?

And yes, it would be better if NPCs noticed that you just vanished into thin air.

If you record that battle maybe we can see what is going on? I did not have much trouble with Evelyn, but maybe I've just learnt how to exploit that battlefield (after playing through it four times before).

I deliberately failed the check with Roberts to test something - if you read his ledger and then go back and confront him, he now confesses and agrees to answer your questions. Perfect, exactly one of the things I requested. I also note the prominent window in his bedroom, also good for explaining how the body was slipped out.


On Pickpocketing:

• Pickpocketing, Rank 1. Target: a book with weight 0.2. Cannot pockpocket – weight exceed my limit. Okay, I know that’s only Rank 1 Pickpocketing, but that is ridiculous.
• Apparently with Rank 1, I can only pickpocket up to level 3 NPC’s at most (and there are only a handful of those in Cyseal)
• Some NPC’s don’t stand still long enough to pickpocket them, and the random wandering doesn’t help. I’m thinking about Esmerelda here. It's quite hard to pickpocket her because Spetimus watches the right side of the store all the time, so you only have a limited window when she's on the left side to pickpocket her, but she moves erratically and rarely stands still.
• Pickpocketing shouldn't be punishable by death.

I think the descriptions need to be adjusted, to specify the bonuses/penalties apply to the base value. The talent effects are applied separately:

HP = BaseHP + [ -1/2 * BaseHP ] + [ 4/5 * BaseHP ] = 1.3 BaseHP

they do not stack, which would give
HP != BaseHP * 0.5 * 1.8 = 0.9 BaseHP


With a constitution of 6 the base HP value is 31, so 15 with Raistlin, 55 with Lone Wolf and 40 with both.

Some comments after playing the Beta for a bit yesterday:

Dialogue (Skills)

The first character I created was a "talker" - I put lots of points into intimidate, charm and reason. Right now, these skills are basically useless however. There are very few situations where you can use them at all and even then you can still get past these checks by reloading and playing the minigame until you pass. There is also no reason for there to be 3 different dialogue skills.

Suggestions:

- Consolidate all the dialogue skills into one "speech" skill. This better reflects the value of the dialogue skills a the moment.
- The dialogue minigame makes sense for multiplayer (between players) but should not be part of the single player game. Instead there should be a fixed skill check (e.g. need 2 in speech to pass). This would create incentive to invest in the dialogue skill(s)).
- There need to be many more uses for the speech skill(s) to make it worthwile. It should be possible to avoid fights and/or find alternate solutions to problems by having speech. The game is mostly hack & slay at the moment, which I find to be a pity. Some more choices and consequences would be nice as well.

Some more random comments/suggestions:

- Ranger arrow spray is far overpowered. Shoud stay in the game but maybe with way of the ranger 4/5 requirement
- Slowed enemies wait until forced end of turn. Really annoying when using oil a lot as a wizard
- Fire is more powerful than the other magic schools. Other schools need area damage as well.
- Might be intentional, but the Firefly spell starts line right before the wizard and ends up always burning the wizard as well.

Totally agree on your first point, unless Larian adds in a lot more situations where these individual abilities are actually useful (your third point). Currently, it seems like they've broken the speech abilities into three just to make the "Social" abilities as numerous as the other three categories (Warrior/Wizard/Survivor), which is completely arbitrary unless the gameplay supports it.

And agree with your second point as well - I think your suggested "fixed skill check" system is how the single-player game worked in alpha?

record? Hmm, I went down the stairs and the figth starts.

The Mage on the rigth try to kill Jack. Evelyn created Zombies about every round. Madora try to kill or knock down Evelyn.

Starlett(ranger) try to help Evelyn and sometimes (if multiarow as allowed) she manage to kill one kultist. Jahan and my wizard use Scolls to heal the partymembers. sometimes they manage to have extra AP's to use Ice or Fire.
And all of them use scrolls, if one Party member was killed.

Somehow I manage to kill Evelyn! The room was full of poisson, because the created zombies break to poisson afer 5 rounds. Jack is dead, I can't ask him about his live.

It is possible to win yes! But frustrating.

Now I finished the beta I think. I don't play it again, because of the hard fights. I'll wait for te next Version.
Maybe i miss some dialoges because of my way to fight. I use single walking Ice Elemental in the fire area east. The party don't fight, only the Iceboy. Against Evelyn I have no Elementals! That was the Problem.

Open Quest are:

- Mysterius murder and consilors wife (maybe because Jack was killes in the fight against Evelyn?)

- The legionares will
- The philosopherer
- Story of the stones
But this 3 quests are not in this version I think.



Yes to the firefly! It's hard to use this spell, but nessesary to clean the ground! The caster hit itself!

But no to lower the Rangerarrowspray! Sometimes it was my only possible way to kill, because the 2 spellcasters had to heal the party and Madora has not enough AP's to kill fast enough.
She run to Evelyn can't hit her, bacause No more AP's Evelyn cast create Zomby and run away. TO kill the Zomby Madora Need 4-6 Hits, means 4-6 rounds. So she dont kill them. She try to catch Evelyn, but because the Zomby next to her... no APs to hit Evelyn when she arrived. So Evelyn and all other monsters must be killed by the ranger.

- The ballista being usable in a fight is an interesting idea, but like many things, the implementation is lacking. You can only use it in combat, just standing beside it when the nearby party is fighting doesn’t work. It’s too far away from the combat zone for someone to run back. I tried it on the west gate. I had Jahan hang back by it and moved my party past the barrel to trigger fighting. The guards back at the gate joined combat, but Jahan did not, even though he was standing beside the guards. So I had to move him up a bit to get him to join, but when I saw that using the Ballista would take 9 AP to use, it meant I’d have to move him back and wait two or three turns before he could fire it once – in the meantime, the soldiers would be on the front lines, in the line of fire. I guess the only real way to use the ballista is to plant a teleporter pyramid there, and separate one guy from the party so everyone doesn’t teleport.


- The hidden tunnel entrance looks much better… to the point where you can’t really see it unless you’re looking, which somewhat undermines the idea of it being a place to go in Cyseal when you want combat. Not a big thing, I guess. Maybe add a line to Robert’s confession and/or journal about him finding a tunnel, guessing that’s where the body thief went, and covering it up.


- In the secret tunnel under the graveyard, I set up an oil trap using a barrel for the skeletons. It was rather silly since I had no fire damage… and then I noticed the hanging lamp. Unfortunately, attacking it with Staff of Magus and Blitzbolt didn’t do anything. It would have been cool if it had fallen to ignite the oil.


-If someone is standing in oil and is burning, will knockdown set the oil on fire? Edward got set on fire and I tried that, but he barely passed the knockdown check.


- Apparently some enemies have a huigh enough PER to see you when you’re invisible? I tried to use that to advance on the Skeletal Scorcher, only to have Edward remark, “Hello, I’ve been spotted?”


- I really like the flamethrower effect now. It looks much better than the Flare placeholder.

- It was kinda amusing for Edward to pass his saving throw versus burning while standing in fire, only to fail it on his next turn and instantly die.

- Is Madora’s Sword just super-powerful, or do Splitting Mauls just suck? Madora’s two-handed sword does 29-47 damage and requires 8 STR, Splitting Mauls do 15-38 and require 9 STR. I keep finding Splitting Mauls, and they are not worth using.

- I've said this before, I think, but West Cyseal needs a Waypoint Shrine. That area is large enough to make walking back and forth a pain, and you are going to want to walk back and forth probably more than once. You'll almost certainly want to return to town partway through that area. I suggest somewhere along the cliffside, between the lighthouse and the vines. There's an intersection towards the vines, past the second undead house where it would fit nicely and make sense as a central location.

- I like most of the revamped names for enemies, but Ghoul-at-the-Lighthouse is a worse name than Lighthouse Horror.

- I did defeat the Lighthouse Horror at level 4, but only barely. I suffered four deaths. My strategy of using Rogue Edward to take out the archers worked great (more or less), Edward even soloed the Lighthouse Horror, but unfortunately the Lupine/Wolf Horrors were more than a match for Madora and my Witch and Wizard.

Even with Madora stacked high with Fortifying Iron, Healing and other buffs, she still died twice. The wolf's Bleeding damage is just so powerful and there's no way to mitigate or stop it as far as I know. It does so much damage and then you die. Maybe lower the bleeding damage those wolves do a little bit. But maybe I don't know, maybe there is a way to mitigate it. I'm going back to town to read all the books I can find to see if there's a recipe to make bandages or something.

Edward did solo the lighthouse Horror, but then died somehow from poison left from its death, even though I thought he wasn't standing in the stuff.

- The Summon Wolf is a little bit too fragile, I think. It needs slightly more health. Not a whole not more, just a bit.

- While I did have enough Resurrect scrolls for everyone thanks to lucky drops, I think instead I'll go back to town and prepare for the fight better, because 4 scrolls is a lot for one fight. At the very least I can pick up more spellbooks.

- I have no idea at all what Talent I should get for my Witch. I've looked over the list twice, and nothing really looks appealing. Maybe I could use Rastlin, but that would fill my AP to full each turn, and I haven't got enough spells - I'll be cooldown locked (and Staff of Magus doesn't do enough to make that seem worthwhile). Or I could get Bigger and Better and then dump two quick points into CON to increase my maximum AP.

- Someone had a very good point when they said that Know-It-All was a crappy Talent because Bigger and Better still exists. They have a point. Know-It-All should probably get an additional upside if it's going to have a downside.

Here are some suggestions:

- There should be an indication of your weapons loosing durability, also it will be nice if they add visuals of your weapons and armour to see if they're worn, damage or badly damage as it will visually tell the player to repair the item or time to go back to the towns. As still there is no indication that you know your items will be broken until you figured it out in battle. (This is truly a must)

- As many suggested the repairing system need to be changed, make it more useful instead of downgrading the weapons and armour as it drives players away from using that skill. Make the repairing system more balanced and exciting such as you can make the weapons and armour upgradeable by adding more iron to it or what not to make it more durability, sharpness (damage), adding elemental effects, etc. which also can take an effect of your repairing skills to be used more efficiently for the player to put in.

- Change Repairing to Blacksmithing? If they decide to make the items to be upgradeable instead of downgrading it.

- The staff should also be used as a range weapon too but with lesser range than the bow\crossbow. They already added a nice feature with the ground attack so it does make the staff useful but it still need to add a range attack (Instead of using animations spells from the hands).

- Weapons with elemental\poison damage should have visuals or effects around the weapon that it will actually tell the player it's an elemental weapon (Fire, Ice, Water, Air and Poison). So far they added the visuals effects only when attacking the enemy by seeing a minor effect out of the weapon. This will truly help the immersion of the game. I always forget my weapon is an elemental weapon and realize that my weapon type heals the enemy, so I have to open up my inventory screen to see why its the case? So I switched to another weapon. (This is truly a must)

That's it for now will add more later, but most of these suggestions are currently missing for the players to understand and not wait until something happened for them to discover, they need to be more aware and be prepared what's to come.

- Tex

Good ideas, Texoru.

If the repair thresholds for when you can't repair at level 1/2/3... are going to stay the same though (which I don't want), then the "your weapon needs repair" indicators should show up before you cross the line where the character's repair skill can't meet their equipped weapon, and show as "breaking" past that line.


I also assume that the Staff of Magus spell will eventually get an animation shat shows the energy being channeled through the staff you're required to use, instead of your hands as the staff flops about.

- The Talent "Morning Person" lets you resurrect to full health. Resurrection scrolls seem to resurrect you to full health by default. That make the Talent less useful, since all classes without Witchcraft 3 will have to use Resurrection scrolls. Resurrection Scrolls should bring you back with about 50% health (well, somewhere between 40-60%).

Yeah, there was a discussion about this in at least one other thread - I totally agree, and had some of the same ideas. At this point I'm just going to wait and see how Larian deals with the whole Repair mechanic in future updates - I have a feeling there are enough suggestions on the forums to make them want to do something about it (along with the whole "lockpicking vs. simply fireballing every door/chest" issue).

Before bloating the 'Bug Report' thread further with new issues i'd like to clarify some things as i don't know if some of them are bugs or intentional changes and if other encountered these things as well.

- Amuletts and rings are missing from the game? I could'nt find any of em during my playthrough. Only amuletts i had where crafted ones and ONE crafted ring. That said i only found one jewellery ring kit, which is way too rare especially in the early game. Compared to the alpha version of the game where you could use any junk ring you found to craft a custom ring the 'jewellery ring kit' method isn't very intuitive either.

- Did the Black Cove fight against the pirates change?


- First encounter in Evelyns lair intentionally?


- 'Endboss' encounter not triggered correctly?


- Is it intentional that you can find rare loot from destroying water barrels or other world objects like the packages in the warehouse?

Here are some of my suggestions, I haven't read all the existing ones so some might have been suggested already.

1. Adding a keychain or a way to sort the generous amount of keys we loot (or maybe once we used the key for its proper chest it could self-destroy?

2. Adding a button to compact the inventory

3. Sneaking mechanics are toned down way too much
==> way too easy to go around stealing stuff in the first town.
Having 0 point into stealth, my fighter should not be stealthing inside every buildings stealing all the ornaments and opening all the chests.

Which brings me to tip 4

4. Making the chest keys harder to find. I understand it's the starting town but they are not even hidden anywhere. All you have to do is enter a building/cellar/whatever and hold down your toggle key to view the items on the ground and voila

5. Adding an option to make the combat movement animations slightly faster. Games with turn-based combat usualy have this option which makes the replayability of the game much more enjoyable.

6. Remove the godly 2H axe from the cook's house that allows my level 3 character to solo group of 5 monsters his level

ALCAR - your first suggestion is already in the "UI Wishlist" thread (and is very popular); maybe check that out and see if you'd like to add anything else.

But I have to admit I like the way the "ALT" item highlighting works now (as also mentioned in the UI list) - of course this is personal preference, but I really don't find pixel-hunting for tiny items at all fun. That said, I think a main menu option to enable/disable the highlighting could please both types of players.