Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Help/Tips/Tricks Most glaring issues fixed soon?

Hi all. I was just wondering if they're ever actually going to fix some of the more glaring issues in the game, mainly dealing with the lack of polish. I've come across at least 10 books in the game that have bad spelling or punctuation. Several ending in a question mark where clearly there should have been a period at the end of the sentence, in the book.

Also, one of the more obvious ones. Most of the NPC's tend to say their lines about 10 times a minute. This can be extremely annoying, so much so that there have been times that I've had to turn down that sound aspect just so I could think straight. I needed to be in the area, but I don't need to hear "Who wants to be judged by a panel of stoney faced gods etc etc" over and over and over and over and over again. Annoying isn't it? Pretty much all the NPC's in the game do this pretty badly, I think once per minute is more than enough. There are a lot of little things like this, and a lot of quest bugs still there as well. I'm on 1.0.8.whatever, the latest version. Its almost as if they shouldn't have released the game yet.

Hey don't feel bad. I don't think anything here moves fast (and totally agree on them saying their lines too often, I want to kill that pirate on the dock in the starting town). I asked how to be able to name my game/server like 4 days ago, checked my post every day, and no-one's even tried to hook a brotha up with some help info. Tried using the forum search (hell had to register just to use the search) and still couldn't find it.

"Most of the NPC's tend to say their lines about 10 times a minute. This can be extremely annoying..."

"...a lot of quest bugs still there as well... Its almost as if they shouldn't have released the game yet.)

Agreed with every single word of those phrases!! The game is just amazing, but the number of bugs/errors is just ruining it. It makes me think if I really should play it before they fix them, since I've seen a lot of players stuck on some part of the game... how disappointing!

Something I've noticed when playing kickstarter games is, you're usually dealing with noob developers. Kickstarter games seem to be almost always released with a severe lack of polish, just as this game was. Its like they just couldn't wait any longer, so they went ahead and released it just to get it out there, even though they knew it had some real problems.


Unfortunately though, it really just makes them look as if they don't know what they're doing. Didn't they have testers play the game and tell them what was wrong with it? It seems like the obvious thing to do, is to get the game as ready for release as you think it can be, then don't release it yet. Hand it over to 20 game testers that come in and play the game and write down every problem they have and everything they notice. Obviously beta helps but that's just to get it to the release point. This would be the final test because its a test of the release product. Without all the glaring issues of beta, the new testers would much more easily find all the little polish items that really finish the game off. I really don't see what the problem is or why so many devs fall into this pitfall.

Game development ain't easy guys...I'm helping a friend of mine with a project and I got quite a few inn's and out's of the whole development process....

Now, Larian has older games with plenty of bugs still to this day, we can agree on that but so do others , heck i've come across some games in my lifetime that had bugs on the main campaign that if you did things in any other way/order you would be stuck , and it was the 70% part of the game where the mistake could have been done much much earlier , enough to frustrate you to never play that game heh ...

STILL , i'm not defending them , but think about it , have 100 game testers cook it up for 3 months before the game is released and it can still be a buggy product , reasons can be plenty...

ranging from the game testers not being qualified enough to overlook things or their pay grade bein shitty and not give a damn ( that type of job requires meticulous,repeatable processess where you also have to have 15 on your perception attribute, gear not included among other skillsets) OH and 1000 game testers does not equate 10.000 that play this in a beta with it's feedback still does not equate 30.000 players anyway hope you get the point...

A game can run out of budget before it's completed nevermind being polished, and we're human after all you can make the plan so solid and calculate day in day out and still get behind your quota... soooo what happens then , when your outta money the wheels can't be greased and the machine won't move, people dont charity hungry kids nowadays and you'd expect em to come to work for nothing ? heh

All this said , considering this is a kickstarter project (and these projects come with their own strings attached don't you worry )...i think it's done pretty great! and i really hope they will continue to improve upon that and get the support needed, in time and until they can't milk it anymore because in the end,it's still a business that has to earn a certain ammount to be worth the effort

Yes all that's true. I know you said you're not defending them, but somehow other developers manage to do it. Take blizzard for example. Starcraft 2. I didn't notice anything sticking out at me. I really couldn't find anything wrong. There are a lot of developers out there like that. There are a lot more that just can't pull it off though. Now I know you'll say blizzard is huge and can afford it, but they weren't always, and their games were still great and largely bug free. Diablo 1 and Starcraft come to mind. These were games from when blizzard wasn't the huge company it is today. Although I will say they ain't what they used to be, what with the whole diablo 3 debacle and WoW in sharp decline due to them constantly messing with the game.

I know you can run out of money, but that's really a tired wore out excuse. Somehow, some way, other devs seem to be able to do it right and not "run out of money". That's a fundamental flaw in the project management itself, and should be addressed by getting rid of whomever the noob is that was assigned that task.

In short, there really is no excuse. This is far from the most buggy game I've ever played, but there are still too many. I'm not saying that Starcraft 2 doesn't have ANY bugs, or that you couldn't break the game if you tried. Just that I noticed nothing, and with DoS I noticed about 30. That's a giant difference that really just puts Larian well below the ranks of some of the higher developers. It makes me not really look forward to the next Larian game, and honestly I probably won't buy another one.

"When will Larian fix glaring issues?"

Example of Glarian Issues; Typo's and punctuation errors, VO too often.

...
...
...
...
...

Son, I am dissapoint.
If those are glaring issues for you I would say gaming goodbye right this instant.

As for "BLIZZARD CAN DO IT", Blizzard spends the entire *amount* of cash spend on D:OS on QA. Why can't Larian do it? Since if they spend all those 4 millions on QA, there wasn't much game left to QA. Also you picked seriously the only developer ever that puts so much into QA that not a single other in the world does.

And you know what happened with Diablo III? (Also StarCraft II was launched with an issue that could melt your videocard(!). Seriously... think about that.
I rest my case...

EDIT:
Or maybe not. But yeah, melting my hardware ranks quite a bit higher with me at "glaring issue" than typo's.
Also you compare a RTS with an RPG. That's like apples and oranges. Compare it with an actual RPG and it becomes far more favorable. Why? Since pretty much every RPG thanks to it's complex systems, many options and variabels is prone to bugs, and extremely much harder to test than a FPS or RTS. It's why to this very date people still find new bugs and fix them for Baldur's Gate 2 (2001!) or Planescape:Torment (2000!). Fans that is, not the real developers.
Not to mention my little "pride poney" Knights of the Old Republic II. It's so broken my TSLRCM jumps to 1 on moddb everytime the game goes on sale on Steam. Should tell you something.

And still it was (is) one of the best RPG's EVER.

The writing and wit in this game is phenomenal. It's good enough that I'm willing to bet a large portion of it is lost on most people.

So for example, the original poster here wrote the following:

"Several ending in a question mark where clearly there should have been a period at the end of the sentence, in the book."

Yet fails to see the errors in his own sentences, like say, when to use a comma. This is the same person who is offering critical feedback on grammar. I'm willing to bet what you think was wrong, was actually right, except, you don't know it.

Sorry Jigga, your post is so full of holes that you're completely not logically aware of, which discredits whatever point you're trying to make.

No, me being tired at the time I post these because I just worked for 12 hours doesn't count as "holes", sorry. Just like right now. I really couldn't care less to check my own spelling or grammar, I just wing it and I assume you're all intelligent enough to get the point, if (zomg) a comma is misplaced. Please don't make me feel like I'm wrong about that. My points stand, even if you're too big of a fanboy to admit it.

As for blizzard, I say again, look at games like starcraft 1. Diablo 1. Excellet games, and for their time, pretty much bug free. Yes, you can dig up some bizarre, obscure bugs on just about any game that ever existed. I've never heard of any such bug that would "fry your video card". That's probably just something someone made up at some point, or just due to some law of averages where at some place and time, some hardware HAS to be affected on such a physical level by some software. And again, I'm not going into all the "could have beens" that are out there. I'm going in to what I saw, and what affects me. Some devs, such as valve, I see nothing. With larian, I see tons. Big difference.

Agreed, this is unacceptable. Larian should be ashamed of themselves. I'm sure they're all going to Hell for misusing a couple punctuation marks. Here I thought Charles Manson was a bad guy for what he did, but Larian makes him look like a choir boy. Whoever put that question mark where a period should have went should get the electric chair! That's it, I'm writing my congressman about this, this is an outrage! I want this person brought to justice!

DISCLAIMER: Any grammar errors in the above post are the result of my having just worked a 12 hour day, they are NOT the result of my own stupidity, or inability to grasp simple grammar concepts.

Oh and by the way, shouldn't this thread go in the "Technical Issues" forum? Guess he was too tired from working a 12 hour day to figure that out too huh?

So in other words, lack of polish is completely acceptable to you, Diablolus. And we shouldn't have an acceptable standard that we expect from games. Gotcha.

And yeah, sorry to inform you but as we say in the editorial business, tired makes typos. You would think you'd know that by now. And no, I don't care if they're there. Sorry.

This kid can't be serious.

OK first he calls punctuation mistakes in the game "glaring issues". Then he makes excuses when he screws up his post and blames it on working a 12 hour day rather than his own stupidity. He didn't make a typo, he clearly doesn't know basic grammar rules, there's a difference. But being at work for 12 hours is just grueling isn't it? Yep, whenever I'm awake for 12 hours straight it's just all downhill from there. I can't even form a complete sentence after that. Yep, 12 hours is definitely my cutoff. Hope this kid never joins the military he'd never make it.

It's OK for him to make mistakes because he's tired, but when Larian does it it's "unacceptable"? They probably worked harder on this game than he'll ever work on anything in his life. Lol I bet Larian doesn't whine about working 12 hour days.

To answer his question yes, this game is more than acceptable to me in its current state. This game isn't just acceptable, it's PHENOMENAL. They're focusing on issues IN ORDER OF PRIORITY. What does he expect? Does he really expect them to stop fixing high priority issues so that they can scour every book in the game for punctuation errors? That's laughable. One look at the MASSIVE list of fixes they've released since this game shipped clearly shows their attention to detail and love for this game and their customers.

Battlefield 4, now there's a game that's not acceptable to me in its current state. And I'm not talking about a misplaced question mark.

Yep, a game isn't considered "polished" until every single CHARACTER in every single sentence of a game is absolutely, 100% perfect. What an idiot.

Also it was cute how he misspelled my name to make fun of it. I'd do that to him but "JiggaJaw" is already stupid enough as it is.



Yeah Blizzard, what a great example huh? Starcraft 1 was bug free? Is that a joke?

LOL yeah Starcraft was so perfect on release that they didn't patch it at all:

http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/StarCraft_version_history

They patched Starcraft for like ELEVEN YEARS after it was released. He couldn't have picked a worse example of a polished game. Go look at the patch notes, they fixed a little more than a couple missed question marks too.

I'm not a kid I'm a 7 year editor, and I'm tired of repeating myself. Apparently there is no point, because your reading comprehension sucks. Good day