I don't mind linear stories. What I mind in case of BG was the illusion of freedom. Sure, you could play/act as an evil character but usually that was super non-optimal and the game was penalizing you for it. And I don't have to mention it being too black and white with the choices where you're either an altruistic doo-gooder or extreme asshole without anything in between really (it's not just BG that's suffering from it, KOTOR also had such problems).
I like a bit of grey in my characters and I really love it when you have the option of playing a more selfish and not-so-nice character without feeling like a total asshat because of the bullshit choices they give you.
What I'm talking about is a hypothetical situation when a bum approaches you and asks for 5 coins in alms and these are the only choices you're given: 1. Give him 10 coins and your best weapon. 2. Kill him and take his 3 coins.
On October 26 2020 02:04 Manit0u wrote: I don't mind linear stories. What I mind in case of BG was the illusion of freedom. Sure, you could play/act as an evil character but usually that was super non-optimal and the game was penalizing you for it. And I don't have to mention it being too black and white with the choices where you're either an altruistic doo-gooder or extreme asshole without anything in between really (it's not just BG that's suffering from it, KOTOR also had such problems).
I like a bit of grey in my characters and I really love it when you have the option of playing a more selfish and not-so-nice character without feeling like a total asshat because of the bullshit choices they give you.
What I'm talking about is a hypothetical situation when a bum approaches you and asks for 5 coins in alms and these are the only choices you're given: 1. Give him 10 coins and your best weapon. 2. Kill him and take his 3 coins.
I don't think BG really was like that.
Take Avalon quest, you could:
Be the knight in the shiny armour and exchange the eggs with the fake Solaufein had given you IF you had been a nice guy and saved Solaufein. No fight.
Give the demons the right eggs because you had killed Solaufein, and kill both the demons and the drows. That was the road to most xp.
Just go berserk and kill the drows before the demon showed up.
Betray Avalon and give the eggs to the demon. Then you could actually kill Avalon and get an ingredient for arguably the best armour in the game, the human skin armour.
Just be selfish, double cross everyone and use the drow disguise to escape underdark, leaving those good folks to solve their problems.
The optimal way for xp and everything was actually: Save Solaufein Not use his eggs and let them give tge goodceggs to the demon Kill both demons and drows Get your reward from Avalon Kill Avalon
But you would need to have pretty good knowledge of the game to know that.
Big "evil" decision such as helping Bodhi against the Shadow Thieves were not really worse than the alternative. Rp wise, in that case, it were anyway different shadows of grey.
On top of that, I would add that the best NPCs were all evil:
Korgan was clearly the best tank, by far Edwin was wayyyyy ahead of any mage in the game Viconia was the best cleric AND had irreplacable magic resistance.
If you played the good guy and got your reputation to 18 they would leave your party.
You will tell me, ok, then have evil characters, be a good guy and commit minor offenses to keep your reputation low enough, but every RPG will have exploitative solutions like that when you know it inside out.
A friend of mine has been saying a lot of good things about the early access, despite (like me) not having liked divinity at all. It's really getting my hopes up.
On November 05 2020 03:36 Sbrubbles wrote: A friend of mine has been saying a lot of good things about the early access, despite (like me) not having liked divinity at all. It's really getting my hopes up.
Anyone here having fun with it so far?
I'm right there with you. I want to hear it from someone who really doesn't like Divinity before i shell out like $50 for it.
Now that the patch for the Druid class is out, I decided to try it and I must say it were one of the best RPGs I've tried in a good while. It catches the tabletop feeling very well and I like that they have gone for 5E as their D&D edition. I have very high hopes for the final release.
I'm curious about more recent opinions on this game. The combat is one of the things I liked about Divinity vs other CRPGs. It's mostly the other, non-combat stuff I have an issue with. Played Pathfinder recently and I have to say I'm falling out of love with the real time with pause D&D based ruleset. Turn-based combat feels so much better for these type of games with a ruleset that is more designed for videogames than pen and paper.
I didn't see this one get bumped yet. I've already played it a ton since the release last week, almost lvl 7. I'll be honest, it could be a 10/10 but it'll probably end up only a 8/10 for me. It's definitely more Divinity OS 3 than BG 3, only turn based combat and the world feels like Divinity OS for me.
The fantastic things first: Everything is voiced and it's just great. The game has a lot of nice quests and characters and it's definitely fun to explore. The graphics are beautiful as well. Also, there are so many choices. Almost guaranteed that every playthrough is different.
I don't like a lot of things but they aren't able to make it a bad game, as the points before make the game feel great. Still gonna list some here: The combat feels bland coming from Pathfinder (which also had non turn based combat as an option), the class system there was so much more interesting imo. The inventory is a garbage masterpiece, just like how I remember it from Divinity. I just ended up selling prettty much everything recently but even that takes a while since there is no sell junk buttton as far as I'm aware of. Also no shared inventory weight sucks.
Hard to write review but been playing a lot since release, impressive work on environments and general possibilities. Tactical depth is nice and seems to grow quite nicely after the early game. The AI is good enough to make the difficulty pretty high on hard difficulty mode. Definitely enjoyable, I'm wondering about the replayability only because it takes so long to do certain things but the potential sure is there and game was made with it in mind. I'd say biggest downside is it can be slow and a lot of rng but it's growing on me as it's interesting to play, easily 8/10 I think.
I don't want to write an in depth review because I haven't even gotten out of act 1 yet, but at this point I honestly don't get what all the hype is about. People talking about 'new standard for crpgs' and stuff, yet it feels like the devs haven't learned anything at all from previous rpg games and pretty much just stuffed as many lines of voice-acted conversations as they could into the game and called it a day. There's virtually no interaction with your companions outside of the +/- opinions and the brief commentary about whatever quest you're doing now and then; they pretty much never say anything during encounters or dialogue which just feels like such a massive fail for a game with a budget as big as this that supposedly focused on interaction and reactive world.
Not only that, but it's just absolutely idiotic that only the character that initiated the dialogue / interaction is available to, well, talk or interact with whatever is going on. Like if my mean githyanki companion was the first to be spotted by some guy that wanted to talk, I have no option to tell her 'hey hold on, let me handle this', nope either the whole conversation is done by a gal with 8 charisma and no persuasion or I have to reload the game. Likewise early on in the game there's a wizard trapped inside some portal who needs a strong arm to pull him out -- you'd think after my little elven bard failed the strength check to do so I could ask the abovementioned githyanki to lend me her 17 str hand? Nope, she's just standing back watching without a care in the world. You're talking to some shifty guy who might be hiding something from you, but your most insightful character isn't the one having the conversation? Too bad, the other dude will never let you know that there's something off about the dude you're talking to. It's just mind-boggingly bad design.
Also, the constant dice rolls and skill checks that are shoved in your face are massively immersion breaking. You're walking through a forest, suddenly a 'perception check: failed!' pops up. Obviously there is a hidden treasure or a pathway nearby. Why are you being told that you failed the said perception check if you didn't spot it? Who knows. Or you're talking to a person who tells you something along the lines of, "I've got nothing to hide, I'm just a dude", suddenly an 'insight check: failed!' pops up. Obviously not just a dude, then. At this point you're either reloading until you pass the check, or move on with your life wondering what the guy is hiding -- but either way whatever surprise there might have been is already subverted. And these aren't one off things, it happens literally all the time.
And then there's the writing... I mean, it's serviceable, for the most part, I guess? People going 'FUCK YEAH!' in a fantasy RPG isn't exactly my cup of tea but whatever, that's mostly limited to one character so far, at least. But overall there isn't anything particularly outstanding, the main quest quickly went from 'this is maybe interesting' to 'jesus christ what a load of crap' imo meanwhile literally every single companion have tried to hit on me within what amounts to... 2 days of time spent travelling together, which is just ???... Like my cleric started telling me I'm the best person she's ever met and I've changed her life by the time we stopped to sleep for a night because like, I didn't let a mean druid feed a child to her snake and uhh, that's actually pretty much it? The tiefling gal is apparently madly in love with me even though I've literally never had her as part of my party and she is just sitting in the camp all day and I'm just confused at this point.
I don't know. I still plan on finishing the game eventually since it's not as if there are many CRPGs around, but the strongest feeling this game has evoked in me so far is, 'gosh how I miss Baldur's Gate 2.'
oh and yeah, that inventory system. in 2023. 10/10 masterpiece new standard in rpg gaming. HAHAHAHAHA.
I can see why you said that, people are generally really positive about the game and I can also see why. There is a lot of depth in quests, the world is beautiful and everything being voiced and high quality graphic is pretty great.
I can honestly see myself prefering Pathfinder WotR in the end though, I much prefer the character skill system there. Not only that, but a lot of little things are missing in BG 3 (which outside of the world to me is Divinity 3). Basically everything about the inventory is a problem, and no statistics feels bad too. Wish you could change how your character looks in camp & outside, feels kinda important with such great item models.
On August 09 2023 19:57 Salazarz wrote: There's virtually no interaction with your companions outside of the +/- opinions and the brief commentary about whatever quest you're doing now and then; they pretty much never say anything during encounters or dialogue which just feels like such a massive fail for a game with a budget as big as this that supposedly focused on interaction and reactive world.
Well you are going to have some pretty major interactions with your companions later on.
The most annoying part of inventory imo is that you get a lot of consumables piling up if you don't use them, and they are of different types so they take up more than the maximum grid you can even see in combat and clutter a lot. But you could use them or sell them. It's just that selling them is not great because sell prices are 5 times worse than buying prices in default conditions, and it can be difficult to find or think of opportunity to use some of them. Also you don't know how much you're going to need them later or not (but then you could store them away). Otherwise you pile up a lot of little things many of them having no use that you can sell for small amount and it takes some time to deal with that, but if you wanted to you could get away with skipping a lot of them I think.
Imo the item management isn't too bad. Yes, it takes some time to get a feeling which items are better to be kept and which can be sold. There is also the option to mark the items as goods (dunno if theres a hotkey for it) to make the selling process faster. If you are not sure about an item you can always send it to your camp. And on top of that you have all the time in the world to take care of your item mgmt.
I'm playing on the medium difficulty and never had any gold problems, then again I barely ever bought something from vendors aside from potions and trap disarment kits. Very rarely something where I had nothing equipped.
So I agree, if I ever play a 2nd run (very likely), I will definitely pick up much less items. I picked up pretty much everything expecting a Divinity 2 where you can use everything, but they toned that down a lot - good imo.
I stand by my opinion that the item selling could be a ton better. It's a downgrade from Pathfinder and honestly even from Baldurs Gate 1. Yes, the inventory there was very small, but that has some pros too. Also picking up items there is 100 times more comfortable - unless I'm missing something very crucial. You have to click every corpse after each battle, don't you?
On August 10 2023 03:41 HolydaKing wrote: I'm playing on the medium difficulty and never had any gold problems, then again I barely ever bought something from vendors aside from potions and trap disarment kits. Very rarely something where I had nothing equipped.
Yeah even on hard difficulty you can definitely have a lot of excess gold so you could leave a lot behind. Plus if you actually ran into a gold problem technically you could likely just go get the stuff back that you didn't pick up lol but I don't think you'd need to. I also think I'll want to play a 2nd playthrough that would be interesting.
On August 10 2023 03:36 Striker.superfreunde wrote: Imo the item management isn't too bad. Yes, it takes some time to get a feeling which items are better to be kept and which can be sold. There is also the option to mark the items as goods (dunno if theres a hotkey for it) to make the selling process faster. If you are not sure about an item you can always send it to your camp. And on top of that you have all the time in the world to take care of your item mgmt.
Just finished Act 2, man I love the story. And you can play it so differently as well. I'm currently playing sort of evil, but not extremely evil. Next playthrough I would play the typical "good guy" style (with other companions), which i normally do but wanted to something else this time.
I think so far a few of the things are really great. Like, if the game tells you, that you have to do something until next morning, that literally means ypo ucan sleep only once. So often games just mess this up. The companions are cool, but i haven't gotten to the part yet, where they start falling for you in droves. You just know this part was important to the developer if you read the patchnotes: Penis C and D would clip though clothes on Githyanki models. Okay game!
The problem that Salazarz mentioned, where the option in dialogues are limited to the character initiating the dialogue are only relevant in multiplayer or in some niche cases where you had split a person off the party. Because in these cases, only the character you currently control are part of the dialogue. Sometimes it might also be buggy and straight not allow more then the leading char, not sure. Generally, MP feels a bit strange in that regard, we have 4 people play one original char each and we basically never get party interaction. And also the barbarian deals with all the mage puzzles because he is always in front and clicks on stuff...Playing with my wife, 2 chars each, is pretty cool though
The item system definately feels off for the swordcoast, the number of minor "magic" items that are just laying around and can be found by merchants is not my cup of tea, also the strange multiclassing rules and amendments to DND are weird. You think you know how this works and then realize. that they switched off just enough to feel a bit wrong. It's probably better for the gameplay if people don't play pnp DnD, but for me it's strange.
All in all, i am currently stuck waiting for my friends/wife, i decided to not run ahead with a solo game and it's killing me. Even with everything i mentioned, i just wanna play more!
On August 09 2023 19:57 Salazarz wrote: I don't want to write an in depth review because I haven't even gotten out of act 1 yet, but at this point I honestly don't get what all the hype is about. People talking about 'new standard for crpgs' and stuff, yet it feels like the devs haven't learned anything at all from previous rpg games and pretty much just stuffed as many lines of voice-acted conversations as they could into the game and called it a day. There's virtually no interaction with your companions outside of the +/- opinions and the brief commentary about whatever quest you're doing now and then; they pretty much never say anything during encounters or dialogue which just feels like such a massive fail for a game with a budget as big as this that supposedly focused on interaction and reactive world.
Not only that, but it's just absolutely idiotic that only the character that initiated the dialogue / interaction is available to, well, talk or interact with whatever is going on. Like if my mean githyanki companion was the first to be spotted by some guy that wanted to talk, I have no option to tell her 'hey hold on, let me handle this', nope either the whole conversation is done by a gal with 8 charisma and no persuasion or I have to reload the game. Likewise early on in the game there's a wizard trapped inside some portal who needs a strong arm to pull him out -- you'd think after my little elven bard failed the strength check to do so I could ask the abovementioned githyanki to lend me her 17 str hand? Nope, she's just standing back watching without a care in the world. You're talking to some shifty guy who might be hiding something from you, but your most insightful character isn't the one having the conversation? Too bad, the other dude will never let you know that there's something off about the dude you're talking to. It's just mind-boggingly bad design.
Also, the constant dice rolls and skill checks that are shoved in your face are massively immersion breaking. You're walking through a forest, suddenly a 'perception check: failed!' pops up. Obviously there is a hidden treasure or a pathway nearby. Why are you being told that you failed the said perception check if you didn't spot it? Who knows. Or you're talking to a person who tells you something along the lines of, "I've got nothing to hide, I'm just a dude", suddenly an 'insight check: failed!' pops up. Obviously not just a dude, then. At this point you're either reloading until you pass the check, or move on with your life wondering what the guy is hiding -- but either way whatever surprise there might have been is already subverted. And these aren't one off things, it happens literally all the time.
And then there's the writing... I mean, it's serviceable, for the most part, I guess? People going 'FUCK YEAH!' in a fantasy RPG isn't exactly my cup of tea but whatever, that's mostly limited to one character so far, at least. But overall there isn't anything particularly outstanding, the main quest quickly went from 'this is maybe interesting' to 'jesus christ what a load of crap' imo meanwhile literally every single companion have tried to hit on me within what amounts to... 2 days of time spent travelling together, which is just ???... Like my cleric started telling me I'm the best person she's ever met and I've changed her life by the time we stopped to sleep for a night because like, I didn't let a mean druid feed a child to her snake and uhh, that's actually pretty much it? The tiefling gal is apparently madly in love with me even though I've literally never had her as part of my party and she is just sitting in the camp all day and I'm just confused at this point.
I don't know. I still plan on finishing the game eventually since it's not as if there are many CRPGs around, but the strongest feeling this game has evoked in me so far is, 'gosh how I miss Baldur's Gate 2.'
oh and yeah, that inventory system. in 2023. 10/10 masterpiece new standard in rpg gaming. HAHAHAHAHA.