Huh. On the one hand, I can see that, but on the other hand, that’s a really good argument for waiting to play until a future build.
Thank you very much for that article, Kimera. Looks like a hard pass from me. LOL at doing anything in front of an Illithid (or Gith, for that matter) at Level 1, other than dying messily. It was ridiculous that your early to mid teens characters were able to make it out of the Underdark Mind Flayer City in BG2.
The story of the passed, tough Intelligence check only serving to screw your character even more, would have lead to a ragequit. People must like this sort of thing, though…
There were people arguing over that moment in the giantitp forums. From the sound of it, it was very, very well telegraphed that what you were doing was a Bad Idea.
Like – imagine if you are playing a D&D CRPG like this one, and you see a big metal tank. One side of it is beat up and has a metal sheet patched over it and bolted/welded on. The front of the tank is glass, and through it you see that it’s full of sickly green acid. Acid is leaking past the seams where the metal sheet is welded on.
You have a bunch of options to interact with the tank that make it clear it is acid; many of those actually do something and move the plot onwards (investigate the tank for clues, etc). One of them is to pry off the metal patch. If you try, you make a strength check and if it succeeds you tear off the patch and predictably die in a wave of acid.
I have no problem with a game that’s essentially a “choose your own adventure” having little dead end detours like this one, so long as you can quickly get back to the game. Like jumping off a ledge into larval in Mario just to see what happens.
I watched a let’s play for the first hour (trying to figure out the action economy) and it’s not nearly that bad. There’s a reason the mind flayers (and other things) don’t attack you. Spoilers though! I stopped watching when the PC gets off the [censored] because at that point things become more free form and I didn’t want to spoil the story any further. I did notice that anything you encounter there is far more likely to be at-level.
Based on how much that reviewer ragged on the basic mechanics of DND** I think he was pretty determined to dislike the game and interpreted that encounter in the worst possible light. If I were DMing a game and a player did what his character did, I’d kill my player’s character too. It’s the equivalent of “does my head fit inside the gargoyle’s mouth?”
**and ones that aren’t even all that unusual – XCOM does the same thing, and in fact unless you have a special class ability always ends your turn when you attack, which is harsher than DND. Also, in this game, you can move, attack, move again; in XCOM even a 1 square step counts as one of your two “moves”
Alright, I broke down and got the game. It’s a blast so far, but I’m only a short way in. I’ve been amazed by how much you can do – even the sort of dumb crap PCs pull all the time (we can’t unlock this chest? That’s ok, we will carry it around with us until we find a key or a rogue or something – with associated movement penalties to boot!).
And I’m even more convinced that this reviewer is full of shit than before. For example -
he was complaining about a scene where three villagers are trying to dig a mindflayer out of a pile of rubble. They are kind controlled to think it is one of their daughters. Indeed, as soon as I started talking to them, the mind flayer used its psychic link to convince them I was there to kill the girl. So they attack.
Unlike that guy, I decided to use my head rather than simply complain. Two of the villagers won initiative and missed my characters. I then had the first PC to win initiative walk up and smash the mind flayer’s head in, since he was helpless under rubble and with 3 HP left (you ARE level 1, after all). The peasants immediately stopped being hostile, though due to my dialogue choices they ran off right after.
This isn’t really one of those RPGs where you can methodically try every dialogue option. A lot of options are one way gateways. It’s not like those games where you can push a hard line of questioning, get the NPC mad, then then try a different line and act as if the previous few sentences never happened.
All that being said. It’s still a little rough around the edges, and while I’m super engaged right now, I’ve only played about and hour or so, just barely past the tutorial.
If you, like me, are super into this kind of DND game to the point where you want to give feedback and try to influence development in some small way, then I say, get it. For a good example of what I mean, there’s a thread on the forums right now about a place where you knock down some rubble and goblins appear. The player tried avoiding alerting the goblins by casting a Silence spell over the section of wall before knocking it down, but since the wall falling and attracting goblins is a scripted event, it didn’t take into account the Silence spell. But now the devs may code an option like this in. According to player feedback, this is how Divinity’s beta went. To me, that sounds awesome – almost like getting to use my DM muscles while playing this game. So that’s why I bought the game.
If you don’t want to play it until release, when that sort of thing is hopefully already in – don’t get it yet.
(I described it to a friend as DND XCOM where instead of jumping to a strategic layer between fights, you stay on the map and interact with the environment in a bunch of different ways)
Goddammit, I think you’re about to cost me sixty bucks.
One of us! ONE OF US!
Like I said though its rough around the edges. There’s a few cutscenes where like a dragon swoops by and right now the dragon is fairly rigid – I imagine they’re still tweaking those animations. Or a character gestures with an open hand while holding a knife – it magically sticks to their palm.
Or i found a book where the text is a placeholder-- [these notes show X and Y] rather than actually X and Y
But it hasn’t affected my enjoyment of the game, yet.
On the developer q&a video, this guy is talking about how he was testing the game and found that at level 1 he could summon a familiar and send it around the map to listen in on conversations, spy on bad guys, etc. The familiar dies easily, and can’t open doors. But aside from that its pretty limitless, as there don’t seem to be instanced areas on the main map.
As it turned out, this only broke a small number of quests – the game is apparently dynamic enough to handle this.
They discussed this internally and considered leashing the familiar ability to 30 meters or something… but after some debate decided to just fix the scripts that it breaks instead, and leave it in.
If they keep this philosophy – at least as much as possible – when taking played feedback into account in EA… then this could be a truly revolutionary game.
I ran into a goblin fight I just couldn’t beat- the gobboes all had the high ground, were spread out, and had elemental arrows of various flavors. I, on the other hand, had to go in through a tight bottleneck, so even if I had the drop on them, they could pretty easily kill my entire group with just a few attacks.
So I sent my warlock’s Imp familiar in. He was invisible, so they couldn’t even try to attack him until he became visible. He had a poison attack, so if the target failed their roll, they’d take a good amount of damage. Once he was spotted, I could have him fly away, hide, then move slightly… and then go invisible the next turn and go back into the fight area. If he died, I just immediately resummoned him.
That Imp took out pretty much every goblin in the fight, singlehandedly.
I realized that my CPU doesn’t meet the game’s minimum requirements. Sometimes those minimum requirements are more of a suggestion than a rigid rule, but I don’t know I want to drop $60 without knowing whether it’ll work.
This might be a good Christmas for a CPU upgrade.
Latest news is that Balder’s Gate definitely won’t release in 2021 and very possibly won’t release in 2022 either.
Definitely time to get a CPU upgrade!