Divinity 2 - Review @ PCGames

Kuddles, welcom to the forums; even if you do live in Ottawa where those horrible Senators play!! :)
 
Last edited:
Joined
Aug 31, 2006
Messages
12,806
Location
Australia
I know that this may be a bit of a shock to you guys but for some of us the music in games is really not that important, you know? ;)
I really like Kirill Pokrovsky's work but for me personally music is way, way, way, waaaaaaayyyyyy down the list of priorities in a game. My reasoning is that they don't call it background music for nothing. I like it if it is unintrusive, silent, harmonious, melodic etc.
It only interests me if it gets on my nerves. If it is too intrusive, too pompous or generally annoying or not fitting the game's theme (I don't really appreciate metal music in a fantasy game for example).
Otherwise I just don't care. I quite often buy CEs of games that I really care for and I also got the CE for Divinity 2 but I have for example never ever made any use of the included soundtrack CD of a game. The inclusion of the soundtrack never sells me on the CE of a game. It just doesn't interest me much. At all.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
3,201
So what is your impression so far? I'm starting to get pretty excited about the English release. How does it compare to other 3rd person action RPGs? How does it compare to Divine Divinity?

Well, I was working my late shift yesterday and today and got home pretty late on both nights so I have only had very limited time to play so far. I have only goofed around in the starter area for maybe an hour or so as if I was playing a demo. I don't think that I could share a fair assessment of the game's strengths and weaknesses yet. I bet that some of the other resident Germans are much further into the game than me and I'm quite sure that it will only be a matter of hours or maybe a day or two at the most before someone is going to post their impressions in English in great detail. You could also check out the official English forums in the meantime and maybe this thread in particular where you will find a link to a video showing off the first 20 minutes of the game. That's probably even better than reading someone else's opinionated blurb since this way you can form your own opinion.

The only thing I can say for myself right now is that I'm looking forward more to getting back to finally finishing Drakensang than to getting into Divinity 2. The latter just didn't grab me in the first hour but maybe it's just one of those games that start slow. It didn't help that there is very little info and context about who, where, why and what you are. What would probably help get rid of that issue is reading the story introduction in the manual (it's actually several pages long... I mean the story intro, not the manual... that is a given I guess ;) ) but I don't have time for that right now. My next full day off from work is on August 16. No kidding. I will have worked for 24 days straight in a row by then. I'm a modern slave.

Well, anyway, don't mean to bore you with the cross I have to bear so to get back to Divinity 2 I'm not overly sad [at least in regards to this game] to have that little time really. Swen Vincke of Larian Studios already hinted at graphical improvements coming up in the next patch. Like (too) many recent releases this game is only going to improve over time so I can definitely wait until it is as feature complete as it probably should have been from day one.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
3,201
My next full day off from work is on August 16. No kidding. I will have worked for 24 days straight in a row by then. I'm a modern slave.

Europe is becoming more like America every day. ;)

Seriously, thanks for those links, the game looks fantastic in those videos. My only concern is that I hope the camera can be zoomed in a little closer than what it was showing.

Hopefully the English voice acting will be done well. Regardless, D2 has become a "must buy" for me, based on what I've seen so far.
 
Joined
Oct 21, 2006
Messages
39,133
Location
Florida, US
I really like Kirill Pokrovsky's work but for me personally music is way, way, way, waaaaaaayyyyyy down the list of priorities in a game. My reasoning is that they don't call it background music for nothing. I like it if it is unintrusive, silent, harmonious, melodic etc.

I look at it like movies - like the Star Wars movies would be lesser without John Williams music, so too do certain games gain something through music - DivDiv, Gothic, Bloodlines, and so on.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
14,932
I bet that some of the other resident Germans are much further into the game than me

Not me. I'll buy the CE at the beginning of next month, and I'm not sure whether the game will run as smoothly as I want it to without taking too much away from it (I mean technically). My system seems to be somewhere in the middle area of systems able to run the game at all, although I fear that it is rather in the lower part of the middle area, or even worse.

Although I should have assumed so because of the screenshots and videos I'm quite surprised on how "strong" systems must be to let this game run smoothly compared to its long developing time ...

Sometimes I even think I shouldn't play it at all until I have upgraded my system significantly, especially my graphics card.


As a sidenote, I also wonder how an international CE might look like ... I do fear that I'll curse myself for having bought the German CE, since my past expariences tell me that in *almost all* cases international CEs are much, much better than German ones ...
 
Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
21,908
Location
Old Europe
Gainward Bliss series, GeForce 8600 GT, with only 256 MB VRAM.
 
Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
21,908
Location
Old Europe
Yes, I thought so already.
 
Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
21,908
Location
Old Europe
I'd upgrade a bit later once there are enough DX11 cards on the market.
 
Joined
Aug 17, 2008
Messages
1,718
Location
Dear Green Place
Most interesting minimal requirement for Divinity 2 is the two core processor
- which I haven't. :(

Luckily it runs on my machine in spite of this...:)
 
Joined
Dec 26, 2007
Messages
1,786
Do you have two virtual cores ? I wonder whether this might work, too ...

Lar said somewhere that the world - the background, so to say - "streams" on one core - the other one does the rest.

He posts relatively often nowadays, since the game's been out.

Maybe I should try and compile some of his posts ?


Edit: I found what I was looking for:

By Lar:

Stuttering problems are usually always a case of something interfering with the games access to the HDD, or not having a multicore system.

The game streams in its content using a seperate thread, and if something is delaying/occassionaly blocking the streaming (or there is no such thread available to the system, or something else is using the thread), then you will have stuttering as necessary data is loaded in too late. The game then starts resolving to all kinds of emergency systems, leading to degraded graphics quality and performance.

In our office, streaming problems are usually related to the virus scanners or other "resident" applications, and when we switch them off, the streaming problems disappear. Fragmented HDD's are another cause as is running some other application in the background that takes up performance.
Top Reply
 
Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
21,908
Location
Old Europe
More replies by Lar (I only took the ones with actual facts) :

Please keep in mind that these currently apply to the German-language releast mostly or only (can't judge) !

Hello,

My apologies for posting in English here, but I wanted to offer some quick aid for some of the problems we've seen reported here.

First of all, fixes for some of the problems reported (and actually also some of the feature requests) are present in the patch. This will be made available shortly, it's currently in the final stages of testing.

Second, here are some quick tips:

Divinity II - Ego Draconis streams a lot of its data from the hard disk drive, and as such it's very sensible to other programs accessing the hard disk, especially on lower end systems. You can increase the overall performance of the game by doing the following:

• Try turning off your virus scanner or register Divinity II - Ego Draconis as a safe executable, if you suffer from hickups during heavy streaming sequences.
• Shut down all non-essential Windows programs especially online chat programs, screen layout utilities etc....
• Regularly defragment your hard drive (this can heavily reduce loading times and streaming issues)
• Increase your amount of free hard drive space.


Always ensure you are using up-to-date drivers for your graphics card:

• For ATi cards, download drivers from: http://www.ati.amd.com/drivers
• For nVidia cards, download drivers from: http://www.nvidia.com/drivers

If hickups occur during normal playthrough with an nVidia graphic card, be sure to download and install latest drivers (84.xx + is advised)

The game does not support SLI or Crossfire setups, so it is adviced to turn these off when playing Divinity II - Ego Draconis. The game will run faster if it disabled.

If you are experiencing poor performance on a low-end graphics card...

* Reduce the game resolution to 1024x768 or lower.
* Try disabling all graphic options and reable these options one by one again, to reveal which option is causing the problem. Like this you can get the most out of your graphic card (for some settings you might have to restart your game before they take effect)

Whatever resolution you choose in the options screen, Divinity II - Ego Draconis will always try to render the GUI to the resolution of your desktop. This will make sure that the user interface is always sharp. But when you have a very high desktop resolution but with a low-end graphic card, this can give performance issues. This option can be disabled in the graphic options screen. You will need to restart the game to see the effect, and this might degrade your image quality a lot, depending on your desired ingame resolution.


We realize that it was a mistake not to expose sliders which allow you to control the update speeds of these animations, and hope to make that feature available in a forthcoming patch together with a number of other options which will further increase the graphical quality. It was really an oversight on our side as it wasn't flagged during playtesting (probably because people got used to it), but as the engine actually allows a lot more and we see now that there is a demand for this, we'll work towards bringing this to you.

The way it works now is that in the beginning of the game you have a regular jump and later(as you progress to becoming a dragon knight), your jumping abilities become much more agile.

The idea behind what I said in the interview is not "our future depends on this so buy this game" - it's an honest answer to the question I was asked - how important is the title to you ? In this industry you're only as good as your last game, especially nowadays, so as a company we cannot afford a slip-up, especially if we want to continue developing this universe and attract investors. Fortunately, I happen to believe Divinity 2 is actually quite a good game, and I hope soon players and reviewers will come to share this opinion as they experience Divinity 2 . Concering PR & marketing, Larian is a developer, not a publisher, and in the games industry, it's the publisher who manages the PR & marketing. In Germany, the place where the game is coming out first, visibility is quite high, and I hope we'll see the same in other territories soon too. The game definitely deserves it.

Both screenshots are from the game, but the second screenshot has lower quality settings. As mentioned in the german section, we made a mistake in not exposing the maximum quality settings in the PC German version, something we are going to fix with a patch and which will be part of the international release.

That's spot on - the major reason was balancing, but that doesn't mean there aren't fights were you can't use your dragon against ground targets. It's just no the general rule. The game mechanic is that the npcs seek shelter whenever the player turns into a dragon, which frankly is what I'd do also ;)

Achievements are obligatory on the Xbox360 so we figured it might be nice to make them available for PC players also. There's a number of secret achievements and some of them relate to easter eggs.

I actually agree with you though there is one side-benifit, on 360 the achievements allow developers to figure out how far players progressed in the game, leading to all kinds of interesting stats and the unavoidable follow=up discussions.
 
Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
21,908
Location
Old Europe
These aren't patch-notes !

They are just various comments by Lar I compiled from various threads because I thought they might be interesting for someone ...
 
Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
21,908
Location
Old Europe
I know, I'm just refering to some of his comments...


First of all, fixes for some of the problems reported (and actually also some of the feature requests) are present in the patch. This will be made available shortly, it's currently in the final stages of testing

We realize that it was a mistake not to expose sliders which allow you to control the update speeds of these animations, and hope to make that feature available in a forthcoming patch together with a number of other options which will further increase the graphical quality.

Both screenshots are from the game, but the second screenshot has lower quality settings. As mentioned in the german section, we made a mistake in not exposing the maximum quality settings in the PC German version, something we are going to fix with a patch and which will be part of the international release.
 
Joined
Oct 21, 2006
Messages
39,133
Location
Florida, US
Back
Top Bottom