Divinity 2 DKS Delivers

Melvil

Super Duper Super Sweet
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Been playing all day, new item sets, rebalanced encounters, some new dialogs, better lighting, less clunky camera, no longer any sticky terrain, apparently Orobas Fjord is revamped, new sound effects etc. The game is officially polished, big discount from Steam if you already purchased the original through their service (you essentially pay for the expansion).
 
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Thanks.

I'd love to hear more about this. I'm considering D/L this, but would have to enlarge my Bootcamp partition to do so... so I'm on the fence.

Can you give more details about the DKS? I played a bit of Divinity 2, and sort of liked it. But the jumpiness and twitchiness of it bothered me. How much better is the framerate and graphics?

Anything you or others can add would be appreciated. Thanks.
 
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DKS appears to be one of the best games released lately. At least, it makes ArcaniA look like a sack of poo. I tried a demo I think for Divinity 2 when it first came out and it was kinda awful. The stuttering animations really did alot to make it all feel shitty. This doesn't have the same feeling and is really cool.
 
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That's very good news! I already loved Ego Draconis despite it's quirks, but it's nice to see that Larian has gone back to that game to polish it some more.

I've got a few questions about this though:

First of all, it is possible to start out Flames of Vengeance right away? I'm asking this because I know my savegames of Ego Draconis won't be compatible with DKS, and while I loved EG, I've only played it recently so I don't really want to go through a 70 hours adventure that I just completed to get to the new content.

If anyone has played the 360 version, can they tell me how the game looks? I've heard that Larian has revamped some of the interface elements, and I'm really excited about that because the interface was probably the most irritating feature of the Xbox version.
 
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OK, I have it installed. But I haven't had time to play it yet. Took forever to get my system set up, but it launches to the menu at least. Going to dive in right after I get home from work.

Question about Flames of Vengeance. I know it's an expansion. But does it start AFTER you finish the main quests, or is it something you can do at any time?
 
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Question about Flames of Vengeance. I know it's an expansion. But does it start AFTER you finish the main quests, or is it something you can do at any time?

It starts exactly at the end of ED and continues the story.
 
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OK, I played last night for around 4 hours, but that included a lot of fiddling around with graphics options to test performance. I played D2 around 9 months ago on the same machine, so the tech stuff is the same but my memory might not be 100% accurate on how D2 was. But here goes, with some very minor early game spoilers:

First, DKS looks better than D2 for sure. Textures are really nice. Faces look good. After changing settings around the only performance increase I got was with reducing the draw distance, and even then it looks great. Lowering textures didn't seem to change performance.

On my non-awesome system it runs pretty smoothly when exploring and moving around. In the dialog cut scenes where you see the characters talking, it gets really choppy, and strangely, the cursor gets really slow and sluggish. Again, lowering textures didn't seem to help much here either, but it's not a big deal… annoying though when trying to select Mindread or Trade.

In the few melee battles I've done the performance is still choppy and gets confusing because of this. The goblins sometimes seem to "blink" from one spot to another, and their animations aren't much better than I remember them from D2. The combat does seem much easier though, at least the small amount of it I've seen playing on Normal.

Items that are revealed from Mindreading or quest knowledge (example: the key on the rafters, or the key in the kettle) have a big, sparkly glow that I don't remember from D2. It was more subtle then I think. You cannot miss stuff when it's revealed now. However the key took me several minutes of annoyingly trying to reach it. Jumping didn't seem to help... I just had to maneuver into EXACTLY the right spot to grab it. Annoying.

The voices are great. I'm not sure how much they changed here, but I haven't run into any bad voice work yet which is really saying something.

So far I'm really liking it, though I may lower even more graphics settings to see if I can get better frame rate/performance in combat.
 
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Want to chime in again.

After another six hours playing and still haven't encountered one single bug or crash. After the hotfix, the game seems even smoother, and I'm playing on a mac laptop booting into Windows via Bootcamp... hardly a muscle machine.

Really fun. I still have pretty strong opinions about crpgs in general... but DKS really, truly delivers a solid fun experience. Very happy the difficulty has been lowered also. Not sure why people like banging their heads against walls just to get through a video game.

Highly recommend it.
 
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Not sure why people like banging their heads against walls just to get through a video game

I doubt anyone likes that.

Some people like a challenge, though.
 
I went all the way through and only had one quest issue involving upgrading my tower. Apparently the bug I had can happen on any flying fortress and involves bosses not spawning correctly. It doesn't happen to everyone and larian is investigating it. FoV was great and I can see why that French review compared it to PST, but it isn't quite to that level. It's close, and the weirdness is welcome though. I'd recommend the DKS package over Two Worlds 2.
 
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One thing stands out as bad about this game. With the exception of the very beginning, there is never any good reason to choose any of the quest rewards except the extra XP. The items you find are just all over the place in terms of quality and usefulness, and the ones you can choose as extra rewards are never any better than what I can find in a chest somewhere, or can buy from a vendor inexpensively.

I wish they could have hand-placed the rewards more. As it is you are presented with what looks like a bunch of choices, but after you put any thought into it at all the only worthwhile choice is the extra XP. This makes the various side quests almost exclusively about gaining more XP, which is fine in some ways but is pretty shallow overall.

Minor weird thing I've noticed about DKS vs. D2 is the lack of earrings and jewelry in DKS. I remember playing D2 several months back and finding lots of earrings. In DKS, I've now made it to Sentinel Island and have only seen one set of earrings once the whole game. I don't remember seeing any bracers so far either. Not a big deal, but a bit strange.
 
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If one buys DKS, can you still choose to play FOV only? I other words, is FOV seperate in the DKS package as if I would buy FOV and just add it to my current core game?

I don't want to restart right at the moment, (since I'm doing Orobas fjords with the original game at present) but I can strangely enough get DKS for quite a bit cheaper than FOV.
 
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AFAIK you can generate a new character for FoV, just like in D2 + FoV.
 
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Ah, good! Well, I'm a bit nervous it will get sold out soon at that relatively good price, so let me grab it while it's there!

Thanks. :)
 
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