Divinity 2 Warning re Div 2

I have a friend playing it in Win 7 and his grahpics underwent a stellar improvement when he disabled HDR. Just a suggestion for you to try.

I've got all my settings maxed out, and it is looking positively beautiful, - but then I'm clinging to XP with a death grip.

I thought it might also have to do with the fact that he runs an ATi (and I, Nvidia, of course (GeForce 9800GTX)) that my graphics seem better (my card is just slightly faster than his - but his has more RAM)
So I'm not sure if it's somehow the OS or our graphics cards that causes the differences (our systems are very similar otherwise)- for instance, I can take beautiful screenies, and he just gets a black screen.
 

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Aaarrggh, -sorry, when devs limit my saving capabilities, I just start seeing red; and this is perhaps the main reason why I hate console-style gaming.

? Almost every RPG I've played on the console has been save-anywhere.

I think JRPGs tend to be different. I remember Lost Odyssey having some Save points an hour apart. 15 or 20 minutes apart, usually, but occasionally an hour or more apart. That sucked. I did not like being forced to play for longer than I wanted to. And I never knew when the hour+ gap between Saves would happen, so I always had to be prepared to play for an hour. I ended up quitting the game, in part because of this.

Between this crappy demo and their bug filled "remastered" version of Divine Divinity, I'm starting to lose faith in Larian Studios real quick.

I think they handled Sacred 2 also. On the 360, that game allowed only a single save (to prevent duping). That was bad enough, but the killer was that they released the game with a very serious corrupt save bug. It ended up wiping out the solitary Save (and thus the whole game) of a lot of people — 1/4 of those playing the game, based on one poll. That was a mess.
 
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? Almost every RPG I've played on the console has been save-anywhere.

I think JRPGs tend to be different. I remember Lost Odyssey having some Save points an hour apart. 15 or 20 minutes apart, usually, but occasionally an hour or more apart. That sucked. I did not like being forced to play for longer than I wanted to. And I never knew when the hour+ gap between Saves would happen, so I always had to be prepared to play for an hour. I ended up quitting the game, in part because of this.
Having at this stage only a PS2, historically my experience with every single console game I have played, has been the save-point system, so I apologise if I'm not quite up to scratch with that.


I think they handled Sacred 2 also. On the 360, that game allowed only a single save (to prevent duping). That was bad enough, but the killer was that they released the game with a very serious corrupt save bug. It ended up wiping out the solitary Save (and thus the whole game) of a lot of people — 1/4 of those playing the game, based on one poll. That was a mess.

Hmm- how does Larian tie in with Ascaron Entertainment - am I behind with my info on that as well?

I do remember something about Ascaron going down financially, but I thought that was after Sacred 2 had finished development.
 
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Having at this stage only a PS2, historically my experience with every single console game I have played, has been the save-point system, so I apologise if I'm not quite up to scratch with that.

Yeah, PS2 carried pretty much all JRPGs, with the awkward save point systems. On the current gen consoles, WRPGs are almost all save-anywhere, thank goodness, although most JRPGs seem to stick to their old pattern. I always have to check its save system, prior to trying a JRPG. I won't tolerate a game that spaces its Save points out more than about half an hour at most.


Hmm- how does Larian tie in with Ascaron Entertainment - am I behind with my info on that as well?

I do remember something about Ascaron going down financially, but I thought that was after Sacred 2 had finished development

No, my mistake. I'm not sure where I got Larian's name from, but I should've said CDV. CDV handled the publishing of both Sacred 2 and Divinity 2, at least on the 360. So that's where the overlap is, not with Larian.

With Divinity 2, you've got the lack of save in a demo, which (I'm guessing) is a developer choice, not a publisher choice. With Sacred 2, there was a save issue, but the real issue was a game-killing bug, which I assume is a publisher issue, though I suppose it's a shared responsibility really.

In any case, CDV mismanaged the Sacred 2 release, not just with the corrupt save bug but with various other problems as well (e.g., a popular preorder "storage Imp" bonus that could not be activated because they'd botched the code, and it took a month to straighten out). There were a lot of angry people. Hopefully they'll handle the Divinity 2 release better.
 
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Well, I just started playing Divinity 2 a while ago, and I'm starting to have fun with it, but it's much too soon to tell much, really.

Going on what you say about saves with current gen consoles, Anderson, I might look into getting one for my b'day later this year - though the high prices of console games still daunt me.
 
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I was also frustrated by the lack of save game in the demo - I was trying out different gfx options and driver options (some of which required a restart) - every time I did this, I had to restart the demo from scratch (since the autosaves didn't work) Anyway, I have just bought the game and it does have save-when-you-want, for which I'm grateful ;-) Runs well on my work machine (GTX 275) but the demo ran like crap on my home machine (Win 7 64-bit, 8800GTX etc) where I'll be playing …hopefully the demo uses erm…less optimized …code than the final release version.

Well, the release version ran as badly as the demo - stutter…stagger…stutter. I tried the various remedies suggested, but the only one that worked was to raise the process priority of the divinity2 exe to 'high' (at which point it runs pretty smoothly, although not silky smooth ;-) I didn't have any problems ending games after doing this, as some have had. I wonder if this is a gamebryo/sound issue? I had problems with Oblivion when I rode a horse and had to get the 'silent hooves' (or whatever mod) to remove the sound played when galloping since the game stuttered and staggered. I have integrated (leadtek) sound - which is pretty standard in many motherboards. If it is this problem, bethesda really should have fixed it by now.

@RivianWitch - I'll try the HDR disable - where does one turn this off? I suppose I'll have to go poking in some config file…sigh
 
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@RivianWitch - I'll try the HDR disable - where does one turn this off? I suppose I'll have to go poking in some config file…sigh
The option to turn it off is just underneath the anisotropic setting :p

It seems I'm one of the lucky people to play the game without any noticeable bugs. :S Simply love the game myself, especially its use non traditional music caught my attention.

I hope you all get it running eventually. You'd otherwise miss out on a great RPG.
 
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@RivianWitch - I'll try the HDR disable - where does one turn this off? I suppose I'll have to go poking in some config file…sigh
The option to turn it off is just underneath the anisotropic setting :p
Yes, it's under the normal options in game, when you press ESC while ingame, and go to the graphics tab. Don't forget you can scroll down the page ;)

I would suggest disabling shadows as well - I have, and it looks pretty good without shadows.

The other thing I would suggest, is setting hardware acceleration for sound off in your Control Panel of your system, if you haven't already.

Interestingly, ME caused crashes for me because I didn't have the latest driver for my sound, tho setting Hardware acceleration off, also worked in that case.
 
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Yes, it's under the normal options in game, when you press ESC while ingame, and go to the graphics tab. Don't forget you can scroll down the page ;)

I would suggest disabling shadows as well - I have, and it looks pretty good without shadows.

The other thing I would suggest, is setting hardware acceleration for sound off in your Control Panel of your system, if you haven't already.

Interestingly, ME caused crashes for me because I didn't have the latest driver for my sound, tho setting Hardware acceleration off, also worked in that case.

Ah! The Graphics option page scrolls - didn't see that! Turning off HDR does improve things a lot, but still not completely smooth. Under Windows 7, I don't seem to have a way of turning off hardware sound acceleration - apparently something to do with the way they now implement DirectSound. I think I'll just resort to the 'process priority hack' - that way I can run everything and it is quite playable (probably 30 fps @ 1600x1200 with most things on high). I kept shadows on, but at a lowish setting since turning them off makes everything too bright and happy ;-)

I'm quite enjoying things so far - was playing until 1AM last night *zzzzzz*
 
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I'm quite enjoying things so far - was playing until 1AM last night *zzzzzz*

This is what happened to me as well. The game sucks you in if you let it.

Of course Larian has made a huge mistake by not having a save option in the demo, the game breaking freeze bug, and now this savegame in a hidden folder. But for my money the game is worth every penny. The only real complaint I have is that you don't have a place to store your equipment until you get the tower. It takes a very long time to get your tower and until then you're stuck carrying around everything you find. They have a skill that lets you carry more items, but that becomes useless once you have your home-base.

Anyways, that's my 2 cents worth. It really is a fun game, but you have to actually give it a chance and stop worrying about the little things (except for the freeze bug which I was able to get around. It seemed to be connected to the dialogue screen).
 
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Actually, I think the first part of the game, up to getting your tower, is by far the best part of the game. After that, it becomes much more an action game/flight sim.
 
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Does anyone know if enemies scale alongside you in this game?
 
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Actually, I think the first part of the game, up to getting your tower, is by far the best part of the game. After that, it becomes much more an action game/flight sim.

That's the feeling I got as well. The first part was amazing, but then I get the tower and everything changes. I like the dragon form and all, but then the maps become these weird places of 'no fly zones'. Still the beginning was great, I'll give the second part another shot later on down the line for now it's been put on hold.

@Rivian I don't think it scales. There are areas that will kick your butt if you try to go to them too early.
 
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Does anyone know if enemies scale alongside you in this game?
They don't.

This actually got me into quite some trouble halfway through the game. I rushed the start a bit and got my tower at lvl 15-16. Needless to say: I got my ass wooped in the first open dragon area.

Had to do some carefull pulls and a bit of grinding to get to a decent level (Tip: You can grind high level area's in dragon form with ease). Eventually it worked out, but afterwards I always seemed a bit too high level during the rest of the game (apart from the last boss).

A bit of a rollercoaster-ride to be honest.
 
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Thanks. I was trying to decide whether getting Wisdom was a good idea or not. So obviously a good idea to lvl as fast as possible. :)
 
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Well Larian is not really helping themselves with this demo. I don't think many people
taking the time to download 1,8 Gb of demo only to waste a couple of hours trying to
work around their loading screen bug (happens to a lot of people from what I heard) will
be willing to give them another chance...

Oh well it was between this and King Arthur so KA it is :)
 
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Hi everybody,

I just wanted to throw in my 2 cents about this as I saw a lot of flak thrown at us and this is one of the sites I visit every day, I wanted to react:

No save-games in demo - I admit that was a mistake. The original reasoning was that we couldn't provide compatibility between the demo savegames and the full game and therefore it was deactivated. I'd like to rectify that, but I dont' want to bother QA at this point until they've done with the patch testing.

Patches - all I can say is that the bloody things have been there since November, but the process of getting them released is just really slow. The problem is that they need to test it against every single version, which due to the advent of online distribution has risen to over 40. Doesn't help you, doesn't help us, and we're just biting our nails out of sheer frustration while we're waiting.

Save-game location - if I'm not mistaking, the location comes from some specification document we got, which is also why you'll see some other games put it there. I actually agree that it's not an ideal place, but nobody stood still during development and reflected on it.

Windows 7 - the game was developed while Windows 7 wasn't out yet and we checked it on beta versions. The one thing that's really important is that the DX9 drivers are installed on Windows 7 (they are not included).

Game tanking - it's actually doing quite well. It's been charting in most territories, with top 3 positions taken in both Russia and Germany and entered at 6 on Steam in the US.

Securom - Larian's official attitude on copy protection is that it's a waste of time, but unfortunately publishers don't agree with that view. We learnt our lesson with Beyond Divinity which is why we stripped the copy protection for that in the form of a patch, and the remastered Divinity versions don't have any copy protection (at least none that we put on it). Still, for a copy protection system, we aren't seeing a lot of issues with Securom.

DivDiv remaster - the digital distribution versions have been updated to handle the issues that were reported.

On another note, I think it really sucks that some people have issues with the game, considering the insane amount of time and resources spent on QA. PC wise it's just impossible to cover all bases and we only shipped when no reproducible game breaking or blocking bugs were signalled by at least 4 companies involved in the QA process. On PC a lot of the issues we are seeing are OS/HW/Driver related or "some piece of software installed" related. We're fixing everything we manage to reproduce, but of course, it doesn't help that those patches aren't out yet. I know that doesn't help for the people who are encountering issues, but we really are pushing as hard as we can for getting them out there.
 
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Hi Lar, good news about the patches indeed. I for one, will spread the word about that.

Heh, I'm one of the lucky few on who's system the game plays beautifully. (I'm using XP SP3, btw)
I can set all my settings on the max necessary for optimum looks and performance on my system. I have both HDR and AA on and working, so I can appreciate what the game can really look and perform like, and in that I 've been sad to see all the posts that complain about lack of AA, since I think the graphics look great.

Very glad to see that you indeed realise that the no gamesave for demo was a mistake; - I had pre-ordered the game myself, but many, many people try the demo first before making their purchasing decision. Almost all who have tried the demo, have been extremely frustrated by the lack of a saving function. So I really hope (for the sake of game sales) we'll soon get a patch to address that.
 
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