Yep. I hope they change the lighting. The current lighting makes it look too cartoony and much like Diablo 3 and Torchlight. That artstyle is so over-used and Original Sin should have an art-style which is more like Divine Divinity.

Agreed.

I want to be able to switch between 2 weapon sets, like in Diablo2 (yes, even if it's turn-based :p).
I really miss this in Divine Divinity, as I use sword and bow.

Here's a thought: In Serious Sam:BFE, you could customize the graphics settings, so if you liked things bright and colourful, you could select that option to dial it up, if you didn't, you could select a more normal option, and there were also multiple greyscale and destaurated options.

Here's a video to demonstrate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFxYkIPogj4


If Larian did something like this, then both people who want it dark and gritty, and those who don't mind bright and colourful could get what they want.

I guess, silly me, I was thinking about the actual gameplay - when the player has control of the game there is no day/night cycle - it is perpetual daytime.

But yeah, if you factor in the cut scenes you refer to then I suppose you can point to evidence that night time eventually comes to the gameworld.

My real issue with the "cartoon" look isn't with the brightness and saturation, I just thought those were elements that could be easily adjusted, either by the devs or the users.

My real concern is the graphics themselves look child-like, as in a game designed for young children. It just comes as a surprise after hearing the descriptions of the game from devs like "A bloody, deadly war with orcs."

I don't want grim and gritty, just something with a tone like original DD or DD2. DD was all 2D art of course, so it's going to look different no matter what, but still, the graphics looked crisp and detailed. There was also an element of realism in enemies and weapons. Same with DD2. Right now it looks like I'm fighting monsters from Pixar films and Super Mario games.

Evolution of Trolls in DD-->DD2-->D:OS?

Will we have our own housing? Maybe an estate or a castle? Especially with the enviroment being interactive I'm sure we could decorate our own castles.

Also, maybe enemies can attack our castle. Age of WOnders turn-based seried had great siege battles.

I think you confused this game with Dragon Commander.

Not confused, just saying that it would be cool to have a house or castle (ala Skyrim and Neverwinter nights 2).

Just read Lar's article The Grand Idea Behind [Div:OS] again and was reminded of a completely different game from my good old days -- Ambermoon.

Now, I'd like to think that Ambermoon was for Amiga what Ultima VII was for the PC. And it had a unique feature that I've never really seen like that anywhere since:


Some UI elements have to be acquired as actual items.

The benefits were twofold:

1. gradual increase in complexity, so the player isn't overwhelmed in the beginning and always gets new gameplay elements throughout the game, i.e. less boredom

2. reduction of micro-management, like an item that makes you not worry about food anymore . A boon every once in a while.


Items from Ambermoon:

• Clock. Shows the time of day (duh). Before you got it you had to guess (the game featured day/night cycles and you could wait for x hours if you needed to in front of a store that was closed for the night).
• Monster's Eye. An Item that was fairly expensive, so required a certain amount of investment before it could be acquired. It added an element to the UI that warned of nearby monsters.
• Compass. Helped you navigate on 3D maps (the game was 3D in towns and dungeons, but top-down in houses and on the world map).
• Locator. Added coordinates to your UI/map so you could easier track your location in the game world and reference them elsewhere. You could literally fly around the whole world at some point, so eventually you'd be back at the same coordinates.
• Wind Chain (?). Enabled you to use ancient wind gates for quick travel around the world.
• Map. The world map was an actual item you could get in the first or second big town you visited, which was a bit of a unique case as it just told you that you were now allowed to use the actual, physical world map, which was a big, hand-drawn poster (the automap in towns and dungeons on the other hand was always available). Before that you had to remember where you were on your own, although that wasn't difficult since the first area was pretty small and there was no real danger to get lost. So you got access to the world map when it was necessary.

Most of these items you got relatively early, but only when you started to feel you really needed them -- and then were happy to have them.


Another feature from the game: Mounts.

Same deal: mounts served as gear checks and made the world easier and faster to navigate as it opened up. They were both fun to have and necessary.

First you had to walk, which was slow and didn't get you far during a day. To reach the second town you needed a raft, which let you cross a shallow part of the ocean to the next isle, but you couldn't cross the deeper parts. For that you needed a real boat, which you got even later. You gradually got gates to quick-travel to certain points in the world (they had to be visited first?) The ultimate form of transportation was a huge eagle you could summon with a flute. So gradually you could reach more parts of the world that were previously closed to you, but at the same time you could revisit older places quicker.

I tend to rather believe that the impression of "it is over-used" comes from persional bias.

Me, I have the other bias : To me, the "dark & grim" art style is over-used.

Skyrim, The Witcher series, Deus Ex, Demonicon, Blizzard, of course, Gothic series, Risen series, and especially shooters.

To me, therefore everything looks actually entirely different : If I look around me, I can see no light-themed (both in terms of graphics style ANd in terms in in-games themes) for the PC sinleplayer platdform anymore.

For consoles, it might be different. But we're talking about the PC platform here, I almost assume.

I begin to have the feeling as if this argument called "it is over-used" is being instrumentalized by BOTH sides now. Whichh each one wanting THEIR taste to be implemented.

Gothic : Arcania already had 2 different sets of graphics/textures. It would be a LOT of more work, but it would please more players. Imho.




In the old forums, someone (not me !!!) wrote that - in this sense - ACTUAL REAL grass isn't as dark as presented within Divinity 1 ...

Just go out and compare the colours !

@Alrik: I'll reply in your thread about Dark and Light.

Arhu
Divinity games always had issues with really unqiue items that have actual weight of usefulness (I don't count singular examples like Dragon Stone - this one dictated by story; in DD there was only the Pyramids). I approve of such suggestion.

All the other Divinity games have had classless character building, this one probably won't be different.

A Day/night and weather cycle sounds good, but the weather cycle is the least important part. It could make for interesting gameplay, if rain makes everything wet and susceptible to lightning and strong to fire.

I don't really agree with the idea of making it dark and impossible to see. What's the fun of that? Don't make it impossible to see without a torch, you can't sneak when carrying a torch.

Giving guards torches will also make sneaking difficult, unless you could cast rain to put the torches out (without alerting the guards.)

Crafting, robust and as much depth as possible. Let me break items down and improve my current equipment. Look at Dragon's Dogma or better Vagrant Story. I highly dout we'd get crafting that is so important to combat but I'd love to see something like Vagrant Story done. Just read the paragraph on how it works I LOVE it. As for Dragon's Dogma you can only enhance your loot with materials you've found in the world which is also fine with me.

I am very excited about this game, having played the original Divinity.

I would like a world where objects stand out and look vivid, I hope that it isn't all bright and shiny because too much lighting effects make things stand out less - a good example of this is in some of the Original Sin artwork, you have red within gray-scale and the red clearly stands out and looks vivid. When everything is bright things stand out less basically. I do not want a grim world, I want a world with variety but is not over-saturated.


I would also like a flexible skill system which has a lot of variety in the way that you can combine skills, even if they are not similar. I do not like it when you are given options, yet a lot of them are pointless, this is usually because of balance caused by the bad skill tree design. An example of this IMO is Kingdoms of Amalur, I didn't really feel the need to experiment after trying individual skills, running a hybrid was very simple and there were not many real hybrid options worth exploring other than those for combining different weapon combos.

If you haven't seen it yet, there is a bit on combining magic spells in the video on the D:OS site.


Welcome to the forum.



NightRonin;
I wish I was going to be at E3, but I guess I'll just have to wait for the announcements and previews like pretty much everyone else. Maybe with more details I'll have a wishlist for the game...

I just got this idea from playing DayZ, but I was thinking more of what you said, not impossible to see without a torch, but still really dark so when you light the torch, you can get some nice fancy lighting! I'll remove it form my wishlist because you're right it does affect your sneaking ability

I think the game is in good hands. My only gripe is that it's multi-player. I'm a solo player especially in strong story driven games with tons of dialog to read everywhere you go(assuming it's like DD). I hate being rushed through quests and knowing I may be slowing the other player down because I stopped to read lore...

My wishlist:

Toolset:
1. Custom campaign/module option (ability to string modules together to form a huge campaign). I hope the toolset is not limited to making small scenarios.

2. Allow custom movies by the user to be inserted in their custom campaign/module .avi, .bik, .wmv or whatever format as long as it can be put in. When I mod a game I usually have this urge to also make my own animations to use for cutscenes. Unless the ingame camera system is top notch then I can do with game rendered cutscenes. I remember DKS has .wmv movies isntalled in a video directory so that it uses video files for cutscenes.

3. Allow users to insert their own music compositions for their custom campaign/module. No doubt Kirill can make music better than me. I'm just a hobbyist game modder. However this just adds more personalization to the campaign I'm making. Usually I make my own animation with my own scoring.

4. Scripting aid, the Electron toolset for Neverwinter Nights 2 was much more accessible to me in that it had gui for conditional/action scripts. Of course, after the gui you still have the option to access the script itself that was automatically generated IIRC. Unfortunately, I'm not an avid programmer even though I still manage to make custom scripts for the Aurora Toolset.

5. This may seem obvious but I'll still mention it: ability to make custom items.

When I saw the shot for the toolset, it reminded me of the Electron and Aurora toolset and I'm just listing some of the capabilities of both. Ok, maybe to be more succint, I'll just have to wish that the toolset is as powerful as the Neverwinter Nights series toolsets.