Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Feeling disoriented in this game

I have 4 team members, equipped with the best gear in town.
It seems like that once I get to the first city, anywhere I go I get my butt kicked.
I went out from West, found Giant Orc and his army, used Ooze and flaming ground barrels, got some advantage but ultimately he always managed to kick my butt especially because my hit chances were low (in the 50&) and mages didn't hit so hard even with 11 INT.
Undeads aren't much weaker either.
I feel there is a lack of progression, I went from one-shotting stuff to stuff one-shotting me.

I have 90 quests but the hints to what to do are very generic (murder quest, Ely is supposed to be "on a shore", meh, it's full of shores here).
If you don't have quest pointers you should have long, detailed descriptions.

Also, the team walks so slowly, especially when you consider how big the map is.

I mean I played similar games like Fallout 1 and 2 but they weren't remotely as disorienting or overwhelming.

You just described why I love this game.

Are you sure you played FallOut 1, like, recently, before making those assessments? :p As of now, FO1 is probably one of the most disorienting RPGs I ever played. Or tried to, actually. Never could bring myself to do a full playthrough, but I only attempted to play it recently, like one year ago.

Really, there are like 2 shores you can go on. It's not like you can't explore there. The entrance, even being supposedly hidden, really stands out. This is the exploration part of the game really, and also the roleplay part, where you can't have a magic compass showing you where to go next. This is more or less what's making the game lovable.

You have more than enough ways to know whether you're going to engage in a battle too difficult for you, because, except for scripted ambushes, you can always do some scouting ahead and check if the encounters levels are too high for you.
If your hit chances are too low, check that you aren't using a buff that would make you hit harder but also have higher chances to miss. Or get your archer closer, or just flee !

Other than that it may be you're using talents known to be buggued as of the latest beta build, poor gearing choices or stat building. If you're low level but your mages are already standing at 11 int ( which isn't a very high score, true ), maybe you should consider putting some points elsewhere, like speed or con to get either more AP or more health.

The team indeed seems to walk slowly, especially when you're discovering the game. Surprisingly, while you could think that with higher knowledge of the map it may seem even more boring to run from one point to another, it actually feels kinda small.

I am not quite sure why people keep saying everyone moves slow... what is that a reference to? Where does everything move super-speed?

And yes, like the others said, explore till you find the proper exit with the lvl2/3 enemies. They're easy, and from then on it's hard to say 'this game is too hard' seeing how really easy it is...

I played Fallout 1 and 2 (and their mods) more times than I can remember.
I love deleveled worlds and exploration - as long as things make sense.
Left of the city = super destroyers of death and right of the city = shit mobs I can oneshot, that's not very good world-building.
Low hit chances make the combat way too RNG too, and it's especially unpleasant if you put most of your points into hit-chance-increasing stats.

I just have enough experience with these kind of games to know when something is done properly or not, and this one needs polishing under these aspects if they aim to get the Fallout audience.

Well there you go. You remember Fallout as a game you know perfectly after having played so much of it. The original Fallout is probably my favorite RPG ever. That being said, it's cruel, it's unforgiving, and while it's not really overwhelming right from the start, you can still feel completely lost very quickly. "Huuuh... Water... right... I'll go... south?" [Die horribly on random encounter, reload game] "Or maybe not..." It took me a certain amount of new characters before I started doing really significant progress in Fallout. Most of my initial playthroughs were composed of a lot of roaming around, dying horribly for various reasons, discovering amazing places I could not explore more often than not, getting killed a lot, and random mischief.

I loved the fact of coming out of the Vault after the intro scene, on the basis that "we need water. There's probably water outside, we don't know, we don't anything about the outside actually. Get out there and find it." You knew litterally NOTHING of what awaited, and that's including the terrible in inevitable death around every corner, and that was the whole point. And not to mention vague and generic quest related info "go somewhere east, maybe you'll find a guy... who knows... something... Maybe..."

It was amazing, but let's face it, if THAT wasn't disorienting, I have a hard time imagining that D:OS is.

Back to D:OS. Hit chances improve dramatically with each stat point spent, so unless you try to wield bows with 5 dex or two handed swords with 6 strength, RNG unfairness disappears quickly. Again, Fallout had % based combat that while being very enjoyable had obvious flaws nonetheless that we choose to forget.

Monsters have a level. If you mouse over them, you'll see it. Orcs on the west beach are lvl 6 more or less. If you go there being level 2, you get wrecked. After having played so much Fallout 1 & 2, I have a hard time understanding why you would find this disorienting and/or overwhelming.

Quest markers? Fallout had close to none. It was fine then but it's not now?




I'm pretty sure the original "Fallout audience" is an irrelevant thing 20 years later. I'm also pretty sure many of us here have played Fallout at some point or another, so I guess that makes us... part of the Fallout audience? Keep it simple.

Well, Wastelands 2 tries to gain the Fallout audience.
I haven't tried it, but can anyone who does give some info how they do stuff there.

I have somewhat a feeling there are no questmarkers there either (fortunately, it seems kickstarter RPG's rightly disband them for good reasons), but any info on the 'disorientation' level?

Not sure why you found Fallout 1 so hard/disorienting, Fallout 2 was much more unforgiving in the beginning (the temple quest).
Still, you knew what to do, as in the info given to you wasn't "HURR DURR BEACH NORTH LOL".

The Fallout audience is very alive btw.
Who do you think this game and Wasteland 2 are being made for?
Skyrim babies surely don't touch these games.

Just saying that proper world-building is gold, even Obsidian learned to give better pointers (in New Vegas there are signs warning about Deathclaws) and you generally have an idea of what you're doing.
Chris Avellone himself said that good pointers are fundamental.

I just rocked almost the entire map around the town single-handedly and guards still tell me how shit my team is and that undeads will fart me into oblivion if I dare sniffing the air outside town.

I understand bugs (fallout had plenty) but these flaws need to be addressed, just like Obsidian did.

If guards say that when using a door... here's an hint; Use the open gate

Are we still discussing the same thing? Disorienting doesn't necessarily mean "hard", it just means "disorienting", although it MAY and will PROBABLY be hard. And you had ZERO indications in FO1. Go out there and be somebody with your puny knife, and that was all. Saying D:OS is disorienting and confusing when you claim FO1 wasn't is kinda ... Dishonest. So "Go to beach north" is WAY more of a direction than really anything in FO1.

Don't know about FO2, but I'm under the impression the beginning was boringly linear until you could at least leave the village. Maybe it was hard, but it doesn't seem like you had no idea what to do next.



Skyrim babies...
I ... I don't even... for the love of all that is sacred, can't we just agree to disagree? These are different kind of RPGs, but they still are RPGs. they just bring something else to the RPG table.
Sure though, I won't touch Wasteland2, I'm not interested in another "hey look I did a game in the 90's and since then I've been playing dead, but thanks to Kickstarter I HAZ COME BACK [insert terminator music]".

Just please refrain from insulting people who may just be a bit more open-minded that you seem to be, at least on this subject.



Obsidian's games are always bugguy and unpolished as sh!t though. Between adding markers that aren't really THAT necessary and correcting bugs or other gameplay issues, I take the bug correction anytime of the day...

"Fallout audience" is irrelevant 20 years later. We've all grown, enjoyed many different things, shifted our gaming goals in different ways in 20 years. It's not like the game was 5 years old and now needed a successor. Fallout had plenty of aspiring successors, much of which, if not all, have failed being an acceptable heir, Fallout 3 being part of them. They all appealed to those who had played the original Fallouts, worked that nostalgia, but unless it refers to the true hardcore fans (which are by definition a minority), "audience" hardly applies anymore. You can have an audience for an ongoing product, or a theme, but not a game that's been off the shelves for 15 years.



What I said was Fallout 1 was just as much disorientating as D:OS is. The Fallout 2 temple quest, by the way, was actually a better way of introducing the player to the game mechanics. See it as a rudimentary tutorial, which was completely non-existent in the first game. "Here, gun. Out. Now."

"Hurr durr beach north lol", which I'm fairly sure is not what you were told, still is a decent amount of information to go on with, especially considering there are only 2 beaches in the game at this point, one of which is west, and the other, north.

Radskorpin ?



I'm confused, weren't you complaining about the game being too hard and disorienting, and now brag about having rocked the place one-handedly?

Look, my point is simple: I feel the things you originally complained about while refering to Fallout as the good the way to go were pretty much things you could also complain about regarding Fallout. It's really odd to me that a presumed Fallout veteran might actually find D:OS disorienting and overwhelming. They're really not that different in the way they parachute drop the player in unknown territory with the absolute minimum infos to go on. So from there saying that D:OS is too confusing and should look for a Fallout approach to appeal to the Fallout community - that is not the Fallout 3 community, because that would make them only a day older than Skyrim Babies - doesn't make much sense to me.

In the end, you want more waypoints and quest markers. Alright, I'm fine with that suggestion. I'm not sure that it does, in fact, target the Fallout vet demographics, though.

Actually, if you haven't played an Ultima game (the main source of inspiration for this game), you probably don't have enough experience with this particular kind of RPG, and that's why you feel disoriented. These are first and foremost games about exploration and quest solving, more than many late-90s-RPGs, Fallout I and II included.
As for the "one-shot syndrome": it depends on the high killing ratio of the system, which is highly desirable in a turn based game with party. The alternative is the "D&D syndrome", namely high level combats that last for decades...

Well, ive heard about this post, somewhere. Just before i dove into OS a few days ago - for the first time.

So i had my hopes up, that the game is really nasty difficult.

But ... Thats not the case. Its actually pleasingly difficult and demanding of the player attention - for which it pays off very nice dividends.

Nor is it confusing, disorienting or overwhelming.

Im afraid the original poster here just got a bit too ... comfortable, (shall we say), through the years of decline and mass market devolution of cRPGs.
Maybe he forgot how it is to play a completely new game that isnt a clone of hundred same bloody action-FPS-RPG hybrids before it.
One that you need to get your bearings in, through the start, before you can actually play for enjoyment alone. Where you need to do some reconnoitering, testing, trying out this and that, reloading, exploring? etc?


I did and this game is fiiiine.

I agree with this post.

The difficulty has gone down and up and such, but I am quite satisfied with the current difficulty curve. In my personal opinion, it's right in the middle of the challenge curve - fights are dangerous enough that you have to pay attention and be careful or else someone will die. Sometimes, someone will still die even if you do the right move, that's just the way the dice land.

The fights are not unfair, and they are not boring. After the interesting twist on the combat which the fire area brings, I can't wait to see what other surprises and twists are in store in the rest of the game.

Ive seen that the combat difficulty has gone a bit down since the Alpha.
And ive noticed those undead mages that dont use magic too, and so on.

But ive started playing, intentionally - without looking at any game manuals or videos or hints of any sort. So i can really test how easy is it to get into the game without knowing anything at all about any parts, mechanics or rules of it.

(I played the Fallouts the same way long time ago (figured out there is a game manual and ingame help, ten years and more later) and it was great. I usually do the first runs like that. Discovering things with my own hands, brains and feet, as it were.)


Original Sin is - even at this beta stage - at that great place where it doesn't lead you by the hand, nose and eyes, but you dont really need any of those idiot flashing signs.

Because internal coherence, setting, characters, environment and other features all connect and play off each other in such a way that engage you to explore in the best ways possible. Which then pays off. A lot.

(It feels like some soothing, refreshing balm really. Its so good to explore again.)

I would also think that not having any corridor areas, - pretending to be canyons or some such nonsense, but instead having a big chunk of nature as a playable area - is what may confuse some rare individual players that lost their old cRPG aptitudes and skills.
(dont worry, OS will get you back into shape you blobs) :P

But it only requires being willing to figure things out yourself, - to actually use those little grey cells a little bit, oui? - and a few slow, easy hours of playing-exploring around to quickly become familiar and a very nice experience.



(-edit- english, you weird language you...)

All mages, and some rangers; are broken.
So yeah, that's probably why the game feels as a cakewalk now. Not sure where people get the 'it's so difficult!' from...
And that's coming from someone without OP Lone Wolf, who hasn't even learned any new skills bar a few for my mage from scrolls I randomly found (no buying from merchants). Status effects are really powerful, and a single mage can keep an entire enemy group stunlocked with ease.

And I agree it's very nice not to have questmarkers or similar stupidity. Very... refreshing.

Im playing a Shadowblade and a Wayfarer combination. Without using backstabbing and stealth at all - in combat. Or OP talents - traits.

The game became relatively easy as soon as i got a few levels and some equipment better then the starting one. (i imagine using normal classes instead of hybrids like this makes it a cakewalk completely, not to mention such OP traits as Lone Wolf or others).



Of course, there are still places on the map where you shouldnt go that early - but thats great.
It would be horrible otherwise.

Hopefully the mages will come online in the impending update and kick my ass in many different ways.
(ive only seen a few buffing allies a few times so far)
Rangers do give me the most trouble in combat now... which is as it should be.
But maybe not all work the best they can, havent really noticed yet that some are broken from all the fun i had.

To be honest, Larian doesn't really love Rogues as the sneak-dagger most well known kind.
In Divine Divinity and Divinity 2, there wasn't really any roguish abilities to begin with. Thief, sure, ranger, check.

They seem to have thrown a few rogue-only abilities or mechanisms in Original Sin but it doesn't seem to be very convincing. "Classes" are like the primary colors : Warrior / Archer / Mage, and then the secondary where you take a little of one to mix to the other. But there aren't really any "sneak rogue" color in this wheel. Sure, one could argue that Daggers have innate BackStab and there are Speedcreep and Guerilla. Still it's a lot of setup for, sure, some high damage, but in the current state of the game the gain isn't really worth the trouble. Guerilla isn't even segregated to Daggers users meaning you can very well use it with a big 2handed sword.

Right now, but that may be because it's the first chapter of the game, the best course of action seem to be to specialize and avoid hybridation. Cleric works ok, though. I reckon that from level 9 or 10 you can start spending some of those ability points in another Way and probably can end up with a viable hybrid for the rest of the game. Not saying Sneak-oriented rogues are bad, just that it seems like a lot of trouble in early game to get a decent setup when some other "class" can just rush in and get the job done. It sounds like a better ( and probably more intended ) idea to spec warrior first and add the sneaking later. Or well, you can get Guerilla naytime you want, as most talents aren't very appealing anyway.

What is making the game look hard or easy entirely depends on your initial class choice. I'm quite sure a newcomer wanting to do a rogue will get his ass handed to him more often than once before he gets the hang of it. The newcomer starting a warrior or a mage will probably spend most of their time rezzing their rogue partner...

I certainly wouldn't mind more skills for the Rogue, that's for sure. I found their backstab-oriented play effective, but currently they don't get much more.



True, but at least it's better than when the Assassin talent was in and even Backstabbing wasn't segregated and you could do that with a 2H sword.



That is true, and so I'm really glad I went Rogue-Witch for the free Resurrections. Two points into Constitution were pretty important in keeping my Rogue alive and healthy, though.