Any news on phasing?

Yes! Moving the camera, and cutscenes! Brilliant!

 

I think we're getting a little far afield of the main issue really.
We can dress it up and add cutscenes and all sorts of things, and I agree that these things would be a great improvement to making quests a bit more meaningful.
However what we absolutely absolutely need, is to get the dialogue system working right and make it into an asset instead of an impossible, annoying, chore.

Even the most basic of things, like talking to a beggar:
Click on beggar to start interaction
Beggar: Can you spare a coin?
Player: Types "yes" - 1 gold coin removed and dialogue ends.

Click on beggar to start interaction
Beggar: Can you spare a coin?
Player: Click on underlined "coin"
Beggar: Repeats something about sparing a coin
Playeer: Types yes
Beggar: I don't know what you mean....

Almost every dialogue that I have dealt with in the game does not feel like a conversation, it feels like an exhaustive word search of click-the-thing-until-journal updates and honestly, you end up getting the same text over and over and by that point, you're really not reading it. HOw many times I have had to travel to previously visited NPC to do an even more exhaustive guess-the-word routine because something's not updated right, or something's broken, or something's missed because it was completely un-intuitive and there is no way to get the conversation around to that way other than dumb luck or tabbing out to find a walkthrough.

Lets get this working first, lets fix the non-updating quest journal, and the awkward, stilted dialogue, with far too many words generating no response, and get that smooth. Then if we want to get fancy with it I'm all for it, but with the state that its in now, fancying it doesn't really make sense. I'll end up watching a cut scene I've got no idea why I'm watching because I clicked the appropriate magic word. And what will happen is, players will just click through all of it anyway, because the state questing is in, is annoying rather than immersive.

I recently went and did all of the outskirts questlines and the entire thing was just painful. All I did was run back and forth for hours in each of the three settings doing a series of fetch quest and nothing that I did felt meaningful. In some of them I felt like the game was trying to make me make a decision or choice, but only one "choice" seemed to actually be functional. So even though I wanted to do X and it seemed like the game would let me do X, I ended up doing Y because its the only thing that would update my stupid journal. And since we all know your virtue is completely determined by how many unobtainable-in-any-other-way decorations you've stolen decision trees within a quest aren't really making a difference to some of us at this point anyway.

 

@kaeshiva totally agree. And unless I'm missing a lot of choices I didn't think were there, or they are coming soon, we would be better served with linear, timed dialog anyway.

(If I am missing them, that's a giant problem too.)

Then cutscenes would be appropriate, as the dialog is rolling out instead of being dragged painfully out.

 

Hi,

Where do I find Blowhard?

 

This is probably the wrong thread.
If you’re referring to the captain from the Highvale Outskirts- he can be found in the “church” / main complex next to the map table.

 

The NPCs are standing around with blank expressions on their faces. I don't see anyone embracing or tears rolling down the cheeks.

SotA does talk about something happening int he text but you can see motion too. The graphics of Divinity Sin II look 30 years old, older than SotA. I'll pass on this game series as it seems less than SotA to me. And NO I don't want that Divinity Sin publisher to remake or make new Ultimas. Yuck!

 

Please don't necro this thread... especially when you seem to be consistent in refusing to see anything good in any game except SotA. It wouldn't be hard to find all the critically lauded games you've panned on this forum.

 

I didn’t. Two posting before mine did. I will quote them for you.

There. Go put your hate towards them.

 

The previous posters didn't try to resurrect the conversation from the OP - it was just a simple mistake of posting something in the wrong place. That wasn't necro.

Hate is a strong accusation. If you give me an example of how my comment was untrue, I will retract what I said.