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This is part two of bronthion's reports, the original can be found again over here. May
2001 Bronthions Larian special, part 2: The first steps
During
my first hours of playing, I started as a normal level 1 Magician. The playing
screen was too dark with the standard settings, as I always said for the
screenshots. Lar corrected the brightness with one of the in-game menus. It
worked fine, even though the dialogue elements weren’t finished yet. After
that I could finally start playing. As
most of you already know, the game starts in the house of the healer Joram in
the village Aleroth. As soon as you leave the first room and reach the
front door, you get automatically a dialogue with him. So you get
introduced to the story and be gently guided in the right direction. Later, when
you enter a certain region on the map, you get some additional information about
the story by other automatic sequences. Of course, it’s your own choice if you
want to follow the story directly or not, but you never get parted from it
completely. It’s
interesting that those automatic sequences aren’t necessarily about your hero.
It’s more something like a graphical exclamation mark: “Attention, observe
the following scene and make your own conclusions!” About
the dialogues I must say that Dante and Patrick are doing a fine
job! I’ve been laughing out loudly several times, because the dialogues
contain a fair amount of dry, even deceitful humour ( I think Ragon will enjoy
this very much). Besides you should also take your time to read the signs and
the sheets of paper which are spread everywhere. The ones who pay attention, can
find a large amount of cynics. But would all the NPC’s react to this the same,
good-hearted way as the healers in Aleroth? What
makes the dialogues even more special, is the different sort of language every
NPC uses from time to time. There’s an elf in distress who he mutters an
ancient elven curse, or there is an Ork who tries to talk to the player in his
native tongue. Definitely successful when you try to talk back to him ;). Lar
said that there has been a language developed for every single race in Divinity. When
you run around a bit in the healers village, you’re seeing all the smooth
animations at once. And when the wind moves the water surface, of course you can
see the blurred effect of the reflection. Perfection. I love such details! When
you move the cursor over an object that can be manipulated, you get a short,
explaining text. As in Diablo, you can press the Alt-key to indicate all the
objects in the surroundings. No, that’s not entirely correct, the truth is
that only important, quest related objects are indicated. (But that are still a
large amount of items.) An
example, as Lar told me: Maybe you remember the Drudanae-quest in Larians last
special feature. You’ve been asked to bring George a little bit of
Drudanae (a plant) from the garden of Lanilor. By pressing the Alt-key,
the Drudanae gets indicated only when you are following that quest. In my
opinion that’s really a brilliant game-feature. If the plant gets indicated
before you’ve received the quest, you’ll harvest the plant (in case you
would need it at another time…) On the other hand there is nothing that can
prevent you from picking it up at any time. That eases the game, without the
domination of the player. Really good made, when it works properly. Slowly
I started trying out the buttons in the snakebar under the playing screen. I’m
somewhat a “chaotic clicker”, frequently clicking before thinking. Thereby
it happens very often, that I open a dialogue box, without really wanting to do
that. This confusion raises of course with the amount of different buttons and
options. And Divinity has a lot of them. Luckily there is a pause-function; so
you can at least stop the game instantaneously, because it doesn’t
auto-pauses, when you find yourself in one of the Inventory screens. The
menus and dialogues almost look like this, which I have put together from old
screenshots. But I have noticed detail improvements with almost all inventory
items, but I couldn’t catch that on a screenshot. For Lar the interface
elements are thereby still ‘work-in-progress’ and therefore tabu. The
inventory is divided in many sections e.g. reserved for weapons or healing
potions. To quickly find anything isn’t always easy for a chaotic clicker like
me. One of the other buttons in the snakebar is the map-button, thereof it
displays two of them; a small environmental map and a big outline map. My
opinion is that the small map is a waste. The big one there against, proved to
be very useful in the enormous game world. You can zoom in on this map and it
indicates a big part of the world. If this map will also be used in dungeons,
hasn’t been decided yet. I hope it will. At the moment, the map is black in
dungeons. By the way, you can mark the map with flags and add comments. In the
finished version the most important spots will be auto marked and commented.
Unfortunately I can’t provide screenshots of this either, because Lar said it
wasn’t 100% perfect. Because
you get send from one place to another in the quests, it was now time to test
the automatic pathfinder. When you are in normal view, the camera is focussed on
the character. You can abandon this centering by pressing the shift-key and
scrolling. When you move the cursor over a far away area where the fog of war is
already removed, you can click on that location and the character finds a way to
that spot. A fine detail is, when you press the Ctrl-key, you run to the spot.
The whole thing, from what I’ve seen, worked totally without any problems. Another
button puts the Camp-mode on and off. Actually this means that you put away/get
your weapon. Not like Diablo, that doesn’t happen automatically, so it is
possible to enter a friendly town with a readied weapon. At least in Aleroth I
haven’t seen any different reactions from the NPC’s, when you approach them
with a readied weapon. And that was good, because I have the unpleasant tendency
to forget to put away my weapon. Once I didn’t even have the time, because
when I got out of a dungeon I got caught in an automatic sequence immediately. When
you click on e.g. a barrel with an unreadied weapon, you open it. When you click
it with a readied weapon, you destroy it, unless it’s outside of your weapons
range (In this case you simply open it). If this works well in the game, I
can’t tell yet. Every now and then I got even surprised by my own clicks.
Though it made no really difference. Right now the opening distance is too high.
So I succeeded once, to plunder a cabinet while I was standing at the opposite
wall! What
probably everybody knows is that you have to select the skills you want to learn
in advance (although there are other ways to learn a skill or gain a skill
level, that is when you find a book or a scroll). Thereupon you collect
skillpoints for the selected skill. On the following picture on the left you can
see the icon used to indicate that you can select another skill. On the picture
on the right, it shows that you’re still in need to collect skillpoints.
When
I entered a dungeon for the first time, I noticed that my Magician didn’t know
any magic yet. In the final version you will get some magic from the beginning,
but that didn’t seem to be present yet in this demo. “You
still have your special ability” commented Lar (the special ability of the
warrior is his Camp vortex, like the whirlwind in Diablo, the special ability of
the Magicians and the Survivers isn’t to be known yet at this moment.)
Although when I activated the special ability for the Magician, the game
crashed.
This is part one of the reports Bronthion wrote, the original can be found over here. Translation has been done by me with help from Bronthion. May 2001:
Bronthion’s Larian Special Part 1: The presentation
The
first part of the story of my weekend visit at the Larian Studios is ready and
approved by Lar. It has become a little bit short , but the next one will be
considerably longer and more interesting. First of all, here comes the
description of the Divinity presentation, which I got from Lar personally after
my arrival in Belgium, together with some exclusive screenshots. (Addition
by Soulflyer: the screenshots can be found on my page under the second
screenshots page) Almost
immediately after the greeting on Saturday, 16.00 hour, Lar reckoned: “You
want to take a look at the game at once, right?” Well, of course I wanted… Then
he started a wide-screen presentation screen. A nice logo with the line E3
demonstration version appeared, and after a short while the show
could begin. I got the same presentation that will be given to the Press at E3.
Of course, I can’t give you a detailed description of it yet, but maybe it’ll
be possible, when E3 is over. As
for now, Lar started to play with the 3 character classes from Divinity, first
the survivor, then the magician and finally the warrior (For
now, there are only male characters, the females are still being rendered). He
demonstrated the special moves and a lot of the skills, including some top
secret “divine skills”. The inventory, the statistics window and the maps
were shown as well. Everything
went fine with the demo, except for some small glitches. But it became clear to
me, it possibly takes some more time before a public demo will be available. Lar
also told me the reason, the promised MPEG hasn’t been released yet: some guy
from another online magazine (No, it wasn’t me, I promise) had “convinced”
him to get it exclusively. After E3 you can probably download it on the net.
Lynn asured me the same evening that there will be a new MPEG made for the forum
soon. When
you see the game ‘in action’, you’ll notice that it has nothing to fear
from a comparison to Diablo 2 or Baldur’s Gate 2. The handling appeared to be
fundamentally more complex than Diablo2 (but not more complex than Baldur’s
Gate 2). The amount of skills was almost overwhelming, because Lar had a lot of
them activated for this demo. In the final release of the game the number of
skills in the beginning won’t be so enormous, so you can adapt slowly to many
of the options. To
judge how the game “feels”, you have to play it first. “You can get this
opportunity right now” said Lar. After that, I had four exciting hours as I
became a real part of the world of Divinity. (The
next article will appear one of the following days) |
