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[PC] [MAC] [PS4] [ONE] Divinity: Original Sin

Unread postby icycalm » 22 Aug 2014 17:48

http://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=4147

Me and Qpo didn't have enough players for PoE today, and we are winning almost every match now on PA, so we thought we'd add a new game to our current playlist for added excitement and variety. Finally, we bought the Digital Collector's Edition of this game (64,99€ on EU store):

http://store.steampowered.com/app/230230

Steam wrote:The Digital Collector's Edition contains:

2 copies of Divinity: Original Sin: one for you and pass on the second key to a friend
Award-winning Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity
The Golden Grail DLC: an in-game item that allows you to colour your items in gold and sell them for more.
Zandalor's Trunks DLC: enjoy a unique in-game undergarment as rare as it is opinionated.
Design Documents
Art Pack
Soundtrack


It's a great deal, all things considered (and note that, unlike what the above quote says, the second player also gets copies of Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity -- we tested it).

The question now is whether to go ahead and play it with two players, or whether to use the following mod and go for four:

http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads ... ber=504225

We are thinking of starting the game right now, so post here asap if you are interested (even if you can't make it today, though ideally that would be preferable).

If two people are interested you could also buy the CE and share the cost.

We are still mulling over whether it would be best to play by ourselves, since this is the official way of how it's meant to be played. On the other hand, the devs have said that they are considering adding the option in eventually... and objectively the game would be more fun with four players. So we don't know what to do. If we get some enthusiastic volunteers we'll brave the technical difficulties associated with every mod, otherwise we'll just forge ahead on our own.
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Unread postby Masahiro9891 » 22 Aug 2014 22:06

I'm up for this too. If anyone wants to go half with me just let me know.
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Unread postby icycalm » 22 Aug 2014 23:25

So me, Qpo, Masahiro and stevenberg are playing tomorrow (Saturday) at 1PM EST (5PM UTC). See you guys then.
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Unread postby ksevcov » 10 Sep 2014 20:37

So who's up for the second party?
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Unread postby Some guy » 10 Sep 2014 21:51

I am!
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Unread postby infernovia » 11 Sep 2014 03:04

Me too.
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Unread postby jeffrobot494 » 11 Sep 2014 05:50

I'm in too.
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Unread postby ksevcov » 11 Sep 2014 08:39

Ok, I've ordered a copy. It should arrive sometime next week. When can everyone play? I am up for almost any time on the weekends (Friday nights included).
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Unread postby Some guy » 11 Sep 2014 11:50

Weekends should be good, Fridays are a maybe for me though.
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Unread postby jeffrobot494 » 11 Sep 2014 20:44

Weekends are fine for me.
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Unread postby infernovia » 15 Sep 2014 14:05

How about 8AM CST on Saturday? That's 1PM UTC.
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 Sep 2014 14:31

We should also get our game going on Saturday. Qpo, Masa and stevenberg, how about 5PM UTC?
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Unread postby Some guy » 15 Sep 2014 14:37

1PM UTC is fine by me.
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Unread postby Steven Berg » 15 Sep 2014 14:39

I can do 5PM UTC on Saturday.
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Unread postby Qpo » 15 Sep 2014 14:40

I might have something coming up on Saturday, both midday and evening, but I'll probably be free (I'll know for sure when I get home tonight). If we're starting over with new characters, you and me should get started earlier, maybe sometime during the week?
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 Sep 2014 14:52

Yeah, I wanted to explain this to both teams.

Basically, we want to start the game over and make one male and one female character, which seems to be what the game expects you to do. One of the devs stated in an interview that he wanted to make a Baldur's Gate-type game he could play with his girlfriend, so the entire game seems to be centered around such a dynamic (see for example the cover art). It's a guy and a girl trying to solve a murder, basically, and that's why the game gives you no choice at all in the protagonists' character models, which is quite ludicrous for a WRPG. So it just looks crap when we have two identical character models running around, especially when they are a hulking monster dude and you want to play a cleric or a wizard or something.

So Qpo and I will restart the game midweek, and he'll make a male warrior-type and I'll make a female wizard-type, and we'll take the game up to roughly the same spot we left it last time, so Masa and steven won't have to redo anything. As for that little starting dungeon, we'll take it on on our own since our characters are underleveled compared to the henchmen NPCs we recruit, and since it's on the way to the town so it's designed to be tackled by only two characters. Might have to go back there later with the full team anyway since it contains a locked chest that no one seems to be able to open from the get go.

Also, here's how to mod the game to support four players: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =280039791

There is another mod in the official forums, but this one is the simplest and works perfectly, so use this. Only the host needs to do this, so decide among yourselves who will be the host (who will also be in charge of saving, by the way, which is crucial to your progress because this game is hard as nails, especially if you play on the hardest difficulty like we do, so pick someone who is not forgetful and can save often). For our team it's me.

Finally, we had some rough problems connecting to each other when we first started playing. It took us over an hour to get things working, and we still don't know how we did it, but after that it was smooth sailing for the rest of the game, so maybe Qpo can give the other team some advice so they know the challenges they'll be up against, and what to try, etc. Start with the easiest solutions, Qpo, and work your way up to the most complicated.

Really excited to get back into this. It's my second favorite game of the year so far.
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 Sep 2014 14:59

Another thing the second team will need to do is pick who will be the protagonists and who the henchmen. Only the protagonists can take part in conversations, and there's quite a lot of them and they are quite crucial, so it would be best to pick people who like to read lots of text and who can respond relatively quickly to it (so the others won't have to wait too long for the conversations to finish), and who also like to relate to others what they spoke about. I would suggest infernovia and Some guy.
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 Sep 2014 15:05

Yet another thing you'll need to do is turn automatic updates off on Steam for this game, because I've read that an update can turn your saved game useless, and you don't want this to happen halfway through a 60-hour game, especially if you are playing it at a rate of 5 hours a week, and will therefore take you months to finish, making the probability of a new update arriving in the meantime all the more probable.
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 Sep 2014 15:47

Something else to think about is party composition. This is not really a spoiler, since it may help improve your game experience (whereas spoilers, well... tend to spoil it), so note that the first two henchmen you meet are a fighter and a wizard, so you might want to take this into account when creating the protagonists. Apparently there are more henchmen later in the game, but I am not sure what their levels will be, so they may be underleveled compared to your original henchmen, who you will also have customized and become familiar with their skills by the time you meet the later ones, and remember that this is a tough game with no random encounters, so you could potentially get into unwinable situations if you make the wrong strategic choices.

So, for an all-around party, you'd want the protagonists to be a cleric type and a thief type, but maybe Qpo and I will go for dual-types (i.e. a paladin instead of a cleric and a thief-mage instead of a thief) to add that extra oomph that might be needed to push through the entire game on the hardest difficulty in our first try. I haven't researched the balance for this game, and don't intend to, but I think that my eye inadvertently caught some negative comments about it in a Steam review at some point. Something about one of the classes being OP or something. But I don't remember the class (it was one of the unusual ones, "Shadow Knight" maybe?), and this may very well have been fixed by now, so we won't be taking it into account in our playthrough.
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Unread postby Qpo » 15 Sep 2014 16:10

I don't think it's possible to disable the updates. The settings on Steam are:

- Always keep this game up to date
- Only update when I launch it
- High Priority - Always auto-update this game before others

So whichever you choose you'll have to update the game to play it, though some guys said that it might work if you only play the game with Steam in offline mode. However, I think that the "saved games won't work in new patch" had to do with the mod for 4-player support, and since we're using the hex edit method it shouldn't be a problem for us. But we might have to redo the hex edit whenever the game is updated.

As for the connectivity, basically they've managed to make the first game in the history of Steam where it doesn't work as it should, so we eventually went and used Hamachi. I feel like it's the easiest solution, maybe because I don't remember anything else working, but it did take following a guide to get it working on Windows 8. I'll make a thread about it in the Hardware forum. Hopefully the game works for the other group without any problems though, as it seems to do for some people.
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 Sep 2014 18:46

Remember I have a new laptop now, so I'll have to reinstall everything. We'll try without Hamachi first, since it doesn't seem like Hamachi ever worked for us.
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Unread postby Qpo » 15 Sep 2014 20:07

I'm free Saturday, so the time works.
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Unread postby ksevcov » 15 Sep 2014 20:20

Saturday 1PM UTC sounds good. I will pick up my copy from the post office tomorrow.
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 Sep 2014 20:26

Another thing to note is that it will probably take at least an hour until the two protagonists get to the town and find the two henchmen. Make it two hours if you are having connection problems at first, and if the protagonists do not head straight to the town but take their time on the way, dealing with all the events and tackling the tutorial dungeon (as they should). And if they suck and die a lot... or if they take a long time to create their characters... it could be even a bit longer -- maybe even three hours or so, all told.

So the henchmen can go online quite a bit later than the protagonists (or they could play AirMech or some other such simple game while they wait).

I am saving you a shitload of trouble with all this advice! We made every single goddamn mistake I am warning you about now, to the point of having to start the entire game over and lose several hours of progress.
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Unread postby jeffrobot494 » 16 Sep 2014 07:36

I can do Saturday at 1PM UTC. Given icy's advice, I'll check in at 1PM but not expect to play D:OS until several hours later.
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