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Lar shed some light on how teleportation and the repair skill is being handled in the game.Lot's of deep gaming thoughts flowing around here - sadly lack of time prevents me from going into them too deeply, but I'll try to give you a certain idea of how things work regarding the teleportation, and why I don't think teleporters ruin the repair skill:
First of all, you can only teleport to areas you already visited. There's no way you can teleport to an unexplored area, unless the story specifically does this, and then there's usually a good reason (for instance, you get thrown into prison)
Second, there are two modes of teleportation in Divinity, and you do need them. We had a version recently where for some obscure reason the teleporter stones didn't work, and the one place developers had to avoid at that time, was the testing room.
Maybe I have to shed some light on what these teleporter stones are. Somewhere in the first parts of the game (typically after one hour or so of playing), you'll get rewarded by someone with a strange pyramidical stone. He's going to tell you that using this stone will bring you to its counterpart, but that he hasn't dared use it, because he doesn't know where the counterpart is. For all he knows it could be in some undead-infested place. Anyway, it becomes a new quest to obtain the second stone. When you obtain it, it'll become clear that what you can do is teleport from stone to stone. That means that you have to drop one stone somewhere, take the other one with you and then you can teleport back to the stone. You can also use it in combat - by throwing the stones around, you gain a kind of "flash" capability which can be very handy. It's up to you how you use them. In general the teleporter stones are a "mark-recall" system.
The second mode of teleportation is a classic waypoint system, but with some more depth to it. At some point you learn that there are strange shrines scattered all over the world from the time of the council of seven (a league of races which is very important in the game). Each race has a number of these shrines, and because of events in the past, they were deactivated. To activate them again, you need to find the activation scrolls which belong to the races that controlled the shrines. So, you can activate the lizard shrines by finding the activation scrolls of the lizards, the human shrines by finding the activation scrolls of the humans etc... Obviously to use a shrine, you need to stand on another shrine.
That said, back to the point which got this all started - the repair skill not being fun because of the fact that these teleportation mechanisms are present in the game. First of all, I always invest at least one skill point in the repair skill. While it's true I can put the pyramids at a trader when investigating a particular dungeon, repairing does cost gold, and just going back to repair my favorite weapon is not exactly what I want to do, plus it's also an expensive proposition. Additionally, monsters regenerate their hitpoints. If I'm in the middle of a dungeon, fighting a particular hard specimen, have him down at half his life bar, but break my weapon, jumping back to town is going to give the critter time to heal, and that's not what I want at that point. Better to run away, hide somewhere and repair my weapon and charge again. On top of that, the pyramids, which are the only means of teleportation I have when in a dungeon (the waypoints main point being accelerating overland travel), can only be targetted at one point, and I have to make a choice where to put them. That's not necessarily at a trader.
Now about the focus on action. Hack & Slash is a choice we made - that means killing a single instance of a mundane monster is something you can do fast, and difficulties arise when you are meeting hordes of them. (The story is different of course for strong "boss" monsters). It's maybe not the most realistic thing in the world, but it's definitely fun. There are loads of strategies you can use to kill these monsters (which is what I'm trying to show with my playbits), and I'm sure there are a huge amount which we haven't thought of yet. The wide range of skills available to the player guarantee a large scale of tactical options. Tactics usually comes into play when you are meeting foes which are stronger than you are. If you are meeting weaker ones, unless there's loads of them, it usually is an easy task to kill them. But given the way experience is allocated for that, you're by definition not going to be so interested in those weaker ones, because you get much more xp for killing a higher level enemy. The thing about the higher level enemies is that they aren't the easiest bunch, and the differences between enemies guarantee that you will have to switch tactics . Another thing about combatting higher level monsters is that you suddenly find yourself hitting that pause button much more than you otherwise would. So while instinctively one tends to say "real time fast paced combat" is not so strategic as "turn based combat", in the case of Divinity I don't agree. I think you'll find combat in Divinity to be much more tactical than Diablo, while at the same time you'll still get the adrenaline rushes that come with fast paced combat.
But let's not forget that combat does not make a game alone. I'm pretty sure that we've hit the right snare with character development. And in terms of story, you'll find there's plenty to go around. Quest accumulation is fast paced and you should't have a moment in the game where you don't know what to do. In terms of exploration, there a huge gameworld with plenty of things to discover, and there's enough surprises in there to keep you motivated to keep on going. Rewards a plenty and there are roofs The only thing imho that now can let all these things fall into water is if we don't manage to balance things right, which is what we're busy with. And obviously, the bugfixing too. |
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Divine Divinity: Teleportation, Combat and Repair Skills
