Sulphur on 15/9/2017 at 14:47
So does the interaction fail if the purloined item is on the collared party member? Are you supposed to pickpocket your own party member to ensure the NPC doesn't find it on their person?
Malf on 15/9/2017 at 15:13
So if all party members are chained, it doesn't matter if it's not your thief who the victim approaches (and even though they shouldn't know who's pickpocketed them, they always know they've been pickpocketed and only ever approach members of the player's party).
You get three choices:
1: Submit to the request to search your bags.
2: Talk your way out of it.
3: Fight.
If the party member approached is chained to the thief, choosing option 1 always results in the stolen objects being found. It doesn't matter that the object(s) aren't in the inventory of the party member the victim's talking to. If party members are chained, the victim sees everything in all of their inventories.
To make sure that doesn't happen, you have to unchain the thief from the rest of the party and run away somewhere you're sure the thief will be out of the victim's search range. And the best way to do that is, as mentioned above, engage the mark in conversation with one party member while your unchained thief robs them and runs.
I like it in concept, but in a game like this where skill points are rare and precious commodities, it means you won't really be an effective pickpocket until late in the game. And as there's no XP from successful attempts, only potential loot, it's a bitter pill to swallow. On top of that, the value of things you can pinch is once again limited by your Thievery skill level. The necessity for Persuasion and a high stat related to the Persuasion type you're going to try makes it all around too fiddly.
What I mean there is that if you choose option 2, you get several options where success is based on some aggregate of your Persuade skill and ability scores: Wit, Intelligence, etc.
So to successfully pickpocket and get away with it without playing the stupid run-away game every time, you have to have Stealth, Thievery, Persuasion and a high score in the ability you choose to make the Persuasion check against.
I'm going to try and make a character like that, but I suspect they'll be critically gimped for a LONG time.
Oh, and NPCs even detect after a while that they've been successfully pickpocketed while engaged in conversation with other party members, and break off the conversation to look around for suspects.
I appreciate the attention to detail, but it doesn't necessarily make it fun to play.
Sulphur on 15/9/2017 at 18:00
Thanks for the detail. I always treated chaining characters as a sort of convenience feature for pathing, I'd never guessed it played into the mechanics that way. It does sound pretty painful in that form, but I guess the idea is to discourage it pretty extensively, both by removing XP from the equation and tying the items + getting away with it down to so many stats.
Renzatic on 15/9/2017 at 18:13
I shouldn't have laughed as hard at this as I did...
[ATTACH=CONFIG]2403[/ATTACH]
Renzatic on 16/9/2017 at 00:37
(
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/09/15/divinity-original-sin-2-verdict/) RPS seems to like it.
They also address my one biggest complaint about both this and the game. Due to the fact that the combat system provides about a billion and one ways to incapacitate someone, it can suck when you're facing off against a much larger group of opponents, and end up getting chewed up in 3 rounds because they're faster than you, better positioned, and know how to knock you down, stun you, electrocute you, or whatever else before you even have a single chance to move.
Though they also do a good job of explaining the joys of the combat system, too.
Quote:
Remember that time I made it rain knives and then electrified the blood of the people caught in the knife rain?
Yes, and what about the time you blessed a fire so that it healed everyone and then somebody else made it rain actual water but the water was poison and we didn't know what was hurting us or healing us anymore?
Malf on 18/9/2017 at 08:46
I finished Fort Joy last night.
It's absolutely brilliant so far, but it's not without problems. There are a LOT of quests that don't finish when you've completed all of the objectives, and lots of situations where how to move forward is unclear. The journal doesn't really help either, as it displays quest progress as you complete stages, not in quest sequence. And as you can complete quest stages out of order, this makes for a VERY unreadable journal.
There have been lots of times I felt I should be doing more to help particular characters, but there has been no way of doing so. And checking online after getting to the end of my tether, I've found that there really is nothing more to do to help those characters.
There's some things you can do that require you to use an incredibly rare resource that then don't reward you, potentially cutting you off from being able to complete more important quests that do reward you.
But all that aside, this is even more open than the first game, with even more ways to approach any given problem. And as far as I can tell, EVERYONE can be killed.
Although that bloody sick elf Verdas in the dungeon that you can't appear to do anything with at all reports as having been important if you kill him (and that's one of the main examples of something feeling unresolved or possibly even unfinished).
reizak on 18/9/2017 at 09:06
It's a little frightening how broken the quest scripting is in the opening act, considering that that part was in the early access for a good while so it's reasonable to assume it'd be the most polished. Must be a real wildland past that.
I didn't get along with the first game at all, but so far this one is much better. Most importantly the groanworthy dad joke humor is gone. I don't know if it worked better in Dutch, but the tone was way off for me.
Malf on 18/9/2017 at 10:09
Oh, by the way, I know Renz is playing the game on GOG; Renz (or any other GOG players for that matter), when you launch, do you get an error pop up telling you the disk isn't in the drive? It doesn't stop the game from launching when you click any of the buttons, but it's odd to see.
Renzatic on 18/9/2017 at 17:05
Nope. Other than some quests not being marked as complete in the journal after finishing them (which doesn't bother me much, since I don't delve into the journal all that often), it's been a smooth, bug free experience for me.
And Malf, I never found anything to do with Verdas, either. I think he might be important in the sense that a lot of other NPCs know him, and the fact you've met him can be brought up in some conversations.
Malf on 19/9/2017 at 10:41
Okay, there's a VERY interesting thing that happens when you leave Fort Joy.
Basically, a massive fight with four important NPCs involved (plus trash mobs), two on each side, and I suspect that all of them could potentially die. One did in fact the first time I tried this, but I reloaded. The interesting thing was, it wasn't a Game Over event.
I could see this having massive ramifications on the storyline depending on who you let die or who you manage to kill.