Bought the game, played for about an hour and am already completely pist off.....

First the game runs like utter crap even though my specs far exceeds the recommended ones, ok, I search around the forums and find the solution, a discontinued config tool to change the rendering to directdraw that for some god forsaken reason was taken out, not only that but to be safe I do the other possible fixes suggested, which included reinstalling the game in a separated folder with compatibility settings and what not and running it with a single core affinity, all that takes me an extra 30 minutes.

Ok everything set now the game is running as it should, I finally start playing, run around the initial town talking to people and all that wasting a good other 30 minutes, go into a dungeon looking place where I fight a skeleton which is incredibly easy to dispatch off, run around a little more, find a cemetery and in it a key, shortly after I find the house which the key opens and in there another "dungeon", in there I am presented to a zombie which of course is a billion times more powerful then the skeleton I fought just 5 minutes before...

in panic (because I hadn't saved) I go back upstairs to heal up after which I immediately go back down to find that the zombie has completely vanished.... Considering this zombie was part of a side quest I decide to start over just in case it was a important quest thinking "oh well, just a silly bug, I just have to make sure not to go back upstairs next time".

So I start a new game, do everything I had done up until that part (and decide not to go fight the zombie until I have better gear), at one point I leveled up, I open the statistics screen to spend the bonus points, and spend them all on strength (went for warrior), so I should have 20 strength and 10 everything else, but I do not commit the changes because the effin commit button is hidden on the bottom of the screen and I have no idea I can move the windows because no one effin told me, there is no tutorial of any kind.

Oblivious to the fact the bonus points are still not spent I keep playing until I gain another level, so I go to the stats windows to spend the new points but what's this? 15 strength still? what happened? oh it must have not committed, oh well np, I'll just spend the 10 stats points I should have right? NO, of course not, of course it had to erase my previous unspent points once I gained a new level, the other way would have made too much sense..... so that was a level and 5 stats points lost, after that I just closed the game without even saving and came here to post this....

I mean jesus christ, the game has been out for almost 10 years now and the damn devs can't get bugs sorted that happen in the FIRST EFFIN 30 MINUTES OF GAMEPLAY???

I can't understand that, seriously I know I can just start yet a new game and make all the progression I had at that point in half the time but what then? when will the next effin bug hit? the first 30 minutes of game and I already ran into 2 possible game breakers.

Sorry for the wall of text, I just had to say something, well at least it was only 6 bucks... I don't think I'll be playing this again, maybe in a day or two I will give it another try, maybe...

This walk through will be of great help to you.

When you level yourself up make sure you press the checkmark button at the bottom or the points will not be added. Sometimes the dialog is located at the bottom of the screen with the buttons hidden. Depends on the resolution you are running and rarely occurs but can.

Points disappearing has happened to a couple of players using Vista or Win 7, it is not a common occurrence. Usually right clicking the game shortcut, clicking Properites, clicking the Compatibility tab and checking "Run this program as an administrator" fixes the problem. The "bugs" you describe are caused by the game not being able to read / write to disk. Might try some of the compatibility modes as well.

If you are running XP, I would make sure my firewall or AV is not blocking access.

If you are running Vista / Win 7and you turned off UAC prior to installing, installed as an administrator (right clicked the setup.exe, click "Run as an administrator"), installed in a directory outside of Program Files, made sure you firewall and AV are not blocking the div.exe from reading / writing to disk than I have no other suggestion for your system.

If you are running a dual core CPU try setting the affinity to a single core. (See Attached) If this helps there is a program called RunFirst that will do it automatically without the need for you to do it manually each time you play, a real time saver.

When I first installed DD, my firewall (Comodo) was throwing up "Allow" dialogs behind the game screen causing the game to not run properly. Only when I ALT - TAB'd out did I see the requests as they closed with the game. Making the div.exe a trusted program in my firewall fixed the problem. I could have ALT -TAB'd out and checked each request as "Allow" but making it a trusted program was much quicker.

Hope you can get it running on your system as this is not normal for the game . . . =)

Edit: Also if you are running a dual core AMD CPU you might try the AMD Dual Core Optimizer as it helps some games run better on an AMD system with dual cores. DO NOT use it on an Intel system.

Thanks for the tips, I'm running it on windows 7 64 bit, I did install it on a separate folder with "run as admin" set on installer, and did try several compatibility settings for the performance problem, I actually found instances where people said that having compatibility options enabled made the game run slower, so I disabled those, but since setting the renderer to directdraw solved that, I'll re-enable them.

Interesting point on the AV/firewall thing though, I only have windows defender running here, I'll try to put the divinity folder on it's whitelist.

anyway thanks again.

You're most welcome, Win 7 64 is a challenge to fully install a game on. I have DD and other games running on a Win 7 rig but I had to do all of the install suggestions I mentioned above for each one.

Hope you enjoy DD as it is a fun game, gave me around 60 hrs of game time on my first play through . . . =)

I played through the entire game on Windows XP without a single bug.

For what its worth.