Have you noticed that the continuous quests give ridiculous amounts of XP? I've leveled a few times just by giving the NPCs a few cans of food and painkillers. The XP seem to scale with your level so you need the same tiny amount of items to get a whole level every time. I'm pretty darn sure the XP rewards for these quests weren't meant to scale. :P

Yeah I noticed that...I would consider that a bug...a good bug, ...but a bug all the same :)

I saw a video of a guy giving Blades to some woman for a load of XP and cash, kinda like the water quest in DI, I dont think they fully thought that out.

Almost everything I do seems to get me a level, between fetch quests, challenges and missions, the first game seemed to be designed with XP rewards. I'm nearly afraid to start a new character and suddenly Challenge XP will from Purna will dump a ton of levels on them :(

Yeah, but IIRC in the original DI the XP rewards for continuous quests didn't scale (I played DI just a few days ago with my level 42 SamB and my XP reward for water was definitely in the hundreds, perhaps even only 100 XP). I certainly don't remember that the continuous quests could be exploited the way like it is possible in Riptide. I really think that some programmer or designer made a simple mistake this time and it will be fixed in the next version.

Also I have another question. ^^ When you import a character from original DI - is the full skill tree imported or can I reassign the skillpoints?

Edit: And now I'm not sure about one thing: whether claws, knuckles etc. count as a one-handed weapons. They are always visualized as being worn on only one hand but the fighting style is two-handed (and hitting an enemy with the left hand even generates the same sound as the armed right hand). God, I hate stuff like this, especially in games where you can't just experiment but will loose countless hours of gameplay because of making a "mistake".

Edit 2: Okay, I went for it. And thank God, it DID increase the durability of hand-to-hand combat weapons. Still, developers shouldn't ever be so dumb to leave out such crucial data from the interface or formulate skill descriptions in such a dumb manner.

I think you are totally correct, I seem to remember the russian chick always gave the same XP for champagne.

The skillpoints come across fully assigned, I think you will get one free point to spend though, My lv 50 Purna got one and my Lv 33 Logan got only one as well iirc.

Of course they are one handed, you hit with one hand at a time I guess :P

Well, in my experience in most ARPGs weapons that occupy both hands are counted as two-handed (in at least one ARPG this specifically also covered gloved weapons :P). Of course it is more logical in case of John's skill tree that this skill serves his main weapon class but then again, you can't always count on the developers' logic with that kind of stuff, can you.

What's worse: I wasted two SP on increasing the size of my inventory which in case of Riptide is perfectly useless (while it was at least useful in the base game). Also the ability to stand up instantly seems kinda useless as lying on the ground kinda protects you since enemies won't attack you then plus you get to recover stamina while on the ground - now I'm screwed. God, I hate these non-resettable skill trees. <.<

Well I ran the new guy for a little while and I had similar queries as to his load out :)

Dunno why you think the extra slots is useless, I have it maxed, but then, I have more skill points than I know what to do with, I even maxed lockpick, havent picked up anything worthwhile yet though.

I bought that "UP" skill, havent had to use it, but after what you said, i'm kinda annoyed that I did now.

Reviewers continue to be baffled by the idea of "more of that first game, thanks."

Not that I am defending this game, I have no interest in this series, but offering people more of something isn't inherently bad. Placing innovation over fun is not inherently journalistic, or whatever. Kind of annoying.

More of the same never did CoD any harm :)

While it is essentially more of the same, it is better than the first game in many ways, more exploration, more interaction, the whole boat exploration is pretty cool with lots of mini dungeons and of course you have the hub defence system, the character dialogue seems to be expanded significantly with more personality traits :

German Doc : If i had a leedle sveet, I vould give it to you now.
Purn : If you did, I'd shove it up yer arse!

DI was like that too. Purna is a funny character, she really was hard to play solo in the first one compared to the others. She's great in groups, sort of the game's Paladin class. Solo she'd frequently get owned.

But yeah, you leveled super fast in DI, since mobs scaled with you you were always getting XP.
That seems to be intended, but I'm not really sure.

I had a lot of NPCs glitching through the floor and counters earlier today on the PC, super annoying as one was the town stash character.

Well, yeah, it actually pisses me off that reviewers treat that as a bad thing. That so few reviewers got what made the original game popular and a commercial success shows how useless video game journalism is lately. For me Dead Island was probably the best release of 2011 and Riptide has good chances of becoming my favourite game of 2013. Is it a masterpiece? Hell no. Does it provide me with weeks of gaming fun? Hell yeah. And that's what a "great game" is about, isn't it.
Well, I guess that it is intended to some degree but that all dialogue still assumes that you did all stages of the main quest is just wrong.
I had that issue with two characters in the original game, wasn't important in either case because one character was just for decoration and the other one (the guy you'd save on the stage on the beach) would reappear later in the town and you could get your quest reward then. Haven't run into that glitch in Riptide yet.

We're 63% into the game now and so far this has been pretty ok. We've been handing it in when we could and we're 57/58 at this point, maybe we'll max out before the game ends but it won't be for long at least. That said, at the point where we are there's a continuous turn-in quest that I could buy at the store, so if we wanted we could abuse that like crazy. That probably wasn't intended :)

So, maybe it is just a bug and not the XP booster causing the problem. I'd love to see the maths on how the booster works though.

I presume that it's just the base experience reward times the XP level or at least almost the level as the amount of items you need to gain a whole level doesn't change that much over the course of the game. Wouldn't be too hard finding it out by comparing how the reward changes each time you visit the guys of the continues quests. I might actually check it out on my next playthrough. I wouldn't be surprised if the math changes due to an update by then, though.

Btw, I'm still not far into the game (just met Kessler) but I really love that this time your character says more than just "yeah" when talking to NPCs. Also the NPCs seem to say slightly different things depending on who you play as. Great improvement, makes Riptide feel much more like an RPG than before. Since you're playing in coop: can you say something about what the dialogue looks like when playing with multiple characters? Do the NPCs talk to the whole group or does everyone hear his own individual dialogue?

Steam Support finally attached Dead Island Riptide to my account (they also removed Dark Souls). So now I just have to get the game installed. Don't know whether I'll be able to use the retail disc to install it, though. Worth a try, but I might just have to download it all through Steam.

Didn't get an apology though.