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Divinity: Original Sin |OT| Sandbox RPG. Co-Op friendly. Bread.

Your friend might be confusing the game with Divine Divinity (ugh, a kitten dies every time I type that stupid name out), which had a lot more in common with Diablo than this Divinity game.

He just saw the loot and the view and made some assumptions. Don't think he knows about Divine Divinity. What a great title though.
 

Monooboe

Member
Hmh they nerfed "Weather the Storm" just as I respected and got that skill.T_T

But still, I love how often they patch this game and this big patch this soon.
 
I bought this game yesterday and I don't really have any idea what I am doing but it's pretty fun. I'm exploring the first big town, trying to make choices in line with how I want my characters to act and shit. It feels like a D&D adventure which I really like. My friend told me it was like Diablo, it's definitely not at all. Just the isometric view. I'm really looking forward to digging some more into this game. Thanks GAFers for letting me know about this game.

Ummm glad you are enjoying it but the game is as far from Diablo as you can get.
 

Palmer_v1

Member
I dig the combat, magic is particularly noteworthy. Finding the level 2~ dungeon to prepare me for what's outside the gates was essential. Now that I'm no longer mapping out dullsvile, this is easier to play. I kind of hope this is the only town in the game or if there is another one it isn't so gerenic. I swear I'm going to kill that fucking cheese merchant once I know how to get away with it.

... but he has so many friends!
 
D

Deleted member 125677

Unconfirmed Member
Is there any way to transfer money/equipment between my party while bartering/trading?
 

Monooboe

Member
OK, so I have bunch of
Blood Stones
, are they all needed for something specific quest wise, I done a couple of them, or can I just use them to
unlock rooms
?


Is there any way to transfer money/equipment between my party while bartering/trading?

Not that I've seen but you can at least change the one bartering in the bartering window.
 

Tanolen

Member
OK, so I have bunch of
Blood Stones
, are they all needed for something specific quest wise, I done a couple of them, or can I just use them to
unlock rooms
?




Not that I've seen but you can at least change the one bartering in the bartering window.

Only 2 are used in side quests, also using them for the quests counts for unlocking rooms
 

Zakalwe

Banned
Any tips for beating
Braccus Rex
, he just one shots half of my party before I even get a chance to do anything

Yep.

Use
the door as a choke point
.

Only
send one character to pull him
.

If you really get stuck you can
block the door with vases and let them through one at a time.
 

Sothpaw

Member
Any tips for beating
Braccus Rex
, he just one shots half of my party before I even get a chance to do anything


Before the fight starts I send three party members to the lower right, where the poison boss spawns. Then I have my tank engage BR. That way, only my tank gets hit by his OP fire AOE spell. If tank died, I just reloaded. Three party members take down poison guy asap while tank engages BR and other bosses. Fight is pretty easy that way.
 

Ploid 3.0

Member
Just bought this on steam. Can't wait to sink my teeth in. This will be my first true CRPG. Loved Dragon Age Origins and it's DLCs, replayed it many times, and I actually liked Dragon Age 2 because of the strategy even with the waves of enemies. I can't wait until this finish downloading in about 20+ hours (darn south and it's ISP problems).
 

epmode

Member
I don't see the point of the permanent base storage. You can already carry enough crap that it'll be hours before you have to unload. The right-click option is nice but you have to wander around for too long to actually reach the chest to remove stuff, not to mention the load screen. I find it more useful to just place a backpack or two by a convenient fast travel point.
 

yuraya

Member
Can't remember the last time I had so much fun playing any game. Nearly 19 hours in now I feel like I am still very early in the game. only level 4 and still areas left to explore in cyseal. Its just too much satisfaction to shower enemies with rain and than freeze them. Dat wet status so good :p

My toons are kinda heavily leaning towards elemental/intelligence. 3 out of the 4 are while 1 is range. Should I balance it out a bit for the sake of not hurting myself in the long run or is it okay?
 

Levyne

Banned
SSDyeXP.png


I swore that said 67 hours last night o_O. Man, what a meaty game. I kind of want to write this as a comparison to Dario's impressions since we seem to have finished around the same time :p

Expectations and Background:

I wasn't even aware of this game's existence before the Summer Sale, so you don't get any better situation than this for starting a new game. ..., but never having the courage to cough up the cash for it. I've not played any games on the Divinity series, the only one I even know by name or footage is the other one I mentioned.

My experience with cRPGs tends to be just about the most important ones from the late '95-'05 years.... Fallout 2 is probably my favorite, despite its problems when compared to the predecessor. I have 7 separate folders of saves containing 14 different characters that I played with, three of them even being the same character build because it was just that fun to play.

I have even less experience with this type of RPG. I've never played an Ultima game ( a little young for the early titles, and was playing mostly FPS in the mid nineties), and my first Fallout was 3. I actually, unknowingly, first heard about Divinity: Original Sin from a co-worker who doesn't actually play very many games. He didn't know the name of the game, but he mentioned an RPG in steam early access that emphasized weather and environmental effects; he had read that you could electrocute someone standing in blood and thought that was just the coolest thing. I then heard from my brother about another game that he told me was "like Nox, sorta, only turn based. It looks pretty." Well I loved Nox, and even though the similarities in the game ended up being mostly surface level, that was an interesting enough comparison for me. The two game do both share a certain level of whimsy woven into a fairly unique twist on the usual western fantasy aesthetics. Durante was hyping the game up during the Steam sale (it was on a slight daily discount on the first or second day) and that was enough to get me to grab it with some steam wallet funds.

It wasn't until after I loaded it up that I realized that this game that my co-worker, Durante, and my brother were talking about was all the same game o_o.

Gameplay:

Combat:

From my whole experience with the game, the combat has to have been the most satisfying part by far...

People might get turned off by the idea of turn-based combat being slow in this case, but I'd argue this is probably some of the quickest fights you've ever seen in an RPG. .. Affecting the surfaces of the combat area is a valid form of crowd control as well, even if it doesn't actually hit the enemies at first.

Unfortunately I have no reference for any similar games or game types. The turn based combat definitely does not feel slow most of the time. Sometimes the number of enemies getting turns in a row requires a little bit of wait. However, this ties in well with the mention of status effects. You quickly learn how to effectively freeze, stun, or knock-down enemies. I found I used these a LOT more than simply slowing, cursing, or lowering the attributes of an enemy force, those effects I'm sure are more necessary on hard (I played on normal) but the results are a little more subdued. The great benefit to me for the first list of statuses is that it means you don't have to wait for 5 enemy zombies to move in a row, hurray! One thing that was annoying at first but learned to avoid and appreciate later was avoiding stunning my own forces with Jahan's various air/lightning spells. Sometimes I would think Madora was in the clear because she was near but not next to an enemy force and still get stunned. I learned later on the usefulness of putting a fair number of points (and wearing appropriate gear) into the various Body Building and Willpower (or wearing armor with some form of immunity instead of just grabbing the highest armor value). Of course, this was a little easier to splurge on with the Secrets vendor exploit still in place...qq.

Jahan and my Roderick were basically buffing Madora constantly with Damage+50, haste, fortification (eventually this wasn't needed) and blessing and then she would do most of the damage while my mages would more often worry about robbing enemies of their turns (or occasionally, healing). My archer saw less use later on in the game, but was more easily able to take advantage of elemental surfaces with her arrow stash.

This webm I posted on the previous page shows a little bit of the snappy-ness of the combat. I was a little overleveled at the time, though.

http://a.pomf.se/vzdmeu.webm

How do they balance giving you that many tools of control? By making all encounters as unfair as possible..

There's a few dodgy decisions when it comes to some status effects being a bit too harsh and having no better way of preventing them than being completely immune to them or hurting yourself,..

My only complaint is that either I was too efficient on dealing with encounters on the late-game, or enemies just didn't have as many resources/good AI to fight back..

Later on in the game, those elemental essences are fairly common so it's very easy to just buff up armor resistance and go to town and watch enemies fail to do a lot of damage. The late game enemy Death Knights were actually somewhat interesting in this regard because they rely on brute strength of a few units rather then an ambush where you have to worry about engaging on multiple fronts for a larger number of enemies. I actually had to change my strategy a bit here since I really only had 1 person able to take many hits from them and my other units (2 mages and an archer) were simply too squishy for the heavy physical damage. Luckily I had two people capable of teleporting them to where they shouldn't be to help keep things in check.

The Braccus Act 1 fight was the first example of the game teaching me the great value of positioning (rather than just forgoing it since it was previously not something that I needed to worry about.) Early in the game, I could more or less simply turtle, buff/debuff, and then focus fire target by target until there were no more targets left. The four foes in that boss fight just do not go down that fast, so I needed to make smart use of summons, teleporting both the enemies and myself, and really paying attention to the turn order. Seems like basic stuff but up to that point I didn't need to be as focused, and instead would just analyze what should be done as unit turns rolled instead of any long-term planning.

Unfortunately, the level of the Braccus fight was never really met again until the penultimate boss fight. From the second map on, I had a pretty great rotation of summons, buffs, and engaging that I really didn't need to deviate from. Most of the mid game boss fights I didn't even need to worry about whatever the mechanic was for the fight. King
Boreas
had an interesting elemental swap and summon mechanic along with the four statues in the room that I assume you could have used but he was dead not long after swapping out of the second element. Maybe I should have played the game on hard, but in act one Normal seemed like a great balance. I probably should have switched but in the middle of progressing through the game the ease of combat first feels empowering instead of boring. I guess that's what second playthroughs are for
someday

The last part of the game really dragged on for me and soured me a little bit. I was traversing the
phantom forest
and would actually loathe seeing red dot enemy blobs since they were just wasting time. I suppose a consequence of the long run time of the game itself as well as the rote-ness that encounters had become by that point. The only interesting encounters in that area involved the goblin
sentinels
since they were so tanky and I couldn't just take them out quickly. So instead I would wipe out all their friends and then just peg them down slowly or less slowly, far past to point of them being an actual threat. I really enjoyed the encounters around Cyseal and Hunter's Edge because the battles felt meaningful and paced between quest progression. The red dots in that final area and to a lesser extent, Hiberheim, it just felt like I was a cartographer scraping the edges of the map and clearing it out just for a sense of completion.

One of my gripes with the combat system, as as been mentioned by others, is that sometimes it's easy to "miss" a target if his idle animation moves him out from underneath your cursor and you end up walking up to give him a hug rather than attack. I wonder if a toggle for a snappy cursor would be a possible implementation. Sometimes you can click on the enemy portrait or zoom and wiggle the camera but a lot of times there are many enemies of the same time and you're unsure which portrait is his, and for me moving the camera can sometimes mess with my mental map.

Customization:

Going away from class restrictions is great for new players not familiar with whatever rule-set the game might have. If you feel like you screwed up a bit your point-spending early on, it doesn't really matter because the game will make up for it for giving you many more points to spend on the later levels....

Pet Talker is an amazing talent and should not be missed by anyone. ..

With the lack of restrictions, I'm sure we'll see a lot of fun & overpowered combinations pop-up on the long run,..

The pet talking talent is indeed super useful, and putting it on one of my source hunters was the only real piece of advice I went into the game with. I see a lot of posts about people restarting to try to perfect their characters while I just went with a long laundry list of imperfections that made the game somewhat interesting. My archer had a few Scoundrel skills that she rarely used because I almost never had her use a dagger, i thought I would end up making Madora use some witchcraft to buff/debuff but instead I never put enough points into it for her (instead focusing on the saving roll attributes) to make the action point cost worth it over a man-at-arms skill. If the crafting/blacksmithing really does cap out at 5, then that's a few wasted points in those areas that I didn't need to use. It will be interesting enough to see people speed run (fewest turns possible) some of the bosses (assuming at the same level) to see what sort of truly overpowered builds people can create.

I only wish the game threw a couple more talents your way. Some of them seems crazy useful (Leech) while others seemed like a somewhat wasted pick with the few Talents you're able to grab (such as the one the shortens both buff an debuff duration). It's kind of hard to suggest the game provide more talent points when the game is easy enough as it is later on, but it felt like I only had to really peruse the talent list a handful of times across the 70 hours.

Dungeons & Puzzles:

Both the highlight and the downside of the game for me. For every brilliantly simple puzzle or moments that make you think you're breaking the game with a dodgy solution, there's a shitty button hidden behind a bookshelf that you can't even see until you tilt the camera in a particular way...

The dungeons themselves are very nicely themed to whoever owned them and have plenty of fun encounters to do. M
aradino
's Lair probably being my favorite of the bunch, with plenty of unique story-books written around him...

I didn't really like most of the indoor dungeons, I liked the encounters in the outside areas a lot more, generally (not in the phantom forest). The indoor areas mostly just felt like corridors filled with baddies or rooms filled with switches. The pixel hunt puzzles were so very grating. The area near where you fight
Mangoth
is especially memorable, as well as hidden buttons in the Dark Cove and the last dungeon of the game. I MUCH prefer the sorts of puzzles such as the hidden path in the
Knight's Tomb
or hidden doorways with a perception check. While the use of a hard check is not super exciting game design, when the game throws you a book mentioning the creation of a perception potion and some augmentors, it's pretty clear what needs to be done.

I didn't like the last set of puzzles much at all, until the candle part, which was nice but too easy. A hard thing to balance, surely. Either the solution seems a little obtuse or it's spelled out and feel like it's wasting your time. While I saw I didn't really like them, it was still more interesting than finding a switch tucked away somewhere.

Not really a puzzle but something I'm reminded of are the reason/charm/intimidate skill checks. I really don't like the implementation at all, at least not in single player. Both the skill check or the rps game seem mostly random, and unfortunately the low barrier to quicksave/quickload make this easy to abuse to get the result you want, even if that makes me a bad person. I'd rather be able to convince someone of a certain outcome by knowing a piece of information or having learned or acquired something from a related quest. Luckily, this does happen to some extent, I just wish it was more focused on.

I suppose it doesn't help that I never really focused on charisma as an attribute, but even if that stacks the rps games in your favor...it still just feels like a weird waste. Maybe it's supposed to be a carry over from a pen-and-paper dice roll, but I'm largely unfamiliar with that.

Loot:

Pretty controversial discussion point... It's a bit weird to open some important-looking containers (B
raccu
s'
Magical Chest
for example) only to find some randomized green/blues inside.

Apart from that, there's a pretty good progression curve to the sort of stuff that you can find, ..

Oddly enough I never really found the need or desire to save scum for loot. I guess mainly because the crafting/upgrading of equipment is easy enough, and the importance skills and tactics is MUCH more important than whatever you are wearing. I recall not replacing Jahan's initial staff until he was level ~14 and I realized my Scarlett had a level 5 cap and boots until very near the end of the game. You could beat the game naked. If they fix the issues with the low level loot dropping from higher level areas, then I really don't have much of any problem with it. It doesn't bug me that I might have an old piece of equipment stick around since since I never happened to find a replacement. You make due with what you get.

Graphics:

The perfect example of a small budget used very efficiently. The game looks stunning almost everywhere and is really visually pleasing...The quality of visuals in Divinity: OS has raised my expectations of PoE a lot.

The artstyle and whole tone of the game is definitely pleasant. The exuberant and over-acted mannerisms of some of the npcs definitely set the tone of the game early on. The environments are great, and the music is fitting, and areas like the
Temple of Death
are haunting as they should be. Sometimes the character models don't look super when zoomed it close, and it feels like a lot of the npcs have the same body-type, but these are just minor grievances and aren't really issues.

Audio:

I love the music and how it's used in certain places,..Dance of Death, since I think it fits the style of the game very well. .. There's some very good use of Ambient Music as well, like the first encounter with the W
hite Witc
h on her
.

While I like the audio design and most of the stuff they chose, there's just a few standouts that might need to be tweaked volume-wise.

Dance of Death is definitely super catchy and I love hearing it. Some of my favorite tracks are Battle Force (it compliment's Dance of Death as a more grandiose theme) and Festival of Immortals. There's a fair number of other tracks I like that I can't track down at the moment. Only one I can name right now it called Dance with Dwarves or something (dum dilly dilly dum..)

Engine:

I love this engine and how capable it is. I hope people have lots of fun making fan modules, because it looks and plays amazing...

My only complaints about the engine is that the interface, while well implemented from a programming standpoint, is lacking in a few options by design. ... There's plenty of ways to get around all of this, but it seems like extra busywork that I'm surprised they didn't fix in the beta, considering the attention to detail to almost everything else.

In combat I think the "Delay your Turn" option could be much improved if you could just drag your portraits on the Battle Order to be after the character you wan.. Being able to undo non-harmful movement would be sweet as well in case of accidental clicks.

Luckiliy my Madora generally moved after she could be buffed anyways. I didn't realize about delaying your turn until well into the game, that definitely could be highlighted and positioned better. I never really fled either, so I just never happened to look over there. The complaints about the inventory UI are solid but it looks like Larian is already targeting these issues. Sometimes it's weird where I'll end up with multiple inventory windows open and when you want to move and item between your inventory and backpack you have to open the backpack and drag the windows apart and then click and drag, These things should be easily tweaked though. I think the character status and inventory could maybe be separated but I'm not sure that would be super helpful.


Conclusion:

This game couldn't have come out at a better time for me,.. No game needs to excel in every area, but a few QoL improvements would be very welcome.

Also this is probably the only game that I liked so much that I actually wanted to write a long-ass post about, so this is a first for me. Do not wait for a sale if you have any interest on this, Larian very much deserves the full price for the amount of effort that went into this game. Those 60 hours of playtime I got weren't ever boring, and very much worth the price, and that's just one play-through.

I have a few issues with the game that go beyond QoL tweaks that I mentioned with the fatigue of Hiberheim and the
phantom forest
and switch hunting, but the whole package was thoroughly enjoyable. I doubt I will play it again just due to how massive (for me) a committed single playthrough is, not to mention now that I know the way the quests roll out, some of the discovery is lost, and I'm unsure rolling a few different builds or quest outcomes will really be worth another 70 hours (or let's say 40-50 since there will be less aimless wandering) but I'm definitely very glad I made it an impulse purchase in the steam sale.

Some steam screenshots. Maybe later I'll take some gedosato hudless ones.

A well versed troll
Gloomy looking gates

Hell or something
 

Varna

Member
Meh. I regret waiting until the personalities were released to play this more.

My first run through the game I intended the the lead character to be the one with the AI (they would have charisma, leadership, etc) while my "main" character only chimed in during the important bits. This doesn't work because even with a personality selected you have to choose a response if you are in control of that character.
 

tm24

Member
Oh god, i killed the Cyseal Harbor merchant in order to fund my skillbook habit, and theres so much stuff that my game crawls to 4 fps if i have item names on.
 

epmode

Member
GAF, I dropped a pyramid and used a waypoint to go back to Cyseal. Now that I'm clicking the other pyramid to go back to my original location, it's not warping me back. I mean, I get the puff of smoke but I don't go anywhere. I ran back to the original location, no pyramid. I checked all of my character inventories, no pyramid.

edit: Oh, the game automatically put the pyramid into one of my other character's inventories when I left the zone. Weird.

Sort by type is fucking awesome btw. I'd only like an option to have new items appear at the front of the inventory list as opposed to the end. As it is, I'm doing a lot of unnecessary scrolling to the end of my list every time I open the inventory.
 

epmode

Member
Hm, my game is no longer saving the position of my inventory screen. Makes it a lot harder to drag items to character portraits. Guess I have to get used to right-clicking stuff and sending that way.
 

TheContact

Member
Untitled.png

Woot beat the game, bought it on the 6th and didn't play anything else until I beat it. If I wasn't on vacation this month I wouldnt've finished this game for another month or two. There's so much to do. The last fight took me all night to beat
At first I tried to kill all the minions but every time one dies he ends up re summoning another to replace shortly after they die, so my new strat was to just go all out on the dragon and ignore the npcs for the most part, besides a few crowd control spells, and it worked great, just took a while to hack down the hp of the boss. I was really undergeared
 

JambiBum

Member
Can anyone tell me how to get into (act 2 spoiler)
the prison
? I know where the entrance is but I can't seem to access it at all.
 

G.Newell

Member
Hey wondering if anyone can help me with a problem I'm having. I bought the game Sunday and played for around 2 hours with a friend getting to the first town before saving. I went to play it the next day and it keeps closing within seconds of getting to the main menu. I've tried verifying the files which said nothing was missing and fully installing the game and reinstalling the game but still nothing.

Lastly I've tried deleting the divinity docs in my documents and getting the files that are meant to be there off a friend but that didn't help either. it always just closes the game after a few seconds of getting to the main menu, no error messages or anything.

I've looked on there forums but I'm struggling to find people with my problem, anyone have any suggestions?
 

Dario ff

Banned
Some of my favorite tracks are Battle Force (it compliment's Dance of Death as a more grandiose theme)
That's the track that annoyed me! I actually like the song, but it just seemed to play during most meaningless encounters ever for me. It enhanced the situation whenever it kicked in a boss battle, but it seemed a bit too much for just fighting some lone regular enemy.

Nice post BTW. I didn't find Hiberheim that tiring, just that there wasn't much stuff to find/do. I saw a lot of people get annoyed at the slipping there, but I just used some of the Snow Boots that you find and call it a day. I know using the Nine Inch Nails was probably the better approach, but I just didn't have them at hand nor do I think wearing a bunch of boots would affect the characters that much (They were in fact better boots than what 2 of the party members had already...). That and I wanted to run freely, not have to carefully walk. :p
 

duckroll

Member
Just looked at the patch notes.

- Use, repair, identify and equip items in context menu in picked-up containers and backpacks
- Repair and identify in context menu in containers
- Sort on item type in inventory


OH.MY.GOD.

Gamechanger! Lol.
 

owlbeak

Member
Just looked at the patch notes.

- Use, repair, identify and equip items in context menu in picked-up containers and backpacks
- Repair and identify in context menu in containers
- Sort on item type in inventory


OH.MY.GOD.

Gamechanger! Lol.
Sort by type!

t33JgPR.gif
 

Levyne

Banned
That's the track that annoyed me! I actually like the song, but it just seemed to play during most meaningless encounters ever for me. It enhanced the situation whenever it kicked in a boss battle, but it seemed a bit too much for just fighting some lone regular enemy.

Nice post BTW. I didn't find Hiberheim that tiring, just that there wasn't much stuff to find/do. I saw a lot of people get annoyed at the slipping there, but I just used some of the Snow Boots that you find and call it a day. I know using the Nine Inch Nails was probably the better approach, but I just didn't have them at hand nor do I think wearing a bunch of boots would affect the characters that much (They were in fact better boots than what 2 of the party members had already...). That and I wanted to run freely, not have to carefully walk. :p

Hehe, it is a little bit weird when that played during a rote encounter with some zombies :p
 

Finalow

Member
2 (probably dumb) questions about this retail copy.
since they only have the german version left, can I change everything to english? I assume that I can do that with the text but not sure about voices. also, will I have it installed on steam even if it's retail?
 

duckroll

Member
2 (probably dumb) questions about this retail copy.
since they only have the german version left, can I change everything to english? I assume that I can do that with the text but not sure about voices. also, will I have it installed on steam even if it's retail?

I'm not sure if this helps: http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=498757

That seems to suggest that the game itself is DRM-free, but that even the retail versions use Steam as a installation base (to keep the game updated and patched, etc). If that's the case you should be okay, but don't take my word for it!
 

AllenShrz

Member
Im very close to drop this game.

I love the concept of the game, the combat system,etc but is waaaaay to slow. Yesterday I played about 3 hrs and no fighting, just talking to NPCs trying to following quest lines and hearing what the people have to say.

I have no problem with slow games as long they keep me engaged but after 3 hrs of just reading text and clicking everything....... well it gets boring.
 
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