I swore that said 67 hours last night
. 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
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
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
The last part of the game really dragged on for me and soured me a little bit. I was traversing the
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
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
'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
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
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
s'
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
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
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
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