Divinity: Original Sin (2014)

Started this again this weekend, now with one Larian game under my belt and playing on PC instead of Xbox, where I tried it a few years back. Definitely been liking it more this time, though I can see how I fell off of it several years back.

While I didn't really actively "like" most of Baldur's Gate 3's party members, they were at least interesting—this game's party members I more actively dislike and find boring so far, and I can't say other NPCs are really what's drawing me to the game either. Quest objectives and locations feel unnecessarily hard to keep track of. Not a fan of certain smaller mechanics like the rock, paper, scissors persuasion minigame, or characters' repetitive dialogue responses to environmental effects like heat and rain. Conversation system in general is not very refined, always re-showing options that you've already done but with no change in the response. Leveling up also feels more micromanage-y than in BG3 in a way I don't love, since it occurs more frequently and there are so many things to select from.

The AP (action point) system in combat is not really my favorite either due to how it somewhat awkwardly combines movement and attacking into the same resource, but it does create some interesting decision points around saving actions for a following turn I guess. Either way, combat is engaging overall. I'm not too jazzed about the overall plot that this seems to be leading toward, but I do think the initial act's murder mystery setup with a bunch of moving parts in the starting area is relatively decent.

So yeah, kinda interesting I guess. Though this shares some foundation with BG3, I definitely don't think it's a given that those who love that game will fall right in love with this one. Gave me some appreciation already for parts of the experience that that later game refined/streamlined/clarified. I feel like this is about the reaction I expected myself to have. It's still the same game that didn't really interest me originally, but I have a bit better grasp of what's going on, so I guess I'll just see how much I want to keep going with it. (60 hours does sound like a bit much for the kind of experience I've had so far...)

12 hours in, still in "Act 1" as far as I can tell. Co-op mode.

Some notes:

-The enemy AI is pretty hecking dumb.

-Tracking quests is a little bit complicated. I was expecting to have a GPS-style tracker like in many modern RPG’s/MMO’s. At least the game is generous with warps and teleports.

-We are both playing mages with min-maxed intelligence and our spider summons seem really OP. They can tank multiple hits from enemy archers/mages and when they finally go down, we can just cast them again.

-We are playing on Tactician Mode and the game still feels like a cakewalk up to now. Apparently the difficulty will spike in Act 2.

-Combat is starting to get kind of repetitive, but still fun.

Started a co-op campaign with a friend. After 6 hours, DOS has been basically a stealing simulator. We have sold so many stolen paintings that I lost count!

Story is kind of meh but the combat is interesting. We have encountered a few bugs already, yet nothing game-breaking. We are save-scumming a LOT so the fact that we both have fast SSDs is a blessing.

Having fun so far! I'm a little worried about the fact that we are both playing mages with little HP, so I really hope the summons + companions can carry us the whole game...

Steam Curator

You can confidently skip to its sequel.

I wanted to fall in love with this game so much. The sense of freedom is absolutely liberating, but at times it felt like the engine couldn't handle it. It was a frequent occurance that scripts would break in quests when I chose to do them in a non traditional way, which I thought was the entire point of having the freedom in the first place? Other antiquities drag down the game as well, such as the clunky inventory management and terrible way in which out of combat healing is handled. The turn based strategy here is excellent, but everything surround it isn't.

For my full thoughts, check out the video review:

I picked this game up partly because of the love it seems to get, partly because I enjoy turn-based isometric CRPGs, and partly because I tried DOS2 on Switch and the small screen and controls made it difficult to play but left me intrigued. I decided to start a game earlier in the series and see what the hype is about.

I have to say I was underwhelmed. I get the sense that it's quite popular and beloved but it didn’t click with me. There other popular things I just don’t get. The British Baking Show. Star Wars. Going back to his SNL days, I’ve never found Norm MacDonald to be that funny.

Anyway, there were some parts I appreciated. I liked the interactive environment and the way the player can use objects in the game. There are some audio clips that will stick with me: “No one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses” “Potions to bemuscle you, scrolls to entussle you” Resurrect scrolls being easily available was nice. I liked the way that you could strategize fights to defeat more difficult enemies.

But overall it felt like RPG #11276.5-A plus interactive environment. The unique mechanic of the environment was good but no more than a schtick in light of the entire game. The difficulty in making progress is incredibly frustrating along with the necessity of unlocking new areas only through puzzle solving. There’s too many quests to not really have much direction for any of them. Each of the areas felt very small. The worst part is the game’s beginning chapter. You’re constantly told you’re not high enough level to leave the city yet you rapidly run out of ways to gain experience in the city. Eventually I just got annoyed and left anyway. But this open-world-but-you’re-too-low-level-to-explore situation was everywhere in this game. It really hems in the openness of the open world.

After each progress blocking difficulty spike, I would go through a series of trial and error quests until I found the one I could complete and managed to get strong enough to advance. But that makes it feel like a surprisingly railroad-y “open world” game. The small size of each area might have contributed to that. It also really feels like you have to do everything in a specific order to advance. Unlike a truly linear game like A Plague Tale or Witcher 2, however, you don’t necessarily know what that order is. You’re forced to explore everything but have to be careful not to explore the wrong places. And opportunities to gain experience are limited to only advancing quests and defeating the weak-enough-that-you-can-defeat, never respawning enemies. I was playing Skyrim during the same period of time that I was playing Divinity and Skyrim was much easier to explore. Divinity really feels a lot more restricted due to the dangers of below-level exploring. Eventually, I ended up using a walk-through to try and figure out what quests I’ve missed in order to reach the level necessary to advance. That is the most immersion breaking way to experience a role-playing game. All of which is to say I appreciated some of the mechanics but not the gameplay as a whole. Which leaves only the story.

Again, here I felt ho hum about the story. It might be something where, if you played the previous games and were immersed in the lore, you had a greater appreciation for the story? I just never quite got hooked on the plot. The bad guys were clearly bad but were the good guys that good? Why is source magic bad but other magic not? Which sister is evil exactly? We have to save the world from what? Who cares? I kind of liked that it was a traditional CRPG that had the feeling of a fairytale in places but it felt like Larian wanted players to get immersed in their story of an epic battle to save the world and it just never happened for me. Possibly because it was all wrapped in the never-ending puzzle of advancing in levels enough to survive the next area. I kept playing it more out of a sense of completion than anything else. I defeated Cassandra, made it to the Source Temple door and realized I needed more bloodstones to be able to open it. That was it for me. I just couldn’t enjoy the game enough to keep trying. My save is in the cloud. Maybe I’ll come back to it but I stopped just short of completing the game.

Dungeons and Dragons is and has been the world’s best game of any kind to me since my childhood. For that reason, I am excited to eventually play Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m especially happy to see that it’s turn-based. One of the things that most annoyed me about BG1 and 2 is that they were not turn-based, which runs against the most basic of D&D mechanics. Still, having played Divinity, I really hope Larian makes BG3 a game I enjoy more than I did this. There does seem to be a problem with D&D based games (Knights of the Chalice) making it very difficult to advance the game.

And thus begins a co-op experience between a pragmatic lib politician who doesn't understand how economics works named Tatsuki, and a sweet loving pyromaniac who actually knows what they're doing named Karma.

For some reason a tutorial didn't happen and I ended up throwing fireballs at myself, woops. It's OK my charisma is really high I'm sure things will work out.

Oh yeah I chose to be a Wanderer because animals are fucking cool and I like ranged combat. My spider shall commit slaughter while I say I have nothing to do with it like a good politician. I don't know if this game allows the character to go through a midlife crisis of "what have I done" but I hope so.

Apparently "let's sober them up" means killing them that is not what I meant holy shit I just wanted to knock them out oh god reload reload reload

Been dropping and picking this game back up a number of times over the years because life just sometimes gets in the way, but it’s still always a good time revisiting.

If you have a friend who loves a classic RPG or even a fan of tabletop RPGs, do yourself a favor and set aside some time a few hours every week and play this out together like a D&D campaign. Absolute fun.

Well, this game is really really bad. I really wanted to like it, but I couldn't... I'll start with the good things though.

The battle system is crazy good. The amount of things you can do and ways that you can approach a quest or a fight is incredible. Also, the graphics look sharp.

As for the bad things, there are a lot. First, the art style sucks. It feels like I'm playing some generic MMO. Not good, at all There are plenty of game breaking bugs throughout the campaign. The story is toothless. The game is aimless and focus TOO MUCH on TOO MANY useless boring puzzles. The difficult spikes are unbalanced and terribly unfair. Sometimes, if you want to do something specific to progess on a quest, you'll need to have a certain skill or an item. They won't warn you about that and if you don't have it, you won't get through. Oh, and if you don't have a mage, you basically won't beat the game.

This game won't help you at all and objectives are never clear enough. It's sad, because this had everything to be the next Baldur's Gate, but has too many wrongs to do right.

I don't recommend Divinity at all.

I played this once a week, almost every week in 8 hour sessions with some online friends since the beginning of august. that was a good way to play this but at times, that also felt like a very long commitment to a game.

This is also the first Co-OP Turn based RPG game I think i've played, (certainly TRPG) it was a good experience and CPRG. IT's been smoothed over compared to what I have also played, it has difficult bits, it really helps to take things slowly and level and complete things, but it also takes a very long time to do that.

We ended up using a mix of non-steam and steam versions of the game, with me hosting it and a few mods (Dos4player patcher) Some worked and some did not but we eventually managed to fumble around through the character creation in a strange way (it took some trial and error to find multi mods that would work) in order to create four player characters with which to assign amongst the three of us participating. The game treated the third person in our group as an 'NPC' whilst the second person received a Main character and I controlled a fourth 'NPC' in addition to one of the main characters. Juggling four characters around in this way during turn based combat with each player having a part was a really fun and interesting experience, made even more so with the combination of magic, and the interaction between our magics (a bit like magicka)

Definitely recommend the co-op route. It's fantastic fun to play that way and it's even better with 3-4 players despite the game not being built for it. It's a unique CRPG experience.

D:OS is a very pretty game. It's an example of a well put-together entry in a classic genre. It has the same core activities as Baldur's Gate and Fallout: Talk to people, buy improve equipment and fight, fight and fight.

While the four-element interaction (Fire, Water, Air and Earth) adds quite a bit on the tactical level, and the tag--along companions come with some interesting back-stories of their own, the environments varied and the crafting elaborate, it just wasn't for me.

I found my self wasting a lot of time micro-managing shops and equipment. Ferrying around crafting elements and applying near-identical tactics to the many many combats. I did not have the opportunity to use the quite ingenious option of drop-in, drop-out co-op and the interface is quite clunky. I think this game suffers from a Kitchen Sink problem, where it's trying to do too much (with the elements, sneaking, three different types of crafting and rock-paper-scissors conversations) that it kind of neglects the core of story and combat. The former is quite interesting but thinly spread and the latter (for me, at least) much too common and repetitive.

An almost classic CRPG but with extremely good fighting system.

I've played quite a few of CRPGs back in the day with Icewind Dale still being my favorite one so was looking forward to playing this. And while it did not make the first place it was really good.

Visually it's really good looking. The locations, the animations, the level of detail - all top quality. Environmental effects, water, fire, sand storms - amazing. Sound wise - similar. Music's nice, everyone is sound voiced (enhanced edition) and there is nothing I found annoying about that.

In case of gameplay it's for the most part a standard CRPG. You pick your characters, meet new ones that can join your merry band, you talk to people - go on some quests, fight some orcs, save the world - the usual.

A lot of the quests can be solved in different ways - both lethal and non-lethal and for the most part they're really well constructed to offer those choices. I did found a bug or two but those were for a non-important quests which didn't matter much except for being unable to remove them from the quest list.

What sets this game apart is the combat system and for it alone it's worth playing. It has a great emphasis on environmental damage - in short combine things in order for your enemies to hurt more. You can cover enemies in oil and then light them a fire. Drench them in water and freeze for a better effect. Poison and fire will create explosions. It's really cool and combining different elements with different enemies reacting to different damage differently makes a whole lot of fun. A highlight of the whole game to say the least.

So why it's not a perfect game? A couple of reason probably. First of the story - it wasn't bad but it wasn't great either. Felt a bit too over-thought for it's good.

Secondly limiting the number of active characters to four feels limiting. I'm used to having a six in a party and usually I have a certain set up. Here I couldn't. I guess the game is designed so you switch the supporting characters based on location but I did not and rolled with a constant party which made some spots more difficult than others.

And finally - that might be due to above - but the game felt just a little bit too hard on the normal level. Made me feel that each fight was way harder than it should. And while I don't mind a challenge generally it felt a bit too much and made me struggle through some of the fights. To the point that I actually for the last 2 or 3 hours of the game turned the difficulty to the lowest as I felt I've had it with the game and just wanted it to be over. Not the best recommendation to a really great game I think.

Overall - if you like CRPGs and don't mind the challenge - it's a really worthy position I suggest picking up.

The best part of this game for me was the battle system, which was a tactical turn-based system. It was great fun to puzzle out each encounter, taking every little nuance of the environment and of my character's builds into consideration. Dumping oil and then setting fire to it, right under the feet of my enemies, never got old. At higher difficulties I'm sure the battles could be quite grueling, but the easier difficulty modes make room for more casual CRPG fans like me.

The rest of the game was relatively bland. The overall story of the game and the world itself were just patchworks made of a hundred tired fantasy troupes and cliches. I felt no emotional attachment to the main characters and I felt no sense no sense of urgency about the main quest and saving the world. Pre-packed D&D campaigns have more soul to them. There are also pixel hunting scenarios and cheap tricks that are in some ways synonymous with games like this. Instant death traps abound, especially during the second half of the game.

But if you are a fan of CRPGS, even a casual fan like me, this one is worth your time. I haven't played the original version but this enhanced version had excellent graphics for the genre, sufficient controller support, and plenty to see and do. I do not regret my 40+ hours here.

Just save, and save often.

Played EE on PS4. On 3-4 occasions I had saves appear to work but then refuse to load and subsequent saves during that session were also corrupted and did not load. I eventually guessed it might have something to do with either extended session length or the PS4's rest / power save feature, because once I started closing the game out instead of entering rest mode inside the game, the problem didn't appear again. Waiting for the game to save and then immediately re-loading the save to make sure it worked added a minute of waiting every time, and with all the save-scumming I was doing it added up to a lot of extra nothing.

Regardless, the sense of humor was agreeably absurd and Python-esque, reaching a highlight with the eternal Altar of Time joking about its affordable potion prices. I only wish there were some portraits or cutscene animation to go with the cartoony VA, although I can see how that would be a problem with the ability to switch away from the dialog at any time. I liked how many solutions were possible to situations, from clever to kludgy. A unique RPG, but I wish I could have played it for 50 hours instead of 60 with the bugs.

Awesome game! A very nice surprise about a RPG! Immersive, hard (even playing on Classic Mode), a true think-based game. Dense and rich story.

This game seems like an table RPG and this is a very positive point related of the game's purpose.

In my case it was a co-op experience, and this is even better. We had some bugs inside some quests and some boses but nothing big at all.