Divinity: Original Sin I & II

[sanquin]

Just started playing this game a few days ago. And so far I'm loving it as well. If I do finish Divinity:OS, I will probably buy 2 as well.

The thing I like the most is that you can just hear in their voices that the voice actors were having a lot of fun doing those roles. So many funny, interesting and above all diverse voices to find in the game.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Just started playing this game a few days ago. And so far I'm loving it as well. If I do finish Divinity:OS, I will probably buy 2 as well.

The thing I like the most is that you can just hear in their voices that the voice actors were having a lot of fun doing those roles. So many funny, interesting and above all diverse voices to find in the game.

These games are so good. I'm probably at most halfway through the first one and I can't wait to play the sequel, it looks so awesome. I'm also pretty surprised how good the voice acting is for not being AAA. The voice actors really went all out whether voicing a rat, cat, well (not joking), or just a normal NPC. How can't Bethesda get better voice acting when they have such the bigger budget?

 

[sanquin]

These games are so good. I'm probably at most halfway through the first one and I can't wait to play the sequel, it looks so awesome. I'm also pretty surprised how good the voice acting is for not being AAA. The voice actors really went all out whether voicing a rat, cat, well (not joking), or just a normal NPC. How can't Bethesda get better voice acting when they have such the bigger budget?

Well, the voice acting isn't exactly perfect. I do notice some bad voice acting here and there. But overall it's of the quality of your average AAA title.

I think why Bethesda and such don't have such good voice acting for the most part is because of money. A game like skyrim takes a LOT more money to make, so they probably want to save money with the voice acting. Which is a real shame.

 

[Imre Csete]

Had my first proper spin this weekend, and boy I'm glad I picked up that PC gaming magazine back in 2002 with the demo disc for Divine Divinity inside, and went to buy it the next day.

Supporting a passionate dev team to show this kind of improvement over the years reminds me why it is good to be a gamer.

No Jake or Bellegar yet though.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

No Jake yet though.

So you're still on the opening beach then... Jake's literally the first major quest.

 

[Zhukov]

Just finished the first one.

Prime example of a game overstaying its welcome.

The late game combat scaling is shit. All those environmental interactions and status effects become basically irrelevant. Things like the damage from a fire surface don't scale, so enemies end up having so much HP they can stroll through hazards without giving a damn and any enemy tough enough to be a threat will have a high chance to resist any statuses that are worth inflicting. It just becomes about dumping as much damage as possible onto them.

By the end I just had my archer shoot everything while everyone else buffed her, healed her and stood around scratching their arses. She had a rain of arrows ability that nuked everything in an AoE and a multi-shot ability that could be used like a shotgun against single targets at close range. Together that killed just about everything that looked at me funny and nothing else mattered.

The opening chapter annoyed me at the time because it buried the combat under an avalanche of shitty story and even shittier dialogue but looking back it was the best part of the game.

 

[Zhukov]

Playing the sequel and ooOH MY FUCKING GOD IT'S SO MUCH BETTER.

Just finishing off the opening hub area of Fort Joy and having a blast. I can see where the rave reviews are coming from.

The character building is nowhere near as hostile toward mutliclassing as the first game. The way statuses work is way better and doesn't rely on dice rolls, so you can actually plan out your crowd-control. Even the writing has improved.

Tactician mode is a ton of fun. Hard and unforgiving, but in a good way. When I get my arse kicked I almost always feel like it was because I did something wrong, not because the RNG screwed me.

Do have some complaints. The voice acting is lacking. It's not bad exactly, but everyone just speak like an ordinary English person. And I mean everyone. Random villager? Ordinary English dude. Blind elf seer? Ordinary English chick. Exiled reptilian prince with a history of consorting with demons? You guessed it - ordinary English dude. I suspect they just outsourced it to some local casting agency or something.

I think fighters have a bit too much mobility in combat. Almost everyone seems to have multiple varieties of leap, dash and teleport ability. It kinda renders positioning irrelevant. For example, there was an early quest that involved clearing a few crocodiles off a beach. There was a raised platform nearby, so I figured I'd post my ranged characters up there and shoot them to bits. One of the fuckers promptly teleported up there and bit my archer in half. Points for comedy, but not great gameplay. On another occasion I figured I'd displace a threatening melee opponent to the bottom of a staircase which would give me a turn or two to dealt with his squishier underlings while he made his way back up. Oh, never mind, he can 'phoenix dive' (i.e. teleport) straight back up and now he's standing next to my healer and wriggling his heavily armoured eyebrows.

I'm not entirely on board with the armour system. I like the added complexity it brings and, as mentioned above, the way it interacts with status effects is way better than an RNG. However, I don't like that it encourages uniformity rather than diversity in your party build. You can get by with a diverse party, but it's not optimal.

Hopefully it avoids the late game scaling issues of the first game.

EDIT: Oh yeah, forgot to mention, the enemy combat AI is pretty cool too. I don't think it plans ahead, but it can pull off some unconventionally brilliant shit on individual moves. Like shooting its own guy with a ricochet arrow so it would bounce to my weakened character who was hiding in cover, or using a low damage attack on its own guy to remove the sleeping status, or setting its own guy on fire to remove health regen because I had given him the status the causes regeneration to harm instead of heal. I, uhh.... I guess what I saying here is that the AI is really smart about friendly fire.

 

[The Gnome King]

D:OS 1 and 2 are some of my favorite RPGs; real game of the year material. I love the open sandbox worlds that Larian creates, I like the humor; I like the writing.

 

[TZO2K12]

I'm just overjoyed that they switched over from the wretched North American McDonalds line cooks (From the original masterpieces of DD/BD) and stuck with actual UK professional voice actors! (D2-DOS 1-2)

TOO many non-domestic/European developers/publishers default to using the cheapest North American localization teams as they are reputed in having shoddy quality 90% of the time! Ironically, some of the most exemplary North American voice-work is domestic, 90% of the time!

But yeah, this is currently one of the best CRPGs out there, bar-none! The best ARPGs goes to The Souls series/Witcher 3...It's no wonder as most masterpieces aren't coming out of the US/Canada as we're too obsessed with AAA spectacle and DLC/Microtransactions/skinner boxed gambling gimmicks!...Hopefully, we'll encounter another AAA gaming crash as indies are poised to deliver us from AAA dreck!

 

[TheFinish]

I enjoyed D:OS 1s gameplay way more than D:OS 2, but I liked everything else in D:OS 2 (companions, story, quests) better than in 1.

The whole armor system can go die in a fire though. It's absolute shite and it cascades into a whole slew of other mechanical problems with the game.

The game autoadding consumables to the hotbar is also incredibly damn annoying.

 

[Fappy]

Playing through it slowly in 4-player co-op with some friends right now. Just finished Fort Joy. The game's fun as fuck even though we botch every encounter and I end up catching literally everyone on fire.

I needed this in my life. It feels like a real game of D&D. It's just as slow and tedious too (with multiple people)!

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

The whole armor system can go die in a fire though. It's absolute shite and it cascades into a whole slew of other mechanical problems with the game.

How does the armor system work?

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

The whole armor system can go die in a fire though. It's absolute shite and it cascades into a whole slew of other mechanical problems with the game.

How does the armor system work?

In short: You have magical and physical armor, the former protecting you against elemental damage and the latter against physical. They are regained after fights and various abilities and items can restore them mid-fight. Until either is depleted you do not take any damage from attacks of that kind (so no fire damage until magical is gone) and more importantly, you will not suffer status effects from abilities or environmental hazards of that kind.

This prevents the hilariously shitty OS1 problem of initiating every fight with your best status effect and then chaining them indefinitely to prevent your opponent from ever getting a turn. The down sides are many:
A) The best party quickly becomes one where all members deal the same type of damage, so you are better off with 4 fighters or 4 wizards instead of an even split (on release the recommended party for highest difficulty playthroughs by the community was 4 warriors with shields).
B) Some encounters skew horribly against partys that rely too much on either kind of damage, making the difficulty curve uneven because you might suddenly run into enemies that have high armor against your preferred damage type.
C) Magic is shit compared to physical damage. This is largely due to the fact that there's only 1 type of physical damage and no enemy is completely resistant or even healed by physical damage. For mages, not only are there 5 major damage types (6 if you count Witchcraft's physical damage magic) but many enemies are completely immune or get healed by one or more of those. This means that a wizard party has to spread its' damage over several types and in many encounters one or more of your members will be pretty useless (classic example being using a earth/fire mage against fire enemies).

 

[TheFinish]

The whole armor system can go die in a fire though. It's absolute shite and it cascades into a whole slew of other mechanical problems with the game.

How does the armor system work?

In short: You have magical and physical armor, the former protecting you against elemental damage and the latter against physical. They are regained after fights and various abilities and items can restore them mid-fight. Until either is depleted you do not take any damage from attacks of that kind (so no fire damage until magical is gone) and more importantly, you will not suffer status effects from abilities or environmental hazards of that kind.

This prevents the hilariously shitty OS1 problem of initiating every fight with your best status effect and then chaining them indefinitely to prevent your opponent from ever getting a turn. The down sides are many:
A) The best party quickly becomes one where all members deal the same type of damage, so you are better off with 4 fighters or 4 wizards instead of an even split (on release the recommended party for highest difficulty playthroughs by the community was 4 warriors with shields).
B) Some encounters skew horribly against partys that rely too much on either kind of damage, making the difficulty curve uneven because you might suddenly run into enemies that have high armor against your preferred damage type.
C) Magic is shit compared to physical damage. This is largely due to the fact that there's only 1 type of physical damage and no enemy is completely resistant or even healed by physical damage. For mages, not only are there 5 major damage types (6 if you count Witchcraft's physical damage magic) but many enemies are completely immune or get healed by one or more of those. This means that a wizard party has to spread its' damage over several types and in many encounters one or more of your members will be pretty useless (classic example being using a earth/fire mage against fire enemies).

Massive Kudos for explaining it so well! I'll add another point though:

Physical Status effects (which, AFAIK, is only Bleeding and Knockdown) are applied immediately if the attack carrying them beats physical armor, whereas two of the main Magic attacks (specifically Cold and Electricity) require a further attack of the same type to have their full potential.

For example: If you have an attack that does 100 damage and Knockdown, versus a dude with 70 Physical Armor, you'll strip armor, do 30 HP damage and Knock them down. Success!

If you have an attack that does 100 magical damage and Shocks, versus a dude with 70 magical armor, you'll strip armor, do 30 HP damage and apply shocked.....which does nothing worthwile until you apply shock again, whereupon the badguy is Stunned.

But yeah, we've solved the Status Bonanza of D:OS 1 and replaced with a system that has a much bigger boatload of problems.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

The whole armor system can go die in a fire though. It's absolute shite and it cascades into a whole slew of other mechanical problems with the game.

How does the armor system work?

In short: You have magical and physical armor, the former protecting you against elemental damage and the latter against physical. They are regained after fights and various abilities and items can restore them mid-fight. Until either is depleted you do not take any damage from attacks of that kind (so no fire damage until magical is gone) and more importantly, you will not suffer status effects from abilities or environmental hazards of that kind.

This prevents the hilariously shitty OS1 problem of initiating every fight with your best status effect and then chaining them indefinitely to prevent your opponent from ever getting a turn. The down sides are many:
A) The best party quickly becomes one where all members deal the same type of damage, so you are better off with 4 fighters or 4 wizards instead of an even split (on release the recommended party for highest difficulty playthroughs by the community was 4 warriors with shields).
B) Some encounters skew horribly against partys that rely too much on either kind of damage, making the difficulty curve uneven because you might suddenly run into enemies that have high armor against your preferred damage type.
C) Magic is shit compared to physical damage. This is largely due to the fact that there's only 1 type of physical damage and no enemy is completely resistant or even healed by physical damage. For mages, not only are there 5 major damage types (6 if you count Witchcraft's physical damage magic) but many enemies are completely immune or get healed by one or more of those. This means that a wizard party has to spread its' damage over several types and in many encounters one or more of your members will be pretty useless (classic example being using a earth/fire mage against fire enemies).

Thanks. Maybe by the time I get around to playing, there will be some tweaks with regard to the armor system. I've watched a few build videos that have popped up on my Youtube feed and it seems like you can still do good enough with any kind of build.

 

[Imre Csete]

Well, it's a shame it didn't stick the landing, but the original D:OS endgame was a mess too.

I guess it was nice of Larian to let Chris Avellone write KotOR II the way he always wanted, but I have seen this story before, so I'm not that amazed, even if it's a huge improvement in writing.

D:OS 2 is still a wonderful game, I'm sure the gameplay issues will be ironed out, but it soured my experience enough to curb my enthusiasm.