Divinity: Original Sin 2
So, yeah, I finally finished a game I quit playing some year-and-a-half ago. I quit at the time because I got locked out of character story by starting a difficult fight with said character too far away to trigger dialog. Go figure. At least I managed to avoid it in this play-through. Heck, I only had to scrap a couple hours of play when I did something similar with another character unknowingly.
...
I sense a theme. Hmm.
Well, anyway, after such a stretch of time, I started over from scratch and probably sunk close to 80 hours into a complete game. There are some cool characters and some there's some interesting story. There's enough of the latter that I looked into older games, but found people saying this is really the first Divinity game to take the lore seriously and thus the previous games lack the continuity and world-building that I found appealing. So I probably won't go play previous installments.
One of the most major good points is the combat system. It's highly tactical with lots of interplay between elements and abilities. This directly weaves in with what I find to be one part of the game that is simultaneously awesome and horrible: encounter design. There are relatively few (and fewer, it seems, as the game progresses) combat encounters that are truly trivial by design. Some of them can be made trivial by lowered difficulty or careful exploitation of circumstances (ie. teleport big, regenerating troll into lava), but most have the feel of a "boss fight," and many change circumstances partway through. The capstone battle to the first chapter sees the player party engaging a group of magisters with some really tough guys and a named caster. This itself can take some planning, but can be manipulated to advantage. Then after a turn or two, a huge monster appears and starts attacking anyone of either side. If you know that's coming, it's easy to plan for it and come out ahead. If you don't know, it's easy to have plans fall apart and stumble into a death spiral forcing a reload. That can make things interesting, but it can also mean losing 30 minutes to an hour or more spent in a combat encounter the first time through.
Now, the possibility of losing is sort of necessary for a feeling of challenge, but I found myself thinking "this game is not respecting my time" and "most of the difficulty here is from cheap blindsiding, and that isn't fun" by the beginning of the final act. It was at this point, I weighed my investment stories that I wanted to see completed versus the incredible time sink of combat that was interesting in design, but not really that fun for me. I completed the last part of the game with the difficulty turned down.
So... yeah... I'm not quite sure what to say about that. Maybe it's lack of patience on my part. Maybe it's too much of a good thing. Somehow the combat system that was deep and fascinating became a burden by the end rather than a thing to enjoy itself. Overall, I still think it's a pretty good game, and there's plenty of RPG content there for the money.
...
I sense a theme. Hmm.
Well, anyway, after such a stretch of time, I started over from scratch and probably sunk close to 80 hours into a complete game. There are some cool characters and some there's some interesting story. There's enough of the latter that I looked into older games, but found people saying this is really the first Divinity game to take the lore seriously and thus the previous games lack the continuity and world-building that I found appealing. So I probably won't go play previous installments.
One of the most major good points is the combat system. It's highly tactical with lots of interplay between elements and abilities. This directly weaves in with what I find to be one part of the game that is simultaneously awesome and horrible: encounter design. There are relatively few (and fewer, it seems, as the game progresses) combat encounters that are truly trivial by design. Some of them can be made trivial by lowered difficulty or careful exploitation of circumstances (ie. teleport big, regenerating troll into lava), but most have the feel of a "boss fight," and many change circumstances partway through. The capstone battle to the first chapter sees the player party engaging a group of magisters with some really tough guys and a named caster. This itself can take some planning, but can be manipulated to advantage. Then after a turn or two, a huge monster appears and starts attacking anyone of either side. If you know that's coming, it's easy to plan for it and come out ahead. If you don't know, it's easy to have plans fall apart and stumble into a death spiral forcing a reload. That can make things interesting, but it can also mean losing 30 minutes to an hour or more spent in a combat encounter the first time through.
Now, the possibility of losing is sort of necessary for a feeling of challenge, but I found myself thinking "this game is not respecting my time" and "most of the difficulty here is from cheap blindsiding, and that isn't fun" by the beginning of the final act. It was at this point, I weighed my investment stories that I wanted to see completed versus the incredible time sink of combat that was interesting in design, but not really that fun for me. I completed the last part of the game with the difficulty turned down.
So... yeah... I'm not quite sure what to say about that. Maybe it's lack of patience on my part. Maybe it's too much of a good thing. Somehow the combat system that was deep and fascinating became a burden by the end rather than a thing to enjoy itself. Overall, I still think it's a pretty good game, and there's plenty of RPG content there for the money.
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