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Divinity Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition

ScrotumBroth

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Joined
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Messages
1,288
Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In
Oh man, little quality of life things I've taken for granted in D:OS2 are slowly getting to me in this game.
Like NPCs randomly engaging party members in dialogue leading to persuasion, instead of just talking to the leader. I've tried reloading, thinking it's a proximity trigger, or order in the party, but no, no no, it's fully scripted with no way to influence it.
Or having to manually give lock pick to a character doing the lock picking.
NPC bystanders spamming the dialogue box while I'm having a conversation is just retarded.

But the worst is rock paper scissors. Good Lord, this is Mass Effect 2 hacking level discouraging.

Dialogues, characters and voice acting in the starting area are all very generic and underwhelming, with roll eyes little goofs, like the retarded mayor.

I'm also peeved at having to create two characters in a single player mode, thus missing out on a slot for NPCs and their quests, assuming they have quests.
And why would I argue with myself over decisions I made? I can see they've envisioned personality orientation this way, and that's cool for co-op. Ehhhhhh...

But the game's bound to get better, considering the praise. I soldier on.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
Oh man, little quality of life things I've taken for granted in D:OS2 are slowly getting to me in this game.
Like NPCs randomly engaging party members in dialogue leading to persuasion, instead of just talking to the leader. I've tried reloading, thinking it's a proximity trigger, or order in the party, but no, no no, it's fully scripted with no way to influence it.
Or having to manually give lock pick to a character doing the lock picking.
NPC bystanders spamming the dialogue box while I'm having a conversation is just retarded.

But the worst is rock paper scissors. Good Lord, this is Mass Effect 2 hacking level discouraging.

Dialogues, characters and voice acting in the starting area are all very generic and underwhelming, with roll eyes little goofs, like the retarded mayor.

I'm also peeved at having to create two characters in a single player mode, thus missing out on a slot for NPCs and their quests, assuming they have quests.
And why would I argue with myself over decisions I made? I can see they've envisioned personality orientation this way, and that's cool for co-op. Ehhhhhh...

But the game's bound to get better, considering the praise. I soldier on.
D:OS1 is inferior in every way, congratulations on being tricked by people too stupid to understand 'deplete the blue bar before using magic CC'
 

DraQ

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D:OS1 is inferior in every way, congratulations on being tricked by people too stupid to understand 'deplete the blue bar before using magic CC'
D:OS1 is inferior in most ways, but that doesn't make D:OS2's armour mechanics any less awful.
And no, not because people don't understand it.
It's awful because, especially in conjunction with cooldowns, it's a neverending clusterfuck of derp, tedium and bad design.

It effectively splits every battle into two phases:
  1. Avoid using status inflicting skills and just spam basic attacks, plus whatever you can deal the most AOE damage with or light the largest part of the area ablaze or shroud it with poison clouds.
  2. Spam skills and lock every enemy down with statuses.
It's tedious and retarded, with phase 1 characters spending most of their time running up and down the ladders, through flames, and phase 2 characters spending most of their time lying knocked down, bleeding, burning and poisoned.

D:OS2 manages to be a good game in spite of this, not because of this.
 
Self-Ejected

IncendiaryDevice

Self-Ejected
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Quick question:

I put my cooking pot on the fireplace in the first tavern you find in Cecil & it said I'd crafted a mobile oven. Awesome I thought, but the item doesn't seem to exist anywhere. The fireplace vanished, my cooking pot vanished, I have a recipe for a mobile oven but no actual mobile oven.

What gives?

Edit: Nevermind, found the answer on steam forums:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/373420/discussions/0/490124466456135848/
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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Steam says I've now been playing this game for 77 hours & I'm just about to leave Cyseal for the first time, all Cyseal quests having now been completed (well, those that my characters were able to find anyway). Level 10.

& I have to say, this seems like an ideal point just to communicate to the world how much I'm enjoying this game. I am actually playing real & genuine incline. This is the improved and updated version of Divine Divinty I've been waiting 15 years to play. And there is just so much good stuff to talk about its phenomenal. Sneaking & rogueing generally is some of the best I've seen & I normally hate playing underused & underdeveloped Rogue characters in RPGs, but here, you can can spend hours just wandering around town noseying around & really delving into every nook and cranny. Likewise, Telekinesis is such an entertaining & worthwhile skill which highly elevates gameplay in both combat and non-combat situations. All the skills & how they mingle with each other & how you get them all up to a worthwhile level all makes for absolutely fascinating classic cRPG micromanagement while at the same time never feeling like you're just influencing a spreadsheet, it feels like you're genuinely developing different characters with different priorities.

Then there's all the other stuff, like talking to animals, charisma, bartering, crafting & Blacksmithing. I can literally spend a whole 10 hour session just having my heroes stand still while I faff around in their inventories & it's more engaging than the entirety of all the aspects of another, lesser, RPG.

It's not entirely without fault however, obviously, and sometimes you have to wonder what went wrong in the development of some aspects, such as the eternally bugged Sparkmaster5000 encounter. The only moment in the game other than the previous post when I had to resport to searching on-line to find out wtf was going on. It turns out the wider internet didn't know either & even more than that Larian doesn't know either. I saw oodles of different ways to brute force the fight & ended up following neither but rather finding an entirely new way to brute force it. So even when it's shit, it's still doing something a lot better than 99% of RPGs.

Likewise, when I came to the Baccus Rex battle I had a sudden memory of the problem with Divine Divinity, that of the sudden leap in difficulty when you encounter the end-boss, to which many builds are actually dead in the water at the end of Divine Divinty, many having otherwise steam rolled the game without giving any hint that they would be useless against the end-boss. When facing Rex you get a big dialogue speech followed by Rex then acting first in combat, to which he one-shots your party. Hum, I thought, are we back at DD again? But no, just sitting back for an hour & gradually thinking of all the different ways its possible to approach situations in this game & suddenly the fight is the complete opposite, a cakewalk. Now that's what I call fantastic design.

I remember hearing talk that the game goes downhill after Cyseal, however, Cyseal has already given me 77 hours of near perfection cRPGing, I honestly don't care if it dips now, Just as long as it's not desperately bad I think I'll be happy. Heck, I still have more stuff I could do in Cyseal if I put my mind to it, rummaging-wise & I still have tons of ingredients that I have no idea what I should be combining them with, which is both maddening & intriguing.

One quite 'in your face' bug to note is how items such as 'Globe' & 'Lab Equipment' are both represented in one's inventory as a jug & two cups. Really ugly & really immersion breaking. I can't believe that was something so hard to fix?

As for people who just bitch about the 'bad writing & comedy aspect', oh just fuck off, it works excellently, thematically, atmospherically & exactly fits both the art style and animations. People who site this as any kind of 'problem' with Larian games really need to die in a fire or just fuck off from the cRPG scene IMO.
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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Interestingly, when I went back to the game & created a new save file, the in-game timer that it marks save files by says I'd only been playing 68 hours. That's quite the discrepancy between the two timers, almost 10 whole hours. No idea what's going on there.
 

Murk

Arcane
Joined
Jan 17, 2008
Messages
13,459
Fun vid tho, I remember stumbling on the chest mechanic when I was trying to get some treasure and book it from a fight that I had an unfavorable position in only to nearly gib one of the enemies with it when it moved.
 

SausageInYourFace

Angelic Reinforcement
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Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit. Pathfinder: Wrath
Speaking of DivOS, does anybody know what song of the OST is playing when you meet Icara frozen in the ice cube? As far as I am aware the song plays only at that part but I haven't found it when I was looking for it.
 

SniperHF

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Aug 22, 2014
Messages
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Speaking of DivOS, does anybody know what song of the OST is playing when you meet Icara frozen in the ice cube? As far as I am aware the song plays only at that part but I haven't found it when I was looking for it.

I think it's simply called the "White Which Theme". That's what it's called in the game files. (well Playlist_HIB_WhiteWitch_new to be exact) It's a re-worked version from Div 2: FoV "Aleroth Healers House". I think the D:OS version is superior.

I used it in the video for my mod and for the main menu. Good track.
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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Warning: several paragraphs are contained herein.

I'm really struggling to keep myself going in this game now & I'm a dedicated completionist. The game save files say I'm about 145 hours in & I've just finished off Lucillia Forest, all areas & have just completed the Hunter's edge area in what one assumes is the end-game forest map, with the rest of that map still in the fog of war. What's been consuming so much of my time? I don't know really, I'm just looking in every nook and cranny & performing the usual RPG routine of collecting goodies to sell or improve my characters, which takes a lot of time in this game as each section involves hoards of weird loot, lots of little side-questy bits and often a new section to explore at the end of time. As I have the talking to animals trait I'm also talking to all the animals in the game, which probably adds a bit, as does reading all the myriad of books. I've lost interest in crafting at this stage and haven't been using crafting time pretty much since I left Cyseal around 70 hours ago.

It's quite hard to describe why I'm losing the will to go on here & if I don't specify these feelings exactly then people will likely assume all kinds of reasons and assume the reason I'm struggling is the same reason they struggled. It might be, but it might not. I'm no stranger to long RPGs and I'm no stranger to losing the will to continue at the end of long RPGs, I have similar feelings towards the end of each Avernum, Baldur's Gates and etc etc, but I've never been this demotivated before, this game has foisted onto me an as yet unexperienced level of demotivation, hence the difficulty in trying to describe it.

I'm using walkthroughs more and more now as I really can't be bothered with the game's ever more obtuse puzzles at this stage. The last few have just been laughably dire. One was a pixel hunt, literally that was all the puzzle was. A large cluttered room with one tiny 4x4 pixel to find that would make even an obtuse Hidden Object Game blush with its obtuseness (press four buttons to open the way to the vial of blood). I'd even worked out that my problem was that I was missing a button before I looked at the walkthrough. After reading the walkthrough, which detailed the exact location of the button, I still couldn't find the button. By sheer chance something highlighted at one point and I could move on.

Then there's the Knight's Tomb, oh dear oh dear oh dear. Defeating the one-hit-kill statues was easy enough, but then, going up the stairs, there's an instant death ray. Uh-huh. I tried no end of ways to 'solve' this 'puzzle'. A fairly crucial puzzle as it leads to a Star Stone (and the amusing Watch vs Codex resolution). But no, nothing I did lead to anything but instant death for every character in my team. No levers, no buttons and, since the game doesn't operate by visible squares, no real way to gradually guess a safe path by trial and error. So, again, even with knowing probably what it is I need to do, the game simply isn't offering me any solution beyond absurdity. So off to the walkthrough I go & discover that all you need is Perception out the wazoo. None of my team have this prerequisite, but, thankfully, one person had discovered that summoned spiders do indeed have Perception out the wazoo. Well thank heavens for that, I can indeed summon spiders & I can now move on.

There's a whole raft of quests to do in Hunter's Edge, and had it been at the start of the game I would have put the effort in for them, but at this stage of the game I simply can't be arsed. Star crossed lovers? I really don't care. Rat extermination & the King Rat situation? Oh fuck off. Etc Etc. The first quest I did here was the Knight's Tomb & that sorted that area, now can I move on please. Oh, I was supposed to have found the hidden villagers first, then found the wizard next before doing the Knight's Tomb? Oh ffs, just get on with it for heaven's sake.

And now the rules seem to be changing and it's very difficult to know what the concept of the Star Stones even are. The Goblins have one that powers a sentient Totem? How the hell does that even work? And Grutilda the queen Orc uses one to turn her bodyguards into even more powerful bodyguards? What? And then when Grutilda's dead her Star Stone seems to have vanished completely. So I look on-line again for "where's Grutilda's Star Stone" and that doesn't even bring any coherent search results. Are we to assume that for some inexplicable reason her Star Stone just dematerialises after use? Why? And then, while looking at these on-line solutions you have to simply despair at people who've forgotten to hoard the 'useless' star stones, because, for some reason known only to Larian, the characters drop the stones after they use them as blood stones. For no known reason other than to troll? Lucky I'm a hoarder.

And on the topic of rules, I was suddenly greeted by a timed quest while back in Lucilla Forest. Some dying guy near the spider queen mentioned something about an imp. After completing most of that map I went to a walkthrough to find out how to do the Troll cave as I still hadn't found the doodad needed to do that part of the game. Turns out it related to this dying guy & you just happen to have needed to walk near a very specific spot in the game to trigger a trap door. *groan*. By this point in the game this guy was dead as a doornail, oh right, so you had to get back to him within... how much time exactly? Anyway, I did that dungeon & then came across the dying guy's imp. Because the guy was dead I told the imp to go back to it's slave master, I had no dialogue option to tell him his master was dead & it seemed logical to let the imp go see his dead master rather than continue cowering in the cave. Low and behold, a team member scolds me for suggesting the imp go back to his master. Lol, what? Upon exiting the cave one hears the imp lament the loss of his master but when you get down there he's supposedly run away. Run away from what?

So, anyway, this made me less interested in any further quests in Hunter's Edge, particularly any which had suggested time-related deadlines. Early on it became apparent that the game held firm to the idea that NPCs just stuck around until you'd done their quests. Good old suspended animation of "I URGENTLY require the antidote", "ok, no probs, I'll get it for you, just let me do a 100 hour adventure first, m'kay", but no, suddenly the game throws a "nah, nah, you took too long" at you from nowhere. Well, that's confusing & removes my trust in how I perform quests in the future. Now I have an increased sense of panic added to a format that demands extreme patience.

Also according to some spoilers I caught while looking for solutions to stupid things I caught that the final portal doesn't open at the end of time anyway. I had been somewhat confused how the Knight's Tomb Star Stone didn't even unlock anything new at the end of time, again breaking the game's own rules of routine. And now I don't know if I am supposed to stop adventuring and finish up at the end of time or if I'm supposed to do this final map or not & if I do one or the other before the other am I doing things out of order. Because, again, the game seems to be even more confused at this stage as to whether it wants to be a linear open-world or a freedom open-world. Ie: you can do things out of order if you want, it'll just fuck you over more than if you somehow guess correctly when to do everything, etc.

Even saying all this still doesn't really quantify properly my irritation with the game by this point & I've still left loads of annoyances out, such as the headache inducing squinting required to even see much of the game's ever darker content, the ever decreasing shit given about either the plot or any dialogues at all at this stage & etc etc etc, but I felt I needed to get at least some of this off of my chest. I'm determined to finish the game now, determination being the only real motivator left & when I looked at the remaining steam achievements left for the main plot I had to chuckle sarcastically as one of them read "Nearly there, lol" or some such troll, like, you know, even the devs seem to be aware that the end game is supposed to be some kind of deliberate punishment aimed at completionists?
 
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BlackAdderBG

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Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Puzzles in RPGs are the stupidest design ever and if you play coop is even more annoying.

The combat is the sole reason to play this game and Larian's quest design and writing are at constant odds with it. It treats you like a child that need to eat the broccoli first to give you the good part.
 
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Strange Fellow

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
^agree (oh buttons, I miss you). Pixel hunts, on the other hand, and mandatory ones at that...

IncendiaryDevice: Google the locations of the star stones and be done with it. If you've done Hunter's Edge you're basically done, anyway. I like the game a lot, but there's nothing more for you to get out of it at this point, and the late game is complete bullshit. Just speedrun that motherfucker.
 

Lord_Potato

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
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Nov 24, 2017
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Free City of Warsaw
Just finished DOS1 EE.

Also had to struggle through the final chapter, although the game only took me approximately 81 hours. Loved the combat, hated the boring and illogical puzzles. Enjoyed the world dense with secret locations, but the itemization sucked ass and so exploration was rarely rewarded in a satisfactory way. The story had some potential, but the way it was delivered made me not care about neither Icara and her sister, nor Astarte and the sins of the Guardians. It was perhaps too high fantasy and not enough focused on the interesting characters. The companions weren't memorable, I would be unable to write the name of the ranger girl that was part of my team since Cyseal or the mage ex king. I never really took the silent thief with me, he was way to weak. Madora however was somewhat amusing and having a third Source Hunter in my party seemed like a logical choice.

Its quite a decent game thanks to turn based combat and some quality locations. However I found the world too small and condensed. I prefer Baldur's Gate approach, with 40 diverse maps than DOS with 4... even though those 4 have as much content as BG's 40... The world presented in DOS was hardly fascinating and original and I did not care much about its lore (even the world of Pillars of Eternity was more interesing and thought out). Although I could feel much enthusiasm went into creation of this game, I could not get rid of a feeling that its quite a soulless experience.

The C&C is minimal and the interactions with npcs often amount to the silly minigame, which I hated because of its pure randomness. Are there even different endings to the game? Propably some shit concering Icara and Arhu, but otherwise, you have to save the world. No way around it, I guess.

Although I love the fourth wall - breaking ending cutscene if you loose the final battle against the Void. Did not expect that. It was pretty cool!
 

Lacrymas

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Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
It's a popcorn game, to be played while finding or waiting for better games.
 

Lord_Potato

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Glory to Ukraine
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Nov 24, 2017
Messages
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Location
Free City of Warsaw
There is plenty of much more fitting popcorn games, which actually feel like a fun B movie, Two Worlds for example. Original Sin, with robust combat system, satisfactory character development and decent production values seemed like its striving for something more.
 

sullynathan

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Dec 22, 2015
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Not Europe
Original sin is fun and allows you to be creative which is more than you can say for many games
 

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