Divinity Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition

[cvv]

Ok, sitrep.

About 20 hours in and first of all - jesus this is SUCH an enjoyable game. It's an almost perfect isometric RPG. I'm enjoying the FUCK out of the combat. Been playing RPGs for 20 years but I definitely haven't seen a better isometric combat ever before (personally, still prefer blobbers but this has almost converted me).

Went with a bow guy with a bit of geomancy and a priest crush-smashy type. Seeing some gameplay videos on YT it was not the optimal choice (the rogue backstab action seems way better than bow and one more mage would come in handy) but I'm managing just fine so far, although a huge help is the Codex trait, the Andyman summon for every char. It's mostly a horse-meatshield but that's exactly what's needed in the tougher fights.

A few annoyances: the plot and lore so far is a typical Larian fare - basically a competent fan fiction. Maybe I'm too jaded but there's, like, nothing at all I haven't seen or played 100 times before. But fuck it, Wizards&Warriors was even worse in that respect and it's still one of my favourite games ever. It's just a bit of a missed opportunity is all.
Also the inventory management is a bit too fiddly for some reason. Can't really put my finger on it but it just takes too many clicks to accomplish anything. Especially the crafting mechanics is way too barebones for the underlying system which grows in complexity as I discover (and like) it.
Plus the game feels a bit sloggy at times. The loading times are the biggest offenders, game behaves as a huge resource hog. Do I really need to wait 20 seconds for the bloody Main Menu to load? And when I alt-TAB to check my mail, I can go take a piss or make a coffee (I got 8 GB RAM, is it really too little in this day and age?).
And some of the casting animations are way too slow, especially summoning Andyman - 8 seconds, really? With four chars preparing for a battle it's over half a minute. Why not make the char just do SCHWOOONG and voila, the Horseman is here! Plus the horse dude moves too slowly.

:D

God. Yeah. These are the sort of complaints you raise when you absolutely love something. It's really nothing at all. The game oozes love for games and role playing in particular. You can see the Larian dudes must be enormous nerds and my kudos fot that.

Right now my only worry, apart from the fact I won't be able to play it up properly until the next weekend, is the balance. I'm level seven and it's not been exactly easy to get here. But already my priest dudette and the fighter hireling woman are getting maybe a bit too bawzy, with high armour and resists. I've lightly skimmed through this thread and it seems to be a real issue. I see a real possibily that by lvl 10+ it's gonna be a perma hulk-smash action with my fighters. Shouldda gone with Hard diff maybe but oh well, too late to fap around the bushes now.

All right nerds, that's it for now, if you have any general tips I'd love to hear them, otherwise see you at the next sitrep (I really hope this game's playtime is dem 100+ hours, like the thing Ventilator said.)

 

[Sodafish]

You can change the difficulty at any time IIRC. Archers are probably more useful than rogue types actually, especially in the early game (all dem special arrows). The rogue's backstab shit gets godly once you get the daggers drawn skill tho.

 

[Tigranes]

cvv You can mess with difficulty by (1) raising difficulty, (2) not taking henchmen, (3) taking or not taking Lone Wolf / Glass Cannon. In any case, though, levelling slows after 10 and you do not get massive changes in your characters after, say, 14. It's also being reported that modding difficulty, e.g. enemy HP, is quite easy.

 

[sqeecoo]

Witcher is 5/5.

[/QUOTE]

I like the Witcher, sue me Sure, I'd put the likes of Planescape and Fallout above it, but with only 5 marks it gets 5/5, especially if DOS gets 4/5

 

[Black]

Witcher is 5/5.

I like the Witcher, sue me

If only it were that easy I would.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

with only 5 marks it gets 5/5, especially if DOS gets 4/5

(DOS) 4/5 if something like the Witcher is 5/5.

It's difficult to argue with this logic

Are you a US film critic by any chance?

 

[Bladderfish]

Ok, sitrep.

Right now my only worry, apart from the fact I won't be able to play it up properly until the next weekend, is the balance. I'm level seven and it's not been exactly easy to get here. But already my priest dudette and the fighter hireling woman are getting maybe a bit too bawzy, with high armour and resists. I've lightly skimmed through this thread and it seems to be a real issue. I see a real possibily that by lvl 10+ it's gonna be a perma hulk-smash action with my fighters. Shouldda gone with Hard diff maybe but oh well, too late to fap around the bushes now.

I don't know about anybody else, but I'm enjoying the fact that the game isn't balanced, that your characters become overpowered around level 10-11. Because beyond the difficulty, the combat is just plain fun. You can approach the same fight multiple times using multiple tactics and have a totally different experience. Self-teleports, clouds of electricty and poison, charges with multiple knockdowns, ricocheting arrows, arrow spray from point blank range so one enemy takes about 20 hits, teleporting bosses so they keep having to run back to your party and miss their turns ... I mean, the list is endless, and in my opinion such opportunities to have fun *outweigh* balance.

There still are some tricky fights (generally the bosses), and they are welcome, but I wouldn't swap the above for every fight being a struggle to survive.

 

[Konjad]

I'm at the end game but the doors won't open because "GATHER MORE STAR ROCKS LOL". Larian are completionists tards. I'm giving up at this point. It took me 56 hours to get to this point though and it was 50+ hours of pure fun, but at the end the game begun to protract itself too much and now it tells me to go back and finish some quests that I left and probably revisit all the locations and check which damn stone I forgot to take with me out of ignorance because they seemed to be useless (maybe the story gives a hint about their purpose, but the writing is so bad that I stopped reading dialogues after a few hours of gameplay). This is a very very dumb way to artificially lengthen the game, even worse one than trash mobs so many games throw in abundance in the late game.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Open the door with the toolkit?

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

I'm at the end game but the doors won't open because "GATHER MORE STAR ROCKS LOL". Larian are completionists tards. I'm giving up at this point. It took me 56 hours to get to this point though and it was 50+ hours of pure fun, but at the end the game begun to protract itself too much and now it tells me to go back and finish some quests that I left and probably revisit all the locations and check which damn stone I forgot to take with me out of ignorance because they seemed to be useless (maybe the story gives a hint about their purpose, but the writing is so bad that I stopped reading dialogues after a few hours of gameplay). This is a very very dumb way to artificially lengthen the game, even worse one than trash mobs so many games throw in abundance in the late game.

How was it not completely obvious that star stones were important? Whenever you come across one, a giant lightning bolt hits every character and you get transported to this strange place called the end of time.

 

[Konjad]

I'm at the end game but the doors won't open because "GATHER MORE STAR ROCKS LOL". Larian are completionists tards. I'm giving up at this point. It took me 56 hours to get to this point though and it was 50+ hours of pure fun, but at the end the game begun to protract itself too much and now it tells me to go back and finish some quests that I left and probably revisit all the locations and check which damn stone I forgot to take with me out of ignorance because they seemed to be useless (maybe the story gives a hint about their purpose, but the writing is so bad that I stopped reading dialogues after a few hours of gameplay). This is a very very dumb way to artificially lengthen the game, even worse one than trash mobs so many games throw in abundance in the late game.

How was it not completely obvious that star stones were important? Whenever you come across one, a giant lightning bolt hits every character and you get transported to this strange place called the end of time.

Well, I knew they were useful for something, but I thought it's just for the teleporting to The End of Time, not for the end game boss.

Open the door with the toolkit?

You can do it?! I'll check it out!

 

[Konjad]

The game tells me the door isn't locked and I can't destroy them either.

 

[railway]

Just finished the game now and can't help but join the general praise. Despite some flaws it's easily the best modern RPG I played in years (and not just because of the mostly lackluster competition).
It took me about 70 hours to finish the game with all sidequests and lots of playing around with the crafting system. In all this time the game didn't even crash once and I didn't experience any other severe bugs either; got some slightly strange dialogues after doing quests and exploration out of the intended order but tath's only very minor stuff.

The biggest flaw for me was the randomized loot, more/completely hand-placed loot would have improved (an already great) game by a lot, I think. It's probably the more diablo-like nature of it's predecessors shining through.
Especially the exploration aspect of the game suffers from this. Jumping through several hoops to get to the super secret special chest only to find the same (mostly crappy) random loot in it, that can be found in easily accessible chests left and right is just disappointing.
It also hurts the crafting aspect a bit if the RNG denies you ingredients you need to build something.

The UI could use some work, too. Inventory management can be very tedious for example. Some small changes could have improved it, though.
Make more/most items stackable, add a "repair/identify all" button to merchants, let me identify stuff in other character's inventories without having to trade the items back and forth, compare equipment to that of the character whose inventory is opened instead of of who started the conversation, and so forth.

I also agree to what seems to be the most mentioned flaw of the game around here: D:OS just gets too easy about halfway through. The beginning was fairly challenging to me (perhaps at least partly because I was still learning the ropes of the game) but since somewhere around the second area I was never really in danger of getting defeated again even though I wasn't exactly min-maxing my characters, in fact I would have built my party differently in hindsight.
I didn't play the game until the actual release and didn't really follow the early access discussions but at times it almost feeled as if some of the lategame encounter were deliberately made easier (perhaps due to early feedback on the difficulty of the beginning?):

Spoiler

Two encounters especially made me feel that way.
1.) The fight agains the spider-queen. The constant sandstorm causing "slow" on all characters raised the challenge by a bit for me, the fights against the spiders accompanied by mages were more interesting (even still not difficult) again with this handicap.
When the spider-queen hatched lots of eggs I was actually expecting a tough fight but for some reason the spiderlings were only level 8, my party and the queen were around level 14. As a result the spiders couldn't even hit me and so I could completely ignore them until the queen was dead. Raising the spiders' levels could have made this fight vastly more interesting.

2.) The final boss battle against the void dragon. The showdown was very anticlimatic. My party's elemental resistances were at least at 100% for all basic elements, so they simply absorbed most of the dragon's attacks. His henchlings were again too weak to be really threatening. The boss' ability to dodge most melee attacks was the only thing that made the fight last a bit longer.
I think the battle could have been improved if the dragon mostly attacked with tenebrium damage instead of elemental (it would make more sense storywise, too - The four elements represent everything the void wants to destroy after all).

My two main characters were a mage specialized in fire, earth and water spells and a Shadowblade who I leveled into a weird combination of archery and air spells. In addition to that I kept Madora as a 2-H tank and recruited a cleric henchman specialized on one-handed weapons and shields.
The archer/shadowblade combo was a bit messy at times in midgame but he did a lot of damage by the end an the special arrows were pretty effective throughout the whole game actually. His teleport spells helped in exploration and in the right environment (lava!) it was strong in battle, too. The starting point in witchcraft gave me access to Oath of Desecration which was also handy.
In retrospect going full on archery or, probably even better, pure mage would certainly have lead to a stronger character.
I mostly recruited the cleric for his healing spell early on but that got redundant when my mage and Madora got healing spells on their own later on. He still packed lots of damage and was hard to hit. I also made him my main character for crafting and blacksmithing, so while another mage would have been more useful in battle, keeping him was still worth it (especially as the late-game gets easy anyway).

The story is a neutral point in my book. It was nothing to write home about but the writing itself was more than solid. There's no real dialogue trees or C&C but it was all done well-enough anyway. The tongue-in-cheek approach was a nice change of pace to all the grimdark epic stories full of teenage angst. The ending was a bit weird as the game suddenly started to take itself more serious than it had before. Especially the ending monologue about the power of love and friendship felt way out of place.

The strong point is without doubt the fighting. Encounter design is great, the countless combinations of spells and environment alone kept me entertained for most of the game. D:OS has one of the most fun battle systems I have ever played, both in modern and classic RPGs. Combined with the great freedom the crafting system provides the game comes really close to a P&P experience at times.

 

[Black_Willow]

ITT Konjad being Konjad.

 

[Raghar]

How was it not completely obvious that star stones were important? Whenever you come across one, a giant lightning bolt hits every character and you get transported to this strange place called the end of time.

He graduated from highschool. Highschool graduates have problems with elementary brain fucntions and creativity. It's a consequence of too rigid school education and generally bad teacher behavior.

 

[Tigranes]

Anyone know what the trigger is for having Tenebrium skill appear in your charsheet? I don't see it for some reason and I'm in Phantom Forest, and because of the skill bug (where tenebrium enhanced weapons don't benefit from normal weapon skill bonuses) I really want to put some points into Tenebrium.

May be related to how I didn't complete the Brandon quest because party AI disagreed with me.

 

[Minttunator]

Anyone know what the trigger is for having Tenebrium skill appear in your charsheet? I don't see it for some reason and I'm in Phantom Forest, and because of the skill bug (where tenebrium enhanced weapons don't benefit from normal weapon skill bonuses) I really want to put some points into Tenebrium.

May be related to how I didn't complete the Brandon quest because party AI disagreed with me.

Tenebrium skill spoilers!

Spoiler

The trigger for getting the skill is that Brandon teaches it to you when you complete his quest.

Luckily there's also a book that I think you can read to get the skill - I'm not 100% positive, though, since I already had the skill when I found it (it's in the Sacred Stone village).

 

[Eddas]

Anyone know what the trigger is for having Tenebrium skill appear in your charsheet? I don't see it for some reason and I'm in Phantom Forest, and because of the skill bug (where tenebrium enhanced weapons don't benefit from normal weapon skill bonuses) I really want to put some points into Tenebrium.

May be related to how I didn't complete the Brandon quest because party AI disagreed with me.

I had to finish Brandon quest in an especific order for tenebrium skill become available. I don't know what I did the first time, but once

Spoiler

I had done the quest, nothing appeared in my skill list. So I reloaded, talked with him, got to the mines with his little box, put an ore inside it, got back and then finished the quest. This time it worked, I have the Tenebrium skill available now. I'm not sure, but I think this is the only way to have tenebrium skill for all of your party members. The book you can acquire only works with the char who reads it (again, I'm not sure about this).

 

[Minttunator]

Spoiler

I had done the quest, nothing appeared in my skill list. So I reloaded, talked with him, got to the mines with his little box, put an ore inside it, got back and then finished the quest. This time it worked, I have the Tenebrium skill available now. I'm not sure, but I think this is the only way to have tenebrium skill for all of your party members. The book you can acquire only works with the char who reads it (again, I'm not sure about this).

Brandon quest/Tenebrium skill spoilers!

Spoiler

To complete Brandon's quest you have to give him the box and the box has to contain at least 1 Tenebrium ore - I think it might not work if you have Tenebrium but it's not in the box, for instance. The book, unlike "normal" skillbooks, should be reusable. I'm also not 100% positible about the book, but I suppose Tigranes will have to try it and find out.

 

[Murk]

Spoiler

I had used a lump of tenebrium ore I had stolen from sacred stone and put it in the blood-stone lined box he gives you, hadn't even gone to troll king cave yet at this point. It just appeared after under the skill list where one-handed and two-handed are displayed.

 

[Tigranes]

Well that's stupid. Add to the fact that the Brandon quest is the only way to solve the Ben quest, and it really means there is only one option. Why even offer an 'alternative solution'? Anyway, I'll try and

Spoiler

look for the book somewhere in Sacred Stone. I don't know what you mean Mikayel by 'using' the ore either. I think one of my guys has Tenebrium 1 but only from that +1 item that drops from the mines or something.

 

[Murk]

Spoiler

To finish the Brandon quest. He gives you a box to steal tenebrium ore from the troll king, but you can just use any tenebrium ore lumps -- like the ones that are conveniently stacked up in the orc+goblin blacksmith shop in sacred stone. just gotta put it in the box and then talk to brandon after starting that quest.

 

[Raghar]

BTW what would happen when you don't hurt Braccus at all? Would we see him being a Lord of that area?

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

The game tells me the door isn't locked and I can't destroy them either.

Delete them perhaps, or add a zone transition somewhere that moves your party to the area beyond the door. It is possible that the opening of the door trips some plot event so check the properties of it now and the transition beyond it if one exists. (I don't know, haven't gotten to that point).

 

[Tigranes]

Weirder and weirder re. Tenebrium:

Spoiler

I think both party members DO have level 1 in Tenebrium, because without equipment bonuses to the skill they are wielding Tenebrium weapons without Rot. But I don't see it in the skillsheet. Is it the Goblin Smith Apprentice in Sacred Stone that is meant to sell the skillbook? He doesn't stock anything, and neither does the angry wizard who has elementals for gatekeepers.

Edit: OK, found it. But there's only one book in existence?

 

[Akratus]

Witcher is 5/5.

I like the Witcher, sue me Sure, I'd put the likes of Planescape and Fallout above it, but with only 5 marks it gets 5/5, especially if DOS gets 4/5

I know for sure that the Witcher 1 is a good game because I forced myself to replay it and I have never hated a game more. That is, for the first 3 chapters. Then, even though I hated it, the game made me like it all over again anyhow. And no, this is not stockholm syndrome. I really liked it this time around because I sided with the elves, and that let me fuck over a whole bunch of human pricks. And also, I figured out how I was handling the combat system wrong in my first playthrough. It's not that the combat is bad, you just have to learn how to use it properly.

Spoiler

Also, Yaevinn > Iorveth

 

[Metro]

People who think Witcher is better than DOS should be banned from the Codex.

 

[Mortmal]

Weirder and weirder re. Tenebrium:

Spoiler

I think both party members DO have level 1 in Tenebrium, because without equipment bonuses to the skill they are wielding Tenebrium weapons without Rot. But I don't see it in the skillsheet. Is it the Goblin Smith Apprentice in Sacred Stone that is meant to sell the skillbook? He doesn't stock anything, and neither does the angry wizard who has elementals for gatekeepers.

Edit: OK, found it. But there's only one book in existence?

I think so, but theres a quest in the miner village"steal ore from troll king" that will grant the skill to everyone .Of course you have to figure out how to pass the petrified troll.