Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Divinity Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition

NJClaw

OoOoOoOoOoh
Patron
Joined
Aug 30, 2016
Messages
7,513
Location
Pronouns: rusts/rusty
Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
Not to defend this game or anything, but "why does my character want to escape this concentration camp?" is a dumb fuckin question
I think it's more about making the player care about it than anything.

"You're in this boat full of dangerous people and there's a murder to solve"
"Now this even more dangerous woman is destroying the boat"
"Now you're in Alcatraz"

It's hard not to feel disconnected.
 

V_K

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
Location
at a Nowhere near you
It's a Larian game, duh. They've never cared much about coherence, whether narrative or mechanical for that matter. How's that even a surprise to anyone who has played any Larian game before is beyond me.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
Not to defend this game or anything, but "why does my character want to escape this concentration camp?" is a dumb fuckin question
I think it's more about making the player care about it than anything.

"You're in this boat full of dangerous people and there's a murder to solve"
"Now this even more dangerous woman is destroying the boat"
"Now you're in Alcatraz"

It's hard not to feel disconnected.
Yes, it's not so much understanding the motivation to escape, it's more about making the player care about that motivation. Everything feels very disconnected, as if a 7-man cuck squad wrote it without having an overall vision they are working towards and everyone writing whatever they feel like. And it literally is that, every quest is an island. In a different dimension. Slasher movies and porn better contextualize what they are doing.
 

FugueLah

Scholar
Joined
Jan 3, 2016
Messages
137
So, I am thinking about buying this game since it is on sale. How does this one compare to the first? Despite its supposed flaws, I enjoyed the first one till the end and if this one is comparable or better I won't regret a purchase.
 

bec de corbin

Educated
Joined
Sep 21, 2020
Messages
207
I think if you enjoyed the first one you'll probably enjoy the sequel as well. Some people really don't like the armor mechanic, but there's mods to get rid of it if it annoys you.
 

MWaser

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 22, 2015
Messages
607
Location
Where you won't find me
So, I am thinking about buying this game since it is on sale. How does this one compare to the first? Despite its supposed flaws, I enjoyed the first one till the end and if this one is comparable or better I won't regret a purchase.
I think if you enjoyed the first one you'll probably enjoy the sequel as well. Some people really don't like the armor mechanic, but there's mods to get rid of it if it annoys you.
The game has way more high-level problems than just armor - enforced round-robin turns causing initiative to be worthless, exponential stat bloat - and screwed up itemization caused in relationt o it, and bad encounter design that leads you to getting constantly ambushed are just the few most damaging ones I can think of off the top of my head that weren't present in DivOS1, which was a considerably better game (albeit not without its own flaws)
 

Darth Canoli

Arcane
Joined
Jun 8, 2018
Messages
5,687
Location
Perched on a tree
I think it's more about making the player care about it than anything.

"You're in this boat full of dangerous people and there's a murder to solve"
"Now this even more dangerous woman is destroying the boat"
"Now you're in Alcatraz"

It's hard not to feel disconnected.

You fool, the first mod you should have grabbed was the one that skips the ship's intro, a real marvel.

I never made it past the first island, killed the magisters once and then stopped, i was playing on max difficulty with the epic mod, bad idea, the extra encounters are extremely difficult and with the terrible combat system, it's the purest form of masochism.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
There's nothing that fixes this mess, but I used the saving throws. No idea about the other thing.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
Even with armor-based saving throws, removed bloat, less experience gain, initiative-based turn order, and what have you, the biggest problem still remains and is an issue in almost every encounter - the split between the two armors. It's very easy to bring an enemy down to very few hit points but not have any character left to do the type of damage required, so you waste that character's turn by doing damage to the wrong armor type while the mob is still alive the next round. This forces you to have both damage types on all characters, so they start feeling samey. With the fixes I mentioned, it is definitely playable, but the worst design decision still niggles at you constantly.
 

Ismaul

Thought Criminal #3333
Patron
Joined
Apr 18, 2005
Messages
1,871,807
Location
On Patroll
Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech A Beautifully Desolate Campaign My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
It's very easy to bring an enemy down to very few hit points but not have any character left to do the type of damage required, so you waste that character's turn by doing damage to the wrong armor type while the mob is still alive the next round.
Another case of needing to git gud.

It's an epidemic.


This forces you to have both damage types on all characters, so they start feeling samey.
It would feel so much less samey if there was just one type of armor like you want, right?
 

Iskramor

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck
Joined
Jul 8, 2017
Messages
910
Location
Bosnia and Herzegovina
It's very easy to bring an enemy down to very few hit points but not have any character left to do the type of damage required, so you waste that character's turn by doing damage to the wrong armor type while the mob is still alive the next round.
Another case of needing to git gud.

It's an epidemic.


This forces you to have both damage types on all characters, so they start feeling samey.
It would feel so much less samey if there was just one type of armor like you want, right?
Low effort trolling even by your standards.
 

Ismaul

Thought Criminal #3333
Patron
Joined
Apr 18, 2005
Messages
1,871,807
Location
On Patroll
Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech A Beautifully Desolate Campaign My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
Low effort trolling even by your standards.
Except I'm not trolling.

I truly believe the criticism about the armor system is overblown, it greatly improves the gameplay compared to DOS the first, and I have argued so in this thread and others when I'm not bored with this one-sided debate. The addition of armor and the new initiative system, while not without flaws, do what they were meant to do: prevent you from stacking initiative to act first and disabling the enemies' ability to even act by applying elemental effects to them before their first turn. It also pushes you to diversify your builds, and find synergies between your characters. I could go on.

I also argued that not knowing how to deal efficient damage, admittedly because the damage formula is nowhere shown to the player, makes people do low damage to armors and feel like it's this huge issue they have to deal with. The solution to that being, obviously, learning how to deal damage efficiently to remove armor. In other words, gitting gud.

Also, the idea that having two types of damage on a character makes them samey is frankly ridiculous. There is much more to a character than its damage type. And reducing the damage types to one by removing the armor system wouldn't in any way fix this supposed sameness.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
All of this could've been avoided by not handing out CC abilities like candy. The armor system is a ridiculous solution that makes matters worse. If they didn't want us to stack initiative in order to always act first, let it be a dice roll which gets modified by our initiative stat.
 

Ismaul

Thought Criminal #3333
Patron
Joined
Apr 18, 2005
Messages
1,871,807
Location
On Patroll
Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech A Beautifully Desolate Campaign My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
...not to mention that stacking CC abilities was the single fun thing in otherwise painfully mediocre DOS1.
Yes, but that's not the issue we're talking about. It's the combo of stacking initiative and CC'ing everything before the enemy acts, that basically cancelled the whole gameplay. DOS2 overcompensated, but it was still better than DOS1.
 

Ismaul

Thought Criminal #3333
Patron
Joined
Apr 18, 2005
Messages
1,871,807
Location
On Patroll
Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech A Beautifully Desolate Campaign My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
The armor system is a ridiculous solution that makes matters worse.
No, it adds to tactics. You have to choose priority targets to CC and therefore from which to remove armor first. Also, if you want to be optimal, you'll want to attack the weakest armor of the enemy, and therefore use attacks and characters that are better at damaging it.
 

V_K

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
Location
at a Nowhere near you
Yes, but that's not the issue we're talking about
The issue is that the armor system took away the single fun aspect of DOS while not improving anything else. There's literally zero reason to play it now. If I want a mediocre TB RPG, I'd rather go for Deadfire in TB mode - that one at least has a fun setting.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
The armor system is a ridiculous solution that makes matters worse.
No, it adds to tactics. You have to choose priority targets to CC and therefore from which to remove armor first.
But that's not how it goes down in practice. When you've stripped the enemy of their armor, you don't CC them in order to focus on someone else, you kill them to permanently remove them from play. There's also the fact you need both kinds of CC on all characters in order to not waste any character's turn by targeting the other armor type. There are much more elegant solutions to this problem and that's what it comes down to, even if the armor system did what it purports to do.
 
Last edited:

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom