Divinity Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition

[a bear named spigot]

and why are you posting them

 

[Infinitron]

It's reminding me of the Daily WTF's short-lived webcomic Mandatory Fun Day. They should open up a comments section and let people make parody strips. Go full "so bad it's good".

Spoiler

Mandatory Fun Day, a comic The Daily WTF ran for several weeks. Season 1 featured poor artwork, cut-and-paste characters, anemic writing, and humor so thin you could see through it; it was even colored in an eye-searing MS Paintstyle. Season 2 redeemed it somewhat, but the general distaste and endless mockery toward the comic led to it being removed.

• The only humor to be found was usually the re-edited strips found in the comments. After some time, the comic's author started acknowledging the best-edited versions of the previous comic in each post. Not sure what that says about his attitude towards his own comic...

 

[Kem0sabe]

If this shit is being written by larian, it would not surprise me at all...

 

[Elex]

If this shit is being written by larian, it would not surprise me at all...

yeah people love larian humor, they must add some random rng loot and an armor system for a perfect comic /s

 

[Lacrymas]

It's probably written by someone on the cuck squad or it's written by someone else from it every day.

 

[Crichton]

I finally finished this about a week ago and I keep meaning to post some impressions but there's so much going on that it's hard to decide what to focus on. I think the simplest way to think about D:OS2 is this: imagine that you told someone really earnest to try to improve D:OS and that person kept adding stuff to it; more writing, more plot, more NPCs, more involved NPC side-quests, more side-quests generally, more locations, more systems, more skills, more spells per skill, more attributes, more factions, more dialog options, more reactivity, etc, etc, etc.

In a lot of ways D:OS2 is what D:OS fans asked for but I don't think they realized what the consequences of all this would be.

Good Things:

- The writing is a step up overall, in some places, like the descriptive dialog, it's a huge and unexpected step-up; I wouldn't have thought that would work, but it does. There's more backstory, more nuance to the characters, more options to dealing with all these new characters. You can see how much effort went into it. Early on, the contrast between the sourcerer/magister/paladin conflict and D:OS1's "we are source hunters investigating orks" is Donald Trump YUUUUUUUUGE!

- They clearly wanted to make the combat more sophisticated and in some ways they succeeded; the polymorph and necromancy skill trees add lots of cool stuff and, in a big improvement over D:OS, not all the new toys are for INT-based characters.

- The freedom/reactivity are at least as good as D:OS; don't want to do the quest, pickpocket the questgiver, don't like working with Y, there's a guy named Z across town offering a different deal, don't like all the wacky NPCs, kill them, need info from that asshole you just killed, maybe his spirit will talk, need race X for some quest, rip someone's face off and impersonate them.

- This bleeds over into combat as well, make the NPCs into anything you want! 4 Two-handed fighters, 4 lighting mages, two fire-mages and two 1H/polymorphers w/ medusa head! Choose from a huge variety of pretty viable parties.

Not-so-good Things

- I don't know how they didn't see this coming, but they took all the problems with the attribute system in D:OS and ported them over into the skill system by making skill attributes. So know instead of simple MAD (multiple attribute disorder) limiting all these "fun" builds the game keeps recommending to you in D:OS, you have the fact that not being mega-invested in a small number of skills fucks you over as well. Summoning 5 Pyromancy 5 instead of Summoning 10, fucked. Warfare 5 and Scoundrel 5 instead of Warfare 10, fucked. Pyromancy 5 Geomancy 5 instead of Pyromancy 10, still pretty much fucked.

- As a probable consequence of all this new, super flexible content, they didn't have time to test shit. I haven't seen so many bugged quests/journal entries since ToEE! And it would be even worse if they didn't write the slate clean at the end of each chapter! I had quests that started without a quest-giver, gave no indication of who might care about this shit, didn't close, and pretty much every other dysfunction you could think of and if you weren't playing with debloat, all that lost XP would really chafe.

- Which brings us nicely to the exponential scaling. I pretty much universally avoid mods for a first playthrough but after 1 chapter of constant inventory churn, I just couldn't take it. I couldn't find the energy to go on until I installed debloat ("D&D-like" scaling). They took one of the dumbest aspects of D:OS and made it even dumber. In place of "The mighty axe of Braccus Rex becomes vendor trash after 1 chapter" we have "every goddamn thing in your inventory becomes vendor trash as soon as you see that golden level-up arrow".

- And unfortunately we're going to circle back around to the writing here. It doesn't just go downhill in the later chapters, there are specific pieces that are 100% awful. I tried out the "romance" with the elf chick and it's 1000 megaZuckerbergs of cringe. It's just nauseating. And it's not like I'm some sort of high-class RPG romance aficionado, I went through the Aerie romance in BG2, all the way through ToB, the baby, that weird delayed gestation thing, the whole deal; still lightyears better than D:OS2 romance. And even that might be better than the finale:

Spoiler

So you already have this Bioware-style big reveal that Lucian is still alive; ok, that works. Then Dallis has been waiting for you and has some dude with her, OK. The dude reveals what everyone else already knows but is completely non-obvious to the player, that random dude is the great Braccus Rex. Wait what? And the only reason he's not killing everyone is that he's chained up, except he seems to just be standing around, I guess the chains are magical. Except wait, there are no chains, it was all a trick, he was just waiting for you to finish making your big dialog choice. Except he doesn't care what you choose. Actually, you know what? no one cares, when you win the fight against Braccus Rex and this god-killing monster that he just pulled out of his ass, you just get another three options.

I think somewhere in the back of your mind you can probably imagine a scene like this that works. Maybe a giant Braccus Rex is chained up in the bottom of the temple with more chains on him than Scrooge saw on Marley's ghost. Dallis arrives right behind you after you unwittingly open the way for her, she betrays Lucian to free BR. Maybe if you keep Lucian alive through the whole fight you get an additional ending option? It's not that any single thing is completely unworkable, but the final product looks like some poor intern had to take three different endings and mash them together at crunch time.

 

[Haplo]

Good analysis. You forgot the retarded armor though.

 

[KevinV12000]

I was having a great, great time with this game, and trying to play it straight. I was winning some tough battles and using a very flexible strategy, trying out new things, using my head.

Then comes this demon Adramalihk fight.

I've now played the fight through five times. My party is 20th level. Ifan (War 10, Necro 5, 2H 3, Hunts 2) - Red Prince (War 10, 2H 8, Hunts 2) - Beast (War 10, Necro 5, 2H 3, Hunts 2) - Lohse (Hydro 10, Necro 5, War 3, Hunts 2).

We had doused all the candles with Malady's help.

Result:

1) Ifan, Beast dead after first enemy move in first round (the demon), RP down to 200 hp. Lohse charmed by next enemy move. RP and Lohse killed without opporunity to take action.

2) Ifan, Beast and RP dead after first enemy move. Lohse charmed. Lohse killed.

3) No first round deaths. Summoned bone widow spider charmed. Got demon knocked down. 2nd round, he's back up with 2700 replenished phys arm (no perserverence was noted...), this time he kills everyone with laser ray + spontaneous combustion + cursed fireball.

4) All killed in first round.

5) Rage quit.

I love tough fights, I really do. I really enjoyed the slugfest in the final arena, for example. But this is just silly. 20th level characters more than 1/2 equiped with Divine level equipment, one-shotted. And I'm only playing classic!

 

[Abu Antar]

It's doable, but it's a bullshit fight, to be honest. Use summons and cheese it.

 

[Crichton]

I was having a great, great time with this game, and trying to play it straight. I was winning some tough battles and using a very flexible strategy, trying out new things, using my head.

Then comes this demon Adramalihk fight.

I've now played the fight through five times. My party is 20th level. Ifan (War 10, Necro 5, 2H 3, Hunts 2) - Red Prince (War 10, 2H 8, Hunts 2) - Beast (War 10, Necro 5, 2H 3, Hunts 2) - Lohse (Hydro 10, Necro 5, War 3, Hunts 2).

We had doused all the candles with Malady's help.

Result:

1) Ifan, Beast dead after first enemy move in first round (the demon), RP down to 200 hp. Lohse charmed by next enemy move. RP and Lohse killed without opporunity to take action.

2) Ifan, Beast and RP dead after first enemy move. Lohse charmed. Lohse killed.

3) No first round deaths. Summoned bone widow spider charmed. Got demon knocked down. 2nd round, he's back up with 2700 replenished phys arm (no perserverence was noted...), this time he kills everyone with laser ray + spontaneous combustion + cursed fireball.

4) All killed in first round.

5) Rage quit.

I love tough fights, I really do. I really enjoyed the slugfest in the final arena, for example. But this is just silly. 20th level characters more than 1/2 equiped with Divine level equipment, one-shotted. And I'm only playing classic!

My experience was similar to yours when I tried talking to him. However if you just start slaughtering his nurses, you can trigger his transformation a couple rooms away. If he has to move that far to get to you in his first round, it won't leave many AP left for his 1-round kill bullshit. That plus some summoned cannon fodder plus arrow storm was enough to sink him in my game (but I was also playing with Debloat Mod by then, so I can't be certain it would work the same way in vanilla).

 

[Bio Force Ape]

He might be buggy. My first attempt he had some ridiculous amount of HP and armor (like 23,000 magic armor!). Impossible. So I reloaded and he had like 5,000 magic armor and half the HP's.

 

[LESS T_T]

Oh right I almost forgot to post exciting comic series: http://divinity.game/en/magic

A DIVINE ADVENTURE: THE POWER OF MAGIC
Magic is a powerful art, and the ones who are experienced in it naturally have the respect of others. Well, at least most of the time...

Do you have it? Then click HERE to claim your reward, and use the code to unlock the file.

Spoiler

Second panel, the dwarf's teeth

 

[Elex]

 

[LESS T_T]

Another day, another comic, and another Fane reward: http://divinity.game/en/ghost

A DIVINE ADVENTURE: THE GHOST OF XMAS PAST
Magic is a powerful art, and the ones who are experienced in it naturally have the respect of others. Well, at least most of the time...

Do you have it? Then click HERE to claim your reward, and use the code to unlock the file.

Spoiler

Third panel, foot of the beard christmas ghost

It's coming to an end...

 

[Lacrymas]

Wow, a female rogue who is only in it for the money and is counting her coins, that kind of joke/character/representation is so old it smells like a graveyard in here.

 

[Jinn]

It's coming to an end...

Thank fuck.

 

[a bear named spigot]

could be worse, if the comics were an Obsidian production they'd each get their own news post courtesy of the news jew.

 

[LESS T_T]

http://divinity.game/en/end

A DIVINE ADVENTURE: THE END
Each story comes to an end. Even a GM campaign.

Do you have it? Then click HERE to claim your reward, and use the code to unlock the file.

Spoiler

The first panel, middle of the tree

The final reward is christmas song!

 

[Darth Roxor]

'merry xmas' indeed

 

[DraQ]

Crichton
Agreed. All in all the game is great, but that makes fundamental design blunders (bloat, armor, attributes) all the more baffling.

Also, I wanted to congratulate Larian for getting out of writing slump that resulted in DOS1, but looking at the comics that would have been premature.

 

[cruel]

I've tried playing this for like 4 or 5th time, but armor mechanic and seeing happy dudes running around on burning surface with ' burning blocked by magic armor' made me rage quit. Pity, everything else other that core mechanic seems excellent

Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk

 

[Jezal_k23]

It's probably the most confusing game I played this year. I can't deny it's good, and can't deny it's horribly stupid simultaneously. It was such a weird experience. It has absolute potential to be excellent, and yet it's stupid. I'll wait to play later next year maybe, at some point.

 

[One Stoned Bastard]

I've tried playing this for like 4 or 5th time, but armor mechanic and seeing happy dudes running around on burning surface with ' burning blocked by magic armor' made me rage quit. Pity, everything else other that core mechanic seems excellent

I also restarted the game a bunch of times. I really want to like this game but just like the previous entries I start getting bored from the moment I open the character creator and I'm asleep by the time the tutorial section is over. Maybe I should just accept that the Divinity series isn't for everyone, cause they're cool games and all, there's just something almost supernaturally boring about them for me. It's a shame because environmental interactivity and all that bullshit is the sort of thing that's missing in other games like this.

 

[Lacrymas]

I don't think waiting will do anything. Larian are already convinced that whatever they do is more valuable than the Holy Grail, so they won't change anything significantly, at most they are going to fix any bugs that are left and tweak some numbers.

 

[Luckmann]

I don't think waiting will do anything. Larian are already convinced that whatever they do is more valuable than the Holy Grail, so they won't change anything significantly, at most they are going to fix any bugs that are left and tweak some numbers.

I really wish this wasn't true, but all indications point towards that it is.