Divinity Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition

[rusty_shackleford]

It was understandable on release because people had no clue which skills are good, which ones are OP and which ones are worthless trash. There are a lot of trap skills and skills that have very bad damage scaling for bizarre reason, or even skills that actually don't do anything useful or have better lower ap alternative. If you insist on using them, then yeah the game will be difficult, because you're basically memeing.

In general 3 ap skills are almost never worth it, unless you have nothing else. They're mostly to be used as a fight opener. Same for the source skills. They're mostly trash with a few busted exceptions like Pyroclastic Eruption which oneshots entire final boss room.
Setting aside Lone Wolf and Glass Cannon and Skin Graft all of which completely remove any challenge from Tactician - once you understand the power of adrenalin and chameleon cloak, torturer, teleport and "jump" skills, barely anything in the game can even touch you.

If you interested in depth which skills are good and why i recommend you to watch Grey NunSei on YT that did runs with different classes where he always explains what skills/traits are worth using for a particular build before starting fort joy.

why even play a game if you're just going to have someone else tell you how to play it

 

[RunningWolf]

why even play a game if you're just going to have someone else tell you how to play it

You absolutely don't have to listen, read or watch anyone. Its for those who still doubt that the game is piss easy on Tactician, assuming you actually know what you're doing.

 

[017]

The absolute level of filtering DOS2 is doing over the Codexers is incredible. It's quite beautiful, really.

Based on the above I would recommend the following games:
- My Talking Tom 2 (or My Talking Angela 2 if you are a girl)
- Candy Crush
- Angry Birds
- ASMR Slicing
- Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- Baldur's Gate 2 if you're feeling adventurous and would like to relive the only bright side of your childhood

 

[Volourn]

Just finished RePers coast. The game's cheesy Mode us still hilariously cheesy and lacks actual legit tactics most of the time. Beating Flaming Cross Girl and Genie at level 16 is hilarious. People who defend it are pro cheese. Every single tip shown on line is cheesy has hell or involves someone literally breaking the system. The game cheats so it is fine if the player cheats. Contrary to what casinos think. Lmao

 

[Volourn]

Made to it Arx. Things went smoother on Nameless Isle. Almost level 19. Not as many ridic battles where insta death is likely in 1st round without cheese. That said, the archer with their charm/knockdown arrows are often the difference maker. My favorite battle is the Alexander one. He us one of the most unique main baddies in anyvgame since his focus is mostly defense and buffing his allies. Normally, I teleport the hard hitters away, but this time I focused on sending him away. Still, another chapter in Cheese Challenge 2022 awards. R00fles!

 

[017]

The absolute level of filtering DOS2 is doing over the Codexers is incredible. It's quite beautiful, really.

Based on the above I would recommend the following games:
- My Talking Tom 2 (or My Talking Angela 2 if you are a girl)
- Candy Crush
- Angry Birds
- ASMR Slicing
- Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- Baldur's Gate 2 if you're feeling adventurous and would like to relive the only bright side of your childhood

 

[Morroweird]

The scene with Radeka the Witch is horribly badly written (SPOILERS if you haven't been in that encouter)

First off, she is described in ways that put emphasis on her supposed seductiveness and attractiveness, despise the fact you find her surrounded by butchered corpses and reeking of rot herself. It almost feels like a necrophilia fetish. I suppose the writer of that scene wanted to go for edgy psychosexual horror, but IMO it's a ridiculous failure.

Then there is the kiss scene. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the player is not presented with any option to resist or evade being kissed. Despite the fact the scene is physically presented as the characters standing on opposing ends of a canyon! Also, the PC can only passively accept or reciprocate the kiss to some degree, despite the circumstances described above. So now the writers chose to take away the agency of the player in their attempt to create an erotic horror scene.

In the end, your own PC is presented to you as easy to manipulate. Plus, you start the fight with an unfair debuff (Diseased), which is applied by taking away your agency in the conversation. Overall, for a game that puts so much weight on player freedom & choices, the Radeka encounter is a total failure.

 

[Darth Canoli]

The scene with Radeka the Witch is horribly badly written (SPOILERS if you haven't been in that encouter)

First off, she is described in ways that put emphasis on her supposed seductiveness and attractiveness, despise the fact you find her surrounded by butchered corpses and reeking of rot herself. It almost feels like a necrophilia fetish. I suppose the writer of that scene wanted to go for edgy psychosexual horror, but IMO it's a ridiculous failure.

Then there is the kiss scene. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the player is not presented with any option to resist or evade being kissed. Despite the fact the scene is physically presented as the characters standing on opposing ends of a canyon! Also, the PC can only passively accept or reciprocate the kiss to some degree, despite the circumstances described above. So now the writers chose to take away the agency of the player in their attempt to create an erotic horror scene.

In the end, your own PC is presented to you as easy to manipulate. Plus, you start the fight with an unfair debuff (Diseased), which is applied by taking away your agency in the conversation. Overall, for a game that puts so much weight on player freedom & choices, the Radeka encounter is a total failure.

With all the shit Larian pulled up to this point, nobody but you cared about that.
Most people skipped through dialog at this point.

 

[Roguey]

Then there is the kiss scene. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the player is not presented with any option to resist or evade being kissed. Despite the fact the scene is physically presented as the characters standing on opposing ends of a canyon! Also, the PC can only passively accept or reciprocate the kiss to some degree, despite the circumstances described above. So now the writers chose to take away the agency of the player in their attempt to create an erotic horror scene.

I didn't kiss her at all dude.

 

[Morroweird]

With all the shit Larian pulled up to this point, nobody but you cared about that.
Most people skipped through dialog at this point.

Up to that point I honestly did not run into anything that bad or forcedly edgy, although I probably skipped a lot od dialogue by getting out of the fort with teleportation.

I didn't kiss her at all dude.

Did you pick a 'die, abomination!!' option that went straight into combat? Because you bet I did not intend to kiss her or get with touching range, the game just went 'suddenly she presses her lips to yours'.

An unrelated thing I seriously dislike is the quest reward window. Why are the rewards completely unconnected with the narrative? Say, I managed to free a powerful being, who had been imprisoned by means of magic, possibly for decades. Would they say 'Thank you, kind strangers, please, take one, EXACTLY ONE, from this stash of magic items I happen to keep with me'.

These one-armed-bandit random rewards really feel out of place for me.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

your character got charmed, deal with it

 

[Roguey]

Did you pick a 'die, abomination!!' option that went straight into combat? Because you bet I did not intend to kiss her or get with touching range, the game just went 'suddenly she presses her lips to yours'.

My recollection of that encounter is that you, the player, have to tell her how hot you find her to find yourself in that situation. You played yourself.

These one-armed-bandit random rewards really feel out of place for me.

Swen likes his item fever.

 

[BruceVC]

Did you pick a 'die, abomination!!' option that went straight into combat? Because you bet I did not intend to kiss her or get with touching range, the game just went 'suddenly she presses her lips to yours'.

An unrelated thing I seriously dislike is the quest reward window. Why are the rewards completely unconnected with the narrative? Say, I managed to free a powerful being, who had been imprisoned by means of magic, possibly for decades. Would they say 'Thank you, kind strangers, please, take one, EXACTLY ONE, from this stash of magic items I happen to keep with me'.

These one-armed-bandit random rewards really feel out of place for me.

Dont feel guilty, I am the same as you. I also like Romance in games

 

[Morroweird]

your character got charmed, deal with it

that I can accept, but shouldn't it get blocked by magic armour?

 

[017]

The scene with Radeka the Witch is horribly badly written (SPOILERS if you haven't been in that encouter)

First off, she is described in ways that put emphasis on her supposed seductiveness and attractiveness, despise the fact you find her surrounded by butchered corpses and reeking of rot herself. It almost feels like a necrophilia fetish. I suppose the writer of that scene wanted to go for edgy psychosexual horror, but IMO it's a ridiculous failure.

Then there is the kiss scene. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the player is not presented with any option to resist or evade being kissed. Despite the fact the scene is physically presented as the characters standing on opposing ends of a canyon! Also, the PC can only passively accept or reciprocate the kiss to some degree, despite the circumstances described above. So now the writers chose to take away the agency of the player in their attempt to create an erotic horror scene.

In the end, your own PC is presented to you as easy to manipulate. Plus, you start the fight with an unfair debuff (Diseased), which is applied by taking away your agency in the conversation. Overall, for a game that puts so much weight on player freedom & choices, the Radeka encounter is a total failure.

First post in like a year only to expose yourself as a retard. Actually kind of based, ngl.

Anyway: Cope. Touch grass. Read Hemingway. Tolstoy. Dostoevsky. Eliot. Kafka. Alighieri. Shakespeare. Have sex every now and then. Learn about narrative devices and styles of writing. No, Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life is not going to make you stop being a tasteless incel. Pussy. Neckbeard. Basement-dwelling goblin.

"First off, she is described in ways that put emphasis on her supposed seductiveness and attractiveness, despise the fact you find her surrounded by butchered corpses and reeking of rot herself."
Besides the fact that this QUITE LITERALLY doesn't happen unless you choose to engage with her in a seductory fashion (taking her hand), this oxymoron works, as it engages the player's mind in a very simple, easy-to-understand way, and is pretty much the first thing you're told by the narrator. Only after you take her hand (a choice you can fucking make) will the narrator note her attractiveness and even then will only touch on how her garments touch her skin. The option of engaging with a person romantically within this context is wrong. Everything you know about Radeka up until that point is telling you that this is wrong (even if you are unable to take into account these simple visual cues, Slane spells out for you that she is pretty much evil). And yet you still have the agency to do whatever the fuck you want. It practically introduces a meta layer over the scene and gives you, the player, the agency over following your instincts or following your curiosity by doing the thing that is clearly wrong within the given context.

"It almost feels like a necrophilia fetish. I suppose the writer of that scene wanted to go for edgy psychosexual horror, but IMO it's a ridiculous failure."
The writer establishes the scene and conveys the atmosphere. You've given clues about her personality with descriptions of her mannerisms. You're then provided with the choice. Your choice leads into establishing the outcome of the interaction, her initial personality and ultimately her true image and the true purpose of the cave you just visited. How this will make you feel it is up to you.

But no matter whatever the fuck you make of that whole interaction, it never implies any sort of necrophilia. Psychosexual horror? Stop projecting, you insecure double-chined toad. The game baited you for being a coomer (or a white knight), get over it. The scene is gory, but it's hardly horror. It's clearly over-the-top both in terms of dialogue delivery and context surrounding it. The writer is having a laugh at your expense for thinking that you could put your hand into a hornet's nest and not get punished for it.

"Then there is the kiss scene. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the player is not presented with any option to resist or evade being kissed."
God forbid the game could ever punish you for making a dumb choice. On a rare occasion, an RPG game nudged you in a wrong direction by having a dialogue option that heavily contrasted other options, you went for it, and got punished both in terms of your character being caught off-guard and appearing weak and being handicapped in combat shortly after.

"Despite the fact the scene is physically presented as the characters standing on opposing ends of a canyon!"
The option that you selected said "take her hand". Within the context of the scene, you baboon, you were right next to her. Cope and dillate. Also, for the love of Allah and all the virgins in the Paradise, just accept that this is a AA indie game and that these decisions likely were made consciously on developer's side. If they did the other way around, you'd now be complaining that your character ran to her, talked with her, and thus abandoned a strategic position that got you killed, even though you wanted to talk to her from afar, because you're a contrarian cunt.

"Also, the PC can only passively accept or reciprocate the kiss to some degree, despite the circumstances described above. So now the writers chose to take away the agency of the player in their attempt to create an erotic horror scene."
You were given agency. But once you made the "wrong" choice, the game simply took advantage of the situation and didn't let you escape it. Imagine being so spoilt that you expect every dialog option to do exactly what you want, without drawbacks or twists. I bet if you were playing a necromancer, and had this exact same option in a random dialogue, you would expect it to go through without any drawbacks, just because it's your character and not an NPC doing it.

"In the end, your own PC is presented to you as easy to manipulate."
You are easy to manipulate. In real life, you're probably the nice guy who would give everything for a crumb of pussy, so I'm sure whenever a woman speaks to you and is nice to you just because she is your co-worker, you think she's suddenly in love with you.

"Plus, you start the fight with an unfair debuff (Diseased), which is applied by taking away your agency in the conversation.
A dubious dialogue choice providing you with a debuff outside of dialogue itself is good design. Your action had consequences, and your game was made more challenging as a result, which also isn't a bad thing, in within itself, unless you're max soy trashlord.

"Overall, for a game that puts so much weight on player freedom & choices, the Radeka encounter is a total failure."
"No!" Overall, for a game that puts so much weight on player freedom & choices, the Radeka encounter is just right and unique enough to be remembered for the duration of the game. It's a 5-minute narrative interaction with a 20-minute combat interaction that follows it up. It's a minor aspect of the game, featuring a very minor character, with a minor impact on the overall story. For what it is, it could have no player agency tied to it at all, and yet it does. The main twist surrounding this short interaction is unique, goofy, and over-the-top enough for an intelligent person to appreciate it. You don't need to be a pervert to find an interaction like that interesting, amusing, or simply funny, because it is so BLATANTLY THE WRONG THING TO DO in the provided context.

A game has random loot. A shocker.
She's actually an example of what you want, dipshit. She drops a very specific wand that can literally help you complete act 1 as a whole (but naturally, the game being player-agency driven, it does provide several alternative solutions). Name one good RPG game with a purely deterministic loot system that is scalable for 100+ hours of gameplay and player progression. Name one, name one, name one, name one, name one, name one, name one, name one, name one, name one, name one, name one, name one.

That armor system jab.
Filtered.

"B-B-B-But I didn't take her hand. Promise!"
Then the game pwned you some other way. Either way, you can avoid the interaction quite easily.

 

[agris]

Is BruceVC Fluent with less brain damage?

 

[Morroweird]

***snip***

***snip***

Haha, I respect if the writers wanted to punish hard the types who would fall for tail even in the middle of an abbatoir.

But they likely missed something in the dialogue tree. I loaded the save specially to verify this and talking as the Red Prince the options went:
>>> THINK BETTER OF TAKING HER HAND AND STAND AWAY FROM HER
>>> FIGHT AGAINST THE URGE TO BE SICK AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF
>>> go on to discuss the dragon/this cave/the Magisters etc.

So I was as guarded as possible and just tried to get any info out of the situation. And I never got to talk with Slane before, given how he was in a soulchained-stupor.

So the writers' intentions was probably along the lines of the sheer schooling you attempted to give me above. A valiant attempt. But the game going, HA! TAKE THAT, HORNY NERD! ultimately felt like a whiff.

 

[017]

tl;dr

 

[V_K]

your character got charmed, deal with it

that I can accept, but shouldn't it get blocked by magic armour?

Expecting the narrative in a modern RPG to acknowledge the mechanics. LOL.

 

[Volourn]

"Name one good RPG game with a purely deterministic loot system that is scalable for 100+ hours of gameplay and player progression."

BG2.

FUkkin' retart.

 

[NJClaw]

BG2 is a 100+ hours game only if you fall asleep while going through the Underdark. And even then you need to hit your head pretty hard so that you don't wake up for a while.

 

[Volourn]

BG2 is clearly longer than DOS2. PLus, the 100+ hour shit is pure hyperbole. LMFAO

BG2 is as long as any game.

Now, go cry to someone else you little DOS2 fanboy bulllshitter.

 

[Roguey]

BG2 is a 100+ hours game only if you fall asleep while going through the Underdark. And even then you need to hit your head pretty hard so that you don't wake up for a while.

https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=810
Every single completionist run is above 100 hours, Volourn wins this.

 

[NJClaw]

BG2 is a 100+ hours game only if you fall asleep while going through the Underdark. And even then you need to hit your head pretty hard so that you don't wake up for a while.

https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=810
Every single completionist run is above 100 hours, Volourn wins this.

Howlongtobeat numbers don't really mean much to me when I've recently played both games, especially since for the last two categories sometimes it throws around random amounts. For a "leisure completionist" run of D:OS2 the reported playtime is 380 hours: if we have to consider those numbers, D:OS2 is two times as long as BG2.

I've completed BG2 twice on my Steam account (once with ToB), doing every subquest I encountered, and my total playtime is around 120 hours. At the same time, I completed D:OS2 once, skipping all the optional content in the last two acts (other than companions' quests) because I no longer cared about it, and my playtime is around 102 hours. I don't really know enough about BG2 to explain this only with "I already played it 10 years ago".

Now, go cry to someone else you little DOS2 fanboy bulllshitter

I'm such a DOS2 fanboy that, while I plan to replay BG2 in the future, I will never touch D:OS2 again in my entire life.

BG2 is a huge game, with probably more quests and definitely more fights than D:OS2, but it doesn't take nearly as much time to finish it. Blame it on whatever you want (TB, loot system that forces you to compare items every two steps, clunky interface that slows you while you examine thousands of containers), but there's no way both are "100 hours" games.

 

[BruceVC]

BG2 is a 100+ hours game only if you fall asleep while going through the Underdark. And even then you need to hit your head pretty hard so that you don't wake up for a while.

https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=810
Every single completionist run is above 100 hours, Volourn wins this.

Howlongtobeat numbers don't really mean much to me when I've recently played both games, especially since for the last two categories sometimes it throws around random amounts. For a "leisure completionist" run of D:OS2 the reported playtime is 380 hours: if we have to consider those numbers, D:OS2 is two times as long as BG2.

I've completed BG2 twice on my Steam account (once with ToB), doing every subquest I encountered, and my total playtime is around 120 hours. At the same time, I completed D:OS2 once, skipping all the optional content in the last two acts (other than companions' quests) because I no longer cared about it, and my playtime is around 102 hours. I don't really know enough about BG2 to explain this only with "I already played it 10 years ago".

Now, go cry to someone else you little DOS2 fanboy bulllshitter

I'm such a DOS2 fanboy that, while I plan to replay BG2 in the future, I will never touch D:OS2 again in my entire life.

BG2 is a huge game, with probably more quests and definitely more fights than D:OS2, but it doesn't take nearly as much time to finish it. Blame it on whatever you want (TB, loot system that forces you to compare items every two steps, clunky interface that slows you while you examine thousands of containers), but there's no way both are "100 hours" games.

I loved both D:OS2 and BG:ToB and in fact they respectively 3 and 1 on my top 10 RPG of all time with Witcher 3 being number 2

So you can trust me when I say BG2 is an excellent game, volo is right