Making a second attempt at this, in co-op with a bro. (His idea, for the record.) I'm having more fun than last time, although I recall finding the game all right for the first chapter before the fatigue properly set in during chapter 2, which is where we are now.
We're playing with the reduced bloat mod. It's hard to say how much of an impact it makes, but we're definitely having to swap out gear less frequently than last time, which is a relief. The itemisation is still dogshit but what can you do.
The faults with this game have been analysed so thoroughly here that there's no point in rehashing them. The upshot is that they produce an overwhelming feeling of disjointedness.
Our party has three characters who do primarily physical damage and one who does magical dmage. Most encounters play out as two parallel combats, where the enemies with low physical armour are assigned to the three and the ones with low magic armour are assigned to the one. These two combats are happening in the same environment but basically don't interact much. Enemies will cross over and attack characters belonging to the other combat, but there's nothing those characters can do about it so it doesn't change anything.
About half of the "class" skills that are required to unlock new abilities are worthless to put points into past the hard requirements for abilities, and 90% of worthwhile abilities only require one or two points in their respective skill. This leads to absurd things like my necromancer dude putting all his skill points into Warfare at levelups instead of Necromancy because investing in Necromancy is pointless, and now that he's done that, he may as well pick up Warfare skills because why the hell not. There's no build identity whatsoever, just a series of walking composites of random abilites from random schools.
Enemies are the same, with the result that you can never count on any enemy behaving in a particular way. You just have to wait and see what sort of bullshit they pull out of their asses and there's nothing you can do to anticipate it based on their name or what they look like. Positioning is completely irrelevant since everyone teleports all the time. Most encounters teleport in extra enemies after the combat starts, so planning around what you can see is irrelevant. It feels like what I imagine MMOs probably feel like, where you just faceroll over abilities as they come out of cooldown, since you can't predict anything and any random bullshit can happen at any time.
It's baffling to play a game so heavily geared towards co-op that does so many things to discourage cooperation. All the pieces that make up this game are floating around in a vacuum, occasionally coming into contact but never building to satisfying sequences of action and reaction. My co-op bro and I are just playing separate games near each other most of the time.
over. We're still having some fun because of the things this game shares with D:OS1 and BG3, and because any co-op game is an excuse to shoot the shit.
