Game News Divinity: Original Sin 2 Released

[Valky]

ok I get it, I'm gullible

 

[Axie]

(...) The Red Prince is probably too iconic not to have him in my party. (...)

My Fane undude stabbed the bastard while he was "helpless" and moaning about water-splashing. Fuck him, let him wait second pass.

Can you kill-off all the companions at the start like that?

Minutes and shipwreck later... Apparently not. Even though I "killed" him in the ship intro scene, he was alive and well, waiting me right at the start of the game at the shore. v0v

 

[Suicidal]

I didn't even realize it got released, and I was waiting for it too.

To the people who're playing - how's the game so far? Also, how is the combat difficulty? This was the biggest flaw of the first game for me. The game became way too easy by the end of the 1st act.

 

[Bohrain]

I didn't even realize it got released, and I was waiting for it too.

To the people who're playing - how's the game so far? Also, how is the combat difficulty? This was the biggest flaw of the first game for me. The game became way too easy by the end of the 1st act.

Disables no longer have a percentage chance to be resisted, instead characters have physical and magical armor pools that have to be depleted before physical or magical disables can affect them (there are a couple of exceptions, anyone can be teleported or slowed by oil regardless of armor).
This means that you no longer quickload if you get a bad roll at the starting turn, it's more deterministic. On the other hand, fights are more about quickly chewing through opponent armor and keeping them in disable loop once you start chewing at their actual health.
It heavily incentives skewing your party damage output to one damage type. As an example, if I deplete an enemy out of physical armor my physical damage dealers can both disable and damage the enemy, but my magical damage dealer can do neither until it's magical armor is depleted. I play on classic (equivalent to normal difficulty) and so far it seems that 3 out of 4 party members doing physical damage while one doing primarily magical works out pretty well, since enemies tend to have a lot of one armor type and little the other.

Personally I enjoy the game immensely more than the first one, throwing oil and fire afterwards was the only tactic you needed in the first game for too long.

 

[Black]

(...) The Red Prince is probably too iconic not to have him in my party. (...)

My Fane undude stabbed the bastard while he was "helpless" and moaning about water-splashing. Fuck him, let him wait second pass.

Can you kill-off all the companions at the start like that?

Minutes and shipwreck later... Apparently not. Even though I "killed" him in the ship intro scene, he was alive and well, waiting me right at the start of the game at the shore. v0v

 

[Suicidal]

I didn't even realize it got released, and I was waiting for it too.

To the people who're playing - how's the game so far? Also, how is the combat difficulty? This was the biggest flaw of the first game for me. The game became way too easy by the end of the 1st act.

Disables no longer have a percentage chance to be resisted, instead characters have physical and magical armor pools that have to be depleted before physical or magical disables can affect them (there are a couple of exceptions, anyone can be teleported or slowed by oil regardless of armor).
This means that you no longer quickload if you get a bad roll at the starting turn, it's more deterministic. On the other hand, fights are more about quickly chewing through opponent armor and keeping them in disable loop once you start chewing at their actual health.
It heavily incentives skewing your party damage output to one damage type. As an example, if I deplete an enemy out of physical armor my physical damage dealers can both disable and damage the enemy, but my magical damage dealer can do neither until it's magical armor is depleted. I play on classic (equivalent to normal difficulty) and so far it seems that 3 out of 4 party members doing physical damage while one doing primarily magical works out pretty well, since enemies tend to have a lot of one armor type and little the other.

Personally I enjoy the game immensely more than the first one, throwing oil and fire afterwards was the only tactic you needed in the first game for too long.

So disable spam is still the way to go, I see. In the first game pretty much all I did was spam disables, which rendered most enemies completely harmless. The difficulty also scaled extremely poorly into the late game, where late game enemies would use level 1 spells against my party. I'm still looking forward to playing it after I'm done with my current games. Hopefully on the tactician difficulty the game will put up at least some fight.

 

[gaussgunner]

I think I'm going to need a new PC to play this

Maybe just a new GPU unless you have a ~10 year old CPU. I had a pretty fast i5 desktop with some cheap old ?GTX 430? card that wasn't enough for D:OS 1. Upgraded to a 760 which is more than enough for these games.

 

[Crescent Hawk]

Its kind crap to be honest. I will be honest I didnt like Divinity 1, and I didnt even enjoy Divine Divinity or any of their games. Its another round of summoners destroy everything, fuckhuge pauldrons, silly dialogue and humour. A great game yeah but not the incline everybody here desperately wants, its like the opposite of DragonAge garbage but a classic? No.

 

[vonAchdorf]

I admire Larian for what they're doing but tbh I wouldn't feel secure if everybody was taking the risks they do. It's better if we have a wide variety of oldschool RPG "sizes" and see what works over the long run.

I think it's good that they decided not to stagnate in a comfortable or at least convenient niche position but grasp they opportunity they had after D:OS.

 

[Grunker]

Got 'im!

Spoiler

 

[Deleted member 7219]

The user interface is even worse than the first game. It seems they were so desperate for it not to appear consolised they made every button and interface element super tiny. Play the game for 5 minutes and your eyes start hurting.

Performance wise, it seems to be optimised well.

Combat is the same as D:OS only now every humanoid enemy either has spellcasting abilities or has grenades, so every fight begins and ends the same way - with pools of fire or poison. The environmental effects are way overused.

Story and dialogue seem to be just as shit as they were in D:OS but I'm only an hour in. Maybe it'll get better?

 

[Crescent Hawk]

It does not get better. After the boring POE experiment and Torment complete and utter garbage I expected Larian to make something more bold. But its just their way of making shit, its that retarded Pathfinder campaign with the DM being THAT GUY all over again.

Oh well fuck it, I am stopping my hate now, people seem to like it and I am glad since its a decent game.

 

[Lambinou]

(...) The Red Prince is probably too iconic not to have him in my party. (...)

My Fane undude stabbed the bastard while he was "helpless" and moaning about water-splashing. Fuck him, let him wait second pass.

Can you kill-off all the companions at the start like that?

Minutes and shipwreck later... Apparently not. Even though I "killed" him in the ship intro scene, he was alive and well, waiting me right at the start of the game at the shore. v0v

I'm pretty sure there is a story justification for this. I did the opposite and tried to help a particular person as the ship was about to wreck.


Minor

Spoiler

I was knocked about and failed to reach the lifeboat, which should have killed my character yet was saved by a an unknown power

Spoiler

if asked, the red prince will confirm having had the same experience

After the boat segment you can kill everyone and i doubt they'll come back

 

[Bohrain]

Jesus Christ the oil field fight kills my rig.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Those numbers are just crazy. They're not that far below Skyrim's all-time concurrent player peak (90,000) and have left the first nu-XCOM behind (with the latter's 70,000).

Well FYI Steamcharts.com started recording data from July 2012, so it doesn't have Skyrim's launch (Novembr 2011) data.

Skyrim set the record at the time: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?s=a3ec68b54d8bf29707938a0ea53caa73&t=451769

(Ah the old Steam's color scheme.)

Still valid about nuXCOM I think.

Up to 85,945 today, almost catching up to Witcher 3's all-time peak of 92,000, heh (if Steamcharts is to be trusted on the latter).

 

[Quantomas]

Had to take a break from my playthrough of Primordia, MRY's masterfully crafted tale, in order to look at D:OS2.

The first thing that needs saying is that regarding its design paradigm D:OS2 is diametrically opposed to PoE. While PoE spends tons of effort on crafting maps and places that look like art, and also making sure that there is proper collision detection and looking all tidy in general, D:OS2 may often seem messy. There is lots of stuff that you can miss, sometimes there are so many items that you begin to go about it strategically, let alone all these surfaces that can be subject to magical effects. Even collision detection takes a back seat, with knocked-down characters intersecting with furniture and other stuff. But it appears Larian made the right call here, not to get bogged down in visual consistency or physics/collision handling, and the result is a game that develops its own visual language that your mind translates into the right picture. After a while you no longer see the knocked-down companion intersecting with a stool, but simply see the effect (knocked-down) and the environment. On the other hand the audio is great, including the voice-overs, and the narrator does a good job.

Interestingly, concerning immersion as a whole, Larian's work is miles ahead of PoE. PoE had the worst immersion breakers I encountered in a game, with the backer NPCs certain to dispel the sense that you are in a game world. D:OS2's art style can seem rough, the artwork in the interludes sketchy, but there is enough to hook you, things that are quirky and make you look twice.

The prelude is mostly a cleverly disguised tutorial to teach you the basics. It seems nothing you do here is of importance. It gets you used to Larian's art style and the game's language.

The story seems initally a bit off, and it is difficult to find the sweet spot how to settle yourself into the world in the initial bits. But overnight, dreaming a bit, it's clear that D:OS2 is quite attractive and makes you curious. What stuck with me were the dialogs I had with the origin characters, the funny bits like the arm licking dialog, Beast's introduction with the sounds on the ship is brilliant, stuff like that. The voice acting definitely adds to the experience, make no mistake. Maybe not for some Codexers, but for the audience at large it does.

The UI needs some getting used to. You will need to enable edge panning and customize your controls. I am going to put camera rotation and zoom on wasd.

 

[Sensuki]

Blaine continues to be right

 

[Blaine]

The contrasts that Quantomas has noticed are caused by Larian's pure motivation. "Pure motivation" is simply my chosen term for a multifaceted concept that is difficult to define, but which is absolutely necessary to create an RPG that will still be played and considered great twenty years later.

If I had to sum up "pure motivation" in a few words, those words would be: "I want to build a world."

In contrast, certain developers' motivations are impure, tainted with ulterior motives that ultimately undermine the entire endeavor. They don't only want to build a world: They also want to "have profound writing, like in Planescape: Torment" or "be reminiscent of nostalgic old classics" or "be mechanically similar to the classics, but better in every way," just to name a few examples chosen completely at random.

These may seem like simple, innocuous goals, but they aren't. They suck energy away from the pure effort of world-building like an insidious psychic vampire always lurking in a dark corner of the office. Instead of focusing on building your world authentically to realize a pure vision, you instead become preoccupied with making your game conform to arbitrary notions of what it should be from a critic's viewpoint, how it should emulate or improve upon this or that classic old game, et cetera.

Don't get me wrong: Nearly all developers pay homages, have other games in mind while they're developing their new game, and so on. It's inevitable, and it would be silly to suggest that they should somehow blank out their brains before commencing development. However, for certain developers this awareness becomes an obsession and a goal unto itself, and this kills the game—not unlike my sister, who is deeply unhappy because she spends a lot of time comparing her life to her old college friends' lives on Facebook (no, I'm not kidding).

 

[Sensuki]

I moreso meant about Infinitron rating posts that are even slightly anti-PoE

 

[Blaine]

I moreso meant about Infinitron rating posts that are even slightly anti-PoE

I'm not a fucking genie. I don't answer summons exclusively to respond to the specific post that summoned me. I post what I want to post when I arrive.

I waxed long-winded up there as it was quite early and I hadn't had my coffee, so let me be more succinct: RPG developers need to start taking a page from life's greater wisdoms. When you are preoccupied with living up to your father's expectations, with getting out from under your brother's shadow, with being as hip and successful as your old college pals on Facebook, etc., you will almost certainly end up being an uninteresting and typically unsuccessful basketcase and your work (whatever that is) will suffer from it.

So, people need to stop doing that.

Also, this excellent post by MRY is relevant: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...venture-game-renaissance.115818/#post-5157943

In essence, the desire to do something WAY COOLER AND BETTER THAN THAN THE THINGS I DID IN THE PAST can also be a pitfall for creative types.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Is it possible to withhold leveling until you get the other party members? What are their starting classes?

 

[thekdawg21]

No you can't, and you can select their class through dialogue when you talk to them. All can be any class. If you feel the need to min-max (I do, even though it's unnecessary) you can do so at the end of Act 1.

 

[NotAGolfer]

If you feel the need to min-max (I do, even though it's unnecessary) you can do so at the end of Act 1.

You mean respec, right?

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Are huntsman/archery skills any good? What about Summoning/Necromancy? In the first game I used 1 warrior w/ sword & shield, one scoundrel with daggers, one fire/earth mage and one water/air mage.

As usual I'm worried about missing out on having enough tanks as well as insufficient support or healing. 4 characters is too few...

 

[Jimmious]

Are huntsman/archery skills any good? What about Summoning/Necromancy? In the first game I used 1 warrior w/ sword & shield, one scoundrel with daggers, one fire/earth mage and one water/air mage.

As usual I'm worried about missing out on having enough tanks as well as insufficient support or healing. 4 characters is too few...

Huntsman is pretty awesome so far in my game at least. A lot of damage.