I must say that after getting through the whole game (which was quite a feat of endurance, btw), I perfectly understand all the critique that circulates here. Because, while the first one third or maybe a half of this game are nigh-perfect, the rest are colossal, massive, tremendous disappointment. On all the fronts. And while it's hard for me to call this game bad (I've started & restarted the game a couple of times to finally make the proper build – didn't know about the respec option – and this made me squeeze about 40 hours or so from the best part of the game, and hey, after 40 hours of fun you can't really complain about something being sucky), I must admit that I've finished this game only because of my intention of making funbuilding about it (which will come in a day or two), otherwise I would've abandoned it somewhere at the lvl 15 or so. Because it was really fun, only it stopped to be.
The reasons for it are aplenty and calling out many of them will sound quite heretical to the Codex, I think (btw, no offense, 'dex, but the whole reference to you in this game was cringeworthy, at least to my taste). First two to blame will be the length of the game and the freedom of exploration. Yeah.
The length of the game problem is quite traditional – it stems from the notion that, no matter what, RPG should be huge. Like, 50 hours of gameplay or gtfo. Or even more. But... While, of course, getting more playtime for the same money sounds exquisite, in reality, making a game which will stay both enjoyable and fresh for the duration of 50 hours (at least) is no small feat of design prowess. And it also is quite a matter of budget constraints, which, with the burden of graphics and full voice-over and the demand for complex animations, becomes heavier and heavier with each year. It's a really hard and challenging task which these games are supposed to complete.
And while many of the codexian favorites can easily provide this much content, most often it is done mostly through the discreet application of padding. Sure, you may score more than a hundred of hours in wizardy 8, but how much of those exactly will you spend while fighting the same pack of crabs? D:OS faces the same problem. While at the start of the game the encounters seem to be really unique and hand-placed and I've thought that finally someone made the game where there was nothing but interesting boss-fights, in reality, the combat system of the game, however strong it started, just failed to support the whole 80 (?) hours of gameplay. Once you crack up the system (which is not that hard), you understand that each encounter, in reality, is pretty much the same and instead of having fun you just go through the motion. Partially, that's the fault of the game's balance. Partially, it's also the flaw of the game's overall design. We'll discuss that in a second.
Another “original sin” here is the free exploration – yeah. See, D:OS is incredibly combat-centric game. It's the main and the only truly interesting feature of the game. The story is somewhere there, but the authors themselves don't give many fucks about it and its deliverance at times is really clumsy. The game's world is non-present, honestly. Because the maps are rather small, there isn't much to explore – no really curious side-content. So the only thing that the free exploration gives here is that it actually screws with your enjoyment of the game.
Let's take cyseal. Once you clean up the lighthouse ghoul and maybe the Arhu's failed experiment, you have 3 more or less level-appropriate directions to explore. First is the logical continuation of arhu's monstrosity cavern, the northern Cyseal and, eventually, necromancer's lab. Second is the beach with the orcs and the Black Cove. Third (and the least obvious – by the location of it I totally expected it to be something like lvl 9-10 area, not the lvl 7 one) is the baron's mansion (though it should be a bitch of a bossfight to take at the lvl 6). And see, no matter where you go first here, it makes the remaining two quite dull and unchallenging. You just become so leveled up that they stop being hard and, well, that's where the fun of the game originates. So when I first went necromancer's lab, black cove was an absolutely meh followup for me. It was quite interesting when I went it first, though, but the lab, on the other hand... And it only got worse through the course of the game. So at the end of the game you can take (theoretically) challenging bossfight. Optional one, though. Cool. What was not cool is that that bossfight gave my party so much experience that it destroyed the whole beginning of the second chapter for me.
And, to be honest, my completionist approach irrepairably broke the game quite short after that –at lvl 12 or so the fights just stopped to be challenging. Oh, sure, I'd get an occasional party wipe or reload solely on the base of enemies being capable to screw you in many ways – one time, my knight got charmed and hacked the rest of the party in one turn. Another, it was just a super-lucky mass stun for the foe. Third one it was just me going easy on the chapter 3 starting spiders (hey, lol, I outlevel these fuckers, how hard can they be?) and them hitting for 300-400 damage per shot (while my girls had 700 each). But that didn't create actual complications, it never made me to rethink my tactics completely, there was never a call for adjustment – it was just me being lax on the game. And what reasons were there to be tryhard? I've used only a couple of healing potions, just one tutorial scroll and about half-a-dozen of special arrows though it (despite all that stuff being supposedly necessary) – there was just no reason to use those.
Once again, hivemind won't approve that, but I think that splicing the free exploration with a challenging combat system is a nigh-impossible goal. I guess you can try to achieve it by making the combat difficulty so mind-numbingly hard, so even the large character growth won't make your guy overpowered (and also a more horizontal-based approach to leveling up will help). Otherwise, the player just can't help but to wander somewhere, thus making half of the eventual combat non-fun for him. Anyway, realistically speaking, you have to choose one of these two as the focus for your game. Otherwise, a joyous playthrough is only possible if the player has the knowledge to metagame him through the levels, sustaining the challenge artificially. Which is something that can't really be done in your first playthrough and, to be honest, is a fucking game designer's job. The player shouldn't be responsible for fixing his mistakes.
Another hindering factor here is that, while the combat loses challenge, it doesn't become instantaneous – no, you have to still go through the motions, to watch all the animations (which are rather slow and cannot be skipped/quickened, not even in the single player mode) and stuff. Which is annoying and it's something that totally took me out of the game – once fights became dull, that infected everything else and so the game's silly humor and plot quickly became annoying and the puzzles caused nothing but irritation (and an immediate googling if they took more than 30 seconds to solve). Because what's the point, anyway? And it was especially bad because the start of the game was especially good. Ugh.
Now for the more precise reasons of that breakdown. The first cause is that the game, like a slutty girl, is all to eager to throw herself all over you, when it's the resistance that really drives the man. All the game's most interesting features and options are shown to you in the first ten hours. All the game's best spells and abilities you get in your first ten levels or so, after which it's just blanks or more of the same or stuff that's actually harmful to you. I mean, it's preposterous that the majority of the tier-5 spells are either semi-random crap (like hail or electric storms) or have the stupidly long cooldowns (like invulnerability) or do more harm to you than they do to your enemy (like the freaking earthquake). And the remaining couple of good spells, due to their long cooldowns, you can easily cast with the +2 AP penalty for having the skill level (like the lava core). But even that I never actually used – I mean, what's the point to cast all those fancy spells if the basic boulder bash+fireball combo works exactly the same?
And it's the same with every school – the 1-2-3 tier spells (i.e., the ones that you get quickly and that are really cheap to afford in terms of skill points) were all that I used through my playthrough. And even not all of them. Which lead to me eventually getting tired of them and wanting to discover something new, but there just wasn't anything else to discover – everything in the higer tiers were either more of the same or clunky and useless. And it's obvious that, without new stuff and tactics, game gets old fast.
The same was with the boss fights – the designers tried to make them really diverse, but they actually failed at that. All bosses here have exactly the same build-up – they're big, tough and they have some sort of stupidly powerful ability which really fucks you up. They may call up reinforcements, they may cast 3 disables per turn, they may heal themselves up, whatever. You let them do their thing – they fuck you up, it's simple. And so is the solution – just don't let them do that, just keep them perma-disabled and focus them before they can make a single move. And, with all the disables available to your party, keeping them shut up is incredibly easy – say, King Boreas. I read he's a tough bastard, he changes resistances, he summons up help, etc. - but in my experience it was just him standing on the place doing nothing, because I've never gave him a single turn to do anything.
And you can say – well, dude, it's your own fault for being a tryhard. Yeah, kinda. But the difficulty here is, the system is built around that. It's either you who screw your enemies swiftly or they who kick the living shit out of you – the best example here are the ranger foes, who either annihilate your entire crew with their ridiculously damaging AoE arrows or you shut them down immediately with disables or line of sight denial. There is no middle ground there, it's a totally do or die situation. And, at first, doing is fun, but not for the entire 80 hours of the game.
It's just the wrong way of designing the system. And it's really hard to balance out – say, make the chance of disabling lesser and you're not achieving anything, you're just making the game more random. Something can be done, of course (like charms lasting 2 or even just 1 turns), but for the majority of it it's easier to build a system from the scratch than to use this one (which is kinda bogus news for all that “the mod community will build new stories!” aspect of the game).1
Another issue with the game is that many little things that make the early part of it enjoyable actually deteriorate somewhere after the middle. For example, guerilla-crossbow sniper tactics, capable of killing foes in one hit and without initiating a combat (which allows to cheese through some encounters rather quickly). Whether too powerful or not, at least they give you the way to skip out the boring stuff fast, not to mention that they're the only decent use for crossbows in the game. But no, after a certain point the gap between the monster's health and the single shot damage becomes that huge that not even an oath of desecration+critical hit combo will give you a one shot kill. Same thing goes for the opportunist, for example – the hp bloat gets so big that one extra attack (which didn't happened that often in my experience) just made no difference. Or the crushing weapons which seems to be something of a silver bullet in the early game (weaker than you average weapon, but strong against specific monsters), but totally lose that aspect in the late game (while retaining their utter weakness). Or, say, five star diner – considering that crafting & cooking is pretty fun in this game, battle eating is a nice addition to the table. But, as the food doesn't really progress through the game, it just gets outdated at some point and nice talent suddenly changes into a waste of talent point. And so forth. In the end, out of a rather big talent pool there's only about 9 which are really worth getting, and most out of those are class-specific (like quickdraw or backstabber).
And, well, inner balance is really screwed in this game. Which isn't apparent from the beginning, but becomes quite a nasty revelation in the middle of the game. I mean, for the first time, bows and crossbows look quite equal to each other and both tempt you with their own unique builds, but once you get to the quickdraw (which, as a ranger, you want to pretty much rush) and guerilla becomes worthless, the value of crossbows deflates. And it's really baffling how can you miss something like that – the simple calculations show you how sucky they are vs bows even in a perception heavy build (which really favors the crossbow). Or the seeming contest between the two-handed axes, greatswords & spears – no contest at all, considering that crafted axes do much more damage than the other two and, say, the extra reach of the spear is too tiny to compensate for it. Or the stupidly strong rubies and 50% resist potions, making enemy's elemental magic almost non-issue – heck, they've limited the max non-potion resistance to 80 in the last patch, but I don't see what's the point. The game is already easy when you can rack up even the 80 of them, going anywhere above that is a total overkill.
And so forth. I could bitch for much longer, but I'm kinda tired at this point and this is already too long of a post. TBH, the game really resembles it's grandfather, the Divine Divinity – it starts nice and awesome and challenging and fun and there's a whole world to discover, only then you discover that half of the game's mechanics don't work and the rest are stupidly powerful so challenge disappears and there's only the bitter grind to the end. Still, I'll remember the merry start instead of the boring mid-to-finish of it so I won't say that I have that bad opinion about D:OS. I just wish I stopped playing once the Cyseal ended (and just replayed it a couple more times).
weap focus slings and all the stuff. HUEILARIOUS
