Divinity: Original SinFollow

Figured I'd talk about this game in another thread, rather than bury it in the Omnibus DD.

I've got about 5 hours in this game and haven't moved very far. So far it's very time consuming. It's not forgiving if you make mistakes, and it doesn't hold you hand on things like quests.

There are strange things, things that are not very serious, that happen. I dug up a grave, and out pops a midget skeleton with a bomb on its back. Thinking it wouldn't be a problem, and my characters were far enough away, I use my mage to launch a fireball at it... big mistake. Bomb explodes, vaporizing my characters.

Then, later, I saw another grave, but this one was shiny, and stood out. So I try to dig it up. It kept asking me "Are you sure?" and made me argue with team mates. I finally convince them to allow me to dig it up, and as soon as I plunge my shovel into the dirt, it explodes, dealing my entire party roungly 40,000 hit points of damage each. (I had, I think, maybe 100 per character).
Who booby traps a grave?

The game features voice acting for the random on screen conversations around town. Not for much of the actual dialog though. The bad part is that how the game calculates how close you are to a conversation is a bit buggy and messed up. You can hear conversations happening inside a house just because you are 10 feet from the outside wall, etc. And annoyingly some NPCs will repeat conversations very loudly while you are talking with NPCs through dialog boxes. I think the developers are working on the random talking to clean it up a bit.

The game is difficult, and time consuming. I'm hoping to get into some actual battles some time this weekend. Right now I'm in the first town investigating the first big quest, a murder mystery. And the game has gone all "Chrono Trigger" on me, sending me to some "End of Time" zone. Don't know what to think about that yet. Sounds like that may be the actual main story, and everything else is just side quests and world flavoring.

You can chose to give your characters AI. Or control them all yourself. During conversations, you'll have dialog options for your characters. The AI choices decide whether they agree with you or disagree with you. Or you can control them yourself and have arguments with yourself about how to progress. If you do argue amongst your characters, the deciding factor comes down to a game of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" and the winner of that is the winner of the argument.

This is also where multiplayer and coop comes in. Another player can control one of your team mates, and choose his own dialog options (arguing or agreeing with you). Right now it looks like you cannot import characters into another game, only take control of existing characters. But I think you can start from the beginning and the other player can customize his/her member on your team.

Edited, Jul 4th 2014 10:10pm by TirithRR

I was weighing Wasteland 2 and Divinity: OS against each other. The kicker for Divinity was it was leaving Early Access right after the sale ended. And price, Divinity: OS was much lower.

Edited, Jul 5th 2014 6:06pm by TirithRR

Work has been rough and I have not played much as I should. I spent my time finishing up some easy story games. Chains of Satinav and Memoria. Now that those are done I plan on playing more this weekend. I still enjoy it. But it hasn't been very casual friendly to me.

I think it will get much better once the mod community takes root. I haven't followed the mods too much. Not sure if it is fully released yet, don't think it is.

I still plan on playing a lot this weekend to get a better feel for it, but may not since I might take a trip to look at some Kubota tractors for sale and finally start finishing my yard landscaping.

I guess the frustrating part of it depends on how you like your games. Maybe like dark souls? It's hard but can be fun and rewarding if that's your thing. You do have to pay attention though because unlike the newer games in the genre it doesn't guide you much at all. But there is a dialog logbook so you can go back and read all the conversations.

The randomness of the chest loot system can be annoying. If you open a simple crate you can find 2 gold, reload, open the same crate and can find a decent piece of gear. And the lack of respawning monster makes me feel bad right now. I'm sure the game is designed for it but it feels off that I can't go back and find a monster in an area I already went through.

You spend a lot of time in game before actually doing much.

Edited, Jul 23rd 2014 5:57pm by TirithRR

Until it reaches Rock Paper Scissor, then it dims a bit. SpoilerAt least in the few arguments I have started, the Rock Paper Scissors AI was very easy to guess. Every time you won a hand, the computer would always throw what ever would beat the hand you last threw. So if you beat the AI's Scissors with a Rock, the AI would throw Paper next, so you just throw Scissors, and win. Then the AI would throw Rock (cause you threw scissors the previous hand) so you just throw Paper to beat the rock, then rinse and repeat. Not 100% sure if it always works that way, but I think I did it twice and noticed the pattern right away.

I'm not sure if the personality type stat boosts during and after arguments mean anything to actual game play though.

Also, when you "Stealth" and turn into a rock or something. Kind of foolish, very lighthearted, seemed out of place at first. Then I met the talking Clam who wanted me to push it back into the ocean, and it gave me basically a "Holy sh*t, a talking clam, I can sell this for a lot of money in town!" option, and then I met a midget skeleton with a big cartoonish fused bomb on it's back. I realized the game wasn't being overly serious, so it all made sense.

Edited, Jul 23rd 2014 7:06pm by TirithRR

Picked this up since it's finally out of Alpha/Beta. So far I've re-rolled my characters something like 4 times; at first because I had no idea what all the various talents and skills did, and then because I experimented with the AI presets and didn't like them.

So far I'm loving the level of customization available to your characters. The turn-based combat is very well executed, and the genre-spoofing jokes are spot on. I'm also pretty stoked to play a quest-based game that doesn't lead you around by the nose with glowing punctuation, but that may prove to be frustrating in the long run. It's already proven frustrating with the "crafting" system which is about as intuitive as [humorous Yahtzee-esque analogy].

Will report more when I've devoted more time to playing it.

Did anyone ever mention that getting > 100% resistance heals you?

Because it was hilarious fun walking on lava and getting healed for 2k+ a step.

Some of the logic is questionable.

"Hey, there's a huge vent. I'm going to drop a spoon on it to cover it up. That'll make the static cloud go away.



Watching the numbers fly sometimes is hilarious though. I think there was an oil barrel in an underground fight one time that was missed somehow, because after a fireball exploded and detonated the already poisoned ground into burning ground, it...just keep exploding. And exploding. And growing. And exploding. For two minutes straight. (Also found out that said mob got healed by fire damage that way...) To the point where the entire tunnel was FILLED with burning ground.

Another thing: install it on an SSD if possible, it's not terribly good at loading stuff.