Divinity: Original Sin

[easytarget]

Has anyone picked this up yet? Looks like an old school RPG, so I'm definitely interested, and it's turn based, which is even better.

Did a search of this forum couldn't find any mention of it, struck me as hard to believe no one here has taken a run at it yet?!

[Beskar]

Too busy playing it. Already done 65 hours into it.

I haven't written a review since I haven't had the time, but it is a old school RPG and what surprises me even now is a lot of the depth and how open-world it can be. You can complete quests in a lot of ways in many different orders, you can find yourself lost/stuck if you go too far by yourself.

[HopAlongBunny]

Too busy playing it.

Some of us are waiting for that review! :beadyeyes:

[easytarget]

Too busy playing it to write about it sounds like a pretty solid endorsement to me. :yes:

[Beskar]

You have to bare in mind I have not currently completed the game nor am I sure on how far exactly I am within the game story. By the achievements I have unlocked (majority of them hidden), it seems I am probably nearer to the end of it. Some sections may involved some spoilers, I will try to keep anything major within spoiler tags.

Main Points

The game centres around two main characters. These are fully customisable, with either being male/female/either. There are no set 'classes' so you can go free for all with your skill points, however, you do not get as many as I like within the game, so you will be limited.

The combat style is turned based, working from an initiative stat and goes in order around that. You may 'delay your turn' to go last.
A lot of the higher level skills and abilities are limited by cooldown, so you will hotbar a mix of low and high-end spells.
Screenshot of a random combat scene with notes on in the spoiler.
https://i.imgur.com/mdG27AK.jpg

The environment plays a big part in the game and there are many effects you can do to alter it to your favour. Such as, fighting fire-mobs, make it rain, to weaken them. Set fire to a patch of oil to make a 'fire-wall' forcing your enemies to go around or through it. Elements can be used in multiple ways such as water can increase the potency of electric attacks.

The game doesn't handhold you that much in the slightest, so if you are getting laid back, you can find yourself running into trouble sometimes, which makes you read through the quest-log to find out where exactly you may consider going to. A patch added a few basic quest markers for some 'critical' quests due to number of complaints, but I have only seen like 4 and I done hundreds of quest stages.

Exploration/Open-world is limited by the levels of monsters and the number of them. Things like character combinations, teamwork, setups can play a very big part on how difficult the game will be, yes, there are a few 'very cheesy/exploitive' methods but they make the game dull.
Example of this would be stacking your entire party as mages, and set them up as specialising in Combat-Control, therefore, stunlock opponents to death. Yeah... boring and dull. All my parties have all been different classes/playstyle characters and I am loving the diversity.

Questing is pretty much 'Quest-hub' format, where you go to an area, they have a number of quests, they all end up continuing in similar places at various points whilst the 'main-quest' hops around between these a little. Before you think this is completely linear, Lets say I ended up doing steps 1,2,4,8,12,13,14,9,5,10 .. pretty much the main quest out of order. There are many ways for steps to advance too, which is amusing when you later come across alternative steps.

A lot of quests have twists and strange results with them able to end in different ways, or even have them fail. There are even quests where one path may fail but you can complete it by doing something else entirely (but related). Best way to describe it, remember those books where your different options lead to different page numbers? Questing at times are a lot like those.

As for size of the world. One of the big areas you will be spending a lot of your first hours in is a place called Cyreal. I am currently on a 4th area of that size, and as I said, I am 65 hours or so playing this game and still going. This is mostly because I have been doing a co-op game and a single-player playthrough.

As for co-op, basically, you have a 'host' who has the saves, and the player 2 can customise one of the 2 starter characters. Ultimately, the 'host' owns/runs the game, there is no drop-in/out of different characters.

Companions: As far as I have met, there are two fully fleshed out companions which you can pick up early on, and a host of 'henchmen'. I have not used any of the henchmen, but the game has a backstory written for them, but that might only be it. I simply don't know. As a tip for variety when making a new character, I will say what those two henchmen are in spoiler tags.
Madora: 'knight' men-at-arms and two-hander. Jahan: air-magic, water-magic (can do heals).

Recommended starting character:
Archer - Basically, you have 30+ different arrow types, you have a range of powerful/useful skills and abilities, all within one skill-tree. This gives you a really good ranged all-rounder who brings a lot to the table.
The second character can be down to preference in whether you want diversity or specialised. I would say to go for a magic-caster, due to there being 5 different magic-skill trees.

Game Rating:
I find it difficult to do, not because of the game being bad quality, but it is entirely down to the tastes of the gamer. This is a old-style RPG which I would throw in the same league as Baldur's Gate with a modern UI and much needed fresher graphics.

I would say the release is 8-9/10 and with the open modding and further development, I think the game could hit a 10/10 easy enough. Things I don't like would be the crafting system and inventory sorting which are both basic. So if you like an RPG with a lot of talking and running around, it may be for you.

However, if this kind of game is not your cup of tea, it can very easily fall to 6/10 and lower. Basically, cue those who go "It is isometric view like Diablo 3! It must be like that!", it is nothing like Diablo 3 in the slightest and you would be sorely disappointed.


Feel free to ask any specific questions and I will see about answering them for you.

[Beskar]

I have done an 'enabler' mod which allows your game to have 4 players in it.

I only know of a few which have made changes to do this, but it was easy enough to mod in.

Link (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=286681511)

[Greyblades]

You mean a4 player co op mod is possible?

[Beskar]

Yes, 2 control the two main characters and 3 and 4 can control the henchman.

The mod I did is a simple enabler, there might be better in the future.

[easytarget]

I bought it and I'm enjoying myself! I love turn based combat.

[easytarget]

I still think this is one of the coolest RPGs I've played in a long time, 29 hours in.

[easytarget]

Update: 50 hours in and still my leading candidate for GOTY 2014

[easytarget]

Got to say I'm a bit floored by the lack of response here on this one, I'm not even alone in liking this one, it's been #1 on Steam since it's release.

For an old school RPG, and this very much is, that's the gaming sales equivalent of walking across a swimming pool.

[Beskar]

Played it, completed it, done modding for it!

[easytarget]

Ah, good to hear from someone else! You've jumped ahead of me, I'm currently struggling to find a solution to Death Knights. :wall:

[Beskar]

You go to...
Source Cathedral, get the Vial of Blood.

and when in the mine, you...
Run Away. Go north by breaking the stone, destroy the guarded gem, then get your stealth character (if you got one), and sneak all the way by-passing the Death Knights and you end up in a confrontation and your party is teleported to you. In that situation, you just run away along the pathway till you get to a mirror, jump through. In the Wardens High Office, looking for a special spell book or note, you combine that with the blood, tada. Make Death Knight vulnerable spell, and it is a re-usable skill book.

[LeftEyeNine]

I've read a very favorable Turkish review on that one claiming pretty much what you've expressed. It mentioned a few glitches and bugs as cons which could easily be ironed via updates to follow.

Will grab it for sure as soon as a deal comes around. It's not easy even reminding of Baldur's Gate.

[easytarget]

Funny thing about those glitches and bugs, often what is reported as such in the steam forum ultimately are revealed as simply game design. Namely the game giving you the ability to suffer the consequences of your decisions. Get really tired of talking to the town mayor and kill the guy, guess what then, you've killed off whatever quests involved him as a central character.

Modern gamers have been led around with big neon signs telling them where to go, who to talk to, etc - they spend a of time gnashing teeth over how this one doesn't, in fact it'll let you leave town and promptly get wiped w/o so much as an apology or by your leave. Make a bad build that can't get you past something, tough.

For those of us old schoolers who actually played DND when it came out originally, well, let's just say we're enjoying ourselves and amused by the consternation.

[Major Robert Dump]

played the last divinity . loved it

[easytarget]

Finished it today, best 100 hours I've spent in a game in quite some time.

[easytarget]

I typically don't go in for full price either, especially with SP games as the content doesn't change and usually the passage of time only leads to patch improvements, so the game not only gets cheaper but also better over time. But when a game receives near universal praise from both critics and players like this one did, and it happens to be a genre and game play style I really like I don't hesitate.

If I could find anything else in life that even came close to the value of entertainment provided by a game such as this even when paying full price like I did here I'd jump at it, turns out though there's nothing else that even comes close to less than 50 cents per hour (and that doesn't even factor in that I plan to play through it again co-op which would push the cost down to like 20 cents or less).

I spent more on the coffee beans I just ground for my morning coffee than I did for an hour's worth of Divinity.

[HopAlongBunny]

Took the plunge today; still waiting for download to complete.
The more I read about the game, the more interested I became; finally I just hit "purchase".
Yes, I'm weak! :on_shame:
Looks like mage warrior for my 2 controlled toons, although other options look viable.
Wish me 'luck :on_gmegap:

[Beskar]

Been a few updates with new companions, haven't tried them out myself. When I get a lot of free time, should consider playing it again myself, maybe when an expansion hits.

[easytarget]

I'm about half way through another run through using a different set of character classes. The battles are every bit as fun as the last run through. Of course I know the story line so I'm not paying as much attention to that, catching a few quests I missed the first time though. Good fun, really like this one.

[Beskar]

I always found it interesting how you could miss large chunks of various quests, as the storyline progresses a certain way. For example, you could just run to a murderers house and find the murder weapon, skipping past 3-5 hours of running around doing investigations and flavour before that point triggers naturally.

[HopAlongBunny]

No "hand-holding" indeed.
Found a shovel and started digging up some of the mounds you run into. Lots of bones...and then bones that moved!
Mage was done in one shot, the tank actually took two; the damage I inflicted? Nada.
Okay, so there some things in town that will clean your clock :)
Despite that, enjoying the world so far.

[easytarget]

Hang in there, the game starts a bit slow as you work through stuff in the city where you start. It'll get going once you've got your team together and ramped up a few levels so you can tackle some of what you will encounter outside the town walls.

[HopAlongBunny]

Been wandering around; it is pretty tightly "gated". You simply cannot explore w/o being within a level of the mobs around the city.
Battles are satisfying: you have to play smart; if you try to "bum rush" everything you will die...a lot.
I lose the thread of so many quests; w/o the wiki I would be completely at sea.
Level 4-5 was a little slow/confusing, but things have picked up very nicely now...but the opponents are starting to get very tricky indeed :)

[easytarget]

Yeah, the opponents can get difficult before you get past the 1st map, after that you become powerful enough to handle most things unless you make mistakes.

My one big piece of advice is make sure your magic dealers have summons. This is so powerful it's really a bit OP because it effectively makes my team of four into a team of 6 or 8, all you have to do is have a point in the right skill and find spell books for spiders, skeletons, etc and first round of any battle you've suddenly got yourself a tank/meat shield you can throw out in front of your team to soak up damage.

Works like a charm. :laugh4:

[HopAlongBunny]

Dropped Madora; fighters bring little to the table and are high maintenance.
Picked up an archer; not quite a mage but very flexible and adds some nice cc options (yes "Charm" is game breaking)

[easytarget]

Yeah, I can see dropping her, I kept her around anyway, not sure why. I do love archers though, used one on my first run through, charm does indeed amuse me a lot, but you know it's probably not any more broken than blind which has saved my bacon a number of times (just as summons have which are probably the single most useful spell in the game and the reason you don't need a tank).

The one thing about a fighter, they can use weapons in the latter half of the game (just as archers can come to think of it) that you are going to need. Ones that spellcasters can't use btw, I won't go into more detail as I don't want to spoil anything. Just suffice it to say there is a twist coming. :yes:

[HopAlongBunny]

Wow! I thought I had this game beat then hit the fight with Mangoth.
Ouch!!! I had to respec my tanks and restructure the battlefield to win the fight.
Nice! (but also frustrating:p)

[Beskar]

My first attempt against the end boss... he went straight for the Druid-girl and killed her before my 2nd turn. That sucked hard.

[easytarget]

Haha, I so loved this game. And the ending was a blast. What can I say, my favorite solution to almost every problem I faced in DOS was summons, the meat shield that keeps on giving. :yes:

[easytarget]

Wow! I thought I had this game beat then hit the fight with Mangoth.
Ouch!!! I had to respec my tanks and restructure the battlefield to win the fight.
Nice! (but also frustrating:p)

A sure sign of a game giving its players their due respect.

[HopAlongBunny]

I'm into the final two battles (Trife and Void)
Ready as I will ever be.
Tiaexz displays one frustration I have with this game; the RNG can kill the best plans period; sometimes all you can do is reload and retry.

[easytarget]

That however is how actual engagements take place, there's the plan for what you intend to do and there are the ancillary plans to deal with what goes wrong at the point of contact which is practically inevitable. So just as I make contingencies in Combat Mission or Xcom I did the same in DOS and rolled with the punches.

Once you complete it circle back with your thoughts, I'll tell you how I killed the last one that will amuse you I suspect and prove my point of working with contingencies, took me btw nearly an hour to defeat him, when you hear how you'll know why. :laugh4:

[HopAlongBunny]

Well that was a bit of an anticlimax.
The Trife was hardly a battle, once my warrior was in tight it was all over. The Void critters are annoying but little else.
The Dragon battle was long, but again once I parked my warrior in his face I knew where the attacks would be. De-buffed he can be blinded, knocked down, slowed, etc.
I enjoyed the game :)

[Beskar]

Yeah, I found the fights where you couldn't control where the damage was going to be the hardest. If they simply decided to RNG, you could get screwed.

[easytarget]

Well that was a bit of an anticlimax.
The Trife was hardly a battle, once my warrior was in tight it was all over. The Void critters are annoying but little else.
The Dragon battle was long, but again once I parked my warrior in his face I knew where the attacks would be. De-buffed he can be blinded, knocked down, slowed, etc.
I enjoyed the game :)

Yep, it was a long slog w/ the dragon, but I liked it, why it took me awhile was because I used summons to deal damage on him and kept my guys back away dealing with what he spawned. Needless to say the summons don't do all that much damage so it took awhile, but I still liked it because it demonstrates what I like about the games difficulty, it's challenging, but it's not stupid save scumming hard in that when you encounter an engagement for the first time you can figure out tactics in battle that will work. So adaption to circumstances works. That's just good game design.

And as you said, you have a variety of options to bring to bear on him which is a nice reward for tracking down the right package for the job at hand.

Tiaxez,

RNG doesn't bother me, I guess I enjoy anticipating the possibility and having constituencies for it.

[HopAlongBunny]

That's cool :) I found the summons did so little damage I kept them back to deal with void critters. The archer would light them up and the summons finish them off.
The warrior had a complete slate of debuffs; when elemental debuff was applied I would nuke, will: knockdown, blind, poison.
Keeping Haste and Shield on warrior basically made him immortal and kept damage flowing.
I agree, the best part about the game is the variety of ways to play it.

[rvg]

Did my playthrough not so long ago, it was lots of fun, but i wouldn't care to it again. The game has no replay value for me.

[easytarget]

Yep, to be expected, I don't recall ever playing an RPG where I had any expectation of playing it again.

[HopAlongBunny]

On my 3rd replay; what can I say I like the game.
A minor bug; all 3 play throughs I pick up the archer in Cyseal right at the beginning and feed her all arrows/parts/sinews etc. Sometime after finishing the first map, the bulk of the accumulated arrows disappear.
No, not dumped in a trunk or used up in combat; one day I return to Homestead, group her up and notice almost all the arrows are gone from her inventory.
Fortunately arrows are plentiful and fairly cheap, I just resent starting from near 0 well into the game.

[easytarget]

Good for you! This is after all a to each his own sort of thing, just because I can't envision ever slogging through any RPG more than once doesn't mean you can't!

And I gotta say, I'm still a big fan of Divinity, it and Valkyrie Chronicles were the two best games I've played in more than a year.

[easytarget]

I liked this one so much I bought in on my very first kickstarter for DOS2. Not surprisingly they hit their 500k goal in 12 hours, haha.

Also looking forward to another run through on the original DOS enhanced version for free (for those who own it already of course) come October.

[easytarget]

Enhanced version is in your steam games waiting download for anyone who already owns DOS. Worth a look, they spent a fair amount of time polishing this one, and given that it's free to anyone already owning the game not much downside.

[easytarget]

Nearly 20 hours in on the new campaign, enjoying having voices to everything this time. Good fun to revisit this one again.

[HopAlongBunny]

Thank you for posting this! :yes:

DOS was just an icon on the screen for months; could not bear another play-thru; looking forward to romping through this! (yet again)

[Gregoshi]

Exiting the EE locks up my laptop. In light of that and the laundry list of bugs I see on the game forums, I think I'll wait a bit for them to clean it up before I give it a serious try. I'm looking forward to it though.

[easytarget]

I've not encountered anything so far, but if you are seems like a plan.

[HopAlongBunny]

Still buggy.
For taking down Arhu's psychotic machine I tried to move the controller to my warrior.
Game will not recognize that he has the controller now; since he's first to arrive at the machine I gave him the controller, but it always shows my mage's position when I use it...she is well back from the melee/hence out of range.
Winning the fight w/o using the controller? At this level very unlikely.

[easytarget]

Can you go back to earlier save where you can change who is holding it?

I'm almost half way through, mainly playing it again just to see how they changed the ending (I liked the original one, so i'm intrigued as to what they did).

[I of the Storm]

Picked that one up on sale and doing a coop run with a buddy.
Fantastic game, we had an awesome evening. Writing is beautiful, combat and puzzles require some actual thinking and the humour and geeky jokes are priceless sometimes.
I especially loved the sneak animations.
Will continue definitely.