Also fairly sure at this point that, with the exception of one character who is a lizard and needs to sleep with a lizard princess, there are no gender flags whatsoever for any of the “romance” scenes
I have played a ridiculous amount of this game in a week and a half and it may well be the best roleplaying videogame of all time if evaluated on the various reasons that people play roleplaying games
that wasn’t actually sahelia in the first act I think, it’s her daughter. I was confused too
it does have the first game’s slight problem where they really don’t want you to be completist – if you only need to satisfy, for example, three of five major questlines in the second act before moving on to act three, but you pursue the others anyway because you’re enjoying the game and want to see what happens, you will get at least one dungeon too many that is trivialized by the time you’re there. otherwise though the combat balance is pretty impeccable on classic, and that it’s held my interest generally is really not a small feat; I’ve gone years at a time without happily putting this many hours into one game, let alone in two weeks.
the persistence and scripting of certain quests between acts, particularly your characters’ personal quests, does feel a little unpolished currently. it’s not a huge complaint as the game is so intent on allowing you to finish any quest to your own satisfaction, even if essential NPCs wind up dead, but it is one case where I wish it didn’t have to effectively fall back on its own robustness.
that, and the sheer marathon of playing through it if you don’t deliberately skip a dungeon or two, are my only two real complaints. I expect I’ll reach an ending sometime next week …
hmmm the endgame is kind of a mess
40-some hours in I think I should probably wait for a patch
now characters aren’t showing up where they’re supposed to be and I keep seeing items that have PLACEHOLDER in their names. people give obsidian shit for busted unfinished games but I’ve never had this much trouble with one of their games. it played the same cutscene 3 times between acts for a while, or played the new cutscenes visuals with the old ones audio.
That last one sounds pretty cool
the damage scaling on some weapons is really inconsistent at later levels too, daggers will increase like 10%, 10%, 10%, then 50%.
it’s a fantastic game but it’s super long and the last quarter/third has clearly not been all the way polished
weirdly good dialogue trees in that sex scene
anyway I’m like 2/3 of the way to level 19 and I think the cap is 20 and I think I just got to what’s actually for sure the final area and it does feel like the game is, uh, more technically finishable through a series of screwtape quest flags than actually done per se
and I’ve been too powerful for much challenge since like lv15
still, it’s so good
sahaelia the blind elf, last seen on an island breaking apart and sinking into the sea, once again shows up perfectly fine in the next act with no explanation.
my brother killed the elf tree on the island at the end but it seemed like the game intended for you to not kill it at first then change your mind and turn around and kill it. and it’s not like anybody responded the elven collective conscious being offed in the next act anyway.
the paladin guy in this act was like they wrote him to just be a corrupt asshole church guy but then had an idea to make him secretly an undead with a mask or something pretending to be the real guy at some point and forgot to rewrite the rest of the game to match up with the one dialogue that explains this.
at some temple at the end of the game where you have to play a game of pipe dream to open the door to the last boss nothing we did triggered the thing to solve. we had all the things going where they need to go. all the pipes lined up. it wouldn’t go. all the bowls except one were glowing for no reason. one of the all time top ten badly written buggy shitheap crpgs.
you do realize you’re playing the very first release that afaik you pirated and therefore will not be receiving any patches
and the first half of the game was much more visibly polished so obviously this will improve with time
and lots of other fantastic recent CRPGs (witcher 2) were in a worse state at release
like, come on
this rules, i restarted a couple of times in the first game until i got into some builds i actually liked
(sounds like leaving this for a few months would be wise, though)
the first ~20h are solid as hell, the next 15 are still great if a little directionless, and the last 25 are kind of all over the place (different quests not interacting with one another in the way it seems like they should, some locale keys missing, and a lot looser balance)
but it also has the GM mode and it’s like hands down the most flexible and fun CRPG engine ever made so I’m pretty disinclined to criticize
what are you talking about? it’s done had multiple patches. I pirated the regular gog release? It’s the full game how else would I be at the end. I said the game seemed like I accidentally downloaded the early access version from the way it plays, not that it was.
we killed the dwarf queen because why not, nothing means anything, everyone seems to just show up again in the next act anyway. she shouldn’t have any problems showing up in divinity 3 if she wants.
the resolution to my characters personal story was a big nothing too. there was already a guy standing there wanting to kill my target acting like I was in his way. I had to kill this clown just to talk to the target to get some revenge closure before killing him myself, he couldn’t wait 2 seconds for me to state my revenge intentions and start the fight, he had to act like he was the main character and this was his fight.
I tried a new patch to get past the pipe dream puzzle but I forgot I had the game alt-tabbed trying to look up what the games fucking deal is so the patch wouldn’t go, then I closed the game and the patch said it was already applied even though it wasn’t and I couldn’t join the game now. so I had to spend 30 minutes uninstalling, reinstalling, patching to get back in the game and spend five minutes finishing it so I could then uninstall it one more time and delete the iso for good measure. the secretly undead paladin guy showed up for the last fight. of course.
it was a very fitting ending to the game that I killed lucian in the last fight, my journal entry even updating to say how I had done so, then the ending cutscenes were all about how lucian lead the world to a new era for peace etc.
it’s the first full release. it’s not done permanently, however you may feel about some big games still needing some post-release support it’s silly to pretend that this is a non-factor, just because you had 60 hours to put into it in two weeks
you’re no better than the steam reviewers if you write off a game for being unpolished before it’s received a single major patch
the game was literally unfinishable without patches and if it wasn’t a “full release” it should have stayed under the early access label, and they could let everyone know when it was finally a real game. obsidian games are in a better release state than this was.
imo don’t whine about something you got for free
does larian write your paychecks felix
no (god help me if I ever wind up in the games industry) but I have better things to do than tar a developer for lack of polish when it’s reasonable to expect that no one would’ve gotten to the end this quickly anyhow
maybe they needed a cash infusion and decided to release early, who cares when the work itself is so good & unique and it’s very clear that it just needs a little more
like I have no great need to take “out of early access” as PLAY THIS GAME TO COMPLETION IMMEDIATELY AND GET UPSET WHEN EVERYTHING ISN’T PERFECT
(I am at close to 50h and still enjoying myself tons though which is nuts for me)
it’s not that good though, if you count on the writing to help maintain some interest in the game. and the things your saying make no sense. they were somehow going to patch this game as it went along to where most of the writing would have to be completely reworked to be sensible, all before anyone finished the game? my brother and I only played for a couple hours every other day. how slow did we need to go? I haven’t heard anything about this game supposed to be some unfinished thing. why would anyone assume it’s not like literally every other game they announce a release date for and then on that day it comes out and you play it cause that’s the game.