it's time for plausibly the best roleplaying videogame ever made

King of Posters
61

I’m saying, it’s naive to act like games don’t get a lot of post-release support, if you feel the wheels coming off a little bit maybe take a break since you know it’ll be more enjoyable later

sounds like your experience might be worse than mine though, I’m definitely not at “needed to be completely reworked to be sensible,” mostly just a few sidequests with dissatisfying minor continuity issues

and honestly my biggest complaint is that nothing has been as challenging since I did bloodmoon island before a lot of lower level act 2 stuff without realizing it

62

I thought the game was iffy even in the tutorial and act 1. I didn’t finish the first game maybe it ended up getting just as bad but I remember it had a coherent logical murder mystery at the beginning both me and my brother could go off and track down separate leads on and work the whole thing out and this was nothing like that. theres a million quests and they all seem to just kind of dead end and nobody ever dies or they just show up in odd places or don’t show up at all.

63

first one was pretty solid throughout but I played it six months after release and the last act was still weaker, didn’t stop it from being best CRPG ever as far as what I’m into

you should really play new torment if you still haven’t, underrated as hell even if the RPG mechanics are borderline, fantastic writing

64

OK I think I’m within a couple hours of ending this finally

I played sebille - red prince - fane - lohse. red prince and lohse both have pretty enjoyable arcs and exciting and challenging endings to their personal quests. of the other two of the main six, I understand that beast does too, less clear on ifan. fane is extremely weird but workably/enjoyably so, he feels like he’d be a DLC character if this were another developer’s game, it’s cool. sebille’s personal quest is kind of a mess (and directly contradicts the red prince’s at several points, though it’s mostly workaroundable if not at all intuitively, I managed not to break anything without using a walkthrough), but because hers is actually resolved before the final area it almost works having her as a main – the main character has a much more important goal to resolve, and of any of them, she actually has the most nuanced development, rather than just achieving the goal she started out with – though it’s still fairly weird at times (reminiscent of playing asellus in saga frontier).

the endgame actually takes a nice leap up in difficulty after the somewhat lessened challenge from the game’s third quarter but they probably needed to cut something on the way here, idk

65

I guess the sebille - red prince interactions are a little reminiscent of having your mains disagree with one another in the first game but it feels like too much of an exception here. Not bad but hard to be sure about.

Also, bows and spears are pretty underpowered. As are 1h melee builds and 2h staves; shields are extremely good on mages but the one thing they’re less important than is more damage on a melee character. Double daggers on a rogue is nicely competitive with & distinct from big 2h melee builds though.

66

Can I ask you to defend the move to Mass Effect 2-style shield bars before status effects? I found the first’s combat to be a really interesting juggle of cooldowns and stunlock, and now I feel pushed to sort: Magic or Physical? Then, max DPS until they break armor (again, similar to tactics shifts from ME1 to ME2).

Are there encounter types they couldn’t build before because it relied on stunlock? Bosses?

67

I’m ambivalent about it. Will share thoughts later. You can definitely still knock bosses over and the game isn’t any worse for it (the best and hardest fight in the first game, at the end of the second big area, involved the big bad slipping and falling in some ice when I finally won), you’ve just got to deplete their armor first. I don’t think requiring you to specialize in physical or magic damage for particular enemies is especially interesting, anyway.

That final battle was a clusterfuck! Really glad that spamming revive scrolls kind of lets you exploit the turn order…

68

there are parts of this that are probably way too flabby which is a trap the first game avoided marginally better but it’s hard to be upset about that for any reason other than sheer exhaustion; that it’s as basically balanced and fun and maximalist as it is makes it really easy to forgive some seriously questionable dev scoping. there are recurring NPCs who struggle to carry the weight they should at 20 hour intervals but I’m not exactly sure what the plan was there.

that said I’ve hit very very few (to no?) actual bugs or quest blockers or any of that, it’s just a lot of silly race conditions in multi party dialog and related stuff that makes it feel unpolished.

69

I kind of wish larian hadn’t played witcher 3, its act structure and the way it structures its endings as a series of vignettes that feel oddly deprived of their weight given the sheer size of it were not the best features to borrow

70

I’ve been playing a fair amount of Divinity: Original Sin 2. It’s such a wonderful game. I can never really get into DnD style role-playing games, but this one has been really, really good.

I think the best thing is how consistently surprising it is, both mechanically and narratively. Most of the best narrative moments in this game come up once and never again. They love to tell strange little stories that are both meaningless to the grand narrative but great for letting the player decide who they are playing as.

There’s also this feeling that I am missing something because I’m too stupid to talk to people properly. Lots of stories end very abruptly because I accidentally piss someone off or they just don’t like me. Luckily there are approximately 4,500 billion stories so ending one abruptly feels good sometimes.

A couple of favorites:

One portion features a bunch of flaming pigs. The flames cause the pigs great pain, but they don’t take physical damage, and the flames never go out. After passing these pigs by about 10 times, I finally devise a way of ending their curse. But once I do, a skeletal lizard woman pops up and boredly tells me she has to kill me because I ended a curse. I try to get more info out of her but I piss her off, and then I kill her after she tries to kill me. The pigs disappear. The end.

A man who may or may not have been a prisoner/slave has special talents. It’s not well defined what those talents are, but one of them is most certainly necromancy. His former imprisoner had a beloved cat who dies, and the man raises the cat back from the dead. However, since necromancy is frowned upon, he claims it is “just an illusion.”

I talk to the cat (I can talk to animals) and he is terribly sad about being a walking skeleton cat. He begs me to kill him. I lie to him about knowing his owner (who is not present), and he is so happy that she is alive that he tells me a secret way to open a door. Now the cat likes me and makes weird, clicking purring noises every time I come near.

My favorite mechanical moment so far was when I killed a monster with his own opportunity attack. I cast a spell so that any damage I took would be transmitted to the monster, and then moved away from him so he would hit me. He did just enough damage to kill himself, and I barely survived.

There are also two small pyramids you can pick up. When you activate one of the pyramids, you will teleport instantly to the other pyramid. My plan is to teleport one of the pyramids up to an unreachable area, and then use the pyramid in my inventory to get up there with my whole party. I’m looking forward to doing some real weird shit.

The larger plot seems to be setting up an internal conflict among my party members. Each of them is their god’s chosen champion, including my main character, so I can’t see this ending well.

I’m looking forward to play more of this game at every possible moment.

EDIT: Also every fight ends with everything on fire, including the enemies, my party, and most of the ground. Thanks pyromancer! It’s amazing

6 Likes
71

Is the first one worth playing on PS4?

I liked KOTOR2 and i have played an hour of Planescape at some point for reference.

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Hugely

73

I found the interface small and cramped on a controller and TV, I was much more comfortable sitting at a computer (you can of course plug your PS4 into a PC monitor).

74

this is probably the last polish patch needed for an unequivocal recommendation

75

I got a 25% off coupon for this in my steam account apparently, who wants it

76

I had a hankerin’ for playing some more roles after finishing Dragon Quest 11 and The Witcher 3 just seemed to faux prestige TV for my tastes at this point and this was on sale for ps4 so I bought it.

It’s super weird to play this type of game on a console, but I like it. I like that it has a narrator that tells you what the facial expressions of the people you’re talking to look like, this is exactly the direction I want game developer energies focused on at this point in my life.

I hope the Tactical Combat Action doesn’t drive me insane, I just got off the boat at the beginning of the game and I’m already feeling kind of overwhelmed.

My typical approach to these games is to over think everything and try to do the “best” thing, but in this case I think the flood of options and details is so expansive that if I try to do that I would never get past the character creation stage. I think I’m just going to wing it and see how things work out. I chose the entertainer lady origin character and made her something called a “Wayfarer” because the outfit was the least ridiculous. I think I made the right choice!

77

the learning curve on this is pretty steep but i finally found my way out of the prison fort or whatever and i feel like things are starting to click

i protected that fucking cat with all of my might, and it paid off

i don’t feel like i’m any better at the game, a lot of the ‘systems’ are still totally opaque, but that’s part of the fun i guess. i’m kind of unaccustomed to this type of game.

but i have learned that you basically just have to save before you turn every corner and hope there isn’t some ridiculously overpowered enemy on the other side.

i guess this isn’t really a ‘roll with the punches’ kind of rpg. you gotta incorporate constant failure from unexpected death vectors at every turn. i can’t really see how it would be possible to anticipate any of this stuff, it just seems like saving constantly and doing random shit to see what happens only to reload 5 min later is just … part of the game? it’s cool

78

yeah it definitely doesn’t mind save scumming at all and unlike new xcom that doesn’t feel like a problem with the game

the biggest problems with this one still are all major changes from the last game – the armour system in combat is less intuitively fun (though fine once you get used to it, it’s just a buzzkill at first), the move to having proper chapters in the story and areas that you can’t return to absolutely crushes the pacing and the storyline in the big middle act, and about half of the different companion stories are kind of a mess and it sucks to have to be prescriptive about that in a game like this. It’s still really really good!

79

I still can’t understand what compelled them to do this either; it doesn’t make any sense for a game as huge and strictly maximalist as this, and you have to have done a whole completionist pass at like the 2/3 mark to not miss out on the many plot thread resolutions in the surprisingly long last act. I don’t think I’d have put up with it in any other game.

80

I wonder if all their playtesters fit the completionist mold and didn’t feel the sting. You’re certainly an outlier