yeah, and that’s one of many respects in which this is much more faithful to the original than I expected, and largely for the better (speaking as someone who played the first two hours of the first one three times)
I feel like my OCD outright rejects this. I simply tend to go through the trees until the text starts to repeat and pretty intentionally try to avoid missing any (via never pressing the text options that I think will move the conversation forward).
This is also probably why I watched all the skits I missed in Berseria online.
this game isn’t for me and I’ll never play it but I hate it anyway, a selectbutton story
Anyway I forgot that Torment 2 was even going to be a thing and I guess 2017 is going to be the year where oops, all my money went to the video games
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my one concern is that the setting, Numenera is way less interesting than Planescape was. Like, it’s just DnD with Science-Magic Swords and Science-Magic Armor instead of like DnD but with certain elements of the setting exaggerated into an interesting space.
Who knows, maybe inxile decided to make up interesting stuff in the setting that is otherwise so dull.
okay, I’m leaving the first town now. eight hours.
the combat is definitely no better than shadowrun, not in the same league as divinity but that’s OK because there’s very little combat
other thoughts:
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it does occasionally feel like the writers run out of ways to describe dune-like trances or interactions with otherworldly devices and this is the main reason why I’d advise against long play sessions, but the writing is consistently of very high quality, and for all the of mysticism and world-building, the interpersonal relationships and dialogue with your party members and other NPCs really do not suffer at all. they consistently drop lines that impress me, and (contrary to perception of the original game) there’s very little conspicuous philosophizing.
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the levels are memorable and well-arranged; the first city spans ~6 separate main maps, and they’re all a good size and have nicely varied art and solid visual design so you’re rarely/never getting lost or fatigued trying to navigate between quests.
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the skill system makes sense and is decently complex but still isn’t particularly interesting (like shadowrun). way too many of the mandatory battles involve trying to schlep someone over to a switch or a gate which serves to make both the enemies and the objective a nuisance.
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you should probably not play a rogue, as the two arguably essential party members are both (sort of) rogues.
But I always play a rogue 
another thing I quite like about this game is that the engine is quite capable but only occasionally announces itself as such; it looks like a purely 2D isometric render, but periodically reminds you that a lot of it is fully modeled in 3D (I imagine some stuff still isn’t, given the fixed camera), and it has nice particle effects.
having typed that I’m reminded that I generally have a disproportionate amount of affection for 2D-on-3D graphics so I guess this isn’t too surprising.
I’m now up to the second town which is much smaller than the first, I understand that there’s only like one more huge area (comparable to the first town in size) after this which means it’s likely to be a ~20 hour game in total. I think I’ve had all of four battles, including a whopping zero in the actual wasteland area between towns, and am quite OK with that. the scope of this game is so far one of the best parts; it doesn’t feel quite as much like a constrained “campaign” as the new shadowruns, and it’s just long enough to have a chewy, coherent arc without feeling like its overstayed its welcome or there’s too much “there” there to really appreciate. as promised, most of the skills checks I’ve failed have been just as interesting as the ones I’ve passed.
I almost always play a female character in single player games but for some reason I didn’t this time and I regret it; the male PC is really dull.
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i’m enjoying this for the most part, the writing is good and i dig the aesthetic
i have no idea what’s going on with the combat when it does come up, every time i’ve gotten into a battle i miss most of the time and die very quickly
Played about 8 hours now, restarted my character 3 times. I feel like I’m moving from save scumming to character scumming now.
Also enjoying it quite a bit now though. Battles are pretty merciless and short as well. So far I’ve found that dumping pretty much all points into a single stat seems to work best and just using that particular stat to solve as many problems as possible.
Game seems to have a lot of options based on Lore and Perception, as well as Scan Thoughts if you’re a Nano.
yeah I’ve played as a nano and I’ve been happy with the amount of options available to me, once you hit tier 3 you can pretty much pass every check unless you’ve leveled up very badly. the only check I failed earlier on was with the words of qra, we’ll see if that does or doesn’t come up again
I think the thing that surprised me is that failing checks also leads to results. Sometimes you actually want to fail a check because the results provide more stuff/options than succeeding. That’s a really nice detail that I’d like to see more of in any game, given that Game Over is the least interesting way to resolve anything ever (though understandable as a necessary give when time and capacity is limited).
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yeah, sorry, I actually meant to say “the only check I failed earlier on that I have misgivings about” – I failed plenty 
there’s a truly terrible unavoidable get-to-the-switch midgame battle which you pretty much have to replay at least once because the goal isn’t clear the first time
based on stuff like this, I think it’s fair to say that this is not as great as original sin – it didn’t come from nowhere in the same way (I know they were both kickstarted and divinity was a long-running series but the eventual quality of OS was a huge surprise), it’s not as funny and huge and vital and it’s definitely not worth playing the game entirely for its systems/combat, which means it’s also reasonably likely that it’ll be upstaged by OS2 later this year.
but it continues to be astonishingly successful as a sequel to torment – despite the 18 year gap and the different universe, this feels much more like the 1999 game (except better-looking and more playable, despite the battle I’m stuck on) than any other CRPG I’ve ever played, and it doesn’t feel cheap or derivative for that, which is still pretty remarkable.
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Why do you even have the option to try it, then?
Dragon Age Inquisition actually has dialogue trees that for the most part flow like a natural conversation. That doesn’t mean they’re particularly notable, but they do avoid the lawnmower problem
The Writing in OS is really bad though. And it seems OS2 is barely fixing this.
If only we could have an RPG with the writing quality of Torment and the mechanics of OS…
I love the writing of OS, the mysteries are actually interesting and it’s so uninterested in typical grimdark presentation
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I dont like Original Sin’s writing but I think it’s fine for what it is; your uncle’s pun-heavy D&D campaign and all his friends are adorable dweebs.
Yeah thats all a plus to me. Like, say what you will, at least it has a tone. Most rpgs are so bland they put me to sleep
I dropped OS pretty fast after I was supposed to care about a murder mystery right after I had killed two city guards. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to take it seriously? I can’t really care about the mysteries after something like this.
And having to heal 10 times with a spell with a cooldown, after every battle, was very bad
Torment was amazing. I tried to replay it later but couldn’t go past the presentation / Infinity engine. Not sure this one is for me.