| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| PC | 9.60 |
| Overall | 9.60 |
|
My history with RPGs doesn’t involve many traditional CRPGs, it mostly begins and ends with BioWare games. Being a console focused gamer I never got into the legendary RPGs due to barriers of entry for me which included overly complex menus and gameplay systems, real time combat always bugged me in these party based games with cooldowns, and I don’t like keyboard and mouse. KOTOR basically began the process of consolelizing (new word) that kind of RPG. I loved those BioWare games but I always wondered could I ever play the really hardcore ones. Recently there has been a resurgence in the indie scene bringing back that classic isometric deep cRPG and these developers are keeping the console player in mind making their games accessible for all while not sacrificing the complexity. Divinity Original Sin 2 stood out as the best of these recent RPGs so I wanted to give it a shot and thank the maker I did because it’s instantly become one of the best games I have ever played. Why does DOS 2 work so well for me? For one it works perfectly with a controller and it was adapted for consoles, that said I played on a PC but the second the controller is activated it enters a TV mode so the game looks and plays perfectly for that comfortable controller setup. Accessibility is another big one, it’s a deep game that doesn’t overburden the player with countless tutorials but still manages to slowly explain and develop all their systems naturally through gameplay. I never felt overwhelmed with the multiple gameplay systems, very well paced game. Best of all though, the one key aspect that absolutely lend itself perfectly for me is the turn based combat system. Oh how I love turn based, it becomes a chess match where I have as much time as I want to survey the field, know who goes next and I know exactly how much AP I have for actions that turn. I can properly develop strategies without worrying about parts of the fight going on without me when I’m not focused on them that moment. It all makes sense and has set rules so that I am in complete control of my team during a battle. This game feels to me like fantasy Xcom (minus the bullshit RNG), almost every fight was a joy to strategize and figure out how to defeat enemies in always varied locations and situations. Lets backtrack a bit so I can describe the game a bit more. The story is standard fantasy stuff, you pick a main hero from the usual grouping of fantasy characters like an elf, a dwarf, a lizard man, an undead skeleton, generic human dude, and a female mage. You create a team of four out of six, you can’t switch them after the first act which is kind of wild to me but hey now I have reason to play this again. Your group goes on a grand adventure to pursue divinity and become a god to battle evil forces that threaten the world, yadayadayada, cool shit happens. You have maps that actually aren’t that big, this is NOT an open world Bethesda game. Each area is packed with detail and a load of quests to do, no space is wasted. So while you don’t really explore a vast fantasy world you are not wasting time, every location in these maps have a purpose and a good story to go with it. The game is divided into multiple acts and after said act that location is left behind for a new one, no going back to finish old quests, so it’s kind of linear in that regard. There are pros and cons to this, for one the story is always moving forward and great content is constantly flowing. The downside is I miss the feeling of exploring a magical world and discovering things off the beaten path. This game has loads of side content but the maps are so small the path is never hidden. You will level up, develop your characters and ultimately get into many many battles with all kinds of enemies. Which brings me back to the combat, oh the glorious combat! To me this is up there as the best RPG combat system I have ever played. Like I said the Xcom type of strategy and pacing makes flow of the battle so much fun and there are so many moments of “nooo don’t you dare do that you bastard!” where a plan goes to shit cause the enemy pulls out some crazy attack and ruins your strategy. The enemy AI is fantastic, they pull from the same pool of skills the player can have and they know exactly how to exploit any deficiencies your team my have. There is a perk you can add to a character that gives them max AP each turn but leaves them defenseless to all status effects, a risky perk to be sure. Well when I used that on my mage,Lohse, I might as well have put a gigantic sign that said “please attack me with status effects!”, my god the AI was relentless. These battles are so interesting, almost all of them are great. Imagine a game where there are no junk mobs, every fight makes you commit and pay attention. Plus Larian studio made sure to constantly vary up the battle scenarios to keep fights fresh 130 hours in. I can’t tell you how floored I was by the sheer creativity of some of these fights; for instance ones where you are up on a oil rig and below an army of oil monsters keep rising up, one ignition of fire and the entire battle arena lights up like an inferno, which then leads to an invading army of fire blobs that get healed by fire turning the battle on its head. Fighting enemies that are constantly healed until certain conditions around the map are met. Battles that are set in trapped filled rooms, some that combine vastly different enemy types which require your team to be adept for any kind of monster and so on. I could not get enough of these fights, they kept surprising me to the very end. Part of why combat is so great is how the magic system works and how interactive the entire game world is, it’s the kind of level of freedom and detail I expect from an MGS game, not a RPG. You got your basic stuff like if you use a fire spell on an oil surface it will explode and cover the area with fire. Cast rain on an area and use lightning and the water will conduct the electricity, or use a freeze spell and it will freeze enemies and create ice surfaces. These mechanics on their own are great as you can create all kinds of great strategies around them but that’s just scratching the surface. If a player really wants to get creative they can use teleportation and the ability to move items around to create elaborate traps. In a mansion I was in there were these massive paintings that basically can serve as gigantic walls. So I organized four of them in a square to basically make a prison and teleported an enemy into the middle of it to essentially take them out of the battle (so long that enemy didn’t have any teleport spells of it’s own). I never did this but I read others filled empty barrels with heavy items and them teleported that barrel on top of enemies to crush them. Experimentation if encouraged, the gameplay systems work so beautifully that it feels like the player is in full control and not limited to a rigid combat system. Divinity 2 has a combat system that is heavily focused on armor, this system is different but has some drawbacks. Every character has physical and magical armor numbers that is provided by the gear you have on. To take actual health damage one must eliminate one of the armor categories and then attack with that trait. Magic attacks take down the magic armor, once it’s zero you can then damage their health using magic. If you use physical attacks you must remove the physical armor first then your attacks damage them. Status effects are tied to this system as well as all status effects will be blocked by the type of armor that defends it. So this leads to battles where certain characters will have distinct advantages over certain enemies; in most battles you will have enemies with large physical armor and some with large magic armor. My team would then split up and focus on the enemy they are best suited for. It adds a strategic element but it also really reduces the effectiveness of magic until this armor is removed. At the start of a fight most of your status effects won’t even land. I also hated when enemies move around and all of a sudden I have a magic character surrounded by enemies with super high magic armor but really low physical armor and this mage has pitiful physical attacks so it becomes a sort of wasted turn. This resulted in me making my characters have attacks for every situation. I still specialized them to be a mage, the tank, the ranger and so on but I would make sure to invest in one or two skills that would provide them with an attack that is not their focus. Speaking of builds this game offers tremendous freedom to make your character into whatever you want. There is a respec mirror that allows you to change most every stat in the game so you are never locked into a choice if you chose to pivot. Any character can learn any skill/spell as long as you invest points into that skills tree. There are perks that can add some really good rule breaking effects like being able to induce status effects even when they have armor. There are some killer builds that can be made exploiting the traits and potions that provide extra buffs, again it’s a game that allows freedom to experiment and create your own style. Spells come in different spell trees, each with increasing complex spells. There is more than enough ability slots to have many spells from multiple trees which can create some creative combinations. For instance necromancy focuses on spells that can alter the dead, one shields you from death for three turns. One spell allows you to chain your life to that enemy so if you take damage they take damage which is resistant free. Say you have an enemy with high resistance to spells, ok chain them, then activate the death resist spell and attack your own character, free damage on the enemy. There are all kinds of interesting strategies to be had and the AI will come up with some of their own that would surprise me. Because the gear is so important to the combat system, loot is hugely important and sadly one of the negative aspects. For some strange reason loot is RNG, yes there are still premade rare sets of armor and weapons to earn from quests but they scale to your level and often times a random armor you find gets a good roll and has stat perks that are better. It’s just weird to find a better piece of armor from a random kitchen cabinet than a reward from a mage you saved. While I didn’t do this, you can just save the game, pick up the loot and look at the perks it provides (say strength +3 and necromancy +2) and if you don’t like it reload the save and those perks would randomly shuffle into something else. As I mentioned it all scales to your current level, the only exceptions being rare armor sets that do provide cool unique powers and quests to earn them. The majority of the time though you will be mixing and matching a bunch of random gear you find from all over. The game has a great sense of progression where the level scaling works so that difficulty stays at a manageable level throughout but it does remove that aspect of making finding a rare armor feel like some special achievement. Since this is a fantasy game we all know what everyone’s favorite past time is, questing! Oh such glorious quests, quests all over, quests upon quests that interconnect with one another. You can’t walk a few screens without being handed a quest. As I mentioned pbefore every corner of this world has something of value from interesting NPCs to some magical puzzle to solve for rewards, there is something to do and see. With the amount of quests given I thought these would get boring or be fetch quests but this game is almost devoid of any of that. Some how the game is packed with well designed quests that never get boring even 130 hours in, it’s a remarkable achievement. The openness of the game also applies to the way quests can be completed. Most every quest can be approached in a multitude of ways and have various outcomes that many times influence future quests. Sometimes I learned of a quest by reading a letter on a fallen soldier that gave me insight into some secret terrorist plot, because I knew that info I then could get extra information from an NPC that was implicated in the letter and from their learn where the base is. But you don’t need to do any of that, perhaps you are a thief and uncovered a secret locked door that you were able to pickpocket and find a back entrance to said base before you even knew what was lurking inside. Quests have so many ways to beat them like the brute force way, persuasion to talk your way out of sticky situations, sometimes putting enemies against each other and just standing back and watching the fireworks. There will be quest lines between two warring factions that directly conflict with one another, how you navigate who to side with how to approach it will change what characters might side with you later on. Choices are paramount to this game as the story has many tendrils that branch out and directly effect storylines for future acts. The main quest is not really highlighted any differently than the side quests, it’s all high quality stuff but I will say the main quests do have some stand out moments. During your travels you will go deep into “dungeons” often times filled with puzzles and traps. I loved the amount of puzzles this game had, it’s no Zelda but it’s more than most RPGs have. My favorites involve riddles and some odd contraption that must be solved to complete a quest. Optional quests can range to silly fun ones to optional super bosses that will test your skills. Each character you have on your party will also have their own major quest line that stretches across the entire game, I found these to be among some of the best the game has to offer. What’s wild is because you can only pick four of six characters to take with you that’s two major storylines everyone will miss their first go, that’s not to mention the crazy way your choices can change what quests you can do. It’s staggering to think of the amount of variations the quests and storylines can take. My biggest negative with the game and why it’s not at the top top of my favorites is how surface level the story seemed. Gaming isn’t exactly known for its really deeper nuanced storylines but in recent years games have reached almost movie quality acting and performances from digital characters. Clearly seeing this is a small indie game it doesn’t have great graphics so I don’t expect it to do that but I do expect it to at least try to create meaningful relationships between the team members and try a bit harder to really nail the emotional moments. Don’t expect BioWare level writing here, while I did grow to really care for my squad I found their relationships to be flimsy at best. They say all the right things “in our time together you have grown as a great friend” but that is kind of just said rather than organically achieved. You can talk to your team members but the dialogue options won’t really change until some major story moments and even then you get like five lines of dialogue explaining how they feel. There is no getting to know them with long sessions of conversations, no real in game moments where you feel the emotional weight of the events transpiring. I had a love story between my main and Lohse that was so quick to happen; maybe I picked a flirting line once or twice but all of a sudden in the middle of the game they are professing their love for each other, totally unearned. The story is told through voice acting mostly with a narrator explaining the scene as if you are watching an audio book because these little character models don’t emote at all. The power of writing can illicit great emotion but it’s kind of standard fantasy fare what you get here. There are some great twists and turns with the story, some shocking revelations and interesting moral conundrums to work through but I never felt completely emotionally invested in the situation. Compounding the issue is my disdain for the persuasion stat, a garbage stat that needs to go away from every RPG. Because I decide to invest a few points into a magical stat all of a sudden I get a WIN button for everyone situation, it’s absurd. The evil villain is ready to murder an important NPC, wait let me see if a clear a persuasion check, oh look I have an arbitrary number tada I convinced him not to. MAJOR storylines that can drastically alter the story are all decided on whether you have a stupid number in a stupid stat. A few conversations do have a non persuasive option where you have to navigate dialogue in a smart manner to get what you want (the way it should always be) but the majority tie getting a good outcome only to this stat. The very worst part came where this pivotal moment between my entire team arrived, the game had been building up to it and instead of some dramatic emotional sequence where relationships are tested I passed a persuasion check “all good, let’s move on”, just like that. From a storytelling perspective the game could be better. Graphically the game is extremely basic, character models are like tiny action figures with zero emotive capability. The world of Rivellon is well crafted with varied locations that are memorable like a blood island, a forest of elves, it’s great stuff. I think the lore is well fleshed out, the different races and enemy types have great designs. Voice acting is average, a few characters do have some big emotional scenes to work with but it’s few and far between. The narrator has the most work to do, he sounds like a British scholar telling a humorous fantasy tale. Larian knocked it out of the park with the musical score, there are theme songs that are now etched into my brain. Great catchy tunes, big epic fantasy themes that capture the feeling of adventure. The sheer breath of content Divinity 2 has is staggering, especially when I consider its impossible to see it all in one go. I easily put 140 hours into this game, I did do every quest I came across and still never tired of playing. So many games of this length I hit a sort of wall and need to take a break, not so here. Part of it is the great pacing and how well balanced it is, so many RPGs ruin character growth when you do too many side quests, here it’s almost required because this game will kick your ass if you don’t level up and never will you feel overpowered (unless you employ certain cheesy strategies). I did reload some story moments to kind of get a sense of what could have changed if I tried a different outcome and I was shocked at some of the possibilities, I’m pretty sure you can kill basically anyone including your own party members and the story will adjust. Oh and there are extra modes that I didn’t even touch, an arena combat mode where you can create your own custom battles and even play them online. Plus a game master mode that lets you create an entire game if you want, I am sure there are user created stories to try out, it’s wild. And ALL of this is playable online with a friend, which I did not do but it’s a great option for some. Now to be fair I did play the Definitive Edition so I had a polished complete game with all DLC added in (like the great Sir Loras, my undead squirrel knight companion) this is basically the only way to buy the game now so I highly recommend to do so. Divinity Original Sin 2 is a masterpiece of a game that offers the best in class combat of nearly any RPG I’ve ever played. It’s gameplay systems allow for so much improvisation which fulfills that gameplay itch I have, it’s a joy to interact with this world. If only the presentation and story allowed for bigger emotional impact this game would probably be my favorite RPG, thanks to look forward to in the future I suppose. As it stands it’s a remarkable game with fantastic quests, great combat, memorable moments, just everything that makes for a compelling gaming experience. |
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Posted by Dvader Fri, 11 Feb 2022 00:26:42
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