Eight long weeks of rolling: Divinity Original Sin

the review is actually negative, nice one steam

In gaming, there's a layer to reading reviews not quite as present in other entertainment mediums.

Gaming is very, very subjective. You might argue it combines all the subjective elements of other forms of entertainment and rolls them together, creating a truly finicky state. From there, you read reviews and wonder is that person's subjective view going to work with my subjective view? And it's hard to tell.

So, often enough, I hit on games that get rave reviews but I'm baffled at how high its marks are. Sometimes it goes the other way, sometimes bad games click. I do think there are some objective elements to gaming: Visual fidelity and quality, clarity of explanation and coherence in UI, so on and so forth. But most, if not all of it, is sort of up to the end user.

Divinity Original Sin is the byproduct of the kickstarter era of a couple years back. I think you could argue there's a pretty clean sweep of isometric-ish rpg-is titles born of KS; a "sequel" to Planescape Torment, a sequel to Wasteland, a "spiritual successor" to Baldur's Gate-ish and then whatever D:OS was supposed to be spawned from. I suppose on a level it is worth noting the game was marketed on its own graces, without claiming it's going to relive torment or BG2 or the lost direction Fallout took.

That being said, I can't really say I understand how or why this game is so positively reviewed. There's not so much hype to it, not really, as I don't know anyone who played it other than a friend I fear I unfortunately talked into it.

Sorry about that.


I'd read that this game doesn't "hold your hand" but I'm going to say no, this game's opening is simply shitty and not well done. I can remember picking up Divinity 2 and having much the same feeling. A good tutorial is difficult to do, but this game just pops up way too many tutorial tips without really helping you get your bearings. It's also really claustrophobic and under informative. I get this weird headache playing the game, one I can't remember ever getting playing Isometric games. I had to turn off a bunch of settings.

A friend bought me this game with the hope we'd play it together, but they didn't much like it, and saints I can't blame them. The start of this game is really bad. I mean I'm playing this after TW3 and FF6, which are games with easy to get into startings, while this is a stuttering ball of crap that starts with you getting teleported to 'the end of time' to get yelled at by a gnome. Or an imp. One or the other.

Like, hi? Can I get my damn bearings, get some idea what I'm doing in this game before you vomit more word spew at me? Spoilers: Rarely does this game try to help you get your bearings, so no, not here, not now. Wordvomit though, this game is astounding at that. Only when it is pointless though. Imagine a card game with no rules text, only flavor text, but the cards still do something. You've got it.

Maybe I'm a bit spoiled by the witcher 3, which admittedly did hold your hand a bit too much, but I feel like you can add a little something when you get into the murder victim room like... I don't know, actual anything? Saints. A quip, a line of dialogue to at least tell me I'm in the right room?

I always feel like the people who like this sort of thing are just lying and reading walkthroughs. RPGs have the most walkthroughs you've ever seen, with piles of details, whereas I couldn't even find a text walkthrough for something like Shantae - just some moron's videos where he misses a jump four times in a row and you start hitting yourself with the keyboard - so I'm pretty sure someone is using them.

I mean, three hours into the game and I'm still baffled as to what I'm supposed to be doing. To call the game "directionless" or "terrible at signposting" feels slightly like an understatement. There's a section where you need to read a "spell" to remove a barrier. It's total gibberish, something about mushrooms, so I went over to the mushrooms I was just talking to and read it again. Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

The solution? Hump the barrier you're removing. Now sure, that's no big deal, but imagine 50 situations like that for every quest area and you get the idea. You constantly need to puzzle out the tortured developer logic. Except when you don't, which can be even more jarring.

In terms of engine and visuals the game is a weird mixed bag. It's a very pretty game; very colorful and nice to look at. But it's also horrible about, well, basically everything to do with actually presenting the game in a useful manner. Loot is a pain to pick up, figuring out line of sight is irritating, sometimes enemies can or can't shoot you through what you think is or is not cover. Then you go to shoot through it, and it is cover. But after they shot you.

The worst? Various things will apply environmental changes. Guess what happens when there's grass on that floor? That's right, the grass clips right through it and makes it very difficult to see. This makes some sense, I guess, when you drop an oil patch on the floor, but not when it is on fire. You grow accustomed to this stuff but it's still way, way sloppier than it has any right to be. Generally I think it's worth being critical when there's a learning curve to using your eyes.

look at this masteful waypoint selector

The UI is a pathetic mess. It's completely jumbled, inventory management is a pain, your leader can't access bags or check gear during bartering, it's awful. I can't set one character as my "talker" and if you try to sell from someone else, their charisma is used, not your barterer. Durr. Hurr. Clicking on enemies is irritating as well, the game loves to be fiddly and require way too much precision. Some enemies have animations they go through in combat, and yes, if the animation moves them off your cursor you can end up clicking on the ground or moving instead of attack.

You can tell the person who programmed the UI is a little slow from the first screen. Press a key or "A" to begin. Why is this here, WHO CARES, the mouse doesn't work. It does once you click space, bringing up the menu to begin... Which should have come up immediately to begin with! It's unusual to so perfectly and precisely pin down the UI engineer is bad at their job, but bam, here it is. It reminds me of that moronic screen windows 10 has just... Because?

Maybe they share trade secrets. Also there's no pause button in this game, because durr hurr. And look at this checkpoint screen. It's brilliant! You have to scroll down through a vague list of locations because they were too lazy or too bad or who knows.

Audiowise the game... Suffers for its sense of humor. Quipping is cute and I like it, but the same quips play over and over while you're going through town. I don't understand how devs don't notice how grating the same lines being spammed gets. The Witcher 3 did this lots, too, and it's just not charming the 9th or 10th time you hear it. Anyway the voice acting is fine, nothing Witcher level, but perfectly serviceable. Probably around Mass Effect or what I imagine Dragon Age sounds like. I enjoy the party voiceovers, they're all pretty solid, but the chatter quips go from funny to annoying to downright aggravating over the course of your stay in an area. It comes off as rather unpolished; I don't know why a game can't keep track of the fact the game has made a cheese pun 73 times and maybe decide yeah, you know what? Maybe it's time to put a cork on it.

You will be sitting there talking to a key character while the same joke about "where is my pepper? achoo!" plays 17 times in the background during the conversation.

So I guess basically: It's good, but then it becomes annoying, and then it becomes bad. The stuff you don't hear too often, like critical hits or calls for a healer, never get annoying and they sound good. I especially enjoy the marksman taunting that she'll take them all in one shot, JUST WATCH when you use richochet (an attack that bounces arrows off enemies to hit more than one). I don't really understand, on the other hand, why you record the same lines of dialogue for situational triggers for each character. They could sound different, but they don't because...?

Music quality is good. The battle music is upbeat and inspiring, and the various themes are solid through-out the game. I don't know if it's a coincidence, but often when a battle takes a major turn in my favor, it seems like the music changes tracks. But I've played a lot of combat in this game, so it wouldn't shock me if it was just a coincidence. Actually it would shock me if the game had something context sensitive and well designed, because this game is monumentally tonedeaf.

Oh, and of course, the game has traps. The worst mechanic in RPGs since there were RPGs. Ah yes, needless tedium that offers no mental reward, that slows down the game and is depressing in how something so boring can survive so many generations of game design. This game takes it one step further, with traps only being set off - once detected - by intentional movement. So they do nearly nothing, until you can't see them, then hurray? Dumb.

Some traps, on the other hand, that aren't defined as traps but still shoot poison or fire or whatever, aren't auto-avoided. So sometimes you have to wind your party through, but usually you don't. Most of the traps in the game you can solve with either teleporter device spam or putting a barrel on them. Very exciting addition. Sometimes stuff just instant-kills you, and sometimes your character just decides to walk over lava.

The writing in D:OS is... Not good. The game tries to be funny far too often, and there's two rules to humor they didn't observe. Jokes need to be delivered precisely, at just the length they need - brevity is to the soul of wit. They're not. They're overdone and irritating. Second, a joke has to fit the when and where, and you shouldn't tell a joke if you don't have anything funny to say. This game just rehashes pun or spams annoying dialogue over and over.

I enjoy the little character conversations. I really wish the game wasn't, to be frank, idiotically designed when it comes to conversation choices. I wanted to have my cohort, the second source hunter, choose her own dialogue as chosen by her AI. This only works if she isn't under my control, otherwise her personality vanishes. And her charisma happened to be higher, so yeah, it would never work. Great. Sometimes this breaks anyway, and she'll just constantly say she wants me to do something else, even if I exhaust all options.

Great coding, this game.

The game's overarching storyline is a lesson in dissonance. I don't want to spoil anything; mostly because I don't want to seriously critique this level of garbage. But mostly it's just offensively mediocre, strung together with puns and bits of "wit" that further garnish the poor writing. There's a bit where you discuss whether or not the antagonist (at the time, who knows with this drivel) can be redeemed. You're standing in a lake of blood from her victims, whose corpses decorate the walls.

Then ten minutes later I was fighting snowmen after a long boring speech about racial equality between elementals. I seriously can't understate how disjointed and sloppy a production D:OS is. It's just hap-hazardously slapped together. You get the impression you're going through someone's grab bag of RPG modules, not a sleek adventure.

I really want to talk about how much I hated the 'homestead' gimmick, the overarching plot, the secondary characters. I seriously wanted to punch basically everyone not in the party. But it's all sort of tertiary and quickly summed up with "bad writing".

So why even talk about this game at all? Because man, oh man, is the combat ever good. Combat in D:OS is basically what you always wanted from isometric RPGs but never got until now.

Combat is turn based, isometric, everyone taking their turns one after the other. It's full action point spreads, with the ability to store up AP from previous turns to a cap set by a stat (so good! you can store up even more points if you spec for it!)  that gives you lots of variety without making the whole pause/wait thing overbearing as it was in other turned based games.

The thing that makes the combat so pleasant is the raw number of interactions and options in the game, and describing doesn't do them justice because interactions come up every single fight and need to be considered.

The simplest thing is the most evident - one early hire has access to a spell that causes a rain storm. Zuh, you think? Does it do damage? No, not really, but it does - Weaken some fire enemies, lower resistance and change how lightning attacks work within it. The whole system extends out like this, you can freeze enemies and then accidentally light them on fire, melting the frost. You can set fire to oil, or use oil to slow enemies, or drop puddles to create great swathes of stunning with lightning. You can even freeze puddles to make ice, which people can slip on. Some enemies bleed profusely, and you can lightning up the blood to stun them. Trolls bleed poison, which regenerates them, unless you set that on fire.

It's fantastic. Coupled with the turn based play, there's so many awesome options and so many lines of play. Sometimes you just spam crowd control, but there's often better ways to do fights, with lots of skill ceiling. A lot of it lies in how you start the fight, pre-positioning, or using teleporter cheese. In fact, I often look back at fights and realize I forgot so many things that would make them easier. There's tons of different grenades, tons of different ways to better crowd control.

There's lots of flaws in the combat, though.You need to prep yourself for some fights, and others can turn into completely obnoxious drag out brawls. One boss fight involves the boss having a 70% chance to resist Lower Resistance and over 100% resistance on all elements. And he summons adds, but he can't really kill you very quickly, so it's just one long drawn out slap fast. You need to line of sight some enemy groups, otherwise you get rushed with crowd control.

Oh and there's also some downright buggy behavior where my leadership character getting charmed caused him and all his new allies to take two full turns in a row because the initiative bonus went over to them. I guess it should work that way, except it doesn't make any sense. There's other bugs as well. The combat order display sometimes breaks, the AI often breaks, and units outside combat - or units that left combat - can be pulled back into combat but don't move as turn based units while they're outside combat. Imagine wild animals just wandering around while you're thinking about turns in combat, because the level of quality control in this game... All sorts of dumb stuff happens.

As a final note, Line of sight in this game is ... Disappointing. You're given the impression, early on, that clouds will block line of sight. Except enemies just casually shoot and cast through it. After a while, this element of the game drops away, and essentially LoS is just something you try to feel either 100% with or don't concern yourself with at all. Basically, if it's a brick wall, you're good. But trees, clouds, flaming wreckage - the AI will just casually shoot through it much of the time. So will you, after a while.

It's still lots of fun, but the way it essentially cheats just denigrates the experience. You don't really mind once you settle into the rules, but it's kinda silly to have smoke clouds and stuff that don't work properly at all.

Enemy design is, on the other hand, highly varied and has TONS of models. Like, an impressive amount of variety. Enemies use the same skill system as you, for better or worse, but this leads to them having tons of options and making for extremely varied combat. The bad point to this is, enemies tend to spam their debuffs, snares and so forth. You need to be sharp about LoS, and there's a real benefit to taking the resistance talents. Thankfully damage is pretty subdued in this game, so having two units CC'd often doesn't mean you wipe immediately.

nice

I don't know how class balance is. I've read it is bad, but I felt like each character in my party did a job and had lots of options to be useful.

The loot system is fine, though the affixes aren't weighted well, but the crafting system is obnoxious. You can either experiment or learn recipes but it's awful. I mean it uses the UI, the UI is garbage. The UI is less welcoming than a mud, I honestly think I'd be faster just typing things out. You can only craft from one character's inventory at a time, and you generally don't want to waste points, so you need to have +crafting items that you switch on, then off. Then you realize you forgot something, look through other inventories, only to realize it was there all along lost in the jumble of trash and just ugh...

Let's talk about quest logs. I have no idea when I've finished quests in this game, or what even is a quest, or if I'm questing. The game meanders, feels poorly put together, with seemingly random events or dialogue options to prod the plot forward. You discover evidence of who murdered the guy in act 1 and walk around town to find no one is interested in, you know, actually discussing it. It's just sloppy stuff.

It's intentionally made this way. It's "old school". Old school is, apparently, a term for shoddily done and irritating. Yes, I understand that the hand-holding quest paradigm of MMORPGs can feel like your character has magical horsePS and that's kind of annoying, but you can come with a better quest log that doesn't tell you everything perfectly.

I mean you in the general sense. Given the slapdash UI I do not actually think Larian can do any better.

Basically, this is a game that needs a walkthrough, because Larian isn't good at signposting or explaining things, or even writing down stuff you're supposed to know. And if things are explained, you might not see them for six hours, and then .... Shockingly ... You don't remember how to interact with them. You won't need it all the time, but you'll hit the dumbest things and have to look them up, because the game has a sexual predilection with underexplanation. I would also advise avoiding forum discussions, as they have that 'dark souls' flavor of morons (who, given their stupid posts, didn't solve it themselves) letting you know that some nonsense is a perfect explanation.

Can I recommend D:OS? Absolutely not. Yes, the combat is excellent, the engine is pretty, the music is good. But the UI and controls are finicky trash, and the game is flooded with bad design decisions. It's the definition of eurojank, regardless or whatever else you want to say about it.

I got right to the end of the game, dragging myself through the last couple hours of truly dreadful writing to reach the door to the last temple. The door, which of course talks, spits out some crap about 'needing to find my pieces' to progress. I look it up and this is a checkpoint on having found enough bloodstones in the game.

Guess what? I'd found enough bloodstones. I found a couple more, tried it again, and still the door wouldn't let me through. What I hadn't done, because it forces you to engage with the wretched story and the idiotic homestead, was open the rooms in my homestead by triggering bloodstones. I started to do this, and after a couple minutes just closed the game because its excruciatingly boring. You're supposed to talk to the imp and trudge around the rooms triggering cutscenes I have no interest in. I didn't, and don't, care about the story. It is actively the worst part of the game, and it just forced it on me otherwise it wouldn't let me progress.

It's been two days and I can't find the interest to push through the last of these awful rooms and awful stories. Time to uninstall and play something with a better story, like I don't know, Total War: Warhammer or Wolfenstein the New Order.

I can't see myself buying another Larian game for a long time, if ever. This game was a critical success, and I think the kickstarter for the sequel was a success, so I can't imagine them fixing any of the issues and just shoveling out more of the same. The combat is great, but I just... Do not want to interact with their writing. I was fine with it until it dragged me kicking and screaming to force me to watch cutscenes to do the last boss and no, just no, not ever.

As a word of warning, if you do get this game, make sure you're using a walkthrough for the specific version as they changed a lot of stuff, and some of it for the worse, in the enhanced edition.