It’s out today. Reviews have been stellar. DoS was great, and this one should be better. I love what Larian has been doing to rejuvenate my favorite genre. I played a bit in early access but cut myself off to save it for release. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been waiting two years for this one. And now it’s here… I’ll be in my bunk.
I got about 30 hours on the first one. Just dove right in with a wizard and a warrior. At first I was loving the no coddling approach it had. Lots of quests/places were too hardcore to try and go to, but the game didn’t prevent you from it. Eventually I ended up in the the caves of compulsory stealth without an invisibility potion and just sorta gave up because the last viable save was too long ago. Will be keeping an eye on this one, though definitely gonna look over some tutorials and walk-throughs before starting.
I’ve been interested in this. Any interest in some SDMB co-op games on this?
It was a few days before I realized that this game I helped fund on Kickstarter two years ago has finally been released, so I just started two days ago. Great, in much the way that game 1 was, though they seem to have nerfed thieving quite a bit. I am still not quite sure how this GM mode is supposed to work, but I’ll get around to checking it out. I’ve ended up restarting the game a couple of times because there are a lot of things I’d kind of like to do after I’ve figured out where the companions I want are hanging out. None of the characters I actually like are healers, but they give you options to decide what kind of character an NPC is when you recruit them. You do that through dialogue, which is a weird approach. It’s like the people can swap out their point expenditure and therefore dramatically modify their life’s story because of something you said in dialogue. But I guess any RPG in which you can re-assign your character points later has this absurdity built in. Why not hang a lantern on it? But the lore later will be weird.
Anyway, I’m playing Loshe as a thief. I’m picking up Ifan as a cleric. Sebille can stay as a ranger, since an archer is one of the handiest roles in the game. Beast as a battle mage suits me just fine. Probably my main will double as grenadier in time.
I’ve been going back and forth on playing as a custom character or one of the origins… Lohse is definitely my favorite to play as but creating my own character has always been such a staple of the genre…
You can completely respec your characters and companions in Chapter 2 by the way.
I’m kind of a sucker for things in CRPGs that open up extra dialogue options. But Lohse’s official personality, a sort of fey nihilist, is different from the way I’m playing her. So I often skip the dialogue choices tagged with her name.
IGN gave it a 9.6/10 and Gamespot gave it a pretty rare 10/10.
I’m enthusiastic in general about the revival of the ye olde schoole glory days of Baldur’s Gate, but as far as I’m concerned Larian has been leading the pack with these Divinity games. To think that they once put out these awkwardly named awkward playing mashups of Diablo and Baldur’s Gate. The turn-based combat is fun and interesting, with the old school challenge of trying to find a survivable path through the game. The crafting system had me obsessive in the last game. The exploration turns up fun world details, many of which are delightfully humorous. And the engine itself looks good and is not very obnoxious to navigate.
I do have a serious complaint that the engine on this installation does not recover gracefully from being minimized. More serious, the game seems to be trying to appeal my nostalgia for the Windows 98 era’s tendency for video games to crash your entire computer. Once in a while, when I’ve pressed quick-save or quick-load, suddenly my whole desktop shuts down.
I’ve been enjoying the hell out of the game. I’m finally off the Fort Joy island after about 50 hours of play time. I admittedly spend a bunch of time doing things that don’t advance the gameplay at all, like trying to get to places the developers didn’t intend with teleport spells, etc. Or
trying to cure Rattus Perfidus of his lying curse. I tried absolutely everything I could think of, but he dies every time. Has anyone managed this?
A couple things made me very glad once I left the island:
Free re-specs! I was pretty satisfied with my main, an undead Dwarf rogue, and a range spec Ifan. I had tried running a sword and board Red Prince and had really messed up my spec with Lohse to the point where I usually just skipped her turn. A trip to the magic mirror fixed me right up.
I have teleport pyramids again! And apparently you can get more than two of them at some point!
My only real complaint so far is that a sword and board tank build still seems mostly useless. Has anyone been able to make it work?
I like the new system of memory slots a lot better than the previous game’s system of forcing you to unlearn a skill to make room for a new one.
That’s really weird. It’s been rock solid for me on Windows 10. The only bug I’ve found is that completed quests won’t archive correctly in the log until I toggle “show active quests only” on/off a few times. I wonder if the upcoming patch will fix things up for you.
The one complaint I have so far (I’ve finished everything in Fort Joy proper and am now at the point where you’ve escaped the prison):
There are multiple ways to “escape” the prison. However, if you escape before finding Emmie in “Finding Emmie”, you cannot complete the quest in any other way but killing Emmie. Because apparently once you “escape” the prison, all Magisters are hostile. (Granted, I already killed all of them in the prison/ghetto.) However, all the Source Hounds are hostile as well. Because…well, it’s doesn’t really make any sense. It’s not as if anyone actually knows you escaped. And there dogs. Whose master is likely dead. How do they become auto-hostile other than through lazy programming? And the worst part is not only does it remove RPG options, but you lose out on about 2000 xp as a result of not completing the quest peacefully. Even though you have no chance to do so anymore. Because of something you had no way of knowing would trigger.
My Red Prince is a 1h + shield warrior and his main function is to knock things down with Battering Ram or Battle Stomp, with Bouncing Shield for ranged damage. He has two points in Polymorph so he can Chicken Claw or Tentacle Lash as well. I’m near the end so everybody has a million skillpoints and 20 active skills and so on but that’s what I had early on and those skills are still really good. I think I branched into Geomancy fairly early with him as well, those physical armor buffs (Fortify, Mend Metal) are cheap to use and scale with level and skillpoints only, no need for intelligence. Getting 1 point in Scoundrel so you can pick up the Pawn talent also made it a lot easier for him to move around.
The main thing to remember is that you can’t really tank in this game but you can prevent damage by using crowd control abilities like knockdown and chicken. And having one or two more tanky characters means your healer can concentrate on the more fragile ones instead of everybody dying at the same time. Also many utility spells don’t need intelligence at all, which means you can easily give a few spells for your “warrior” character and still be effective.
I was glad to har that there is respeccing possible. I’m still on the island and my sword/shield Red Prince is mostly useless due to terrible mobility, action points get mostly wasted by simple movement.
I love the game so far, the only complaint is the sudden gotcha encounters where enemies suddenly materialize all around you by surprise, usually forcing a re-fight and cheesing exploit, which can still be a different kind of fun though 
Knockdowns and other stun skills are super important in this game. Buying yourself that extra turn gets really important from the 50% mark, when you start getting 8+ enemies to keep track of.
As for movement, get the Scoundrel talent The Pawn if you don’t want Executioner, you just need one point in Scoundrel to unlock it.
I’d suggest the following talents:
Pet Pal (Opens up so much hidden stuff, it’s brilliant.)
Executioner (+2 AP on a kill. Incredibly useful.)
The Pawn (1 AP of free movement every turn. NB, can’t have both this and Executioner)
Opportunist (Free hits on passing enemies.)
Rooted (3 extra memory points)
I put Morning Person and Come Back Kid on everybody as soon as possible, and I do much of my haggling to keep me stocked with resurrection scrolls. The ablative physical and magical armor seem to have basically nerfed the versatile power of the archer. But I have been working out different strategies to cope.
Can someone smarter than me tell me if my new laptop will run this game? Not looking to run high settings. Just want to be able to play it smoothly.
HP Spectre x360 13-ae0xx
Intel Core i7-8550 1.8GHz
16GB ram
Intel UHD 620
512GB SSD
Integrated graphics is not officially supported for the game. That said I have seen reports of people getting it to work with a bit less than that albeit a bit clunky.
My recommendation is to buy it on Steam and try it. As long it is not run for more than two hours you can return it for a full refund. You should be able to tell if it works well enough for you in under two hours I would think.