Divinity: Original Sin is officially released today!
This is an old school CRPG in the model of the Ultima games and Baldur’s Gate, but with modern aesthetics, UI and a level of world interactivity that was promised but never truly delivered on back in the day.
http://www.divinityoriginalsin.com/
Would love to hear your impressions so far for those of you that are already playing it. I haven’t had a chance to really delve into it yet, but the little I’ve played sent me back to Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate. The writing is definitely more light hearted in tone and humorous though, but the combat feels really good, and the interaction with the world and the various elemental effects is super interesting.
I’m 12 hours in and it feels like I’ve just started my adventure. The game is absolutely amazing, just what I wanted when I backed this way back in last year - my only quibbles are tiny little things like the townspeople having their voice snippets set to repeat way too often. Quite often the game feels like a proper tabletop game on a computer, one where you can solve problems in a creative way. Like when I couldn’t get to a chest and tried teleport on it on a whim and it worked, teleporting the whole chest to me.
Have to head to work now, but I’ll be back to blather about the awesomeness of this game later on.
Now they patched the townspeople’s looping background yells, so I’m starting to be completely out of quibbles.
Let’s try this singing of praises -thing again, shall we?
First, there’s combat. It’s turn-based with your Action Points carrying over to the next round within certain limits. No mana or other similar resources, just the AP cost and some abilities have short to medium length cooldowns, so you don’t have to worry about wasting your spells. Which is nice, since many of them are very useful out of combat as well - the whole game could be considered a sort of massive physics puzzle, and you have an enormous amount of different skills, spells, abilities and items to use both in and out of combat.
It goes from the elementary things like a fire spell igniting a torch and a water spell dousing it to spell combos like poison dart causing a puddle of toxin that burns if you cast a fire spell at it. Puddles of water freeze if you cast ice spells on them or turn into electrified water that shocks anybody that touches them if you zap them with a lightning bolt. Whirlwind attack can spray so much blood it extinguishes nearby flames. And it isn’t just you and your companions doing this, enemies have elemental attacks as well.
Every fight is just so much fun! Knocking the enemy spellcaster down, then dousing him with poison and finally setting it all on fire or sending a fire elemental to tank enemy fire spirits or charging through a patch of fire and arriving to your destination half-dead. The animations and sounds back it all up, creating a very satisfying feel to it. Targetting can be a bit fiddly since there’s no hexes and sometimes you need to aim your lightning bolt between two friendly characters to hit the enemy but it all mostly just works.
Then there’s the other stuff, the NPCs and quests and talking. It isn’t quite as revolutionary as the combat and terrain manipulation, but unless you really hate humor (Larian studios don’t really do 100% serious games, though the silliness rarely bothers me at least) it’s all pretty good. There’s dozens and dozens of quests and most of them have several different ways to finish them. Your two main characters can argue and disagree if you so want or if you are playing 2-player co-op (which works great and is easy to set up). There’s secrets, teleports so you don’t need to walk endlessly, stuff to steal if you feel like it and so on and on.
Awesome game, all in all. I really happy I backed this.
DLC seems rather pointless, no need to get it. And yes, you can flip back and forth - whoever hosts the game “owns” it and has the save games, the other player is just a visitor. You can’t export or import characters.
You can however start the co-op right from the character generation. We were testing it with a friend of mine and I joined his game, erased the name he had selected for his warrior and wrote “BWHAHAHAHAHA” into the name box instead.
Once I quit joking around we finished the two characters, did the first tutorial dungeon and ran around the town a bit. Co-op seems to work perfectly but I wouldn’t play it with a random stranger, there’s way too many ways to troll the host. I had to quit after a while and he continued the game solo, just continuing from where we left off but controlling all 2 main characters and 2 companions.
So in your party of 4, 2 will always by NPC even in co-op?
I would have loved to see a 4 player party a-la Gauntlet.
In reality I’d probably only play single player, but I love the idea.
It looks awesome, but I’m going to leave it a month or two. Firstly it’s sunny outside and secondly, I want them to work the kinks out, let them patch it a time or three.
I hate these threads, as I (almost) never buy games new (though I did back Project: Eternity and will get that new). So now I have to wait 12 months until it is at least 50% off.
Fortunately, I have about a years worth of $5 games I haven’t played (Witcher 1 and 2, Dishonoured, Metro2023, Assassin’s Creed III, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, I’m looking at all of you!) and a scarcity of playing time, so it’s not that bad.
It was 50% last week! Of course, I scoffed at it since it said early access. Guess I should’ve read a little bit more about its impending release. Oops.
Can you co-op with someone who has the DLC if you don’t? If you can does the DLC turn off or something or can the one without the DLC experience via the shared game?
It looks like the DLC just add some silly items, so I’d imagine if the host has the DLCs you get to use them. There should be no issues with the co-op either way. I don’t work for Larian though so don’t sue me if I’m wrong.
For the life of me, I can’t seem to figure out how to see how many action points a character has left during combat. I can see that I can’t cast things because I don’t have enough points left, but how the heck do I see that I started out with <x> points and have <y> points left?
I know it’s gotta be something silly that I’m missing, but I just can’t seem to find it. Anyone?
and secondly, I want them to work the kinks out, let them patch it a time or three.