I remember at a young age enjoying but being too young to successfully play the original Fallout. Given that I am pretty much a CRPG new comer I was wondering if any duders had enough experience with CRPGs to let me know if either title is at all friendly enough for a new comer to learn with?

If you're familiar with X-Com, I'd say you're pretty good with Divinity. Non-combat stuff is real time, and if you have the patience to explore, you'll be fine. Combat is turn based/action point based. They added new companions, so you probably won't screw yourself over with character creation. Since you're new to crpg's, I'd probably just pick the premade templates rather than going skill ala carte.

As for Wasteland 2, I'm not very far in at all. However, my early impression is that Divinity has a lot more polish compared to Wasteland 2.

@zelyre: Alright Divinity it is! Thanks

@dinkmonger: For a newcomer it really seems like despite less polish, Wasteland 2 will not be nearly as overwhelming with it's systems, nor as punishing with the gameplay as Divinity.

Also if you prefer more sci-fi over fantasy then that might play a role in your enjoyment of either one.

I'd say they were both about equal in the learning curve stakes, but this is coming from 40hrs in Divinity and only 6 so far in Wasteland 2 so Wasteland might throw a few curve balls at me yet.

They're both great games. Divinity, as has been said, is more polished in terms of graphics and UI and thus maybe a bit more attractive to a CRPG newcomer.

Whichever game you choose be prepared to bin your entire party after a few hours and start again with a lot more foreknowledge, and have a lot more fun.

Uh don't worry about the naysayers... Divinity has a learning curve and a steep early challenge... but once you get level 8 or so and wrap your head around the game it isn't really that hard at all. By the time you are level 12 or so most fights are made short work of by any decent team. Wasteland 2 on the other hand is very.... old school. Lots of the skills have extremely limited uses, require heinous levels to be useful, and there is a harsh penalty for messing up. In many ways I feel like Wasteland 2 is too old school for it's own good, it is basically just a Wasteland 1 with graphics. That isn't a bad thing but they could have tried to bring the game into a more modern place especially with the terrible UI and inventory.

Divinity's got better combat and polish, but I really hate the way it doesn't let you create your whole party right at the beginning of the game. Wasteland's got the edge there.

Wasteland 2 starts crashing a lot once you reach the area just after where the beta ends (which is kinda funny) but I dig its humor more personally. Both games get pretty random and never take themselves serious, I cant imagine liking one and not the other, Wasteland combat has less to it though but I enjoy both. Work Shadowrun Dragonfall into that too. Its a good time for turn based strategy RPGs.

Honestly I think the question is which setting you find more compelling. Divinity is pretty standard fantasy fare, albeit with a number of surprises and things that go against tropes. Still, it's knights and clerics and wizards and shooting fireballs and summoning skeletons and stuff. It's a colorful game that has a decent amount of variety in locations, some of them really pretty lush. The dialog is pretty funny, though a lot of the humor reads as quite self aware (not necessarily a bad thing, just saying.) It's a game where a treasure chest might sprout legs and run away from you while slinging insults when you try to loot it. There's also not a whole lot in the way of content blocked due to lack of skills -- most everything is combat related with a few minor exceptions.

Wasteland is a grittier-than-fallout post apocalyptic desert. Don't expect to see much vegetation or a whole lot in the way of drifting snow. There is still humor, but it tends to be of an incredibly black variety without any cartoon pip boys. It's a game about scrabbling around in a parched, lifeless world worrying about how much water there is in your canteen and whether or not you can afford to waste ammo on killing an irradiated mutant bee, then having someone bleed out on you because your surgeon ran out of trauma kits. You will constantly run into things you can't do because you have really limited skill points despite having 4 characters. On a whole, it's more 'hard-core' than Divinity even though Divinity has more complicated combat and a lot of magic interactions.

They're both great games. Like NmareBfly said, the setting is really the most important deciding factor.

Divinity is more polished than Wasteland 2 though, which makes a big difference overall and makes W2 seem really janky in comparison.

I have bad news, Rorie. Wasteland gives you a team size up to 7, but only lets you make four characters - the rest need to be recruited along the way.

So, Divinity: Original Sin lets you make 50% of the characters, and Wasteland 2 lets you make... a bit more than that.

Maybe it's because I've been trying to get into CRPG's for a while now, but I found Wasteland 2 pretty easy to get into and start playing once I had filled out the character sheet. The character sheet is the most intimidating thing about it and you don't even have to mess with it much if you just want to use pre-made characters. After that, talking to people is talking to people and combat reminds me a lot of X-Com.

Just from the Quick Look that Brad played, I'm going to make a wild guess that Divinity Original Sin's gameplay is a little more complex and difficult. Wasteland 2's story seems more involving and interesting, though.

I guess I phrased that poorly: Divinity's four-person party feels like a whole party, and so does Wasteland's. It's far easier to get a wide swath of non-overlapping skills and weapon choices in Wasteland, though, since you create all four of your characters off the bat (or at least have the option to). The skills that your other companions bring to the table are handy but if you plan right with your party, you shouldn't find yourself noticeably hampered if one of the first companions is similar to a main party member.

In Divinity, though, if you had made a two-handed warrior and a Hydrosophist/Aerothurge wizard at the beginning of the game, you would've been tremendously hampered in your ability to play the first few hours of the game on the normal difficulty due to the fact that the designers didn't give you the option to choose other companions until you unlock the Hall of Heroes. (I know they recently added two more companions, months after launch, which helps, but doesn't fix the overriding design issue.) That wouldn't matter in something like Mass Effect where there aren't a huge amount of skills to split up between your party, but there's definitely a "right" and "wrong" way to construct your first two party members here for the portion of the game between the start and the Hall of Heroes, and you have no idea of what that might be until you get to Cyseal and find out what skills your mandatory (when the game launched) companions have, which strikes me as a pretty poor design decision.

To be more precise, the combat system in Divinity is complex enough that a proper balance between characters seems like it's far more important to get right, whereas in Fallout, you're probably going to do alright if you have a variety of weapon types spread across your team, making it all that much more important for Divinity to give you the ability to customize every member of your party. I get the allure of adding companions with backstories and dialogue over that, but it's not the choice I would've made.

These are two of my favourite games of the year, hands down. Spent $80 for the both them, which is major value considering that there's total junk out there like Destiny which is $60 for just itself.

@rorie: To be fair, you can unlock the Hall of Heroes immediately upon entering Cyseal if you know where to go, but that still doesn't change or excuse the problems you have with it to be sure. The addition of the 2 new party members certainly helps I imagine (Backstabbing rogues can output a ludicrous amount of damage and archers are super versatile thanks to enchanted arrows), but I also wouldn't be surprised if a mod that lets you create all 4 party members at the start doesn't show up at some point.

In regards to the games themselves, I think they're both very good. If I had to pick one over the other, I'd probably go for Divinity at the moment, but Wasteland is no slouch either. I hope Pillars of Eternity is good enough to complete this triumvirate, though I'll admit I've found the backer beta a little frustrating (the combat is a little too fast at the moment and thus battles are sort of a mess unless you pause every few seconds or turn on "slow mode"). Here's hoping Obsidian can get that tweaked to be just right, they've certainly nailed the aesthetic properties of the Infinity Engine.

Both are great games but I'd go with Wasteland 2 if you are more into story. The Divinity story is pretty much just window dressing, the only worthwhile interactions I can remember were with animals if you have the animal friend perk. Those were pretty hilarious! But other then that I'd say go with Wasteland 2. I disagree some with other users comments regarding polish - aesthetically Divinity wins hands down, its graphics are far superior and I feel they accomplished what they set out to do artistically- but Wasteland 2 runs great, looks decent and has an awesome art style- really gritty with cool looking armor and your characters can even equip hiking backpacks!- I've also encountered zero bugs during my time with the game so far while with Divinity I was met with a few frustrating ones such as missing text and items as well as not being able to click on enemies without a soft restart.

In the end you cant really make a wrong choice.

@rorie: I don't know that I'd agree, but I see what you mean now. Thanks for clarifying.

In Divinity, I find that the skill overlap doesn't really bother me. The game has such a tight focus on combat, with so many possibilities for each encounter, that even with fewer overt "skills" there are just as many - if not more - potential actions in combat. For example, you could have two hydro/aero mages early on with similar spells, but if one has a fire staff then that's a gamechanger.

Wasteland 2, by comparison, has a lot more skills but is less flexible about their use. I know there's more than one way to do some of the skill-related things, but it still feels very arbitrary most of the time (especially compared to Divinity). Combat in particular is very straightforward and inflexible, with clear do's and don'ts. So, yeah, more options but less actual use for what's available.

Then again I'm only twenty hours into Wasteland 2 so maybe I'm just missing part of the depth. I better go dive back in!

In Wasteland if you don't decide pretty early "ok these are your 2 skills" for each of your custom characters, yer fucked pretty quick. So make your bomb guy who can disarm alarms, your computer hacker dude who can fix electronics, your thief who can brake locks and safes, perceptive dude who can knock down a wall, etc. Same with weapon, switching over to a good weapon that you have no proficiency with is painful. Couldn't hit the broadside of a cliff. I mostly just punch people's heads off with the brawler now, playing this shit like I played New Vegas and punching everything to death.

Bit of advice, in most cases where I get a specialized conversation option, hardass is available. So just buff that up and push everyone around cus you can't be buffing them all, you need those points for that other stuff.

They are both good, it all comes down to personal preference. Wastelands 2 does seems easier to get going, If they character creator menu confuses you, just pick up one of the made characters; their role is explicit.

I actually find Wasteland 2 to be far more punishing. If your starter party is wrong then you are going to hit a wall you can't pass at some point. The character creator is down right confusing for anyone who didn't play the era of RPG's it eludes to. Even then some of it's confusing to those of us who did. I get what they wanted to do but even as a player of those RPG's at the time I always hated that type of character creator. It's a road block to entry and you are expected to know the games balance and content before you have even played it. It would be fine if the game was perfectly balanced and any reasonable party combination will get you through normal (by normal I mean the second difficulty setting can't remember what it's called) difficulty but unfortunately that isn't the case.

The only real requisite for Divinity is don't pick melee (Or at least it was when I played it, don't know if they ever balanced it) and you will be fine. One thing I really respected Larian for with Divinity was they had the guts to leave out that sort of character creation, despite making a game that eludes to the same RPG era. Most of the combat system is based around logic. It's all elemental, if you through water on fire it makes steam. Throw fire at Poison gas and get an explosion. Electric + water is electrified water etc.

Don't get me wrong both are great games but Wasteland 2's difficulty is going to depend mostly on the party you make rather than the actual encounters. Some may get lucky and have an easy time, some might not even be able to complete it and then have to restart the game because they made what is essentially a blind choice. Divinity tends to be difficult but mostly fair.