It sad that i haven't seen more people talk about this game on the forum ( let's blame Destiny for that ) but as my title describes it's really good and then some. The open endingness to quest is baffling compared to your typical western Bioware rpg. You can literally kill everything in the world from quest givers to other important story people and still not break the game. i tried to sketch out one quest on a board and the ways to end where plentiful ( somebody had fun trying to break this game ) i wanna see Vinny break it. If you like old stuff like Baldurs gate or Icewind Dale this is a most buy. It's a great improvement compared to Original Sin. With better dialogue voice acting and more interesting characters definitely some GOTY material, to bad nobody on the crew is gonna finish it. ( I heard it's over 100 hours long :D). Can't wait to see what Larian is up to next cause this game is a goddamn masterpiece in game design, a new standard for Classic RPG's.

I like it and the way you add new characters to your party and what class they are is genius. Having said that I think I screwed up my first party and have no range attack abilities so I may have to start again, good thing I'm not that far into it.

The sheer amount of mechanical interaction that they've thought about and made work is really refreshing. The game feels like the developers are ahead of you, you say "hmm I wonder if this works" several times while playing and the answer so far for me has always been yes.

The writing while still being rather bog standard high fantasy with all your typical tropes is significantly improved from the first, and the voice performances are all very well done and add a lot to my retention of the story.

If it manages to hold the enjoyment I'm getting from it at the same level through to the end It will easily be in my top 3 so far this year.

Ah but what's the best Classic Modern RPG?

@fredchuckdave: I assume he means crpg, but yeah, that is a strange title to read.

Ahh man, now I want to play this one and I still haven't gotten around to the first one yet.

@otterchaos said:

If you're having huge combat problems early in the game, then by all means do whatever you want and restart if need be. However, just know that once you get off the island and into Act 2, you unlock the ability to respec your entire party, for free, as often as you want.

@sinusoidal said:

My advice is to just jump right into the sequel because you can always go back later and play 1. The story of 1 and 2 aren't connected as they take place centuries apart. The events of 1 are basically ancient history and lore at this point and 2 gives you all the backstory you need as you play it.

Never got past the tutorial in the first game and kept saying I would finally get back to it. The good talk about this one makes me want to finish that up, but i am busy with xcom atm.

I am about thirty six hours in, just past the boat section so I feel it's a bit early for me to call this the best crpg out there. That being said this is probably the best crpg out there.

Uggggggh I wanna play this AND destiny and I don't have the time for either! I thought once I became an adult I'd be able to do what I want....

@bdead: Same. It's game of the year so far for me unless it turns into Big Rigs or something in Act 3.

It's really good, and I kinda hated the first one so this is very impressive.

Then again they brought in or otherwise allowed good writers to take the stage and that was my major beef before.

Gotta patch those quest bugs though it is driving me mad.

@efesell said:

Yeah, they said this week they will be patching those quest bugs out and that it's only a display issue (the game knows the quests are complete).

I really enjoyed the combat of the first game and that got me through completion, but ultimately felt the same way you did that the story and characters were meh.

I feel like the first one suffered from a sever lack of control over who I felt like I could play, with what felt like a severe limit on the NPCs I could have tag along and, in general, the actual push for a interesting 'I wanna see where this goes" narrative, and a focus on co-op that bleed over into the single-player too much. I never got past the first 2 hours, after multiple attempts at breaking through, and I just sorta passed it by. That said it was before they re-did it and released the update for free, so maybe some of the problems of the original got fixed ultimately.

That said, this game? It feels like someone asks me about all the problems I Had with the first game, and went about correcting them. Now my issue isn't wishing I cared about the limited party members I have on offer, its agonizing over the fact I can only bring 3 of them along with me. Its not about lacking an interesting narrative, nor feeling pigeon holed into making a specific kind of character cause the NPCS provided fail to fill the slots I need them too.

Frankly, letting me set the class of every npc party member is a fantastic idea i hope every rpg of this genre apes from here till eternity. Being able to take the party members I want to explore the story and plot of, not 2 of them + the one healer in the game cause otherwise I had to play a healer myself (I'm looking at you dragon age origins).

That said, I'm running into a road-block of sitting down and actually pushing forward, which happens with a lot of these games. The one thing I can for sure take away is..everyone needs to take the pet pal perk. Not doing so is a travesty. Being unable to hear the poor narrator try to give voice to every animal in the game +runing into the crap who knows he is going to be emperor of the world is pretty much mandatory for full enjoyment of the game IMO.

Eh...it kind of knows. I've had some weird quest logic bugs come out of it also. Not game breaking but extremely irritating.

I have had to put it off for a bit until I finish a couple games, but I'm excited.

Personally I am pretty down on most of the recent RPGs that have come out going after the feel of the classics, but Divinity OS stood apart from the start with its interactions, dynamics, and the feel of its combat being totally turn based. It has some new ideas and an interesting mix of ideas.

I had a lot of problems with the first game in other areas but those basics really grabbed me. I think the second game looks like a huge improvement in art style and I have heard really good things about the story. I am very excited to play it.

Does the story in this continue from the first? There were some things that put me off the first one like the difficulty spikes and the "humorous" writing. Did they fix that stuff?

Does he? CRPG is such a vague term that no one really what it means. Could be Computer RPG, Could be Classic RPG. If it's the latter, what exactly qualifies as a "classic"-style RPG? Does it have to be isometric? Does it have to be party-based? Meh.

D:OS 2 is (so far) a very good isometric 3D party-based, turn-based RPG. :)

It takes place in the same world hundreds of years later. There's no direct continuation of the story line, but there are references to some of the lore and characters from the last game (Braccus Rex, Lucian, etc.) - nothing all that important and you can pick up most of it from context.

The writing is way better in Original Sin 2 in all respects, and that does include a much better tonal balance between serious plot and occasional humor. You're not constantly getting bombarded with puns and goofy quests like you were in the first game.

The one thing that hasn't changed is the difficulty. This is still a very challenging game.

@flasaltine: The biggest improvement is in the writing. The story isn't a sequel to the first game either.

They also brought in Chris Avellone to do some work on this game which at this point I could probably pick out individual scenes and love every one.

That being said regarding the writing... maybe don't romance any of your companions. It's in the game because it was a stretch goal I think and boy does it fuckin' show.

Sounds like they took everything great about the first one and truly made every aspect better. Great to see! I loaded up my last save to finish the first one and forgot about how goofy the world and satisfying the combat are.

@frytup: It means computer, and it refers to Infinity Engine styled games. Yeah, they're pretty much all isometric and party based. CRPG is way shorter than "isometric party-based, turn-based RPG" and rolls off the tongue way better than Baldur's Gate-like. It's not really that vague at all.

As someone who didn't like Pillars of Eternity I'd agree that the Divinity series is the best cRPG but with DOS2 a lot of the shine has worn off after playing 116 hours of the first one without completing it. I have my issues with DOS2. The physical/magical armor system is a bit tedious to chip through on some occasions, the "back and forth" way initiative works kinda annoys me, there aren't (yet) any enemies that i find that interesting, and some of the side quests seem to go nowhere. One of the quests involved me talking back and forth to two people who were right next to each other and, to my surprise, i find in the quest log that the quest was closed. I'm only in the fourth chapter though, so maybe things get more interesting.

The problem with a game that offers so much detail is it's a real gut-punch when you find things that should work just don't, or they're inconsistent. crafting for example, i'm trying to collect empty bottles - no problem, just drink a bottle of water or a bottle of wine and you should have an empty bottle, right? not in this game, but if you drink a bottle of beer i believe that will produce an empty bottle. I have empty jugs, why can't they be substitutes for the bottles in crafting?

I'm pretty sure the tutorial mentions selling your wares in "one batch" but i'll be damned if i can figure out how to do that or if it's a keyboard+mouse only command. Don't even get me started on games that don't allow simultaneous keyboard/gamepad inputs. Though, this is more a problem for Steam Controller users than anyone else.

Also, the big fight at the end of the third act was just annoying. It was an annoying thing that i always hate in games and it was made even worse when AI allied characters would botch the strategies i set up. So I saw this opportunity to freeze two enemies in place, they had no magic shield, which is rare, i throw a water balloon at them and fallow it with a freeze grenade and BAM, both were frozen, both would be missing a turn - mission accomplished. At least it was until the AI decided to throw a fireball at them, melting thier frozen status allowing them to get their turn back! This was during the 4th time i restarted this battle that i just really didn't want to do.

That all said, i AM, in fact, enjoying the game but the second time around doesn't have the same impact for me. Maybe this is an overall better full package than the first but if a third is in the wing, it better be a Divine Divinity to Divinity: Original Sin leap between the two before i'll jump in day one next time.

But yes, the Divinity series has a much more interesting design and pushes the modern cRPG forward where i feel the other cRPGs are stuck in the past.

@sin4profit: That quest you mentioned closing has a long and involved solution I think that no one will ever see because you can 'resolve' the issue so easily.

Nah, it really is.

What is a CRPG?

Still don't don't know

Is it this?

Tricked into going to RPG codex.....

@frytup: sigh... "all genres labels are meaningless" people are really tiresome. Doesn't help that I can't tell if you're being flippant or not.

Nevertheless, I am more excited for Original Sin 2 than Pillars of Eternity II. The turn-based combat was always more my jam and it seems like they sanded off all the really annoying edges about Original Sin 1 and infused it with a much needed boost of production values. It shot way up the "to-play" list when I heard the rock-paper-scissors was gone and you can freely respec the entire party starting at Act 2. Just waiting to for some critical bug-fixing.

I'm not sure if I'd go that far yet, but if it's not the best of the modern throwback CRPGs, it's up there. I still might like Pillars of Eternity more, but it's already better and less crushingly disappointing than Torment: Tides of Numenera. Yeah, remember how that game came out this year?

As someone who really liked that first game (in spite of its flaws, some of which were eventually addressed in the Enhanced Edition) this is more of that, refined, polished, and significantly better written. To be fair said "significantly better" writing isn't like, Obsidian quality, but I like the companion characters, I think the dialogue avoids being laborious (a problem with PoE) and I really appreciate that it's better able to balance the serious and goofy stuff. Bonus points for being fully voiced, like the Enhanced Edition. I kinda love the droll narrator and the various animal voices via Pet Pal. Additionally, unlike the first Original Sin, I think it might actually be fun to play this one in co-op for more than like an hour.

I was pretty into Numenera once I could carve out the time to sit back and read a video game again, but that was harder to find then when Torment was new.

I think I also prefer Pillars of Eternity overall but that game may as well have been made for me and all of the things that I like so it's a high bar.

@fredchuckdave: Changed the tittle ! thanks for pointing out my bad Grammar.

Now Divinity 2 is a very different game.

GOTY for me so far. I've played pubg a lot more, and probably will play it a lot more in the future, but this game is incredible.

10/10.

Really enjoying the game and i also enjoy the devs stance to bugs in it.

This "glitch" was found and its not getting patched out because it doesnt break the fun of the game.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 producer David Walgrave tells me that Larian doesn't plan to patch out this technique because it's "part of the system."

"It appears that it is not a never-ending loop and you're not doing anything else while you're doing it," wrote Walgrave. "It's not like you're damaging anything for free without spending action points. If I understand this trick, it's still within the purposeful synergies of our skills and usually these are accounted for."

That's true: you can't do anything while the loop runs its course. Though, based on the video, which shows a troll losing 6048 HP like it's nothing, it's obviously quite a loop, technically 'never-ending' or not, and I've asked for further clarification. For now, rather than 'fix' the combo, Walgrave says they "applaud" it. Examples of techniques that would be patched out include anything that "breaks the fun" or is actually a bug. "If this would tick in realtime, it would be a bug," wrote Walgrave. "And if this does not cost AP/skills and/or is not blocked by cooldown/consuming a scroll/... then we look into it."

Otherwise, "If you glitch the system, congratulations," concludes Walgrave. So there you have it, feel free to combo trolls to hell all you want.

Also loving this game so far about 10 hours in. I played the first one a few times and loved the combat but kept getting bogged down by the shitty opening and story, but so far this has grabbed me. Only complaint I have is that the potential party characters are all too interesting and I had a ton of trouble figuring out what stories/races/classes I wanted to see through. I like my group, but I would equally love to have a party with the ones I didn't pick (and I don't have nearly enough time to play through this twice).

Finished it and I think the first Original Sin pre-Enhanced Edition is a better if more busted game and my only complaints are the armor system, forced initiative leapfrog, and the godawful pauses between enemy actions.

Armor needs something like a sliding scale that affects saving throws vs. CC (100% armor = 100% save, but then a decrease modifies a base save) or at least anything but DPS Race: The Game. Initiative only matters in so far as you want to have more initiative than the enemies on one character because the game forces the turns to go You, Enemy, You, Enemy,..., etc. and there's no reason to alter initiative other than ordering your party's turns in that mess.

The pauses could be my machine, I have no clue. I cranked everything at the start and only experienced these crazy X-COM 2 hangs in the last few fights.

That said, the endings are all actually pretty neat and the companion arcs that I took (Fane, Lohse, and Ifan) were good. I especially loved Lohse's for the last "setpiece" moment that leads up the conclusion and Fane's relation to the final area. That awesome Ultima, Gothic, what have you reactivity of the world is still around and I still get a kick out of Healing a wounded NPC and getting unique dialogue about it.

Classic difficulty was a good Goldilocks and the majority of the fights were just plain old fun with a fair bit of rage for those pauses and an AP system that is strictly beneficial for the enemies thrown in for a good laugh. But I'd rather each and every fight be a meaningful combat that requires some tactics at the very least and cleverness if you want to take on a higher level squad than the trash mob + overwritten dumpster fire that was Pillars of Eternity.

I've finally had some time to put into it during the weekend and am a fair ways past escaping Fort Joy.

The writing is (so far) a definite improvement over OS1. I really hope it keeps up as the game progresses. And I have experimented with solving things various ways and also using various characters with their own backgrounds and traits talk to NPCs to get different results, so that's great.

That said I already have plenty of bones to pick with the game here and there, from minor nitpicks that I hope they patch in, to just core design stuff.

The game smartly lets you share certain skills between characters, like Lore Master, awesome. Why does this not extend to trading items or opening containers? You need to open stuff specifically with the Lucky person to get the benefits of the skill, ok not a big deal. But for the love of god let me just sell stuff through my Barter character directly! Having to manually transfer any items I want to sell for a better price to their inventory first is such a pain in the ass. Like others have mentioned the quest log could really use some work, but I can look past it since the game does need to account for so many variables.

There is just a bit too much unnecessary trash and bloat in the items still, I get it they want to have crafting in the game but like just removing the food (it's so marginal) would take almost nothing from the game, or reduce the crafting daisy chain of making one item into another into another into another, could streamline quite a bit. Crafting systems in games are notoriously prone to this bloat I get it, but we have also gotten better with this stuff over time, just take Witcher 3 or Pillars of Eternity for example. At some point you would rather just stop engaging with that kind of system if it's too much hassle for too little payoff.

I am really 50/50 on the armor/shield system atm. Just like before Larian seems to come up with something new but kind of stumbles at the implementation a bit, like they usually do. First of all the binary nature of it, CC being useless on while enemies still have protection ok I get it fine sure, but then once those are down it's like a clown fiesta, you can just turn the biggest badasses into useless chickens as you please guaranteed and with like 0 investment. More importantly the armor/shield system actively discourages a lot of party diversity, from a meta gaming perspective. Having characters specialize in doing a particular thing well is one of the core RPG tenets, good. But so is having a diverse party that can do as many varied things as possible, without sacrificing their individual specializations. I'll preface this by saying that you can still play the game just fine with a mix of magic and physical damage party on standard difficulty, you're just gimping yourself combat wise out of the gate if you do that.

Let's do some simple example math.

Most of the game enemies are either heavily shielded or heavily armored. So for our example lets say that the common ratio is 2:1. Two units of one type of protection, one unit of another. (like say 100 armor and 50 shields for example). And you are fighting groups of enemies. So some of them will be more heavily armored from physical attacks others more heavily shielded from magick.

If your party is even and you have 2 physical damage dealers and 2 magic damage dealers and then use them optimally, your physical guys will go after enemies with low physical armor and visa versa. Essentially they will be twice as efficient versus them, and your magic dudes will be twice as efficient versus enemies with low shields. So far so good it seems. But in order to do that that would need to split up their damage versus their appropriate opponents in the first place thus you're killing things slower in general already.

Now lets take a party of 3 physical damage dealers and 1 magic guy. Guess what your magic guy is now barely effective because he has to punch through magic shields of even weakly shielded enemies all by their lonesome, taking more time, meaning less CC, having to focus on different enemies. Essentially you now have created anti synergy between them and the rest of the party. That's super bad. Your magic damage dealer is now relegated to support only 90% of the time.

Finally lets take the opposite example of a party focused only on physical damage (there are schools of magic like necromancy and earth that do mostly physical too). 4 characters that all do physical damage with their skills. Against regular 2 to 1 ratio'd enemies (either way). Against physically well armored enemies their still as efficient as in the first example, since you have all 4 characters focus firing and stripping down the physical armor of even heavily armored enemies, 4 character vs 2 times armored enemies. And against the poorly armored enemies your party is now 4 times as efficient as the diverse party in the first example!

The fact that armor/shields are just HP buffers and not actual resistances in any way only encourages this issue.

TLDR: What does this all mean? It means that a party that diversifies their damage type (and consequently what their CC is checking against) is functionally splitting their focus fire, has less ability to help each other out and less synergy. A party that focuses around only one of the two types of damage/CC either magical or physical only ever has to worry about one type of protection can all CC their targets and even when enemies are well protected against that type of damage/CC it does not matter. A part with a 3:1 damage type breakdown is the worst.

Party diversity (in terms of dmg/cc focus) is thereby punished by default. That's bad in and RPG imo. It's literally backwards. By making such a system and trying to split up the damage efficiency before CC can be applied Larian tried to encourage a diverse party makeup on paper, ie: certain characters are better certain enemies. In practice this does not pan out.

(yes a tiny bit of diversification is good here and there for buffs or for protection spells, i know trust me, but that's just achieved by dipping some stats, you don't need to split your party damage/CC type for that)

Never mind hybrid characters themselves, they aren't even worth mentioning, battlemages, wardens? What a joke they are, compared to one track characters with just a tiny bit of points here and there to get the good perks/spells. But hey that's a common thing in RPGs it's just more pronounced here.

Still despite this weird design decision I am really enjoying my time with the game so far, and looking forward to respecing some of my characters :P

@tennmuerti: I don't think you're wrong in any of your points and the armor system definitely punishes you for choosing to have 3 100% phys damage characters and 1 pure "nuker", as you stated. I ultimately don't agree with the premise that it's inefficient to have a mix, though. Maybe that'll change as I finish up Act 2, and maybe my opinion would be different playing on Tactician instead of Classic, but I find a mix of damage to be getting me through the game without any trouble. In fact, I can't remember the last time I've lost a character in an even-level fight.

Yes, if you want to have a 100% Warfare fighter and a 100% Scoundrel rogue and don't secondary dip elsewhere, you'll probably have some issues. But right now it's very easy for me to destroy the magic armor on the warrior-types with my mage on a single turn, allowing my Fighter (who has secondary skills from Geo and Necro) to toss a Worm Tremor and lock them down.

The armor system combined with the fact that you can't stack AP like you could in DOS1, means you need to set up combos between characters a lot more. That either means you go 100% into one damage type like you said, or you build all 4 of your characters for diversity, which is aided by the fact that the majority of skillbooks don't require more than 2 pts in the school. It's easy to dip into 2-3 other support trees as a primarily Warfare fighter, for instance.

I could see how people who like to min/max each individual character in their party would feel like this is a step back though. Your rogue will do less backstab damage by taking two points in Polymorph or Aerotheurge, but your fights will go better because of it. I think it's hard for some people to reconcile.

I've been thinking about buying it. Should I play the first one before this one? I own the first one but never got around to playing it.

@cheetoman Nah, jump straight into DOS2. There are some small references to lore but story wise it's not connected at all, you won't miss anything. Only play DOS1 if you beat and end up loving DOS2, the first one is still an amazing game but DOS2 is even better.

All of this - the extremely limited time I get now (~2 hours a week) to play is currently invested in Destiny. Hopefully come December I'll get some time to jump into this because everyone that has touched it says this game is incredible. On my waitlist for sure, but I also bought Pillars of Eternity a while back and haven't launched it.

This is an absolutely huge game... and in my experience so far, a much better written one than the original.

My goodness though.... I think I'm in the penultimate map area and I've already put 100+ hours into this game. I wouldn't be surprised if I'll need to put in another 20 to finish the game (and I'm not playing as a completionist... just avoiding FAQs.

This game is a *serious* time commitment!

Probably the greatest CRPG ever made. The way you can split up the party and engage with the world and NPC's is really incredible. Stealing from towns and taverns feels like pulling off a heist, having all 4 members distracting people and obscuring vision. So many cool interactions, and the story has been pretty solid.

I think I might be over CRPGs. Everything about this game is spot on, what I've wanted in a CRPG, but I'm not compelled to play it. I got up to the part where Dallis attacks your ship as you leave Fort Joy, and I have dropped off from it to play other things. I think I need a clear time period to really sink some time into it - I struggled with it early on and probably built my characters in the wrong way and need to start from scratch.

Beat it this weekend and loved it.

It's certainly my GOTY despite it's quest bugs.

@captain_insano: So, you totally get the option to respec for free, as much as you want, right after the part you're on. You could drop the difficulty for that one sequence if you're having trouble.

Of course despite really enjoying this game I also got distracted by a couple of other things and need to get back to it at some point.

@arbitrarywater: Yeah I had the chance to re-spec on the ship, I just have no idea what I want to do! I dropped the difficulty for a battle earlier on, I just feel like I'm not "getting it" - which is no fault of the game, it's just where I feel at the moment. The writing and dialogue in this is far and beyond the first DOS.