Quick Look: Divinity: Original Sin II

I'm so glad Vinny and Rorie did this together.

Larian's Baldur's Gate II

It's going to be overlooked by everyone else on staff, but at least we have a quick look.

Lewd

Was wondering if it would be Vinny or Rorie AND I GO THE BEST SURPRISE!

You can do full free respecs later in game

Start of act two

Also you can use Shift and click on items in the inventory to tag them as trash

Only 39 minutes? Expected this one to be at least two hours.

Best game this year.

I really enjoy the combat in this game, and found that once I understood the armour system I was able to control the flow of battle much better.

One thing that I really hate that is unchanged from the first game is the way that enemies are a fixed level, and there aren't really that many encounters so the result is that there is a fairly rigid path through each area so that you only fight people at your level. There have been some battles where you might scrape through whilst underleveled, but the difficulty curve is almost vertical. I wish there were a few more encounters per level so that while exploring you could find something to fight and help level you up rather than just being a solid wall to repeatedly die against until you turn around and go and find the 'right' area for you to be in at a particular level.

Love this game. Excited to see a Quick Look up.

Listening to this QL I'm gonna say this game isn't as hard as they're making it out to be. I'm not quite sure what Vinny and Rorie are missing but it's no more challenging than any other turn based RPG out there.

Hope it doesn't deter people away from the game.

For the first area just play around and test things. You can respec later once you know what you are doing. Traders restock as well, so you can buy multiple of the same skill book if you need to switch some party responsibilities around.

Don't fight enemies above your level and make sure you buy armor for your characters and you should be perfectly fine. I've found classic to be a bit on the easy side.

@ivdamke: They're making it sound harder ...

Yeah, inside Fort Joy I would only classify the Houndmaster fight as really hard. It's basically the "you ready for this?"-check of the tutorial area, but ANY fight will be hard if you're under-leveled.

The key early is to find enough equipment that everyone has some amount of physical and magical armor, and to only engage in fights where you're not obviously underleveled. You get XP just for discovering new areas, so sort of moving around the map and doing everything but the fights is a way to level up early. I.e, if you're getting destroyed, go somewhere else for a while.

Also, I will say that knowing too much AD&D and applying it to the game can lead you astray. For instance, casters should probably have a shield (and decent armour), at least early on, because shields provide a massive amount of physical resistance.

The Griff fight in the QL, for example, is completely optional. Even if you don't WANT to give up 'your source', you don't have to fight Griff. Maybe you SHOULD give up the source and THEN handle the situation that comes from that?

Rory saying he wishes he could respec his characters when you can completely respec all characters for no cost after act 1...

The arena quest is broken, hopefully fixed in today's patch.

They would bin it within 30min so whats the point?

YES! YES! YES!

The boat fight Rorie is talking about is brutal. I got past it after multiple tries in classic mode. It is a game were patience and persistence are crucial.

He knows you can respec, mentions it later. Which makes that comment more odd.

(Don't replay Fort Joy again with custom characters. Playing a custom (or many customs) just cuts out all origin story content, which... why would you want to cut that the first time around?)

Well it is pretty hard even as turnbased RPGs go and from a perspective of people not used to those games its brutal. You have to devote some serious time to even get moving right from the start in this game.

Even 40hours into the game i have to give every fight focus and proper planning which is the part where you go around buttonmashing stuff in "normal" games.

@mensaap: I dont play western rpgs usually, but this game is fucking amazing

It's not on consoles (yet). I wish I was interested in this, but because I got bored of the first and never felt like moving on from where I stopped, I am not that interested.

How well does this game play with a gamepad? I know keyboard and mouse is probably preferred for a CRPG like this, but I kind of want to be able to lie down and play this also.

I really like this game, but there are problems. I agree with Rorie that it's hard to plan when you don't know which skills are available down the line. I think it's a weakness, but I mostly got over it when I got to Act 2 and had many more skills and and a library of skillbooks if I ever needed to respec.

The inventory is not very good once you've got more than twenty items. Using containers to sort things manually helps, as does having a designated skillbook carrier, etc. Still, I could really use a free-text search to filter ingredients and stuff. :-\

I also wish there were a bit more character banter and environment barks (that doesn't pause the gameplay). They're are some, but I feel there could be way more.

The real problem is the item and level scaling. Basically you can forget about finding a great item and keeping it more than a level or two, because even your Legendary X of Something Awesome which meshes with your character's skills perfectly will be outclassed by a Rare Whatever that is two levels higher. This generates a grind where you're constantly switching out gear and thus have to engage with the (not great) inventory and vendors. This isn't fully apparent around Fort Joy because the level range is very small and it's perhaps better itemized than later parts of the game.

I haven't played since they nerfed Lucky Charm, but that was one way to engage with the gear grind without having to focus on money/vendors/stealing. Not sure if that's even viable any more.

I really wish items scaled with you better, or there were some sort of 'infusion' system to upgrade items.

I'm about halfway through my first playthrough of the first Divinity Original Sin and I absolutely love it. Now that I understand the systems from that game I don't think this one will be too difficult. Not sure I'd suggest you play the first one to learn a simpler version of this game beforehand but... you could? Also I don't know how much vital connective narrative tissue there is but you'd probably be fine either way. But yeah, awesome game and I can't wait to get to this probably more awesome game.

@rethla: It can be a challenge yes, but I just don't feel it's that drastic in the way they were basically bringing up how hard it is every 2mins for a 40min video.

I'm rather inexperienced with turn based rpgs, I missed most of the golden era ones in the late 90s and only dabbled in them for a few hours recently and I've found it challenging at times sure but not ball bustingly hard.

I'm not trying to say "lmao this is ez git gud" but moreso I don't think its so challenging that this conversation between Vinny and Rorie should shy people away from trying it.

Quick Look where they spend majority of the time explaining about a game is usually quite boring.

feels like a playdate with the game would be much more enjoyable.

I really hope Rorie realizes that you can completely change all aspects of your characters for free and as many times as you want at the very start of Act 2. Hearing him say he's restarting the game because he didn't pick up a Ranger when he's at the end of Act 1 makes my heart hurt :(. There are definitely ways to optimize your builds/party and you can get yourself down a build path that really doesn't do enough damage. Thankfully you can respec.

There are definitely some buggy things about this game that I hope get ironed out in patches. I still love the game and I'm glad Vinny and Rorie are taking a look at it. Hopefully it'll come up in game of the year.

If it helps I'm playing Divinity 1 now on PS4, and I've never played a turn-based RPG in life. There's certainly a bit of learning curve for combat- party placement, crowd control aspects, etc - but I got the hang of it after a few hours. I'm also playing on 'classic' difficulty so there's perhaps a bit more room for error and experimentation there. And I'm loving the game - so much so that I want to finally upgrade my PC to allow me to play the sequel.

Easily the best game of the year. The amount of depth in this thing is insane, not to mention the writing. The overall story isn't even that great, but the writing and interesting characters save it and then some. I didn't think any RPG could top The Witcher 3, but this just might be it.

I can only infer that it's a good parenting skill, but I respect Vinny so much for actually listening to others in conversation and engaging appropriately, instead of just "talking at" someone when they are done talking at him. A huge part of why I've remained a fan for years.

More like Da Vinny: Rorieginal Vin 2. Duders, this ain't on consoles. I might be playing it if it was because holy cannoli does it seem cool, that is if you have a fondness for tabletop fantasy. Guess I could finally go play that first Original Sin game but there are currently too many games to play! The oddball combination of four characters of this party makes it seem like Rorie's playing some bizarro alternate reality Drunks and Dragons. Thanks again for the QL.

An astounding accomplishment of a game. The combat is difficult for me on Classic, but rewarding and I enjoy the trial and error even when it leads to failure. Balancing high ground, and how elements change the terrain, and positioning characters where they work best all makes for tremendous strategy. The moment when I knocked an eldritch horror's physical armor out and then turned it into a chicken is my Moment of the Year.

I love the humor, by the way. It keeps surprising me. Like you can collect arrows, but they're only good to sell, since you have infinite regular arrows. The first regular arrow I found had an item description along the lines of, "Really? You know you have endless arrows. But if you like picking stuff up..."

Jason has the rightest opinion of the game

That's...a lot of HUD.

I like the gamepad controls - Usually play with mouse/keyboard but have put a few hours into the game on my living room TV via the Steam Link and the entire UI changes to be more couch-friendly.

@stryker1121: The first Divinity: OS was a little more straight forward than DOS2, which adds just enough new features to be confusing for people who are familiar with the first game.

@boonsong: The game plays very well with a controller, i played all 150 hours of it with a controller and, other than the inventory being a bit more tedious, i felt the controller was well implemented.

@eloj: @ivdamke: To be fair, the difficulty of the game is very dependent on the make-up of your party and possibly a large amount of foresight that you're not going to have in your first playthrough. So the difficulty could be a crap shoot for certain people, while others just happen upon a build that works from the start.

Going into the combat of this game you really need to think way outside the box in same cases. You can do such things as have a single character initiate combat while the rest of your crew sneak into the fight and get a free hit in, stack boxes to block the AI's pathing, start a fight - kill one character - flee - rinse repeat, or even initiate a conversation with a character while another character picks their pocket. There are a lot of aspects of this game that familiarity with other games becomes something of a problem.

As demonstrated in the quick look, seeing what will happen and than restarting to be better prepared for it is pretty common in this game, which is a bit lame and makes it feel like it's Save Scum: The Video Game. But then again, there is so much to do and so much to experiment with that someone else will have a much different experience with the game.

Don't get me wrong, i like the game, it just didn't have the same impact for me as the first D:OS and it had enough design flaws in it to be needlessly frustrating at times.

I've only played this game on a controller, and it's totally fine. I'm usually impartial, but just felt like not hunching over a keyboard for this game and I can say it's not problematic in the least.

This should be longer but Destiny 2 stole all the bandwidth.

I loved the first one and this is, somehow, an improvement in every way. A true joy to play, instant top 10 of all time.

This game is so damn good so far.

@sin4profit: What new features are you talking about exactly? The new armor designations seem a bit confusing at first blush.

I haven't played this yet but the first DOS was incredibly difficult for someone who hadn't played a ton of CRPGs and who didn't have a real grasp of DnD RPG-type systems. I've since learned quite a bit more about both but I can definitely relate to that "banging your head against the wall" feeling

Comment regret...

Vinny is doing it right by maining Fane. Playing as one of the main/origin characters adds a lot to the experience. I'm playing as Lohse and I constantly get little vignettes, unique dialogue, and a story moments that seem 100% specific to her. Got to do a little musical number with some dwarf guitarist that was an actual track with vocals because she was a famous musician before getting collared.

Edit: You can customize all the origin characters' abilities and skills when you are in character creation. I.E. Lohse is an enchanter by default, but I went into the stats/abilities and rebuilt her as a archer/cleric hybrid. I don't think there's actually a way to see the origin characters' "default" class when you're starting up, since the only option is to cycle through class presets then customize from there.

The term "Sourceror" dampens my enjoyment of this game.

Hm, in many ways this seems to steer the series in a direction I might enjoy, but the armor system seems really bad. Or maybe just contrary to how I like playing games like this.

I love crafting well-balanced, multi-faceted parties. That appears to be a fast way to failure in this game. From watching the QL, my optimized party would probably just focus physical damage and aggro enemies down. Which seems lame.

Unfortunate, since there is a lot to like.

50 hours into this with a 3 man coop group and we haven't even finished the second act.

Best CRPG since Planescape Torment.

Also, anyone who is interested in the game, you don't really need to look up optimal build guides. I'm playing on tactician, and while the early going was rough, the game has now become completely manageable even with some of my characters being a bit of a hodgepodge of skills. You just need to wrap your head around the idea that there are no trash mobs: Every fight is handcrafted and intended to be a challenge, so going in half-cocked and under leveled is a recipe for disaster.

When you're in Fort Joy you just need to scrounge for all the non-combat money/gear/XP you can before taking on some of the harder fights and don't neglect brewing healing potions with the mushrooms. If something seems too brutal, move away and look for something more manageable.

@stryker1121: The armor is a bit confusing at first and, specifically the magic armor, diminishes a lot of the fun you had with elemental combat/combos. It was fun to lay down a puddle in D:OS and fallow it up with electricity that would shock anyone who's standing in it. In D:OS2 you have to whittle down the magic armor before elemental statuses take effect. So hitting a guy with ice won't "chill" that target unless the hit depletes the magic armor and touches the targets vitality. Considering how much D:OS2 seems to favor physical damage, it can be difficult to deplete magic armor and the cooldown on spells are fairly long so it often feels wasteful to use them before the magic armor is gone.

There are spells in the game that require source points to cast. It's quite awhile before you have the means to efficiently replenish those source points so they become spells you mostly never use because you never know the right moment and you don't want to waste them on the wrong moment.

There are new elemental variant surfaces in the form of cursed surfaces. They can't be extinguished by normal means. Elaborating on this maybe kind of a spoiler, so i'll spare the details.