Quick Look: Divinity: Original Sin II

@xbob42: I actually didn't consider doing it with a full party of other friends. That's a good point. And there IS that GM mode, which I haven't even looked at yet. In that way, I can see it working.

I may be in the minority, but I actually appreciated the video. The fact there wasn't any goofiness in this QL actually made me pay attention to it. Often when I put on GB's QLs in the background, I can find my attention start to drift as their interest in the source material also clearly begins to drift.

So, yeah, this was a nice change of pace and I actually paid full attention. I don't think I've played a CRPG since... Nox? Are those words right? Yeah... that's how out of my comfort zone I am with this genre.

As someone who has very little interest in RPGs in general, this pulled me in. So if you're totally into this genre or this series, I'm sure this wasn't the best QL - but as someone with no knowledge at all, I liked it. Game seems neat.

I'm afraid this game will be this year's Witcher 3. A great game that will be snubbed big time because no one has the time to invest in it.

@jerkchicken: I think you will find alot of people who had the time to invest in W3. It was a success.

This however i agree many will turn away at the steep learningcurve and slow tempo.

@rethla: Are you sure he's not referring to the Giant Bomb staff specifically?

@ahifi: You make a valid point.

Beginning is the hardest part. Once you get more skills/gear it gets much smoother...classic gets too easy with 4 man at a certain point :D

Played the first Original Sin in coop. Not sure if we misssed a lot of content, but eventually most of the fights revolved around us dragging around barrels and making sure to keep enemies stunned within an elemental attack to deal the brunt of the damage. Eventually every fight required a wombo combo like this, or we would have to keep fleeing people out to rest. We often had to retry 5-10 times.

On one hand, this was a really fun new way to play the game and every won fight felt like a huge reward. On the other hand, now i'm afraid to play the game any other way. It became the 'barrel' game for me, and telekinesis was my main skill.

This is definitely my GOTY. Every RPG fan should play it.

Witcher 3 won a couple awards that year. And GOTY is bullshit anyways and they even say as much. It's just something they do.

*chain CCs dangerous enemies while everyone teleports everyone every which-a-way*

I think you're missing some stuff. By the time my industrial-strength Bullshit™ is done with enemies, it's just mop-up duty. The teleports are for enemies still armored up. Anyone cracked open gets slept or murdered.

Another hint: use armor rebuffs as curative spells GO GO GO

Oh geeeeez I want this bad.

Yeah, Giant Bomb's GOTY has always been more about recognizing interesting elements of games (and smaller games that do really neat shit) rather than flat-out stating "This was the best x/y/z/ of the year."

It's crazy watching this if only to see how differently I interpreted the characters and built the party. There really is a ton of flexibility, especially once you start branching out and having characters skill up in complimentary areas of magic. I have the Red Prince as a physical beast, Fane as a elemental master, Lohse as a summoner with some supporting magic, and an elemental ranger. But I'm with Rorie that it's very frustrating to have only a vague idea what you'll have access to later in the game for each skill. Even at the respec point, I still wasn't precisely sure what I should be going for. Especially since you start to find skills later on that require points in two magic types.

Also with Rorie that the beginning of this game is absolutely brutal. Armor is critical and you start basically naked - enemies can tear you apart and inflict tons of status effects in a couple turns as you're just learning the combat system. And you have to spend valuable Resurrection Scrolls to bring back anyone who died, so any mistakes that leave one character out of position and destroyed feel really punishing.

Once you get a couple levels, some more skills, and full sets of equipment it becomes easier and you don't die on basically every encounter, but there are still some very challenging battles that require prep and thinking about your approach. Sometimes you feel really smart in doing so through clever usage of skills to control the flow of battle, chain stun, create obstacles, and teleport foes around, but it often does feel like you're cheesing the system through stuff like pre-prepping character locations for an ambush you know about or abusing the AI when you know how they'll work. And the cheesing does seem often required.

This game is fantastic. Incredibly happy I made it my first Kickstarter project and it's honestly astounding what they were able to achieve.

I am pretty sure they toned that down though. I played a little bit of the Fort Joy part in early access and I remember some of the early fights (Crocodiles, Turtles) just wrecked me, even in a full party of 4 people. When I recently started over for real with 2 friends those fights were a breeze (all on the "normal" difficulty).

@deathpooky: Took me a while to understand properly how the armour works, once I had that down it's not been too bad because it becomes fairly obvious who should be attacking who.

No problem with cheesing, it's pretty much the core of this game.

Rories problem is he takes something he doesn't know then extrapolates it to the rest of the game, compounding what he doesn't know.

I wonder if this will come up in the GOTY discussions

This game is hard, but it's not as hard as the duders are saying. Here are some helpful tips from somebody with about 50 hours in on Tactician (the difficulty above normal.)

• You can pregame a lot of fights by sneaking. Sneaking will show you vision cones for enemies. The bright spots are where the enemy will catch you even if sneaking, the darker spots are where you can stay hidden while sneaking, but turning off sneaking will still get you caught. Doing this saves a few turns of defending and moving characters.
• You can move characters out of combat during fights to heal up or sneak into a better position. You can also get a free shot in on enemies this way. It is not cheap, and the game even has a talent (Guerilla, which isn't super great) that benefits this tactic.
• Get a tanky person, give them Geomancer for the spell "Fortify" (and later Mend Metal) to regenerate a lot of armor for his or herself (and in the case of Mend Metal, any party members nearby as well.)
• Focus most party members on physical or magic, with one going the opposite of the rest. I recommend, for starters, to have 3 physical and one mage of some sort. Give the mage some healing spells, some support spells (like any kind of magic shell) and use a wand+shield combo. You can then learn the "Shield throw" spell to deal physical damage at range that scales with the shield stats. It's awesome.
• Thievery lets you steal most of the spells from venders if you distract them. Make sure the thief has no stolen equipment equipped, get some equipment with +Thievery stats for this purpose, and rob the hell out of all the vendors. You can only do it once per vendor, so make sure you make it count! Make sure all of your characters with stolen gear stay away from that vendor for a few minutes after (they'll notice they were robbed and they'll start inspecting your characters,) and you'll be set! We had multiple copies of every skill book. You get access to respec your characters infinite times later one, so having all the skill books was very useful for optimizing our team for the tough areas and fights.
• Lucky charm can help you get some great equipment and money early on, but it was somewhat nerfed in the latest patch.

This game is amazing! My favorite game this year by far and its only made better knowing that vinny and rorie think its awesome too!

I feel like Rorie said Divinity Original Sin 1 was wicked hard, and while you could absolutely go to a high level area too early and there were some fights that were tough I never felt like that was an accurate assessment? I never used build guides and just sort of made characters that made sense. (Rogue has speed and dexterity stats, mage has wisdom, etc. etc.) and it worked out?

Anyone have any sense if 2 really upped the difficulty from 1?

This game is really wonderful but you do need to accept from the off that it isn't about giving you the same power fantasy as other RPGs. Sometimes you want to do the 'right' thing but it'll get you killed because you're not strong enough for the resulting fight - but you can still give it a go if you want. It actually adds a really nice line of in-world realism.

Some of the quests are really well written, with multiple paths through, and the battle system is super cool. It's a brilliant game, easily of on the year's best, but will probably be overlooked by many because of the up-front density and difficulty.

Rorie plays this game like I played BG2. It's alright to start a fight over to reposition your team and set traps first.

A lot of the older staff have that skill. It's incredibly refreshing and balances some of the other members "talking at" tendencies.

I had to restart my game a couple of times just to get the right set of skills and classes. But, once you figure out what combination of skills and classes you need. The game becomes much easier.

I started playing this the other day and have about 12 hrs in so far. Most of that was getting my ass kicking in combat and trying to learn everything. Only after that 12 hrs am I now getting comfortable with everything. The game does a absolute terrible job at explaining it numerous systems and its really easy to get overwhelmed in combat. There is really no excuse for it; it's worse than pre-patch Witcher 2 at explaining itself. It's not surprising at all that people bounce right off this game. Yet it keeps me compelled to play it. And now that I'm starting to get the hang of things, the combat is tactical and dynamic and the writing is top-tier. Honestly the writing is probably the best from a game I've seen in quite some time. There seems to be some interesting thing around every corner. It would just help if the explained anything past the dozen or so tool tips they give up front. I haven't delved deep into a isometric rpg in a bit but not unfamiliar with them in the least. I couldn't imagine being fresh to the genre and trying to play this. You can't fault anyone for having a hard time with this one.