Divinity: Original Sin has a lot of flaws that make it borderline unplayable. And I want to talk about why you should try it anyways.
I picked up Divinity: Original Sin because it reminded me of games that I loved when I was younger, like Baldur's Gate 2, Fallout 2, or Planescape: Torment.
It also supports co-op really well, so Tiffany - who has the same fond memories of the same deep games - joined in. Together we would beat this game.
First of all, the game does very little to introduce new players to its many mechanics.
The way we started the game was at the character creation screen, with a bunch of 'suggested' character builds and the complete set of character customization options.
Whatever characters we picked, we were going to have to spend at least 40 hours with, and yet at this stage we had no idea what any of the customizations meant!
I really like it when a game gives me diplomatic options, so I took the default "Rogue" character, took away his backstab ability, and replaced it with a perk that gave him significant bonuses to character interactions. In case you are wondering, this was a huge mistake - I just didn't know it yet.
Tiffany wisely chose a fire/earth mage.
A white-haired mage named Espyr and a talkative but useless rogue with a blonde handlebar moustache named Hup-Hup just sort of washed up on an island and started fighting with some local baddies.
Then: a tutorial dungeon, which did an okay job of explaining most of the basic mechanics of the game. This is how a mage casts a spell! This is what an item looks like! Things were looking up - the game didn't have much depth yet, but it seemed like it was building to something good.
Instead, the game dropped us in Cyseal, a gigantic city filled with hordes of useless NPC's named "citizen", and dozens of talkative cheesemongers, fish-havers, and bar-whatevers.
Nope, leaving Cyseal resulted in instant, messy death at the hands of Orcs way above our level and explosive traps way above our level on an otherwise very nice beach.
Nope again, leaving Cyseal in a different direction quickly ended in our small party getting consumed by a pack of ravenous wolves.
At this point, we've been playing for a couple of hours and it's been far too long since we've had a good, satisfying fight. I like games that don't hold my hand, but it could at least bother to give us an idea where we should be going or what we should be doing.
It seemed like what we needed to be doing was wandering around the city, talking to all of the stupid civilians.
In lieu of any satisfying forward progress, the game has seen fit to drop an entire barrel of exposition in our laps. The writing of this game is just a smidge above "fanfiction" in quality. The game's story is every cliche in the book - the little town is surrounded by nasty undeads! There's a great evil on the horizon that threatens everybody! Cheesemongers be cheesemongerin'! There's a guy named "citizen" and he has hundreds of clones and none of them have anything even remotely interesting to say or steal!
If it were just me playing the game, I would have given up right here - but because it was me and Tiffany, we could work through it.
And by 'we could work through it', I mean Tiffany could talk to everybody in the city and give me a broad strokes summary of what she'd heard, and I could spend the next hour and a half carefully liberating every loose painting, wedge of cheese, and utensil in the city.
With all that said and done, we still had no idea how or where to continue. We'd tried a few more of the exits to the city and they still lead us to quick and messy deaths.
This wasn't fun.
But I remember going through this same trouble with Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape: Torment.
I never finished Baldur's Gate 2. I owned the game before the internet was as common and cheap as it is now, and the game was really quite hard to deal with without a walk-through to tell me where to go and what to do.
When I started playing Baldur's Gate 2, I didn't even know about the pause button - I mean, the game had introduced the 'pause' button but I hadn't realized how important it was to constantly be pausing, so instead of playing the game like a strategic, thinky RPG, I was clicking frantically and wondering why everything was so hard. Eventually I figured out that one crucial detail - how the 'pause' button turned Baldur's Gate 2 into a proper RPG - and started to slog my way through the main campaign, and I loved it! The depth was refreshing and fun, even if the game would frequently leave me hanging with no idea how to move forward.
When I started playing Planescape: Torment, I wasn't willing to put as much love into it. Despite Planescape: Torment's wonderful writing, it was even more opaque than Baldur's Gate 2 - no, this time I was going to use a detailed walkthrough and extract every last iota of fun from the game. With Planescape: Torment, though, this made the game way, way too easy. Knowing the solution ruined the fun.
It was time to go to the dreaded walkthrough for Divinity: Original Sin.
I wanted some help, but I didn't want to ruin the game for myself like I did with Planescape: Torment.
Modern games shouldn't need walkthroughs, right? That's what tutorials and affordances and self-explanatory game mechanics are for! No, Divinity is a game that definitely needs a walkthrough, and needs one badly. There are so many things that this game didn't tell us, things that we absolutely needed to know in order to get the most out of the game.
Things like:
- In order to keep your characters from getting over-leveled, there is approximately one correct path through all of the game's battles. You can skip some of the battles, but if you try to do quests out of their intended order, you're going to get stomped.
- An encounter full of monsters 2 levels higher than your characters is probably impossible, if not very, very difficult.
- There are lots of ways to build your characters wrong. A rogue who can't backstab is useless. A mage with low intelligence is useless.
- After getting the Weird Pyramids from the End of Time, you should give one of them to each of your co-op players. That way, you can always teleport to the location of your beau.
- Every encounter in the game is designed to be tackled by 4 characters. Going solo is going to get you stomped.
- Trying to piece the game's complicated crafting system together out of the little snippets of scrolls in books like "The Bachelor's Guide To Medieval Cookery" is not even a tiny bit fun. It's much more satisfying to just read a crafting guide online.
- If you're not stealing paintings, you should absolutely be stealing paintings. Constantly.
- You're going to meet a powerful Fighter and an Air/Water mage in the city pretty much right away, so choosing a Fighter or an Air/Water mage as your character builds would rapidly feel awfully redundant.
- The game gives you access to a tonne of arrows, potions, scrolls, and miscellaneous. Use them! I know you want to hoard objects, because it's an RPG, but in this game you have to use the objects.
- The solutions to half of the game's puzzles are somewhat ridiculous.
I mean, these were things we might be able to solve by carefully listening to the game's assortment of peasants and cheesemongers, but wading through the game's mountain of exposition wasn't for us.
So we started using a walkthrough to help us get through the game. Carefully, though - not reading every last detail, just using it to get an idea where we should be going and what we should be doing.
It was like having a wise old sage whispering secrets at us. "If you seek the answer to the weresheep's mystery, go to the tree of Kickstarter names and put starflower on the ground."
The difference between Planescape: Torment and Divinity: Original Sin is that Planescape: Torment was a mediocre RPG with excellent writing, so having a walkthrough spoil all of the story while I had to still slog through the gameplay? No fun. Divinity: Original Sin is, at its core, a pretty good RPG with terrible writing, so having a walkthrough to help out was pretty much only win-win.
All that being said, there are a few reasons that Divinity: Original Sin was worth it for us once we worked our way through some of the initial slog.
- The Co-op is really good. I can't think of a lot of games where I've had an opportunity to play a 40+-hour long adventure entirely with the same person. The list is pretty much "Divinity: Original Sin" and "Borderlands 2" and then nothing else.
- The combat is really good. The game is careful about not allowing players to power-level - there are only so many monsters on the map and once they're defeated, they stay defeated. This railroads players into going through the game in a pretty fixed order - it might have been wise for the designers to consider a more linear run through the game to accomodate this - but if players are willing to play ball, it keeps every battle in the game tense, dangerous, and interesting.
- The peripheral systems of the game - items, crafting, equipment, and spells - are rich and deep, like a summer cheese.
- Skeletons and the undead are extra subsceptible to fire. Light them on fire! They also like to throw poison at you. Light the poison on fire! Light everything on fire!
Ultimately, we had a lot of fun - although a big part of that might have been because there were two of us.