Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Final Steam Review After Beating It, 96 Hours

This game is a full-on experience that will give you nearly 100 hours of well-paced, challenging, tactical RPG fun.SCORE: 90/100.

People are not kidding about the roleplaying depth, the massive and interactive environment, the SERIOUS NO HAND HOLDING, the difficulty already (but fair), and the rewarding nature of tactical combat. Co-op adds another layer on an already incredibly complex game.

This game might have THE SINGLE BEST TACTICAL COMBAT IN THE HISTORY OF RPG AND STRATEGY GAMES. Better than Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics: Ogre, Advanced Wars, and X-COM. Use of the environment and common-sense use of spells and effects make combat so breathtakingly amazing it will be hard to go back to much simpler combat in other games.

There is some dialogue and some minor flavor speech, but most of the interactions are text. I'm ok with that, but this game has a LOT of reading. It's mostly pretty good, but be warned.

The inventory management is not good, unfortunately. Each character has their own bad and I did not like that, but I know they did it due to carrying weight limitations. You will spend hours just moving stuff from character to character, to inspect, sell, store, and more. The crafting system will be awful to most gamers because there are no recipes and none are stored even when you figure something out. I don't want to have a journal of recipes outside of the game or constantly referring to websites. Crafting is tedious and not enjoyable. Some will think it is great, but most will hate and or avoid it as much as possible.

This is not for casual gamers, people without patience, or people looking for a hack-and-slash loot fest. This is for people looking for a deep and rewarding game, story, and turn-based tactical combat.

I'm interested in how you determined this game's combat to be better than the games you've listed. I'll give you that it certainly starts out harder than them, but I think that's about where the line is drawn. The game literally never gets harder. The reason it starts out so hard is because the game gives you the absolute toughest strategies it can pull by level 4.

The combination of your characters getting into superhuman power and a lack of improvement on the enemy side quickly makes the combat get easier as the game progresses. The opposite is true of the games you brought up as examples. Those games don't start out easy, and they only get harder with enemy power and strategies improving as the game goes on.

Maybe the combat itself would be a lot more meaningful if it didn't eventually boil down into bring the mad AoE hurt and win every fight in 2 turns because it certainly has the potential. The problem is that the AI's skills and strategies do not improve as the game progresses so once you have a formula down you just stick to your guns and it works forever.

Difficulty? I have to disagree, I found it to be one of the most simple and easiest games I've ever played. Mods are probably the shining light here as they can fix most of the issues.

I agree. I'm getting a bit disappointed by how easy the game has become.

Just out of curiosity, are those of you finding the combat easy playing on Hard mode (I assume so, but it's best to ask)?

Also, are you using any of the controversial abilities that some have argued are overpowered? Engaging in "prep the battlefield" style tactics regularly? Took advantage of save-scumming? Piling on enough resistances to start being healed by elements? That sort of stuff (stuff that seems, well, "broken")?

Not pointing fingers or looking down on anyone, I'm just curious where things might start breaking down.

Unfortunately my game boiled down into

1. Madora moves close to the enemies on turn 1
2. Madora oneshots 3/4 of the enemies with rage>whirlwind on turn 2.

Because enemy health doesn't scale even remotely proportionately to player damage. Though enemy physical damage certainly took a huge jump in hunter's edge.

Good review original poster. I agree with both your good and bad points.

I just beat the game on hard and found it just challenging enough to keep my interest in the combat. So it wasn't super easy, but it was by no means hard. In the last half of the game I probably had to start over on 5-10 battles? I did get about 5 pairs of the books from the End of Time, but the last 2 of them were spent without much thought.

I did prep the battlefield for a few fights, but I stopped doing that the further in I got. Really what makes combat easier is the ability to CC so effectively and while the AI is generally fine, it sometimes does a poor job of reacting to certain battlefields. For example, in the second to last fight of the game, one of the enemies essentially passed for 2 turns in a row presumably because of the burning field in front of him.

Either you haven't played many games yet or you are just exaggerating. Sure, the game is not the biggest challenge ever. But it's a much bigger challenge than most other games on the market...

And the fight are not the only thing in the game, some puzzles were more than broken imho. (the one with the weight for exemple, or the one with the 4 switch in Leandra's room (that 4th switch man...)
It took me 4 hours to passby the Deaths Knights in the mine.

They are hard, not broken. Broken means that they don't work. But they do. They just require either clever combining or a lot of trying...

Think you're overselling it dramatically. It's a good game but by no means some kind of new standard for turn based RPGs.

Combat is fun but woefully imbalanced. X-Com was much more difficult and better balanced, as much as I hated a few aspects of it.

The dialogue has its entertaining moments but it's shallow especially when it comes to inter-party dialogue. The game has nothing on Planescape: Torment, Mass Effect 2/3, even Baldur's Gate 2 which was similarly on the comical side - except better writing.

You're also overrating the interactive environment. Putting barrels of "shoot me to AoE" all over the place is not particularly remarkable. The elements were done fairly well but it's nothing we haven't seen before in games like Bioshock or Magicka.



That said the man with many cheeses is fantastic.

TB combat in XCOM is different and no, it wasn't better balanced. It was just plain unfair in certain moments. That's in no way the same as being better balanced. Both XCOM and D:OS have their issues with balance. I don't know any tactical party game without balance issues. Also the combat in D:OS offers a lot "more" than the combat in XCOM (in which you could only choose to fight your primary and second weapon and grenades). Honestly, XCOM is pretty much but from a purely tactical side it's nothing compared to D:OS.


True but the game was never made to focus on a deep party interaction - it was made as a co-op experience where much of the story evolves between the human players...


Bioshock? Really? Don't make me laugh, please. D:OS is a ton better in terms of iinteractivity than both Magicka and Bioshock. I guess you just haven't tried many things in the game...