Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Initial Reaction (Act 1)

TL;DR for Initial Verdict
Let me just start by saying I have just started Act 2. Now, with that said:


Reaction & Reminiscion

(No major spoilers, I referenced one moment without going into specific details)

(I am not going into details of the game's features here, I am just expressing my reaction and overall feeling to the game)

(I must also warn you that it is awkwardly paragraphed because I did so afterwards, I just wanted each paragraph to be somewhat the same size for OCD reasons even if the information on the paragraph below had any direct relevance, and therefore should have been the same paragraph. My girlfriend is an author, not I)

With the latter out of my mind, I do not know if there is any more reason to prove whether I like this game or not, it should be self-explanatory. The fact that I am sitting here writing this feedback/review even surprises myself because I normally don't, I barely even read them as the blind consumer I am.

There was no such thing as reviews when I was a kid, well there probably was, but not in my consciousness. I went to a reseller, picked up a game that sounded cool from its cover and rear description, went home and played it. And I had a great time! I shared my experience with my friends which was our way of "reviewing" games back then.

We had a great time, and most of those games were RPGs or RTS. I am talking Age of Empires, Final Fantasy, Pokemon and etc. (Yes, I am 90's kid). Those titles were considered good ones and still are up until this day. I also played games that in modern times are not considered very good, but we did not know that back then, did we give a shit? No. We played them anyway because we were not influenced by other people's opinions.

This game takes me back to those times, not that many of the games I played back then are very relevant to the cRPG genre, but it is really just the overall feel of it. Of course, in 2017 it is very hard not to take a peek in social media and constantly get spoilers, but this game literally has an infinite amount of possibilities (or pretty close at least, within its respective boundaries and rules). There is nobody who can tell you how to play it, nobody can say you are doing something wrong because quite literally it has so much freedom. Saying something has two sides to a situation is an understatement in this game.

The game rewards you and punishes you for every choice, but in many or most cases you would not notice until later in the game. Sometimes you make a choice and someone dies, you think like, "Aw shit, let me reload that quicksave before it happened".

But what you do not know is that four hours in, that particular choice you made actually affected the storyline in one way or another. I did quicksave and reload a dozen times however because of stupid mistakes, which I believe is fair, but what I have come to think of later is that what would have happened if I just kept going, accepting the consequence.

Like this time I saw a huge dragon shackled between two poles, my initial reaction was, "Holy shit, a fucking boss fight, let's kill him", but guess what I did? I went straight down there and realized I could talk with him, so I did. What happened? We became best friends (of course something happened in between, but I will not spoil too much).

I am still curious to as would happen if I actually went on with it and attacked him. Would he get freed from the shackles and start defending himself? Or would he just stay shackled, effectively getting tortured by my arrows, eventually leading to a slow and painful death?

These are moments I want to come back to and re-experience, but I have yet to see the positive or negative outcome of my choice. He will eventually return and help me out with something, but when? I do not know.

The amazing thing is, this is just one small scenario. There are hundreds of them, and they all intertwine together somehow within the game's complex journal system. See, instead of quests (go to A, fetch B, kill C, return to A), you have a journal.

Although the journal does mark POIs and objectives on your map, it works differently, it feels different. It does not directly tell you what you should do, rather what has happened. It relies on you gathering that information in any way possible, requiring exploration and the interest of actually reading every book you see, speaking with every person you meet.

Look, I could go on and on with this, but I think it is safe to say by now that I am really enjoying this game, and I can see how much time was put into it in order for it to feel and be as authentic as possible. I do not want to go into details on every specific feature here right now because it is just my initial reaction and I have still got two acts to go, but sooner or later there may be a full review.

Thanks for reading my reaction, I hope it did make some sense at least!