Posted this in the middle of a thread elsewhere, and only got one very interesting comment on it, so giving it it's own thread because I did put my thinking cap on for this one, and wrote it for the purpose of provoking debate. Spoilers! So please don't read unless you've finished the game yourself.
-- MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW --
To start with the positive, this game very nearly is a masterpiece that’s chiefly let down by a rushed Act 3, weak characterisations and an over ambitious agenda that could have benefited from shedding some of its larger promises that it obviously couldn’t uniformly deliver in the time it was given.
The visuals are easily the best I’ve seen in any game. And here I don’t mean the technical bells and whistles, which are no doubt excellent in themselves, but specifically the art direction. The storytelling, hugely improved over D:OS 1, can’t live up to the imagination that went into the environments, or the creature design. Take the Harbinger of Doom that stops on occasion to neurotically chew on its own arm – this is a vividly wretched creation that sticks out in memory. And the kraken is, I think, the most original, and convincingly warped invention since Giger’s mind-bending human-machine hybrids – it definitely needed more show time than it was given.
There’s an expanse of thousands of candles the quietly opens up in a demon’s lair that was so simple, evocative and well-played that it trumped the entire narrative efforts of Act 3 combined. The timing of the lashes of rain during what is, for me anyway, the game’s second best battle – The Drillworm and Alexander – makes for some great visual drama.
I could go on about the visuals – but long story short, the artists are doing their job, and doing it better than most.
Narrative-wise, the game starts strong, and is infinitely improved over the goofery and cartoonishness that made D:OS 1’s story seem so slight and forgettable. But the foundation starts to tremble somewhere during Act 2 – and by Act 3, it has completely lost the plot, almost as though the writers suffered some kind of artistic crisis and couldn’t pull it all together at the last minute.
Characters like Dallis, Alexander and the mysterious ‘Cloaked Figure’ disappear for massive stretches, only to show up so abruptly that they might be characters from another game. Somehow, Braccus Rex is unmasked as the main antagonist during the daftly unbalanced final battle. Didn’t he die in the first game? Never mind: I don’t want to know the hokum that’s shoehorned in to make this plot twist viable. He’s fighting alongside another character who’s also had no development (read: appears as a relatable person, with lines of dialogue) whatsoever throughout the game. I’m talking, here, about Lucian the Something, who I think had a few waypoint statues made in his honour, and was mentioned fleetingly in dialogues here and there.
Because these characters scarcely appear in the scenarios leading to the climax, there’s no investment on the part of the player. No big payoff in watching them live or die through what follows.
The weak characterisation is problematic across the board, however. In a story full of largely well-written, if underdeveloped, female characters, all of the males, bar Ifan, get the short end of the narrative stick, and end up snarling lines like the zingers our man Braccus flings at Lucian – ‘you babbling buffoon!’. It schlocky stuff, I’m afraid, and there’s a lot of it.
There’s no Jon Irenicus or Master Mirror from The Witcher 3 that the game badly needs to give it some edge in the villain department.
Act 1 is, for me, the strongest part of the game, with a sturdy if somewhat bloated Act 2 following close behind. Ultimately it’s the slapdash Act 3 that lets the game down the most. Everything about it seems hurried. There are technical slowdowns witnessed nowhere else in the game that tell a story of developers who didn’t have enough time to optimise code. There are paintings that actually have the name ‘placeholder’.
There’s a passable fantasy city, full of a couple of named merchants and dozens upon dozens of anonymous ‘cizilian this’ and ‘paladin that’ types. The village areas of Driftwood and Fort Joy had more personality and life. They were more organic, more lived in – more populated with people than walking placeholders. The quests in Arx are maddeningly designed, culminating in a pipe puzzle that makes you wonder what on earth the designers were smoking at this point.
The game becomes the equivalent of that really great, nearly five star movie that gets four stars because it was ‘30min too long’. Except here that 30min is exploded tenfold into hours upon hours of messy, badly designed Act 3 quests that pale in comparison to the quests that preceded them. I would have been happy if they’d just ditched Arx completely, took its best elements and turned them into an epic final few hours that consisted of 10% of the time you otherwise have to waste in Arx.
The best battles in the game are the ones where randomness was allowed to create its own drama. The highlight for me is still the brilliant Blackpits oil field battle with the slugs. It just so happens to be the best fight I’ve ever played in a game. Simply genius design, full of deviously unexpected moments. The rest of the game’s battles are unfortunately the same thing over and over. The same number of enemies, the same enemy types reskinned to look like monsters but that are really just variations of the standard classes you’ll encounter throughout the rest of the game.
If only they’d thought of more enemies like the revenants that respawn in cursed fire (although some of these, with infinite cursed arrows, are clearly broken). Now that’s what adds tactics to the game, not inflated HP and armour bars.
The boring tactician mode could really benefit from the few more randomised encounters seen elsewhere but are sadly limited in number.
Level progression also becomes a problem, when nothing ever really changes, bar the health bars. The same set of skills used in Act 1 will still be used in Act 3, alongside ridiculously overpowered ‘source skills’ that really should just belong to a few boss type enemies and not be available to the player. The problem is that the base skills don’t evolve beyond damage boosts and the like, so very little seems to change, beyond the length of time it takes to end a fight.
The environmental eruptions of poison, ice, fire and so on, once one of the great innovations of the game, degenerate later on into cursed variations (inevitably cursed fire) that are immune to the more interesting clean ups and mutations available to their earthly counterparts. It’s either tornado or bless, which is dull and limited and the very opposite of what this mechanic offered in D:OS 1.
All of that being said, it still manages to be a fantastic game. The visual artwork, in particular, is exceptional. The story, though flawed, is far better than that of most other games, and the writing, though occasionally hockey, is nonetheless solid enough that it never completely embarrasses itself. The actors appear to enjoy delivering their lines, at least in Act 1, where the writing affords the characters some personality and variety. But by Act 3, it sounds like even the voice actors gave up and are just going through the motions.
Thanks for the entertainment anyway, Larian. It was well worth taking a trip around this remarkable, flawed, inventive creation. And I’ll be glad of long break from it all as well!! Best of luck with your future projects. Cheers.
