Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Very bored by the end of the The Nameles Isle...

I'm almost done with the Nameless Isle, and I find myself playing less frequently and for shorter stretches. I am completely bored and disappointed. Here is why.

1) Lack of visual stimulus. Everything is static.
It gets really tedious to constantly look at my party of clay figurines that are so emotionless, and don't do anything other than move in 4 directions. No cut scenes or animations whatsoever. Nothing connects me to these characters, other than the narrator, which falls short. When narration is the only means of advancing the story, everything starts to feel stale. A 2017 game should be able to connect visually on some level.

I understand that DOS is supposed to mimic a tabletop board game, but Larian have taken that to such a literal extreme, that it seems unfulfilling on the computer monitor, especially in this day and age of computer animations. I still have such good memories from older series like Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, Witcher (and no, there's no escaping from comparing any modern RPG to those classics). It almost feels like Larian is using that 'table top' mode as an excuse to rely solely on narration, which is a mistake in a modern video game. In DOS2 I have started to skip through the narrated dialog just to get things moving again. Even when I read everything, I don't remember it next time I play because it doesn't connect on any emotional level. It's not memorable. In many situations I don't even see any NPCs that are supposed to appear and talk to my guys.

Here is an example of my latest 'encounter' which is missing an NPC. In the image below I'm supposed to imagine some godess Xantezza appearing behind my party and talking to them. Well, having some voice tell me about an imaginary godess just doesn't cut it anymore.


2) The main story is unoriginal and very similar to DOS 1. From the getgo I've been constantly beaten over the head with the same old "you're the new divine and you're gonna save the world from the evil king, blah blah blah". While it's true that the characters are not as 1-dimensional as the source hunters in DOS 1, and are more nuanced and tragic, it's not enough to change the overall boring feel of the main story. Some of the side quests and incidental encounters are much more interesting than the main story line, especially the ones that deal with adult topics such as death, loss, etc.

3) My party builds were pretty much complete by about level 15-16, which was somewhere in Reaper's Coast. Nothing is evolving anymore. Nothing changes. My party gets stale, enemies are stale, combat is stale.
And after reading other players' complaints about how boring Arx is, I have literally nothing to look forward to in the next act.

4) There are no side activities in the DOS games. I miss being able to sit down in a tavern, play some cards, throw some dice, maybe get drunk, or have a fist fight with the local thugs. I can't settle down in a town, buy/build a home, relax, maybe do some gardening, or other mundane stuff unrelated to questing. It's all about the next quest. It's all just running around looking for the next fight which will be the same as the last one. I never feel like my characters belong anywhere. They don't develop any relationships with the local population. I miss the 'homey' feeling I had when I played Skyrim. These side activities really add character to a game.

I really enjoy the combat system in DOS 2, but that alone won't get me through the end of the game.

I find you're mostly fair.

I don't think you need cut scenes or animations per se to make it appealing. While those can help, gameplay, story and lore should always come first. That said, OS2 is quite mundane in its fantasy. It's all left to gameplay to fix it, but unfortunately, we don't really get a lot of engaging level design or interesting/challenging encounters. The few optional, tough bosses from Reaper's Coast is as far as I can remember.

On the personality of the characters I agree, too.

On the need for the world to evolve, I am on the same page.

Pretty much this...Larian were trying to bite more than they can chew with OS2. And I am only repeating myself saying this.

I have to confess, I don’t really understand this modern TV series/game series mentality of ‘let’s hire an army of writers, because more is clearly better’. Really? Should we list out the ‘famous’ novelists of the world, and how there was only really one of them that wrote the whole shebang?

Thing is, the party members in this game are clearly all written by individuals, because they’re so clinically isolated from one another that I don’t believe they ever really have any meaningful interaction throughout the whole game. I can’t even begin to imagine how you might realistically put a team of writers in a room, each responsible for an individual character, and have them come out with a natural ping-pong of dialogue between their various imagined characters.

It’s batshit. Only in game and tv land. No wonder half of it is disjointed dross.

Act 1 is very good though imo. Act 2 very competent. And Act 3 and 4 are like something from a half-formed planned expansion that they included in the game anyway because it makes it longer…

It’s all a very interesting mess. Because they have all the material they need (from forum comments etc), as well as their own common sense – which I think is pretty damn good – to know Act 3 and Act 4 are undercooked, creative-fatigue type chapters that are a predictable result of over ambition.

And they know the armour system is pants. Tactician mode is subpar. And so on.

I think they’ll correct these things, honestly. The game just needs another year of development.

Many of the mods have really good ideas, and they’re obviously looking at them.

Once is enough of a play through for me. But if they go back give it one last hurrah (with everything they’ve learned so far), I do believe they’ll create a classic that’ll withstand all the futuristic graphical bells and whistles that are to come…

I'm inclined to disagree with you on a few things.

Firstly, I actually find it REFRESHING that despite you being 'the chosen one out to save the world', you're still not treated like God King of the Village after doing two and a half side-quests for them (hello Skyrim). Some side activities like tavern-gambling or 'true' open world would be nice, but I do think that there's other games that would do those things better. I'm happy the game stays focused on doing well what it sets out to do, and doesn't succumb to feature-bloat that murdered so, so, so many games in the past.

No cut scenes or animations? Are we playing the same game? Or do you require a party-wide dance number every time you finish a quest? Far as I can tell the animations -- for what they are -- are gorgeously crafted, and there's -just enough- variety there. have you seen the staff-twirling, the dagger-sheathing, or literally any ability used by your characters? I may be biased because I study animation, but I do think it is the last thing you should complain about in this game if you just take the time to look at what's on offer, without expectng Blizzard-tier full-CG movies after every chapter (it is, after all, essentially a high-tier indie game).

The story and the characters... I mean. Yeah, it's generic fantasy, but I still found it to be one of the better stories in the past 5-10 years, surpassed only by the likes of Witcher 3. I honestly missed classic, no BS western D&D fantasy RPG with dragons, knights, elves and wizards. If you're looking for something else you should look elsewhere, as Divinity games have always been about cheesy, over-the-top, cliche Generic Fantasy. And I hope they stay that way, because GOOD generic fantasy is very, very hard to come by these days.

Not to say you're entirely wrong -- there's always room for improvment. But it just feels like you're looking for a different kind of game than a old-school CRPG with a lot of what you're saying. It's always been part of the charm of CRPGs to use your imagination for things that aren't directly shown to you. And while you -are- correct about excellent core behind DOS2's combat system being bogged down in shoddy execution (predominantly down to just how much numbers go up with every level), I just can't agree with most of the rest of your post.

I believe I made it quite clear in my first point where the game is lacking visuals and animations, and I wasn't talking about combat at all. I was talking about the narrated quest scenes that the the player is supposed to imagine, like imaginary NPCs talking to my party. Or just the fact that characters cannot physically talk, or do any other 'complex' actions because they are always just standing there like statues. I'm tired of imagining by a narrator how someone sneaked up on me, put a dagger to my throat, or hugged me, or kissed me, or yelled at me, or fell down, etc etc etc. These are the missing animations or cut scenes. There's nothing to stimulate the senses. The character models seem to be missing basic physical attributes such as a talking mouth, or facial expressions. So yea, the game is quite lacking in the animation department, especially the personal stuff that's supposed to make the characters or story relatable. To me that's much more important than staff-twirling.

True, the characters perform combat skills, but you make it sound like Larian has revolutionized the staff-twirling and daggar sheathing. That's a very low standard for any modern rpg.

The one that really made me laugh was when I had a special night with Sebylle and we woke up in the bed decked in full armor, haha. I even had my helmet on.

Yes. The romantic scene was one of the few remaining things that I was still waiting for, with some hope that it would be done well. It was a complete letdown all over. The same old voice tells the whole scene while the characters are... well, again just standing like statues on the ship. Lame.

This utter lack of visuals breaks the whole role playing element for me.

Maybe this isn't your type of game.

none of the things you listed in the OP were at all what i was expecting out of this game, nor what i felt it was missing

i agree that act 3 slows to a crawl at parts and that arx is kind of a mess, but cutscenes? this game and games like the elder scrolls and dragon age series are simply in different boats, sorry. if you're looking for stuff like that, you're in the wrong place

That's kind of my point. Those games are very immersive.
And what's so strange about cutscenes? The best rpgs have excellent cutscenes instead of a narrator telling me to imagine stuff all the time. It's something I would expect from any modern game.

In the graphics department, if you look at a game like Kingdom Come Deliverance that's coming out soon, you'll see what modern games are capable of. The level of detail is amazing there. Granted, that's a RT-RPG like Skyrim or Witcher, but it just shows you what's possible. I don't expect the same level of granular character models in DOS, but I do expect the models and animations in DOS2 to be far superior than DOS 1, which they are not. When I zoom in close to my characters, I don't see living creatures, I see clay figurines.

For a game that's full-priced I expect more.

I've been a gamer since the 90s and at one point I stopped playing all together because I was just bored of linear, hack-and-slash titles. Then I discovered BioWare games (KOTOR 1&2, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, SWTOR) which got me into gaming again.

I fell in love with their interactive cinematics and choice-driven stories. I am still very picky about non-BioWare games. I actually couldn't get into Skyrim and some other titles. That being said, I actually really enjoyed both D:OS and D:OS2.

These games have a style of their own and really shouldn't be compared to titles that rely heavily on the visual, cinematic element. I feel it's kind of like comparing a painting to a song.

Would it have been nice if there had been some cut-scenes, at least for important events? Sure. But at the same time, I didn't feel that it broke my immersion or that the game was lacking. It was just *different*. The narration did a very good job at setting the scene and my imagination did the rest.

Perhaps it is because I come from a time when games had pixels, and one could get captured by a story even if it contained minimal animation, and that I love to draw, write and do anything that engages my imagination. I think resembling older games is actually something D:OS2 was going for, and a big part of it's charm.

I have to agree with some of the replies here that this just might not be your type of game. It sounds like the problem is that you were expecting something different. I am curious as to why you kept playing for that long, since it's obvious quite early on what kind of game it is and how the interactions are handled?

Either way, I am sorry you feel disappointed. I honestly really enjoyed these games, and if there is a D:OS3, I'll definitely buy it. Just like I'll buy the next BioWare game, despite it being two different worlds.