Someone pointed out in Skype that I'd never mentioned WHY I wrote that huge spiel above :P
As an aspiring (read: amateur and crappy) game designer, I tend to make notes as I play through games, about the game-design lessons I learn. Really the "review" above is just a reformetted collection of these notes. I usually notice more "bad" than "good": we humans recognise things "out of place" far more than things being "right and proper", for obvious evolutionary reasons! This doesn't mean there's more bad than good in the game: it's just what I wrote most notes on.
So, yah: I shared my notes as a review in case they might be of interest to people, but do not mean to say "this is the way it is": rather "these are the things that I, personally, was thinking, as I made my way through the game."
BD is a secuel (hope I spell it right?), not the second Divinity game ;\)
Sequel (like "sequence" and "consequence", rather than "second" or "secession": I think English is evil, and it's my first language.)
There're MORE reasons to replay a RPG besides of "moral decisions" etc ... I find, for example, a RPG replayble because of having fun to play it again, simply to have a fun time and hear the music, laugh with the tons of humor in this game, etc ... And also to choose other Skills next time or another class (or combination of classes!) or ....
I sort of agree - which is why I said I might revisit it in years to come. Long-term replayability comes from good memories of a great game, and wanting to re-live those memories
Ask me in a few years whether the game has that :P
I was speaking more of immediate, short-term replayability. Few people can read a book, then turn it over and read it again. So, short-term replayability hinges on being able to have a
different game, or at least, a radically different angle on the same story.
Larian certainly tried for that, in several ways.
[*] They made the character very customisable, so you could try different approaches. but this only affects combat.
[*] They offered alternative tower minions, with alternative platform upgrade quests. But while extremely cool, this choice was the only significant choice in the game.
[*] They gave a plethora of sidequests, such that unless you're
extremely OCD, you're probably not going to find them all, by yourself, in a single playthrough. But... I am that kind of OCD :P
[*] They made quests so that the outcomes were contradictory: you could save one person or another, but not both, etc. But it was trivial to play both paths by reloading, since consequences were rarely more than five minutes away.
Other than the tower minions, they didn't have whole quest trees that you had to choose between. And they didn't have
how you play affect the game whatsoever. If you play as a warrior, a mage, a ranger, this only makes a difference to how you fight. If you play as good or evil, there's only a difference in the quest rewards. No different greetings, quests, endings, or longterm effects whatever.
That's not a bad thing. It makes complete economic sense from a game-design perspective. The vast majority of buyers will not finish the game even once. Of those that finish it, the vast majority will not play it a second time.
So for that small proportion of a small proportion who DO play through it a second time, after already had their money's worth from a full play-through, it's just not worth the expenditure of developer and QA time to craft alternative stories for a second play-through. It's far better economics to focus your developer time on making a single story that is very well-tested, well fleshed out, lengthy, detailed, and so on.
I get the feeling Larian is small, almost "Indie". That matters to me. As a game by a large publishing house, Ego Draconis is merely an OK game: Bethesda would have been panned for bringing it out, because they've set the bar for themselves pretty darn high. But as the product of a smaller development house, it's frankly a stellar game.
So, while I marked the lack of significant replay value as a "bad thing", that doesn't mean that I think (as with any of the "bad things" I listed) that they should have spent time addressing them: in most cases, developer time - the most precious of resources - was certainly better spent elsewhere, in making the story and the world great.
Well, except for the levitating, moving platforms: for that, there's just no excuse :P
