STORY / WORLD GENERAL

75) The mystery of the Source Hunters blows its wad far, far too soon.
Basically, the Weaver of Time spells out the overall arc and proclaims the source hunters as reincarnated deities from essentially the first meeting at the start of the game. Oh. Okay, game, thanks. I guess there is no point keeping me in suspense or anything.

There probably is not any great way to make that kind of you-have-a-secret-past plot have an emotional impact in this game, given that the characters are blank slates filled in by the player. A secret past and personality has more impact for characters who have a fixed personality. But I realize that sort of thing is not Larians preferred style.



76) Cyseal sets up a bunch of recurring things that never recur.
  • The Fabulous Five seemed like a group that would go from place to place swindling people but they never show up again. I suppose that could not be helped seeing as every other town is under Immaculate control.
  • Billeh Gahr seems like he might be recurring. Never shows up again.
  • Zombie Jake is revealed as a Sourcerer near the end of Cyseal. Seems like a potential recurring villain. Never shows up or is even mentioned ever again.
  • Bellegar is freed from his prison in Cyseal. He is completely absent from Luculla and Hiberheim, and his appearances in the Phantom Forest have the appearance of [we forgot about that guy, toss in something quick]. The maze was neat, but the design documents reveal that it was salvaged from a cut dungeon, not something made for Bellegar.


That seems like a waste.


77) Too many locations and quests are tied to the main quest.
This is a totally subjective opinion, and opinions on this will likely vary wildly.

Only a handful of places and locations are only side-quest. There are four towns. Cyseal, Silverglen, Sacred Stone, and Hunters Edge. Sacred Stone does not seem to have any sidequests. Hunters Edge does have sidequests, but it is enemy-occupied.

You have to visit most places in the game, and there is not a lot of content that is only for sidequesting. Compare that to Divine Divinity and Divinity 2, which have many things other than the main quest to do in most places (although that does fall off the farther you go in all the games.)



78) Mysterious Stranger encounters do not build up to anything.
They just stop. I think he was eaten by a brain-sucker and became a Cyclops? I suppose I probably should not have expected much from something whose only interaction with you was a long stare and an enigmatic acknowledgement.

I just wanted some climax or conclusion to it other than lol he got his head eaten by a parasite. Maybe if he showed up in the first garden, either before or after the final boss with one final comment about the journey and/or source hunters, it would be more satisfying.



79) Affection choices are basically all used up and done by the end of Cyseal.
There are two types of choices that affect the relationship between characters: scripted quest based ones that dictate how much they agree, and generic ones emergent from gameplay that dictate how much they like each other. Quest ones continue throughout the entire game, but gameplay emergent ones seem to be almost entirely used up by the end of Cyseal. This effectively makes the affinity ones the only ones that matter for the characters relationship.


80) Was Arhu supposed to be permanently polymorphed at some point?
I mean, I figured this game would have that happen, but as far as I can tell, it does not, at least he never mentions it, and that seems like it would be a big deal. There was one encounter with a white cat in Sacred Stone, but its dialogue was absent or bugged and I never knew what it was about.


STORY / WORLD LUCULLA NORTH

81) Tenebrium Handling seems a bit too easy
Just take a look, its in a book, the reading rainbow

The toxicity of the stuff is legendary. Silverglen is full of horror stories of how nasty, hideously dangerous Tenebrium is. But all you do is read a book about how to handle it and suddenly it is perfectly okay to lick it. I would have thought that reasonable precautions would have already been tried and failed.

Maybe something cooler like a machine in Atenboroughs lab that grants the protection? I dunno, just tossing out random notions. EDIT: I suppose though, that in a game that is full of magic spellbooks already, one more doesn稚 matter, so, nevermind.

I also agree with whoever said that the book or whatever should have granted the reader a TALENT for Tenbrium Handling, instead of a skill. That would have instantly solved the replaces weapon skills issue.


82) Orc prisoner does not recognize being freed from his cell if you Featherfall him out.
He did wander around and I eventually lost track of him, but when talking to him after featherfalling him out, he seemed to think he was still in his cell.


STORY / WORLD PHANTOM FOREST

83) Kill-zone only at START of Phantom Forest feels a little clunky
It feels a little too much like a gate to keep players out. Gates are fine when they are handled right, but this one seems a little too obvious - it does not seem to make sense for the toxic area to only be at that one spot. That mildly sabotages the atmosphere of the area.

It also seems a bit pointless, since the Immaculates get to the temple anyway. Maybe they crossed the river by boat or something.

The other oddity is that you have one amulet to get past the area for four people, so you have to send someone ahead, and use the teleporter pyramids. (The first time I did that, I was a little too close to the edge of the toxin and three-quarters of my party instantly died. Yay.)

I think a better solution would have been a little closer to what the Tenebrium-handling solution was. Some book or artifact in Zandalors house that bestows a blessing on the party so they can all enter together. In addition, the entire woods (but not the swamp or temple area) would have clouds of poison drifting through the area, so the player remains apprehensive and never forgets that this is a hostile, toxic environment.

I said drifting clouds because I do understand that constant fog can make it hard to see things on the ground. Maybe just clouds fading in and out. I dunno.


84) Temple of Death starts strong, but whimpers to an anticlimax
Figuring out how to get in was nice, and the first room with all the bodies and coffins and the ambush was great, but after that there is the wolf encounter and that is it for danger and challenge. There are some vents with steam. I blocked those with barrels, expecting some kind of ambush with lightning-casting enemies, nothing. There is a laboratory, some ingredients storage, and the secret room with the bones, but that was all. No more enemies, no traps of note, not really any puzzles either. I was thinking you would have to look in several places for the bones, but they were all in one place. The temple overall gives an impression of being half-finished. Is this all that is left of the 10-level Phantom Forest dungeon? When it was announced that some levels had to be cut from it, I did not think you meant you deleted the entire thing.


85) Disappointed that entire Phantom Forest Dungeon was deleted
I know Larian ran out of time and money and did not have a choice. It is still disappointing that the entire thing was quietly cut out of the game.


86) Do not kill - killing makes Balberith stronger
Given that the comments about [do not kill anything in the forest or swamp, because it will make the demon stronger], I was expecting it to actually, you know, make the demon fight harder.

Instead, what it does is place a few ghosts in the courtyard of his shack. Do not get me wrong, the demon fight was plenty hard for me already. But I actually just had my Shadowblade with Sneak 5 walk behind the row of cyclopses guarding the front door, and teleported my party into the shack with the stone. Nothing saw me. I did not fight the eyeball-spawned monsters or the shack-guarding ones until later, when I was trying to reach level 20.

Also, the ghosts appear even if you have already killed the demon. Those ghost ones should NOT appear if you kill the demon first, because it is explicitly stated that the demon is what is causing them to appear.


87) Source Kings Chest loot is inappropriate level
Braccus Rex has a Source Kings Chest. The key for that is found very late in the game, in the Phantom Forest. Going back to open it, and you get crap that you would find at level 5 or 10. That chests level should match the location of the key to open it.


STORY / WORLD SOURCE TEMPLE


88) Who wrote the directions?
The stone elemental in the swamp said that if you stick to the right, you will come to a weak wall that you need to bust through to bypass. Number one, I did not really see any sign of a weak wall. There was a strong wall which had a stair case there, but it did not really look like the accidental bypass it was supposed to be. Number two, it was on the LEFT hand side, not the right. Sheesh. Number three, why is this supposedly SECRET way into the high priests office easier to find than the intended, MAIN entrance to the trials? Why is the way to the trials even hidden in the first place?


89) Pixel Hunts: Still terrible
F**K PIXEL HUNTS. I got stuck in a room because I was following the path of touchplates. It led me into a room with a skeleton on a table and a big, prominent, important-looking lever. CLEARLY, there was something I was supposed to do here with the skeleton and the lever to open the door. It was so obviously placed here for a reason. I just could not figure out what. The book I found said the first test was to be complete in body and soul, so the apparently obvious answer was to find a missing piece and put it into the skeleton.

WRONG! I was actually supposed to scour the walls for a tiny button. That is bad design. What commands your attention in that room is the skeleton and the strange lever.


90) Forced Teleporter Pyramid usage is not intuitive
The correct way to get through the trials is to throw the teleporter pyramids through some barred grates. Maybe I am just being overly grumpy because the surprise pixel hunting put me in a bad mood, and no one else had trouble with this, but I think that the pyramids here don稚That is not intuitive for two reasons.

First, the game has taught the player that pyramids CANNOT be used like that. Pretty much every other single place where you had grates blocking the way, or even gaps, or good-sized holes in walls or windows, teleporter pyramids were not usable. So it is in no way intuitive that suddenly they can work here, where they did not work before. Going against the lessons your game has carefully taught the player may be a sign of bad design.

Second - and here is the problem where trying to think like a real person, and use the games own internal logic fails - the actual initiates doing these trials would not have had the pyramids. So the expectation is that there is a non-pyramid solution. A pyramid solution was obvious for the collapsed bridge, since the initiates would have had a working bridge. Elsewhere it was not. How were the initiates without pyramids supposed to get through these challenges?


GRAND FINALE

This has my thoughts on the final boss, the story, and some miscellaneous plot hole things.

91) Final Battles could use unique music.
I understand that Kirill has been ill, so this could not have been helped, but it would have been nice to have more unique music for boss encounters, especially the final one, instead of the same old familiar battle music you have been hearing since the tutorial dungeon. That does not set the proper tone for the final battle.


92) Final Boss fight unspectacular.
The Final boss focuses almost all attacks against Astarte until you get close enough. It does add tension, since if she dies it is game over but that also makes the final boss seem somewhat like an escort mission, since you need to devote a lot of your time to babysitting her. At least given the story it was intuitive that if she died it would probably be game over. She could probably use more health so you do not have to spend quite as much time keeping her from dying. About 50 percent more health than what she currently has feels like you壇 still have to protect her, but you could do a bit more than JUST protecting her.

The final boss never really engaging the players is not that much fun. He mostly spends his time plinking single target high damage spells at Astarte. So exciting.

The final boss is also really vulnerable to sneak attacks. As soon as the boss summoned in his first wave of reinforcements, I realized that I had to spend some time focusing on him. My Shadowblade went behind it. He completely ignored all my backstabs as long as I was sneaking at the end of my turn. Eventually, after I whittled down the summons enough, Madora was able to join the fight. She got in a couple whacks, and the Void Dragon actually cast lightning breath at her, but the shadowblade did 95% or more of the damage, and pretty much never got hit or even noticed.

I think a good tweak to the fight would be to have the void dragon focus a bit less on Astarte himself and a bit more on the party. His summoned minion would be much more inclined to target Astarte instead of the party.


93) Quibble: Air element completely off the table in final battle?
It seems a bit odd that in the final battle of the game, an element is completely worthless. Normally, is not it traditional for all elements to be viable in the final fights? This is not something that needs to be changed, it is just something mildly unusual.


94) Big shocking plot twist falls completely flat.
At the end, Astarte says that there was some big conspiracy behind selecting the guardians to guard the Godbox. (Honestly I am not fond of that name. It sounds a little silly and I would have preferred calling it something meaningless and strange, like Absycratix. But a little silly seems to be the general atmosphere of what Larian was going for this game, so nevermind.)

The conspiracy was that the guardians were intended to fail, because some of the gods are secretly evil? The game only mentions this about three seconds before the end and never clarifies anything. If that is supposed to be any kind of secret plot twist intended to make me shocked, well, it did not and just fell completely flat.

First, the gods do not really seem to be important players in the Divinity universe. You only learn their names from that one book [A brief history of the seven gods](?) and never actually interact with them. So having some of them being secretly evil or betray us does not make us care because they are non-characters who have never appeared on-screen.

Second, because Astarte does not even dare mention them, we still do not know who or what is behind this conspiracy, or even if they are part of the Seven or just extra deities lying around. It is just a confusing mess that hurts the plot a lot more than it adds to it. Because it literally adds nothing at all except vagueness.


95) Character arcs cannot be compressed to two paragraphs at the end.
It is true that Larian games are not about having the main characters as actual characters, and there are not really a lot of character arcs to speak of, but since it seems like Larian was trying them out in this game, by trying to have the players actions influence their ultimate relationship, I should give feedback on how well that worked.

Mechanically speaking, from what I can tell, it works brilliantly. I have read what other people have gotten for their Source Hunter endings, and was quite surprised by the diverse outcomes possible.

In terms of creating a story and character arc, though, well, let me put it this way:
The Source Hunters, have been working together all this time and their interactions have them bantering causally like friends, it is a fairly neutral relationship, no matter how many times they have disagreed on something, they still have the same casual banter. So together they beat the final boss and then an imp appears and says that after being freed from their duty, our casually-bantering buddies then spent the rest of eternity in a deathly struggle to murder each other.

Can you perhaps see why I found that a bit jarring?

This is not actually something that Larian could fix, though:

All the interactions between the source hunters, whether through the automatic, voiced dialogue, or decision points during quests, happen in a vacuum. This is also required because of the freeform nature of the game.

There is no possible way that anyone could rewrite all of those interactions reflect the actual current state of the relationship, it would just be way too much work and resources. So I do not fault Larian for this at all, there simply was no other way.

But nevertheless, the game supposedly has the relationship that develops between two characters as a key feature. Their interactions are completely neutral in tone for the entire game, and then an unrelated third party pops up at the end and gives you the entire character development arc in about three paragraphs. Not even the main characters themselves talking about their relationship and future, but an imp? That is not a satisfying way to do a character or relationship arc. It does not work.


96) Nitpicky plot hole: The Guardians and the Shelter Plane
The whole shelter plane is supposedly for the Guardians, there are beds, forges, workshops, etc but the impression that I got from the story cinematics is that the Guardians were kinda like the stereotypical Royal Guards of England, standing in one place staring straight ahead perpetually. They did not strike me as needing food or sleep, or in fact as ever leaving their posts. So the existence of the shelter plane seems to not make a lot of sense. It would almost make more sense as Zixzax痴 home base, if not for the pesky star stones unlocking portals.


97) Nitpicky plot hole: So why is Astarte casually hanging out in the dining room?
From the story, it is revealed that Astarte decided to fight the Void Dragon in perpetuity to save the world. So I am confused about her appearing here and there in the Shelter Plane. Is that an image? Is the void dragon already loose? I don稚 really understand what she is doing there and why.


98) Ultra-super Nitpicky Nitpick: The First Garden doesn稚 look very garden-like.
I had heard about the First Garden all game. I was expecting it to be wild and primitive, very full of nature and stuff. Instead it was mostly stone and stairs with a bit of grass.