Hi everyone! I finally managed to get the money to buy DOS2 and I've been playing it a couple of hours already. Here are some of my rants; it's going to be a pretty long post so be warned. For the record, I'm right now in the swamp after the fort, just past the flaming pigs and some imprisoned dragon. I'm at lvl5 if memory serves, not in home right now. My party is tanky Beast with sword n board, fire + earth mage Red Prince with wand and shield, water + air Lohse with a staff, and rogue Sebille with two daggers (kitchen knifes, because I haven't found a single better weapon yet).
Let me start by saying that I absolutely adored DOS1. I played the original in all it's buggy and imbalanced glory, including the incoherent plot that made no sense. DOS1:EE was like a totally new game to me, and I completed it both Classic and Honour mode. While I did had some troubles finishing it with the latter, the worst parts were mostly cheesy ones, like Air Elementals teleporting my characters into the lava (isn't that fair?).
DIFFICULTYAll right, let's begin with the most annoying issue I've encountered, the difficulty. Holy crap, this game is
hard. I started in Tactical mode since I was experienced with the game already, but this one is just a pain in the ass. The fact that crowd control is pretty much useless at the beginning of the fights means that all my previous tactics are now worthless, and I have to develop new ones. That's fine by me, but the sheer amount of advantage the enemy has borders cheating. Why they all have like 80 armor without a shield, yet when I kill them they only drop 20 gold coins? I assume they're packed with magical items, but nope, they seem to be just thick skinned.
The most obvious problem for me is that there isn't room for mistakes. A wrong turn in a fight means instant death, since the enemy just runs across the battlefield and aims for your weaker characters, obliterating them in two hits. Healing now seems to be quite bad, and that pissed me off since I always loved playing healers. My old combo of water + electricity is now useless because I can't manage to destroy their magic armor fast enough to lock them down, forcing me to also have a character with offensive spells, and that's just lame.
My "tank" is anything but that. The enemies just ignore it and run towards my other characters, and even when I do manage to attract their attention, they just melt me with spells faster than I can power up my shield. And since I can't charge them down, I find myself surrounded by enemies in a blink. Staying behind is not an option, because
every single fight has archers or wizards who won't hesitate in AoE me down instantly.
It seems that there is a proper way to play the game in order to advance. If you leave the fort at lvl3 you're pretty much done for, because you can't return to it to farm guards since they will all attack you at the same time. I had to restart the game twice already, once because of this and another because I didn't picked Pet Pal, which seems to be mandatory to obtain the most xp from quests.
I'm trying to power up my characters but there isn't any gold lying around, and most of the books and items costs a fortune. I'm slowly progressing but damn, it's not smooth at all. I've quickloaded the game like a hundred times already because every step seems to be an impossible encounter with monsters showing up from thin air. Yeah, that's another problem, the fact that you engage one guard and they just magically summon three friends to destroy you for no reason. I should be able to decide if a battle is worthy or not, not every encounter has to be an ambush you know.
CONVERSATIONSThis should've been included in the previous section but I wanted to divide it. First of all,
thank you for removing that R/P/S crap. That was some bad design right there, but now it's much more fluent, intuitive, and logical. I'm a stronk, bad tempered dorf, I am supossed to bully people into doing my will, and now I can do just that. Well, a couple of times at least.
Now that I had that out the way, let's go with the bad part: the fact that nearly every conversation ends up in a fight. Yeah, so far I only found two instances in which I can avoid a hard fight by talking: the dogs in the prison, and some Magisters attacking a Seeker (not their four friends tho, those are mean). The rest of the situations play like this:
- *Let the man knows that you come in peace*
- DIE YOU SWINE!
That's basically every conversation. No matter what I say, the conflict seems to be inevitable, and most of the times I just bump into them.
Ran into a captain torturing some fella? Yeah, it's a fight, and I won't stand a chance since he somehow summons extra guards and dogs that just go into a frenzy and chew on my mages.
Found some guards in an unusual place? Yeah, I don't even try to talk my way out. They will attack no matter what, and they will have three times my armor and damage.
Found a crazy guy in the beach eating people? Reload, I'm dead because I didn't had the item he wanted, which I had to know beforehand to pick it up.
Found some neutral turtles? Yeah, they're evil. And they will only transform when they're surrounding you. Reload and cheesy it by sending the tank first.
It's like every step has to be taken with extreme caution, and that is just not fun. I understand I'm a half naked prisoner, but couldn't just be red NPC in those areas so I can know where I can actually walk, instead of making them yellow for no reason but to forcing me to reload? The whole idea of making NPCs neutral by default is to give me the option of getting past them somehow, you know, like a roleplaying game. I can try to bribe them, seduce them, trick them, whatever. But no, it's like "OMG TRESPASSER!" every time I walk into a new room.
INTERFACEThese complains are more like nitpicking, but I may aswell take them out of the way. First of all, I'm having
real troubles with the camera. Somehow I find myself moving it constantly because there's always,
always some foreground object blocking my sight, especially in fights. That never happened to me in DOS1 and I don't understand why it's happening now. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but I honestly find it extremely annoying.
My companions are beyond stupid. The Red Prince gets stuck in the ladders constantly for no reason, he just stands there and never climbs them up. They just walk over hazzards when my main character clearly goes around them, and step on mines when I can see them. In most fights, since they seem to happen after a conversation, my companions are just scattered and end up stacked together when the combat starts, of course getting me instantly killed by the insane amount of AoE. They rarely position themselves the way I told them to, except when I slowly walk into a fight against red NPCs.
And last, something that may have a solution but I couldn't find it: having to press Alt all the time to highlight things. I don't remember if DOS1 had this feature, but I just want a way to permanently toggle every object, much like in Pillars of Eternity. Can this be done? Otherwise having to press Alt every step to see if I can find a stupid herb is a pain in the butt. Not to mention, I can't right click the popup box to send an item to wares or read a book without picking it up - why not?
MUSIC AND EFFECTSThis should've been my first issue but it's more personal than anything. The first thing I do when I come to my workplace is put some Kirill Pokrovsky music, particularly from DOS1. That man was a god among insects and his death made this world shittier. I was expecting DOS2 to have his music recycled, but no, instead it has one of the most bland and boring soundtracks I've ever heard in a RPG. Sometimes I barely know it's there, not even the combat music is entertaining.
Even worse, not having Kirill music makes me feel that this isn't even a Divinity game, it just doesn't feel right. I wish there were a mod to modify the internal music into the DOS1 one.
And that's not the only thing: the voices of the characters are just lame. In DOS1, every skill had a particular warcry. When you used Encourage they would go "For Rivellon!", or using a charge attack was "Ramming speed!" (which
I loved). Now it's just "I yield to none!" every time I cast something, even when I just create rain or heal someone. Yeah, very creative. They really got lazy on this area.
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Welp, that pretty much covers most of my complaints. Overall, the game is quite nice: the story is kinda interesting, I liked how they managed to put all of the main characters in the same place without making it look stupid. I like how it feels almost like DOS1 but with minor differences, so it's not just an expansion.
Still, I think it requires a lot of polishing, and I expect this thread to be filled with fanbois screaming "OMG GIT GUD" and things like that. It's ok, I can handle it. While the game is hard, that's not what it bothers me: it's the fact that there's a
right way to play it, and a RPG should never have that problem. I should be able to complete it anyway I want to, not being forced to cheese my way to victory, or knowing beforehand every step to take in order to not getting stuck. There should be a place to grind my levels up in case I missed a couple of quests, not being forced to restart the game because of it.
That's all for now. Have a nice day everyone.
