[quote=Warlocke]
You see, I am the opposite. I found little to like in D:OS world and characters. It's incoherent, shallow and flat.
DOS (1, haven't played 2 yet) overall is just a playground to goof around in. Apart of maybe the front loaded skippable exposition in the introduction movie , there's barely an attempt made at a narrative hook or conflict to pull you in at all -- compare that to the moment you arrive in Guilded Vale in PoE1, for instance. Slight early game spoiler ahead: The bodies on the tree, the bells announcing yet another hollowborn. It's a moment where the writing, the visuals and the audio together communicate the world's conflict pretty clearly. DOS1 doesn't have any of that.
Which kind of makes sense, I guess. I've recently read an article with Tim Cain and his pal Leonard Boyarsky where it was said how difficult it was in a multiplayer environment to tell a coherent story. What with everybody running around to do whatever they currently feel like. And whilst BG3 will be multiplayer too, I liked what I saw in the BG3 presentation so far though.
I found D:OS much more compelling because it set for itself a very different array of goals and, I feel, executed them quite well. The series is delightfully irreverent, and unashamed of its absurdity with sort of a Monty Python sensibility. I very much appreciated that.
PoE, on the other hand, takes itself very seriously. It is somber and solemn almost to the point of being overbearing. While there are moments of humor, it is largely joyless. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but I rarely ever found anything about my time with #1 evocative. Looking back it seems to be in my memory a tapestry painted only in shades of beige. I’ve played through it completely twice and, aside from the hangman’s tree, I can remember almost nothing about the experience.
As for #2, I’ve put about 150 hours into it and have still never beaten the game. I try. I’ve started several attempts, but I always lose interest at around level 12 or 13. At this point I’ve just given up on it. The story and the design of the game are exceptionally discordant. The story places a high imperative on tracking down the rampaging god absconding with your stolen soul. The stakes are very high and deeply personal. But the world design is a big open map for exploration and side questing. If I just follow the story, I feel like I missing out on most of the game’s content, as well as opportunities to level and gear. If I meander about, the narrative becomes trivial. Such a disjunction in design is a real deal breaker for me.
This is one aspect where I found PoE to flounder, though there are others, and all these keep me from seeing the series as anything but just okay at best.
