Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General D:OS Reviews coming in :)

Well, trying and reviewing the co-op mode is absolutely necessary for doing this game justice. It's not a tagged-on additional game mode. It's a core game mode of this game, basically on the same level as the SP experience. It's unprofessional to not even trying that mode and mentioning it in a review. As I said before, that's kind of like reviewing CallofDuty games without trying/testing the multiplayer. But other than CoD a lot of design aspects in Divinity: Original Sin are especially made with co-op in mind, like dialogues, storytelling, UI and general player progress. If you don't play the game in co-op you never have enough information to review and assess these design aspects properly.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/divinity-original-sin
http://www.gamerankings.com/pc/672174-divinity-original-sin/index.html

Looks like mid 80s.

"You sir are completely full of shit. " Thanks for the well-reasoned and clearly erudite response. I'll make sure I log that in the appropriate bin.


"but you go and score it a 75? REALLY?" - Before I respond to this, you DO realize that reviews are subjective right? Not every person will like every thing. I like Blade Runner. Most people do. Some people find it to be absolutely terrible. It doesn't make them, to use your parlance, "Full of shit".

"Pathetic. Send your reviewer back to Burger King." - Thanks for your valuable feedback.

"Don't forget to fix "Lorian" instead of Larian in the start, and please, get someone who doesn't want his hand held and someone who knows what a "journal" is, to review the game."

We'll get that fixed - thanks for that. As for the journal, there is a balance between 'hand holding' and 'unintuitive'. Without having played the game myself yet (I picked it up after this bit of fun), I can't say where this falls in the spectrum. I shouldn't have to pore over a huge manual to "learn to play" - this isn't Falcon 4.0. (Yea, I'm old)

"Well, trying and reviewing the co-op mode" - I completely agree. Lucious should have tested out co-op for his review. This shouldn't have gone live without it. That said, there is something to be said about wanting an epic RPG to be balanced for single or cooperative play. For instance, I personally don't have a schedule conducive to cooperative play, so I rarely get to do it much. He should have at least played it cooperatively enough to test the mechanics and to understand how and if it changes gameplay.

Well, the game rewards progress made by own exploration. It's not about sinking endless times in a manual but the game provokes and requires your own critical thinking. How could that work? How could I solve that quest? Where could I go next?

But I agree that the journal itself is sometimes just too vague by not storing the proper information you've leant in dialogues or by other means. That happens not often but sometimes.

Funny how some low reviews can drop a score right? You scored lower than the fraud panned review, so don't act as if you were somehow being reasonable.

This is all subjective, but when you pass out 90's for games that are commonly known as garbage, and then pan this game, it shows extreme ignorance to this title.

The fact that you have users here trying to educate you on your own job? /sigh

Sir, if you worked for me, you would be fired.

I think you misunderstood him. He's not the guy who did the review...

Just another click bait low review site. Nothing more to see.

Unfortunately the initial response to your post was just rage and thus made your life realy easy to just dismiss it, so here goes something a little more elaborate.

The review in question was clearly made by a reviewer that is very sub-par in this kind of genre. When even my wife can play the game co-op with me witout me saying much in hints and then you have a "RPGer" reviewing the game and having more dificulty in the game it's a very clear sign something's wrong.

Another sign something's wrong is that you have a dozen prefessional reviews over 85 that praise the game and hundreds of user reviews stating over 9.0 average, when mostly all negatives are from people either playing pirated versions with unpatched bugs or people QQIng it's too hard, and then you give it 10 less points as the average. 10!

Another CLEAR sign you review was just made by a bad reviewer is that it clearly states larian released an incomplete game, wich is just absurd as i already ended it with no game-breaking bugs. Even more serious the reviewer criticizes larian for releasing too early and having major bugs and already pachting the game twice when you you gave Diablo 3 a 90!!!!!! a game that was impossible to play for a full week !!!!!! talk about double standards here ah? i could give more examples just browsing your portfolio of reviews of bugged-games-at-launch-with-good-scores

(http://gamingtrend.com/game_reviews/dark-lord-couch-diablo-iii-review/)


Some realy evident quotes that make your reviewer realy realy bad or realy realy "naysayer" for the sake of it:

"and many quests went ignored because I had no idea where to find the characters to drive them forward"
Yes, it's called reading dialog and paying attention to hints. What is this? a 12 year old playing an RPG after playing Mario Brothers?

"How do I craft an item? Stumble over a recipe book or drag a few random items over one another in your inventory and maybe you値l get something"
He's not even trying. Realy, it was a rushed review. There are soooo many recipies in the world that he mentioning "stumbing" means he didnt play the game more than a couple hours. And yes, you can randomly try to combine items but recipies will tell you everything you need to know.

" Now you must decide if you want your archer to stay near the back of the formation, where their exceptional accuracy but low health (because there are only so many points to go around) will be most effective in combat, or lead the group, where they can quickly locate potential dangers but be much more vulnerable."
What ? this makes no sense at all. What you "lead" outside of combat is diferent from the combat formations, i bet the reviewer didnt even notice the battle formation button. Oh and btw the archer is not accurate at all and suffer a lot from low% chance at high range, magic users are way more accurate at all ranges. Another mistake that clearly says he didnt play the game at all.


I'm realy sorry but this review was a half-baked-sorry-excuse of a review. No mention of the good points of the game because it's clearly a review made by someone that has no clue how to play and didnt go far into the game nor didnt have time to experiment and explore solutions.


I'm realy sorry but i can't take your review site as serious after this review. I'm not trying to be a fanboy defending "larian honor", i'm just realy trying to understand if it was just a poorly made review from your reviewer, or you are "fishing" for page-hits based on this score.

Hopefuly you as an editor in chief will be wise enough to understand it's a bad review. Hell even if you gave the game a 90 it would still be a bad review. Poor texted, poor depth, poor explanations of how the game works, etc. It's a review worth it for an amateur third grade local newspaper. If you think the game deserves a certain score at least provide serious arguments about it either it's a 50, a 75, a 90, etc, and not just a couple of paragraphs criticizing a 100 hour game in a couple lines that don't even make sense and are not true nor objective in fact.

If you say you want to growth this is realy not the way to do it m8.

Good luck in your "review of the review".

This. Lucious works for me. Unfortunately, Tanist, most of your feedback has been hate-fueled vitriol and you've not bothered to read any of my response, so I'm done replying to you. Have a great weekend.

Clicks are pretty easy to come by. We don't need to throw out low reviews to do that. As I said before, if we botched this we'll fix it and I'll contact Metacritic and Gamerankings to have our review pulled until it hits where it should.

Sounds very reasonable to me, thanks.

Normally not the case with Lucious. He really is a big RPG guy. Tired? Rushed? I don't know what all contributed to this. I'll admit that I'm saddened by the personal attacks though. People calling for his head on a pike, calling him an asshole, an idiot, a stupid fuck, etc. over a review. I guess people's personal feelings aren't important anymore. Gotta love the anonymity of the Internet.

Our reviews will never, ever, take into account the reviews of others, be they professional or fan. That's not in any way a good representation of a product, nor does it represent the writers opinion on that point. That's a mob with pitchforks and torches.

You said it yourself - patches. We received the game well in advance of release, and well in advance of those patches. Perhaps Lucious ran into bugs that were fixed before you had access to the game? I'll find out. I'm not sure where you are going with my D3 review - it played flawlessly. We didn't have a single problem with the console version of D3. If you did, sorry. We didn't, so that's what we scored. Again, no mob score, but one that reflects the experience I had. In the case of this review, I'm going to get to the bottom of what Lucious saw and we'll take appropriate action to shore up or re-review the game, as appropriate.


Sorry - not going to respond to personal attacks.

Haven't played the game, but it sounds like he didn't find it as intuitive as you.

Don't know, but I'm not happy with the combat descriptions in the review - I'd like to see a lot more info on classes and formations. It's one of the things we'll fix.

There are quite a few references to the good points in the game. There is even a section outlining a few of them labeled "Pros".

So you are judging the entire site based on one single review out of over 2000 reviews and over a decade in this industry? Now who's unfairly judging?

I'll take appropriate actions, but I'll point out that you are criticizing somebody for their work while your own reply is littered with personal attacks. It's a little hard to take constructive criticisms that way.

Appreciate that. It's pretty much ruined my weekend thus far hearing some of the awful things people have had to say about a really good guy who just wanted to talk about videogames. I've dealt with this a few times, but I suspect he'll probably end up quitting over this, despite any objections to the contrary. But hey, it's the Internet.

That cannot be true. There were no review copies for anyone before release. I know that 100%. Don't tell us any BS here. Larian weren't even ready with the game until literally an hour before release...

If your reviewer played/reviewed anything before release it could be only the early-access beta version which in no way qualifies for a final release review.

You do realize that we get copies of games well in advance of release, right? In this case, I went and checked the email date and it's the 30th - the day of release. There were bugs on release that were fixed over several patches, so I can't say that Lucious didn't have bugs to contend with if he started playing on the first day. There was a patch just today that fixed a dozen more bug items. To suggest anything else is just silly.

Well, in that case I was correct, wasn't I? If he got the game at release day (June 30th) he couldn't play it in advance of the release. I know quite well that in many cases the press gets review codes a while before release but not in this particular case...

I just wanted to make that clear to avoid misunderstandings. That doesn't mean that he couldn't encounter bugs during his playthrough. No game is bug free and there is a reason why Larian constantly release updates for the game.

Can you link to the previous RPGs he has reviewed?



That is good. I will admit, I think the review is garbage myself, but pulling a review because people don't like your opinion is bad form. On the same token, though, the review has inaccuracies and light details of such a nature that the review really is poor quality. I've seen a few good reviews of this game that are pretty poor too.



Hard to say, since the review is rather light on details, eh?

As for D3, I didn't play it, but I do remember people talking about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_III#Marketing_and_release



That's hardly a biting personal attack. If the text was skimmed, and it caused him to have difficulty questing, that's hardly a criticism you cannot ignore. You said this guy likes RPGs--they tend to be text heavy, and in this game most of the details are are in the text. The game does have some problems with not telling you some things--some of them are in the manual however. It's fair for him to bring this up, but it's not so severe that it renders the game impossible to play. Missing the fact that the alt key shows items is both in the manual and is covered in the tutorial he mentions, so his criticism about not being able to find items is pretty clearly a sign of skimming since the point it MENTIONS that is a case where you need to find the key to open a chest!

It's funny how you can dish it out to me, but can't take it. Preserved for posterity:

http://i.imgur.com/OR0N0kj.png

You guys must really pride yourselves on professionalism.


Dude, he wrote in the review that he knows it's about combining items. That's all there is to it. The game intentionally just does not tell you to combine X and Y to get Z, it's inferred from the recipe guides. It doesn't say "Combine knife and log to get stake," it would, for example, have a short paragraph in the crafting book on how you can use knives to carve logs into a stake. There's no basic list of things to combine in-game. That's why he couldn't find it "intuitive," because it's more reading. And it is largely obvious. Potion crafting is literally just dragging together and herb and a pot. It's EASIER than crafting in the Witcher series. The game just doesn't tell you explicitly what X and Y lead to until you try the combination (in which case it will tell you the result and how many of them you want to make). How do you make a larger health potion? Drag a stack of smaller health potions across another stack. I can't stand crafting in most games, but it's so brain-dead simple in this one that I do.




http://i.imgur.com/OR0N0kj.png

Unless he played it in early access. In either case, if he reviewed based on that, prior to release, it's strange to see this in the review:



Since they apparently didn't run into bugs on Diablo 3, they didn't include it in the review--so what's this review doing mentioning bugs that apparently were from research after playing it? (and there are some bugs out there, some bad, most relatively minor, that cannot be denied, but nothing really uncommon from a AA cRPG on release; it's not like NWN or NWN2 were flawless upon its release, far from it).

I don't understand what being a good guy has to do with being professional in a review that is seen by thousands of people and will probably make some people not buying the game when you say "but that really might not be a risk an average buyer will want to take". We are talking about potential sales lost mainly due to a bad review made by a guy who was either realy realy tired or realy, i don't know.

I also understand that you want to defend him no matter what, it's a commendable action from your part and i do the same with my reviewers (not PC gamming tough, Motorcycles as a side information), but sometimes we just need to understand that our actions move a huge amount of people (and money) and thus we need to be professional and spot-on perfect even in a "small review".

Our actions matter, we need to understand that our opinions online are realy much more than "a guy talking about videogames", and if we can't take the pressure nor the time required to make something well made, then it's probably better not to do it at all.

Again, i'm criticizing the quality of the review (lack of), not exactly the score. I also understand the poor usease of pictures, it was lazy, but completely excusable, sometimes time is scarse and shortcuts are made.

ALso: "We received the game well in advance of release".

I'm sorry but AFAIK larian didnt send out review copies because the game was being made up to the last few days before the 30th June, wich means that your reviewer played the beta version of the game, or a preview code that was not finished, or he played the final version after the 30th June, but most patches were done up to the 3rd July so... i'm kinda confused here and not sure what version he played. But probably it's not relevant to this conversation i guess, because all other reviewers played the same version and even tough all mention some minor bugs, it seems your reviewer was the only one (and another one in a lowish score i think) that state the game is probably not worth buying for that price due to being imcomplete with bugs... oh man, this is so wrong, unfair, biased and untrue that it boils my heart.

Anyways, i'm not going to keep arguing with you. You already mentioned that you will review what was done and that you already have your weekend destroyed, i don't want to be responsible for making you even more upset, i'm not that mean.

I genuinely hope you can make the review fair and true. Don't change the score if you don't think it's needed, but at least provide more depth and arguments to the criticism in it. Good luck

You can click on anyone's name on the site and see all reviews, news, videos, interviews, or anything else they've written or contributed to. We are transparent. Dig as much as you'd like.

The fun part is that I've got folks here saying "don't pull the review" and I've got folks on Steam accusing us of baiting for clicks by leaving the review up. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Most modern RPGs are not heavily text based. I imagine that there will be a lot of reviews that cite this as a negative. Whether those reviews are positive or negative remain to be seen. In all cases, they are that person's opinion.