Divinity Original Sin 2 Skip Fort Joy
Lillia Iniguez
I try my hardest to finish every game I start if I really like it. Unfortunately, sometimes I can't: either my game of the year comes out, or people hook me up on some other game that I decide to play immediately... Incomplete titles pile up. I try to remember these games and come back as soon as I get the opportunity because I don't like unfinished adventures.
Divinity: Original Sin II was one of those games. Time and time again people recommended The Source Saga to me, especially DOSII, and I have never heard a bad thing said about this game. A really long time ago I played Divine Divinity, a diablo-ish hack'n'slash, about 8 years ago I picked up Divinity II but didn't like it. All in all, I can't say that my relationship with this franchise was positive or consistent, for that matter. Then I learned that nowadays you can forget all that old nonsense and just jump into Original Sin because OS is the RPG gem of your dreams.
As usual, I decided to start from the start and wasted about 30 hours in Divinity: Original Sin before abandoning it for good. It just wasn't fun. Combat was a suffocating drag with a remarkable potential to be anything but that, I had a fairly mediocre party setup and I couldn't find any way to respec my characters. The plot did not pique my interest either and I decided that was enough. If you don't enjoy the game you're playing - better leave it to someone who would and find a new one.
Having left DOS, I turned to DOSII. The contrast was stunning: the combat was indeed fun and dynamic, the map gained verticality, you could now move almost freely around the battlefield and had more action points per turn. However, the more I played the more the game seemed to be pulling me into some weird kind of emotional swings: I would play several hours and enjoy it wholeheartedly before being thrown into some kind of ultra frustrating episode. Every few hours the game would toss at me something foul: a bug, a weird quest, limitations, an imbalanced fight where my party would get wiped before its first turn. Sometimes the game would just force me into using the atrocious trading interface and I would spend an hour managing my inventory.
Every time I thought: it would be the last time, it would get easier the more I progress, maybe I am to blame and I'm just not playing it right. Alas, the more I played, the more frequent the frustration was, and every time it got worse. I finished Divinity: Original Sin II but in the end I got more negative emotions out of it than positive and the ending - any of them - just felt like a spit in the face. It made me realize that I wasted so many hours ultimately for nothing. I could've played something else.
The main issue with the battles in DOSII is simple: you can't prepare for them. You can't see your opponents since they spawn out of thin air as soon as you trigger the battle, or the battle is triggered during dialogue when you don't expect it. It's not much of a problem when you traverse the map but when it's boss battle time it just becomes one of the most frustrating things. Your initiative is always lower so the boss gets the first turn. At this moment your party stands in one spot and waits. By the time you finally get to do anything, your party has been bombarded with mass murder spells and mass melee skills and you'll be lucky if half your party makes it to your first turn. You load up your game and, knowing the enemies' positions, spread out your party so you won't get wiped immediately, and then trigger the fight. This is stupid. I should be in a more or less equal position with a boss and either win or lose based on my strategical decisions. I'm getting destroyed just because the boss always moves first and I have to resort to save-loading.
It always annoyed the living hell out of me but the frustration reached its peak at the end of Lohse's personal quest where you battle the archdemon Adramahlihk and the nurses. I came to talk to him and the dialogue was triggered when my party was standing in the doorway. Adramahlihk always has the first move since his initiative is insane so for 30 seconds I watched him piling up Epidemic of Fire and other mass murder stuff onto my poor melting party.
I loaded the save file a couple of times and realized that fighting him after the story-related dialogue makes no sense. Regretfully I spread out my party in the reception area and proceeded to attack the first nurse with my Red Prince until she - and all other nurses - turned hostile. While Adramahlihk was slithering his way to the reception I got rid of several nurses. Since my characters were far away from one another and three of them were hidden behind the walls, the demon could not cast his AoE spells effectively, and I prevailed. Was I satisfied with my victory? I was really rooting for Lohse, I wanted to complete her quest more than any quest in that game. The answer is no. Technically, the quest had no closure, there was no dialogue with Adramahlihk, I just broke into the hospital and killed everybody, that's what I did. People on forums share a dozen ways to kill him: teleport one of the nurses outside and by that trigger the other nurses; get closer and kill Adramahlihk in his human form but not so close he'll turn into a demon; drop Lohse off in the Hall of Echoes so Adramahlihk won't possess her, which apparently makes this fight ridiculously difficult. Just as my approach to the fight with camping my party in the reception area, it doesn't have anything to do with how the fight should unfold. These are just the ways to get you past this headache of a boss fight because that's what it is - a headache. I'm not against a fair challenge. I love fair challenges. But when your party gets stuck in the doorway and you helplessly watch it being destroyed by a boss before you even have a chance to do anything - it's a bad joke. I don't think a player should have to load the game and jump through hoops to try and survive the boss' first move and still have a chance against them. If you have to load the game because the game puts you at a disadvantage for no reason and you have to come up with a sneaky way, abuse a mechanic or use some kind of exploit - it's a bad sign. No even mentioning that it completely breaks the immersion and makes no sense from the plot perspective.
The final battle is the apotheosis of bad design. Final battles where all bosses you've defeated up to this point miraculously come back to life and gang up to beat the shit out of you always felt very, very cheap to me, and this is exactly what happens in DOSII. I spotted the arena from afar and preventively spread out my party so I wouldn't get wiped before my first turn, and then triggered the dialogue using the Red Prince. Alas, the game just teleported everybody together, nullifying whatever tactical plan I was trying to pull, and I was yet again watching a bunch of mass murder spells destroying my party and Lucian swinging his blade like crazy. He had 70 initiative, way more than any of characters had so no chances there. I loaded a couple of times and then decided that I want no part in this circus, I just want to see the credits of this game roll before my eyes. So I googled the possible outcomes and picked the dialogue options necessary for the path of least resistance. Not because that's how I wanted the story to end, by that moment I'd already stopped caring. I just wanted this story to end, period.
One of the most surprising things for me was the uselessness of resurrection scrolls. I admit, I've never seen anything like it in any RPG game I've played before. If you decide to spend 3 action points to resurrect your fallen comrade, be ready for every single enemy to turn their heads and focus on your pal. Even if you teleport their resurrected body into the farthest corner where, in theory, no one should go because it doesn't make sense, your adversaries will drop whatever they were doing and will just tear the resurrected party member apart before you have a chance to heal them or do whatever. I never managed to resurrect anyone successfully, not even one time.
Well, that's both really ambitious and wildly untrue. While being one of the major selling points of the game, the "freedom to go anywhere" didn't live up to my most modest expectations. The game is shockingly and later amusingly linear. It's a corridor, and a rather narrow one at that. Because the gap between levels is so wild, you will go not where you want to, but where you won't get killed by a mob one level your superior, and at every moment of your playthrough there is only one such place. You will be stuck inside a cage until you clear it up, level up and make this cage a little bit bigger. The game doesn't care what quests you want to do - you will do exactly those quests that fit your level until you do enough of them you level up. It doesn't matter how many times you replay DOSII, your route will always be the exact same. This is especially noticeable on Reaper's Coast. When you arrive, you are bombarded with dozens of quests all over the area, the map fills with markers, you get really excited. However, you can just as well number these markers because you can only do these quests in a specific order. I was interested in going to Blackpits. Could I do that? Heck no. If I stuck as much as my nose out the permitted area, I would have it bitten off by someone one level ahead without a chance.
You can say that it's typical for an RPG to have level-restricted areas and quests. Yep, that's right. It's just a very rare occurrence that the gap between two levels would be so insurmountable you wouldn't even stand a chance. It is also quite rare to be artificially prevented from exploring the area you gain formal access to. When you arrive on Reaper's Coast, you get dozens of quests you can't do and a big area you can't explore, and it's frustrating. Maybe locations should've been smaller, or the enemies should've scaled with the party. Instead the game just forces you to go in one pre-determined direction completing quests in a pre-determined order.
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