It's difficult to even begin talking about what this year has been. Seven months in and it feels like ten years have passed in that span of time. 2020 will go down as a historic year assuming we arrive as a country and planet at the other end of it. But this isn't a blog about world events or social issues. This is a blog about inane bullshit and video game minutiae, so let's get down to business here.
So, I mentioned briefly in my last (of many) Final Fantasy XIV entries that I was "stubbornly replaying" Divinity: Original Sin on PS4 after having played it originally on PC in 2014. I ended up going the distance on that and finished up the Enhanced Edition with the expectation that it would refresh my memory before moving on to Divinity: Original Sin 2 (also an Enhanced Edition, apparently). Well, I didn't move on right away, because after playing through D:OS1, even after a span of multiple years from playing the original version, I felt pretty burned out.
It was definitely a different experience than my first run-through not only because I was experiencing the enhancements for the first time, but because it was the first time I'd played it solo. I have to admit I really missed the camaraderie and cooperate strategizing that so characterized my initial experience with the game. On the other hand, I really enjoyed having a couple more choices for party members, even though I never experimented much with the new rogue companion. I did greatly take advantage of Bairdotr, a new archer companion that my girlfriend and I affectionately dubbed "Bear Doctor," for obvious reasons.
The Expert Marksman set of skills in that game is devastatingly powerful and gives you an absurd degree of control that I found I quite enjoyed. I took great advantage of the Arrow Spray skill to one-shot a lot of bosses, too. I also have memories of playing the original version of the game in 2014 with Madora becoming an unkillable monster due to a combination of the Leech and Comeback Kid talents. I think even before the Enhanced Edition came out, they tweaked that. Before it was fixed, Madora would get massive healing from bleeding or making enemies bleed. This was easily exploited by using a Witchcraft skill that caused bleeding 100% of the time. Combine this with coming back to life after your first death and you have an almost impossible-to-kill warrior.
Divinity really lends itself to game-breaking strategies by nature of its very open-ended design. The Teleportation spell is an infamous tool that in the hands of a knowledgeable player could entirely transform a wide variety of encounters. Enemies could be isolated or bugged to the point that many otherwise difficult encounters could be trivialized. Based on what I've read, the Teleport spell was repeatedly tweaked to limit its power, but it's still incredibly strong even in Original Sin 2. Tough enemies can be isolated and encounters can be picked off in more bite-size chunks if the spell is managed properly.
It's clear that Larian Studios wanted to take steps to curb the power of crowd control, and did so in a clever way, but their steps resulted in some unforeseen consequences. In the first Orginal Sin, Action Points—which determined how far characters could move and what spells could be cast in a turn—were determined by a pair of stats. The total number of Action Points and the amount regenerated per turn could be modified by your character's build. In the sequel, this process has been standardized significantly. Across the board, all abilities and skills cost 1, 2, or 3 AP (with few exceptions) and all playable characters are standardized to have a maximum of 6 AP, but only regenerate 4 AP per turn. This cannot be modified through stats in any way, which can feel a little stifling when it was more than possible in the first game to attack five or six times in a single turn. It's not frequently possible to attack more than twice in Original Sin 2, which is disconcerting, especially in the early stages of the game.
The other major change in Original Sin 2 is the addition of Physical and Magic Armor, mitigation statistics that function as extra pools of HP for physical and magical damage. What's really important about the stats is that they entirely determine whether or not crowd control effects will be effective. This is a big change from the first game in which many fights were decided by opening with powerful knockdown effects and stuns. Now, fights are frequently determined by how effectively you can chew through that mitigation so you can land those crucial stuns and disables. What's frustrating about this is that it turns many fights into DPS races. Low-damage tanks function less effectively because their crowd control effects are pointless until enough damage has been done to get through their mitigation.
These two changes further slow down the pace of a battle system that was already pretty slow to begin with. It wasn't until many hours into the game that I really started to understand what I was doing wrong. After playing through the original game twice, I had a pretty firm idea of how that battle system worked. The ways it differs in the sequel really threw me off, resulting in many hours of feeling ineffective and frustrated. I'd spend an hour on a tough fight only to get slowly ground into the dust because I couldn't put out enough damage to get through the enemy's armor totals.
Suffice it to say that I have mixed feelings about these changes. I admire in spirit the idea of standardizing Action Points and even believe the division of physical and magic armor is particularly novel, but it's hard to ignore the effect these changes have on pacing. Talents like Torturer that allow some crowd control effects to ignore armor are helpful but don't entirely eliminate the problem. It begins to feel as if the only surefire way to be successful in encounters is to create a party full of characters geared primarily toward dealing as much damage as possible, which doesn't gel particularly well with my idea of an open-ended fantasy game. Sure, it's a lot of fun to slink around the outskirts of a battle as a rogue and blow people up, but it'd be nice to be useful as a lumbering stun-bot as well. In Original Sin 2, it's important for your tank to deal a lot of damage too.
Despite my gripes, Original Sin 2 is very fun when things are going your way. I've found that since I've made a point of ruthlessly mowing through every quest in sight and ensuring my levels are up to date, I've had a lot more fun overall. I just wish I had more fun when playing from behind.
