It's not that Divinity: Original Sin is a "bad" game because it's not. What puts me off about it is that it pales in comparison to it's predecessors, which ironically this is the prequel to. Divine Divinity was one of my favorite games the year it came out but the follow-ups I never got around to playing so I thought it would be kind of neat to revisit an old friend. Well, sometimes when you haven't been with an old friend, you find out that over the years they have actually grown to be annoying.
That is the first word that comes to mind with Divinity: Original Sin so it was surprising that Gamespot chose this as their Game of the Year. For this long-term PC gamer it felt like anything but. The reasons are varied and let us just say that thirty hours was enough to formulate at least some opinion. It is my wish that it wasn't just any one thing but the whole that bothered me.
Starting with the character creation screen which is standard stock RPG character creation with one exception, D:OS allows many more options over most RPGs that usually just give you a familiar five or six shots at a character. Something else offered that I found unique is you actually are required to form a beginning party of two which means you carry a lot of weight, if not all the weight, of your starting party's skills and abilities. Nevertheless, this can work against the player in a myriad of ways because your partner character cannot be dispensed with or at least I found no way to do so which means players need to choose carefully.
Skipping past descriptions of facial features and the like the fact is you can create a "bad" party in that pure fighting parties would have absolutely zero chance of survival so don't even bother going there. Secondly, without some form of range fighting, you're dead. However, you will be able to pick up these class skills as your party expands which harkens back to the days of old Might and Magic RPGs. I first tried fighter/archer and soon found out that without healing, it's pretty much a study in futility.
I moved on from that to trying knight and cleric and that seemed like a decent combination. Once that was completed, it was on to Cyseal, your first stop. As the story unfolds, you're a "source hunter" that goes after baddies that are employing "source" magic or "sourcery". Apparently, that's a big no-no and you've been employed to hunt down the offenders. This is against a backdrop of an orc invasion on the beaches that the city skirts. As though that isn't bad enough, you have an undead population that has risen up to further terrorize the passersby. Sounds pretty bleak doesn't it?
Well it is and mostly this is due to the game's composition, how it unfolds and how it plays. The first thing readily apparent is it's a tough life out there. No immediate freebies you miscreants, you'll be fighting for every stitch and stone to survive and trust this--survival is very difficult throughout the opening sequences. So much so that you may find yourself wondering just where you're going to go with all this. Venture out to the beach too far and you're clobbered by orc parties, venture too far north and you're up against an undead legion. Not satisfied you try east but alas there are plenty of undead buggers to deal with that way as well.
Now this all sounds pretty standard but the one thing that struck me early on is that the outer lying areas all have one thing in common; you're not facing challenges, you're facing near impossibilities with most enemies being hordes that are well over your level. Your party of four will find yourself facing parties of five or six which in itself not so rough but the bad news is, many of them possess skills you have no chance of acquiring in the early stages of the game. Almost to the end of a tough battle? Undaunted, your enemy can resurrect their friends or they can freeze your friends which makes it rather easy to die an obnoxious death.
The other drawback I found is that any RPG that is 100% turn-based can be tedious. Might and Magic still had one of the better systems of escape from turn base but it could also be exploited as a result so it's true that you can't have it both ways. Thankfully, there is a Flee option that extricates you from impossible situations however, even it is not usable if you are too close to your enemy.
In and of itself, my complaint with all this is I don't mind challenges but at least give me some options that allow me to slowly, if need be, level my party up. These choices just are not as easy to find as one would hope for as death in D:OS can be unbelievably painful and obnoxious. Forums will tell you that you need to save, ALOT. That usually doesn't spell fun and the auto-save feature that is provided, most times is timed decently but not always, meaning you may find yourself repeating tedious encounters that you just wish were done.
Trade can be performed with just about every NPC you can chat with but unfortunately, it's almost as though some huge inflation monster has blown up the prices on most anything you find useful. As well, you can only steal so much before you run out of things to steal. The other form of acquisition is crafting which does come off as somewhat convoluted but at least it is logically defined to some extent. The biggest issue is whether you actually can craft anything of value early on and whether you train one of the two skills--either "Crafting" or "Blacksmithing".
Nevertheless, the game does have depth given the continuing and divergent storyline and the environments are more or less perfectly reminiscent of a souped up version of Baldur's in the graphics department but lacking in so many fundamentals on the gameplay side as to make it rather cumbersome. Some of this is due in large part to the interface in which you're constantly passing things back and forth to your party rather than just allowing the accumulation of crafting materials or gold or whatever being inclusive rather than exclusive to character interactions with NPCs.
The gist is does it offer enough satisfying gameplay or does it seek to do too much and fails as a whole? I'd say the latter were more true but one cannot take away from the beauty and magnitude of the game. It's just unfortunate that the game mechanics are as they are because rather than expand on the enjoyment, they tend to drag it down which is usually what most RPGs try not to do.