I've played around 100 hours of Divinity: Original Sin. The last 20 hours I played were brutal. There was an absolutely massive difficulty spike at the beginning of the third act. I consistently ran into overwhelming numbers of enemies that individually outclassed my party in nearly every skill set. I found myself spending more time blinded, knocked down, poisoned, cursed, weakened, and resurrecting characters than ever before. Three groups of enemies in particular took me over 6 attempts to defeat, each. I even turned the difficulty down to easy. Still I only won through by luck alone in many of the encounters. And conversely I found an entire large set of later encounters a breeze.
When I finally arrived at the final encounter of the game the difficulty spiked yet again. “I'm done,” I thought, “Its been a great ride.” A rather mixed bag really. While on the one hand I do appreciate a challenge, on the other the battles in Divinity: Original Sin lengthen as the game goes on. By the time I'd reached the encounter that broke me they were in excess of 45 minutes. Iterating on tactical combat that takes nearly an hour to resolve is too much for me. Each failed attempt sets me back nearly an entire hour of playtime. I decided to step back. Get away and play other games for a bit and come back.
So now I've come back and tried out that last battle once more. And I'm still in the same place. I no longer feel invested enough in this game to continue, for now. I in no way regret the time I've spent playing. I did indeed enjoy Divinity: Original Sin. But there are a couple of issues that started off as bothersome after the first ten hours, blossomed into annoying after about 30 hours, and were honestly infuriating after about 70 hours.
First and foremost was the log.
If the completion of one quest is contingent upon the completion of another there is really no way to know until you've progressed far enough in a given quest that you either complete or are stopped by a blue force-field, invincible foes, or other impediments blocking off the end. And I ran into these impediments several times as the game progressed. These impediments meant that I hadn't completed a prerequisite for this section of content.
As I came to understand them these impediments were placed to solve a problem. Divinity: Original Sin was created with around an ideal of freedom. From the different interviews and videos released over the course of the Kickstarter I came to understand that by freedom the developers meant that they would create a rich world filled with possibility and turn you, the player, loose. No hand holding, no quest markers, an “old school RPG” aesthetic. And while Divinity: Original Sin does successfully capture that old school feel, where it falls short is the log.
The quest log in particular is an absolute mess. Quest are listed in the order given, with no hierarchy of importance whatsoever. A side quest involving a talking well is given the same weight as a main quest involving a murder. And to make matters even worse there is a separate quest item that details your accomplishments as Source Hunters that moves up the queue after quests are completed. You can of course filter out completed quests, but this really doesn't help except to keep your log less cluttered. And it will be cluttered anyway. And if you reach a place where you can't continue the game will only give you vague hints near the place you a blocked from. So you'll be looking up quests and spoilers on the internet a lot. Or at least I was, and so were many different people on various forums.
If the quest log would just keep track of the quest giver, which overworld map the quest is located on, and the current step to progress, or which quest is conflicting, it would do wonders. As it stands I found myself backtracking to dungeons that I completed around 40 hours in, after 80 hours of play. Just to retrieve a couple of items that it took me a half an hour or more of forum trawling to figure out that I needed to progress. At one point I was blocked from the final dungeon because of a quest (involving a certain demon rift and the End Of Time) I was given tens of hours before, that I didn't know how to complete. This was particularly jarring as once this quest was completed an absolute barrage of consequences, with new gameplay mechanics, that had occurred in the interim totally ruined the flow of the narrative right before the final quest.
And the second issue was that massive difficulty spike in the third area.
I think that I might be to blame for some of this. Maybe my party build is wrong. Maybe my equipment loadout is lacking. But for whatever reason, and for the life of me I can't figure it out, round about 70 hours into the game, or party level 16 I started getting annihilated on a regular basis by pretty much everything. The three groups of monsters at the entrance to Phantom Forest were particularly brutal. I would run around to different merchants trying to get more potions, scroll, equipment, skill books anything. I finally won by sheer luck in two of the battles and sneaked past the other. I feel like I may have missed some things. But I have no idea why, or where I might look. Then it happened again wit the final Boss. And after 100 hours I feel like its time to move on for now.
I will acknowledge that there is still a lot of game that I haven't experienced yet. I've not tried out the co-op multiplayer, which is a big deal I know. There is an entire skill set I never touched (scoundrel). And there are quests and alternate solutions to quests that I haven't seen or even thought about. Larian set out to make the best RPG they could. And they came to the community through Kickstarter to engage with the fans and craft something special. They certainly haven't failed in that regard. Not in the slightest. And I don't think that this will be my last journey in Rivellon. Not in the slightest. But I'm going to wander elsewhere for awhile. Its such a wide world out there.
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