Divinity: Original Sin 2

[got_quiet]

My brother and I finished our run of Divinity! It was a lot of fun and particularly enjoyable to play as a duo. I played a Necro/Hydro Ifan with some sword and board skills, and my brother was a glass canon summoner/archer Lohse. While playing with a friend was a fun way to do it, there were some pros and cons.

Pros:

• Discussing tactics in battle and speculating about quests or pondering decisions together was a lot of fun. It was also nice to share feelings of achievement when we hit a particularly nasty combat or tried to achieve a certain outcome and had to keep trying over and over again. And of course when someone did something stupid or crazy and it worked or absolutely didn't there was an audience.
• The RP approach when you're in multiplayer is a lot different from solo play and it was fun to have your other party member be an actual person with certain of his own ambitions. We both got into our characters pretty well and enjoyed becoming invested in their own quests.

Cons:

• My brother tends to play at a faster pace than me and I have a habit of wandering off into random places so while we were generally in sync sometimes one of us triggered something big while the other was nowhere nearby. There's a teleportation mechanic that helps prevent this from being a huge problem, though, playing split meant...
• Sometimes one player gets lore and the other doesn't so the story feels like it would probably have been more coherent if it were played solo.
• The difference in RP approach was also something of a con. We didn't interact with any of the NPC companions because we Lone Wolf duoed it, so I still know nothing about them, and even if they had been in the party it would have been harder to really interact with them properly when there is two of us.

We both agreed that it was a great game and we'll probably play again, this time separately. I want to try a rogue elf. Maybe I'll pick Sebille, though I might try a romance in which case I kind of want a male PC. It'd be also nice to play a game in which the scoundrel skills are at all in play. Neither I nor my brother took any of them and we couldn't sneak, steal or lickpick for to save our lives. But a second run is probably not going to happen any time soon. I don't replay games too often, and don't have too much time to do so either.

Below are a few plot/spoilery reactions to the game:

 

I don't know if it's because of the disjointed nature of duoing with someone, or because we discarded all of the companions beside our origin characters, or because we missed some threads in the side quests, or some combination of the three, but the lore dump in the final fight took me marginally by surprise. I had a general grasp of source, and the void, and what the voidwoken were doing (but apparently not really what they were doing) and what the gods were, and so forth, but if you asked me to explain it in detail I'd be like, uh... well... you see... And I couldn't get a good grasp of when it was that Lucian was supposed to have died, that Ifan served him, or what Braccus Rex was doing suddenly at the very end of the game after he had largely been forgotten past the intro. Like who was that guy and why don't I remember anything about him? Part of my confusion may also be that it probably took us something like a half a year to finish the game, maybe longer, because we were only playing it in brief stints once a week at most, and I can't remember things for shit (unless for some reason I can).

As we played we did our best to save any of the NPCs we came across, which included the ones that seemed determined to suicide into enemy lines. We did a decent job of it, though it sucked to see Gareth at the very end of the game having been turned into a source zombie. It looks like we made some bad choices there, but the choices we did make were IC so I guess I can't regret too hard. In the final battle Lohse ended up falling twice and I only had one res scroll (we maybe resed twice the whole game before that cause if we lost we tended to get completely wrecked) but Ifan managed to pull the win off alone at the end, and the both of us chose to just become source communists and let everyone be sourcerers. Yes, the epilogue says that the world fell into war and chaos not too long after but really, that's not our fault now, is it? Meanwhile the lizard prostitute Ifan slept with probably got the best ending out of all of them, cause he got to establish his own brothel and rake in the cash.

If you run a multiplayer campaign and play an origin character, the epilogue will tell you the fate of your partner, but will give you some noise about getting to choose your own future, but we just told each other what the game had said, and apparently Ifan went to help rebuild the forest, which, good for him. Poor boy gets an opportunity to heal. I played him a little vengeful and quick to cut down everyone who fucked him over, so he could use a little him time.

 

With Divinity officially in the books, I'm eyeing BG3, but I won't have time to really sit down and lose my life to that thing for a while yet, and I don't want to spend that much money either, so it'll still probably be after New Years that I can get to it. Meanwhile I'm trying cinch this BLM bundle VN play through. I'm almost done for real this time, and if I could get it done by the holidays then I can feel a little accomplished in my fannish life.

Comments

[autumndaze]

Glad you had a fun time <3 I remember when I played WoW with my father there were a lot of really fun moments, but we kind of veered off from each other over time. We still played together plenty but we definitely did our own thing due to scheduling and different play styles.

Good luck getting through the bundle!

[got_quiet]

I had some fun WoW times with my brother too back in the vanilla days! We had a few friends who liked "breaking the game" so we had some fun dungeoning moments.

[tally]

Dang, I really need to bump up Divinity's priority in my wishlist. I keep hearing about how great those games are!

[got_quiet]

I've only played this one but I was indeed impressed with it!