Posted November 23, 2010
Well, sort of. After umpteen zillion hours, I finally got to the last battle, but after finding it nearly impossible to win (even after consulting guides), I gave up and settled for just getting to the end. So this is sort of a mini review . . .
Good -
This game was ridiculously easy, even on the hardest difficulty level. Prior to playing I heard that it was actually excessively hard, but until the very last battle (and briefly at the very beginning) I mowed through enemies with total ease. I suppose the game might be hard for folks who don't make at least one of the two main characters into a melee specialist (my character had all his skill points in "one handed with shield" + "shadow", and my death knight was a caster with his points in three different damage spells). Suffice to say, I never would have made it through this extremely long game if it were any tougher, because it simply isn't a good enough game to merit significant amounts of grinding. Oh, and I never bothered using summoning dolls, fwiw.
Since I rarely died, I was able to make fairly rapid progress, and the game does develop an awkward sort of charm, especially after the first act.
Bad
As others have noted, the game feels "off" compared with Divine Divinity. Overall, even after however many patches (which I assume are integrated into the GoG version), it feels unfinished. I mean, what the hell is a "metal"? Or a "round"? (Yeah, they're shields, but how long would it have taken to make sure that item names make sense?)
This game shares one of DD's weaknesses, namely that you grind through like nine million monsters, kill a boss, finally get to that chest at the end, and lo and behold . . . 26 gold and another of those damnable tumbleweeds (herb catalysts or whatever) inside.
Another complaint - artifact sets are worthless. You don't get a bonus for getting the whole set, and individual pieces are NEVER better than the best of the random loot you pick up along the way. This goes for "named" artifacts that aren't part of sets, too - not once did I ever bother to equip any of these items, because at most they offered only minor bonuses that were easily exceeded by the normal stuff I grabbed, especially after adding a charm or two.
The skill trees/system . . . whew, does it suck. HUGE step back from DD. The fact that you can pay to unlearn stuff and redistribute all your points is the only GOOD thing about it (even though it makes absolutely NO sense), since it at least allows you to correct yourself after you naively try to do anything other than specialize. Frankly, the one point / level (2 every five) isn't enough in this game, though it seemed perfectly balanced in DD. While it's fairly easy to imagine someone becoming more proficient with "maces" as a class of items, what exactly does it mean to put a point into "slashing accuracy" with two handed "shadow" weapons? On the flip side, by pouring all my points into "two handed shadow" weapons, as long as I used the appropriate weapon I basically killed everything with ease. Maybe shadow is the killer damage type in this game - it worked for me all the way through, and in the few spots where it didn't, my death knight mopped up with damage spells.
I always had ridiculous amounts of gold and potiions, which is probably a good thing.
The battlefields were useful mainly for selling excess stuff and identifying things (if you're like me, you won't bother learning repair or identify, because skill points are too precious and the battlefields so accessible). Lockpicking is similarly useless since chests in this game, locked or unlocked, almost invariably have nothing valuable in them. I cleared the dungeons in the first three just to stock up on health and mana potions, that I then rode all the way to the end. The experience gained was actually negligible in the long run - I doubt I picked up more than three or four extra levels for grinding through the majority of the battlefields than if I had just used them for merchants.
The voice acting is uniformally, astronomically, stupefyingly awful. My wife nearly divorced me over it. And she would have been right to have done it.
OVERALL
I largely ground my way through this game for several reasons: I took it in two hour blocks over the weekends over several months, after the first act I rarely died, and there's an irresistable sort of forward-momentum thing that happens between acts 2 and 4 that sort of propels you along, even though so much of the game is bafflingly inept after Divine Divinity, which was generally great. The story, such as it is, does get marginally better between acts 3 and 4, and some of the spell effects were cool.
Now, I'm curious - has anyone else on GoG actually finished this game? Even if you haven't, if you've played it I'd be curious to hear your experiences with it.
Good -
This game was ridiculously easy, even on the hardest difficulty level. Prior to playing I heard that it was actually excessively hard, but until the very last battle (and briefly at the very beginning) I mowed through enemies with total ease. I suppose the game might be hard for folks who don't make at least one of the two main characters into a melee specialist (my character had all his skill points in "one handed with shield" + "shadow", and my death knight was a caster with his points in three different damage spells). Suffice to say, I never would have made it through this extremely long game if it were any tougher, because it simply isn't a good enough game to merit significant amounts of grinding. Oh, and I never bothered using summoning dolls, fwiw.
Since I rarely died, I was able to make fairly rapid progress, and the game does develop an awkward sort of charm, especially after the first act.
Bad
As others have noted, the game feels "off" compared with Divine Divinity. Overall, even after however many patches (which I assume are integrated into the GoG version), it feels unfinished. I mean, what the hell is a "metal"? Or a "round"? (Yeah, they're shields, but how long would it have taken to make sure that item names make sense?)
This game shares one of DD's weaknesses, namely that you grind through like nine million monsters, kill a boss, finally get to that chest at the end, and lo and behold . . . 26 gold and another of those damnable tumbleweeds (herb catalysts or whatever) inside.
Another complaint - artifact sets are worthless. You don't get a bonus for getting the whole set, and individual pieces are NEVER better than the best of the random loot you pick up along the way. This goes for "named" artifacts that aren't part of sets, too - not once did I ever bother to equip any of these items, because at most they offered only minor bonuses that were easily exceeded by the normal stuff I grabbed, especially after adding a charm or two.
The skill trees/system . . . whew, does it suck. HUGE step back from DD. The fact that you can pay to unlearn stuff and redistribute all your points is the only GOOD thing about it (even though it makes absolutely NO sense), since it at least allows you to correct yourself after you naively try to do anything other than specialize. Frankly, the one point / level (2 every five) isn't enough in this game, though it seemed perfectly balanced in DD. While it's fairly easy to imagine someone becoming more proficient with "maces" as a class of items, what exactly does it mean to put a point into "slashing accuracy" with two handed "shadow" weapons? On the flip side, by pouring all my points into "two handed shadow" weapons, as long as I used the appropriate weapon I basically killed everything with ease. Maybe shadow is the killer damage type in this game - it worked for me all the way through, and in the few spots where it didn't, my death knight mopped up with damage spells.
I always had ridiculous amounts of gold and potiions, which is probably a good thing.
The battlefields were useful mainly for selling excess stuff and identifying things (if you're like me, you won't bother learning repair or identify, because skill points are too precious and the battlefields so accessible). Lockpicking is similarly useless since chests in this game, locked or unlocked, almost invariably have nothing valuable in them. I cleared the dungeons in the first three just to stock up on health and mana potions, that I then rode all the way to the end. The experience gained was actually negligible in the long run - I doubt I picked up more than three or four extra levels for grinding through the majority of the battlefields than if I had just used them for merchants.
The voice acting is uniformally, astronomically, stupefyingly awful. My wife nearly divorced me over it. And she would have been right to have done it.
OVERALL
I largely ground my way through this game for several reasons: I took it in two hour blocks over the weekends over several months, after the first act I rarely died, and there's an irresistable sort of forward-momentum thing that happens between acts 2 and 4 that sort of propels you along, even though so much of the game is bafflingly inept after Divine Divinity, which was generally great. The story, such as it is, does get marginally better between acts 3 and 4, and some of the spell effects were cool.
Now, I'm curious - has anyone else on GoG actually finished this game? Even if you haven't, if you've played it I'd be curious to hear your experiences with it.
