Divinity: Orginal Sin - I have finished it!
 

Great game - superb final battle (duration: 2 hours on normal/no crafting).

My party: level 21


No quests left - playing time: 122 hours :)

I love this game - I encountered no bugs. Good game balance on normal difficulty level.

Congrats!
I did it too, dunno how many hours, but more than 100. All characters were level 22, also on normal and no crafting. How's that possible? I did the charmtalk then killed them all later = double xp. :evilgrin:

Sadly one quest in my game was left unfinished:
http://i59.tinypic.com/2ynh312.jpg
I've checked later, that rift scroll is still in my inventory, I can't find bloody yeti anywhere, I thought he picked the spell automatically. :(

I will write a post in "finished" thread with some general things about the game with x/10. Later when my head cools off.

…

Some things are however left… Mysterious. I'd love to know if someone cracked those:

1. Orc Tavern upper level secret (http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24911 ), how to open those two paintings?

2. Mysterious Stranger RPGcodex troll, okay, but what's with the illithid mysterious stranger that answers "…" when you try to talk to him in abandoned shack basement (Phantom Forest)? Teleporting him out of the cage doesn't help. Do I need some book to translate it or what?

3. What chatty spiderpig in King's Tomb (IIRC) was supposed to have? Unlike other pigs, this one's mute. And it's spiderpig, not mutepig!

4. How to save this chicken from tenebrium mines near Spider Queen, you can't teleport it nor pyramid close to it. How I know it's a chicken - she sounds like one! Oh and it's name is awsome:

http://i62.tinypic.com/n15ez4.jpg

5. What's this chain on the wall used for? You detect it with high perception, but you can't move it (Ice King dungeon):

http://i59.tinypic.com/16m3prm.jpg

…

Pics are taken with FRAPS as it's GOG game.
A bonus for the end since I see Hidden has it up there - a weresheep I wanted so eagerly to find just to get a semi useless armor set at that point of the game. A spoiler for those who can't find a place where she is lurking:


Oh and these sounds in the attachment are definetly going on my phone. The first one goes either on SMS or on calls. The second one… Dunno, any ideas?
Note that both are in .ogg format so forget bloody WindowsMediaPlayer and use a proper media player (VLC for example).

The game's balance is severely broken as you can easily see skimming the official forums. I suspect you're similar to me though - building characters that seem to make sense in terms of the game's logic as intended by the devs, not fiddling around to find the biggest holes in the system (like a stealth party, it seems).

Personally I'm gonna wait to see if they add in more features (in the vein of AI personalities) or tweak the balance some more.

Do you feel like there's enough exclusive content that you didn't see to warrant a replay?

I'll play again on the hard difficulty settting (with crafting this time around) and different character classes.
I have only 43/63 achievements - so I think some secrets are still in the game.

Now that you've finished, you can look forward to playing this:

Diablo: Original Sin

I hope someone will re-build the original Divine Divinity…

Sorry not interested into nostory or two-sentences-story games. :)

@Joxer

5. What's this chain on the wall used for? You detect it with high perception, but you can't move it (Ice King dungeon)

Eh? Um… No. The chain by the stairs disables prison guardians and you don't need perception for that one. This one I'm talking about you can't operate at all. You can't pull it and you can't hit it.
There is also another chain on the end of the hall that disables guardians (invisibility, run, pull). Again that's not this one - this one is stuck completely.

I didn't powerplay this game - neither did I try to min/max stats nor get maximum money. I used crafting only when it was necessary to fulfill quests.
Overall the game is challenging, but always fair. Some puzzles are really hard, but I like this kind of adventure-difficulty.

I can imagine party builds that are hard to beat - but what's the fun in this?

Yes I want an Ultima 7 remake too. But really, Diablo had a lot of story to it. It just sucked because it was a linear wall of text. Think of what could be done with this engine though, not to mention combat would be much more interesting.

You may make practically anything with this engine except FPS. Or Candy Crush. :)
You don't have to make RPG at all, it allows making a puzzle heavy adventure!

But to make grind, grind, grind… Isn't that a waste of resource?

Sure. But i thought that diablo is a click fest. In contrast to the turn based tactical combat of dos.

that's what I'm talking about. I'm tweaking characters regularly, but when I've figured out something that makes the game a cakewalk, I go 'meh' and try some other setup. I'm not playing through a game like that, and I'm not complaining about balance issues if I can avoid them easily. That's not always possible though - rest spamming in Infinity Engine games comes to mind. They just were designed with this playstyle in mind and there was no real way around it.

Mysterious Bottle - RPGWatch style - is working now:

Just finished a few minutes ago. Some final thoughts:

-the game's engine and general combat system is very good. Nearly rock solid stable on my system, with only about 3 crashes, and strangely enough those crashes were completely recoverable, with a momentary black out of the screen, some garbled audio, and then it automatically returns to the game exactly where I left off. This was interesting.

-story was okay, with lots of humor. But once it started to get heavy & serious, my interest level in following the plot & reading dialogue started to wan. Began to skip though dialogue screens a lot, relying on my journal to give me the short, pithy version of what happened & what I needed to do. After a point I just wanted to have fun solving puzzles, killing things & moving forward to the end. All in all, the story wasn't overly compelling & didn't grab me.

-game was a bit too long. Will be looking forward to shorter, less rambling user modules where I can sit down and have a fully contained 4-5 hour session with a complete story instead of 50-100 hours split into smaller sessions.

-combat was generally a blast and highly addicting, though too many battles seemed to involve spending 30-60 minutes just chipping away at an encounter until it's dead, Jim. Still not as fun as the many hours I spent on NWN modules but admittedly this is a very visually pleasing & powerful engine that can go places NWN couldn't go.

Really looking forward to what the modding community does with this.

Final rating: 8/10

DONE!

Da Sloth - Archer/Geomancer
Windy - Water/Air mage with a dash of fire (mostly for Haste)
Madora - Straight up fighter
Ithalos - Witch/Fighter at the start, ended up maxing witch and spread points through man-at-arms, fire magic, water magic, and air magic.

I ended up half way into level 20. There were a few quests I didn't finish, though I only really regret missing the Troll King. My archer crafted some lockpicks but that was it for crafting - though I still picked everything up, of course, just in case. I must have had around 200,000 in gold by the end.

I started at normal difficulty. About half way through, I missed the mines quest and ended up going straight after Mangoth. It was a tough fight against +1s but I beat them. After that I put the difficulty up to hard to try and make the mines a challenge but honestly, I never got a serious challenge again…. until the VERY final battle. That void dragon is death incarnate on hard! After a few turns, I had to drop back down to normal difficulty.

I liked the game quite a bit but it definitely has some issues that could use fixing. The first time I fought the void dragon, Madora tried to put fortification on herself, missed, and fortified the void dragon! Miss-clicks like caused three or four reloads in the early game.

Now I need to see if I can hunt down the proper soundtrack I was supposed to get with my kickstart!

Dunno about Steam version where it is (rightclick on the game title in Steam list, properties, DLC) but on GOG version you may download Soundtrack separately.

However you don't get all ingame scores in it as some were featured also in previous divinity games. Only new ones are in this OST.

There's one in the Steam directory but its just .WAV files. I sure hope that isn't it!

That isn't it. I emailed support asking what's up and it seems they're still in discussion about some of his unreleased works.

Something I should have mentioned about the game - it really was THE best for role playing I've ever experience in a single player game. The extra challenge of keeping two characters straight helped me keep better focus.

Interesting: 600-900k copies sold?

Cattletech said:

We know for sure after being on #1 topselling steam spot it sold much more than 500K copies, but the question is did the number reach 1 million?

Would be nice if it did. I'd just love to mock Ubi and EA subsidiary forums that you don't have to lie to your fans nor suckup to mainstream and still sell a million copies.

Promised: Day/Night Schedules
Promised: Henchmen become companions and are fully fleshed out
Promised: MegaDungeon
Promised: Weather and Moon phase changes, which affect magic use
Promised: Kirill gets his own orchestra

I'm wondering which promises they actually kept. Don't get me wrong. D:OS is a decent game, but Larian didn't keep several of their promises and made very lame excuses as to why each wasn't met.

Everyone sees what they want to see, huh? I paid over $500 in funding D:OS but it doesn't blind me to the fact that they're no better at keeping promises than those American publishers you hate so much, Joxer.

True but I doubt they care when they make a billion in sales of the next FPS/Acton game. I'm happy for Larian, but hoped the game would of sold more copies.

A least the cost of development was earned back with some extra change.:)

Keeping promises is one thing, admiting you can/can't do it to your customers BEFORE the game is released is the second thing.

Deliberate lies, scams and misleading is the third thing. That thing I hate on that one American publisher. Not all, cmon. There is only one american devil, and we know which one that is. The rest are just wannabies. ;)

Activision Joxer?
Day/night: Failed.
Companions: Two in, two more on the way. Some day.
MegaDungeon: Failed. It left some scarring on the Phantom Forest dungeon, too.
Weather: Yeah, but it never moves.
Moon Phase: Huh?
Orchestra: No, but the folks that funded enough for the music are going to get far better. <ahem> Some day.

I don't know about "lame excuses." They just barely made the day/night cycle funding level so I'm not surprised about that. There's not much helping Kirill getting sick, either. Missing so many is a bit sad but I can understand just fine. It's extremely difficult to predict how difficult all these things will be to get right. That's why game companies don't like to promise features until the game is pretty close to publishing. The mistake was probably to make goals like that in the first place.

What'cha bet they don't do that next time?

@Zloth, I'm mostly just poking at Joxer a little bit. He likes to bash Bethesda, Bioware and Electronic Arts, which are all American based companies. He's very forgiving to European houses, on the other hand. Larian isn't part of a corporation, so in that way they're indie, but this is a dev house that has been around a long time and should be able to match up one on one with the big boys.

I'm not saying they didn't either. Just that they're the same as everyone else. There are some things missing from their game that was fully expected by their stockholders (kickstarter backers) and they didn't deliver. Bethesda, Bioware and EA would be in deep shit, but Larian can get away with it because us stockholders chose a bad way to invest in the company.

Erm…

I hate EA. Not for it being american company, but because it's a scamming company. I said "american devil" because another doesn't exist on both america continents! :D

Bioware is a canadian company. At least I thought so.
Yea, it's still EA's subsidiary, whatnot and whatever. But I don't bash them often nor I bash them for everything they do. Just when they dumb down stuff and when are spineless to show the middle finger to the parent company.

My bashing on Bethesda was only because of their incapability and lack of talent to fix bugs in their recent singleplayer RPG. But check yourself what I did with Dishonored, also a game published by Bethesda. In "just finished" thread, I've put 10/10 on it. Stating publically that a game is IMO a masterpiece is bashing? Since when?

Larian could have been a company from Burkina Faso for all I care. They gave me an awsome game, patched and polished it and provided me days of fun. Did I say the game is perfect? No. But it's IMO nearperfect. Would you be more happy if I said it's mediocre? I could do that, but then I would not speak the truth.

Sorry crpgnut, but that's how things are. It's never about the country the company is in. It's about how I feel towards the product I'm supposed to have fun with. And when I'm disappointed, who do I call out for it? The publisher. It just happens that almost every single time it's EA.
Maybe something is wrong with me. And maybe the same something wrong is with many of people who voted EA for the worst company. I just wonder what that something wrong is.

IMHO, anyone who has an intense dislike for EA can't be ALL bad!! :)

EA/Bioware deserve most of the bashing they've received in recent years.

I have to agree with the EA/Bioware bashing, myself. They have some serious talent at these places, yet for the most part they really make poor decisions on what to do with their products.

Oh, I totally agree with EA/Bioware bashing. I was singling Joxer out jokingly. I don't care what he likes or hates; I was just messing with him about the "you don't have to lie to your fans nor suckup to mainstream" part of his quote. To me, Larian is on equal footing with Bethesda as far as what my expectations are in a final product. D:OS isn't quite everything I was hoping for, but it's a decent game.

Skyrim is probably my favorite game ever, but that isn't solely due to Bethesda. The mod community gets a good little piece of the credit for all the Skyrim goodness. Of course, allowing folks to mod their game caused them not to be able to fix all of the bugs. I can live with that. If Bethesda fixed every bug but it disabled SKSE in the process, that's not a trade anyone with sense would accept, for instance.

Just thought I'd resurrect this thread somewhat to add my own thoughts upon finally completing the game this morning, having started it way back in early August.

Here's the party I used: (No crafting - that's something for another playthrough…)

Vigamortis: (PC Mage - pyro speciality)
Cassandra: (Second PC character; built her as a Cleric to begin with, but became a fighter hybrid by necessity. Probably gimped her a little!)
Madora (Fighter/Ranger hybrid)
Jahan (Second mage)

I finished half way into level 20 and with a Steam hours count of 135 on normal.
My hours were extended by my arrival at the Source Temple short of a couple of Star Stones, which caused a need to backtrack a fair bit. As a consequence, I only experienced a few "End of Time" portals at the very end of the game, which made them arguably less useful. I also ran into difficulty at the Cassandra fight (couldn't output enough damage per round) which made me pursue more sub-quests until I could return better equipped.

The final fight was quite brutally long and must have taken me at least an hour to get right after a couple of failed attempts (the first of which was worth it just to simply to experience the failure screen…)

I liked the strategic and interactive variety within the most excellent combat engine (summoning those two-handed wielding zombie knights rocked!) but probably found the game overall a tad too long. The sections after Hunter's Edge in the Phantom Forest in particular started to drag a little for me. I also wasn't so much a fan of the rock paper scissors mini-game; though the argumentative dialogues between characters were fantastic and always entertaining, giving some nice angles for offering role-playing options.

Despite my general preference for turn-based combat, I'd say that I enjoyed Divine Divinity more due to the stronger originality of the Pokorovsky score and more lively pacing in connection to Larian's humorous tone. Whilst I love the slow pace of Original Sin as well, it also felt much easier to get bogged down in the details, causing the game to lack a little bit of "flow".

It was fun to catch the references in the game; seeing Dhruin, Myrthos and Moriendor and the little Watch rivalry with the Codex Imps was great.

Perhaps I'll try another party configuration into the future with a different PC class combination. I'd definitely like to see what the henchmen and additional NPCs from the patches are like. This "I want to play it again sometime" factor, is a tribute to a very solid game. :)

Eeek, 135 hours… Me mind loses track and wants to play other games after 30 max…

I'm still stuck on chapter 4 of G2 + NOTR because of that….

Looks like a great game. I wish I was a student with 15 hour days of notingnesss again :D