Divinity: Original Sin II - Final Kickstarter Update
 

With the release of the Definitive Edition of Original Sin 2 in 2 days, a final Kickstarter update is made available.

The contents of this update is obviously about the release of the Definitive Edition.

There is a stream to kick things of.

And as always, there is a new video.



More information.

As I am not even finished with the game, I have to think about restarting or just continue my existing play.

Me neither think I'll wait a few more days to play the game.
So I expect we'll see a switch port someday?

I also sincerely hope we see other games developed instead of more Original Sin games.

I'm in the same boat. Made it to the city of Arx and just got burnt out on the game I guess. I had the same thing happen with D:OS1 where I made it to the last 1/4 of the game but ended up restarting a new game when the enhanced edition came out because I stopped playing a number of months went by. Since about 5 months has gone by now since I last played D:OS2, I'll probably just start a new game with the definitive edition.

Whatever they're having at Larian's, I want some.

Glad to see I am in good company, I also got part way through and became side tracked and never finished.

Gonna miss that music. Again.

P.S. +1 to the guy who was able to go down the step with a bucket on his head!

I also haven't finished the game. Not sure if there's enough new stuff here content wise to justify a restart…

I'm still bummed out that we wont be getting new talents and skills; kinda mist opportunity :/ Especially since there wont be any expansions or dlcs.

Well I will not complain about a company who is respecting its customers and delivers. I got bored with the D:OS1 after a third of the game but this one I just loved it.
Kudos, lot of kudos to them

This is live tomorrow and the Steam page isn't up?

I'm keen to check out the complete patch notes :)

You gotta watch the video:

From what they said in the video it isn't a new game; it is a patch to the existing game. When you start the game you will be given an option to play either the original release or the definitive release.

Was there any talk about addressing the rapidly outleveled loot problem in the "definitive" edition?

I felt the first one had better combat (or at least more fun combat); the second had a better story - well not the necessarily the overall story but the key points were better written/presented. Esp the origin stories which were mostly quite good (imho). I found the combat less fun but the tractical arrangement was generally better or more interesting (if that makes sense)

There are mods for that. I got so annoyed by the absurdly scaling numbers I restarted with a mod that simply reduced the bloat but didn't change the balance (maybe slightly since you didn't have to buy new gear as often, but money was never the problem anyway).

It made for a much better progression system in my opinion.

I got to the final battle area. I was close to the end of my patience with the turn based combat. Can be fun but sooooo long. I forgot to save and after about 2 hours of battling my way through I made a stupid mistake in a very long combat and died.

I should have just quit and cooled off but I was so annoyed, and frustrated, I deleted the game and the saves. So got like 95% of it done. I don't think I could go through it again. The combat was just too painful in length and not a fan of the constant equipment scaling. I loved the rest of the game though.

That being said I do recommend the game especially if you like turn based combat. But will be a long time before I am ready to consider playing it again.

It's interesting you struggled so much with the turn-based combat, as I thought it was possibly the fastest TB system in any CRPG I've played. Certainly for a traditional CRPG like this.

They deliberately cut the action points down to a minimum in order to make combat flow faster.

Hehe, I'm a very impatient person myself - and I played it with two other people - both of whom took at least twice as long with their turns, when compared to me ;)

I am not sure as I played some TB games way back in the day. But it had been a long time since I had when I picked up DDOS2. I did enjoy it for about half, maybe even 2/3rds, of the game. Got into a rhythm. But I dunno after a while the length of the battles, while short for a TB game, started to get under my skin. Maybe I was just tired of all the constant item micro management and the many previous hours of long combat (I didn't take many breaks from the game and pretty much played whenever I had a chance to).

The fact that I made it so far is a testament to how much I enjoyed it …and there were parts of the combat I was very fond of. If I had kept my patience at the time (perhaps I had too much coffee in me) I would have just taken a break for a few days then gone back and finished it … I really wish I had. But whats done is done.

I just know that as of right now the idea of playing another TB games gives me the chills … so that burned out feeling hasn't passed yet. I admit I do prefer the RTwP style the most along with combat in a game like Skyrim and FO … which I know others don't like but I do *shrug*.

Hehe, fair enough. I do concede it had some tiresome bits - especially when the various elemental traps and what not took over.

Also, I agree about the inventory management. That was truly awful - considering the otherwise excellent design of most of the game.

Thankfully, I played with a friend of mine who's extremely patient and meticulous when it comes to fiddling with the minor crap - like managing items and selling them at the best prices, etc.

So, my brother and I would just send him all the crap and occasionally wait while he went back to town and maximised profit ;)

Coupled with my very enthusiastic pickpocketing - money wasn't much of an issue ;)

I'm amazed at the number of folks who complain about inventory management (though it is a common complaint); but never fear they redid it in the definitive edition. As for combat i was some what confused by you being amazed that tb combat can be time intensive. Particularly in some of the very difficult fights on the difficult level it can take a bit of 'planning' between moves - but it depends on your party composition (and equipment) and placement as some 'hard' fights can be quite trivial for others. remember a couple of fights being quite time consuming. That doesn't mean they are unenjoyable just that they take a lot of time.

Also - for myself - as i've said several times I found d:os-2 combat less enjoyable than d:os. The first time I played (have played twice); i had quite a few very difficult fights but the second time I only had 3 or 4 (nothing like getting ambushed in a bad position 2 levels below game expectation on hardest level - you should be able to figure out which fight this is as there are only a couple of places this can happen); the second time I played the game that same fight was a walk - go figure. Anyway i'll probably play the definitive version once - i also have one more origin story i want to explore and i want to see how they reworked the last chapter which I have frequently complained was quite poor start to end.

Was just about to write the same!

I hope the next game will be something new. Like a good official D&D game or WH40K or or or.

One can dream, but I seriously doubt that will happen. Nor do I think they'll abandon the JRPG bloated numbers or the Diablo loot mechanics.

I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy the hell out of their next RPG in spite of that though. As long as it's moddable. ;)

Or continue the story from Divinity 2 and get back into 3D!

Exactly it has been many years since the ending cliffhanger.

You're not alone there Wolfgrimdark. I don't like turn based combat either. In fact, I hated the combat so much in DOS1 that I never finished the game.

So I've stayed away from DOS2 because of how much I hated the combat in the first game (it's turned me off turn based games for life!). But I'm getting really desperate for something new to play, and I've heard this game can be modded.

So does anybody know if it's possible to mod the combat/weapons so that I can kill everything in one hit? If I can do that, and bypass that dreadful combat, then I think I might get this game after all.

Cause everything I read about the game sounds wonderful! I just can't get past that appalling combat system.

That's the end to the original game. The expansion's ending has everyone happy as they are watched over by a certain cat that's rather handy with web pages.

@Tiptoe, there might be a mod to make all the battles trivial. I did a quick search but didn't see anything. It could be my search-fu is too weak, though.

The older Divinity II game is live action plus it has more Bellegar, which is always a good thing. Here's part of a battle I fought.

I know they are adding a "story mode" to the Definitive edition, which might be what you're after. Also, there is this mod, which claims to provide an ultra easy explorer mode.

https://www.nexusmods.com/divinityor…ab=description

Yeah forgot it was changed but you still don't fight Damien at all.

He is still out there.

If we're ever going to be a couple, please remind me to never break up with you.

Greatest comment of the day, thank you!

I'm still waiting for a physical Definitive Edition for the PC.

I don't believe you will get a physical definitive edition for the pc. Certianly not as part of the kickstarter; but these days if they did sell a boxed pc version it would most likely just contain a manual, map and steam code.
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Now if you don't have internet connection and want a disk version; you could try sending them mail and they might accommodate you in some fashion. They certainly did so in the early days - though these days i'm unsure if they would work with you. A lot has to do with who receives your message.

I downloaded it from steam. Keep in mind it's a whopping 26 more gigabytes in space compared to the old edition. That kinda sucks that its so much extra space, if you are like me and are already having low free hard drive space issues. My hard drive is jammed full now. (Too many games, and that take up too much hard drive space!)

This happens because developers don't fully compress their games anymore. I'm not kidding we have gone from 10GB to 50GB & sometimes a lot more for new releases.

It's mostly textures, music, and movies especially with JRPG ports.
You already said it better then I could.

As the console versions are the only way to get a physical release. I know that sucks, but that's pretty normal for most PC games nowadays. Though exceptions happen.

Pretty much every game is using compressed assets. If you looked at a modern game in uncompressed form, it could take up terabytes. The assets can only be compressed with the standards that the hardware can deal with - textures have to be in compression formats that the GPU can deal with in real-time. Really heavy compression is extremely hardware intensive, and would have a major impact on the game.

Modern games just really are that big. I think it would be true to say that because disk space is not considered a big issue, not that much effort is put into addressing the problem. If it were, probably the industry would work together to improve things. For example, they pour a lot of effort into new video compression, to make big savings on bandwidth costs. But, there's not much individual studios can do to improve things without a big push towards new standards and hardware.

PC Gamer has an article about this problem.

Link - https://www.pcgamer.com/how-game-siz…t-even-bigger/

It's only going to get worse also. Cant wait for the first game to take 1TB.

Yep, sounds about right.

Gods damn it, now I want to restart for the…6th or 7th time is it? Is the story any good? I don't mind the spoilers.
I think I've always quit somewhere around 1st major area, clearing out trash mobs before dragon something something.

H.265 is much better than h.264. For a modern article that stardock guy is behind hte times. Having said that the bulk of the issue is texture. The comment about jpeg is also very lame (very poor article) since there are very good compression technique that are lossless or nearly lossless.

I suspect the problem is how to un-compress the exture fast enough to load them when needed. I don't know factually that this is the issue but certainly it would require that most pc have fairly fast hardware esp at the higher resolutions ('fast' here is more than just cpu as you need adequate disk bandwidth). I think a console built to handle the specifics could do a better job than general pc just because the variance in perf will create real issues for some users. Load time is already fairly slow for some users and I don't know if the bottleneck is poor implementation, disk time or similar. Maybe one of these days i'll dwell into the specifics.
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There is a catch-22 in my commetns because if you heavily compress the textures the amount of diskspace and therefore disk iops are both reduced but you still need to counter-weigh that by the time to uncompress the textures real-time. Also for mechanical disks the bulk of the cost for modest size files is seek and not actual read. I havne't really looked into the issue so i can't comment on authority on the crossover between compression cost and iop cost to say too much in a reasonable fashion other than list the issues that would require close examination.

The story's not bad but remember it's a different game from the new Original Sins. The only problem I had was once the toxic fog moved in the game fell in quality.

At least the expansion added more content, and redeemed the game. Anyways Larian Studios said they would make Divinity III someday, but it has been years.