I finished Divinity 2 and I think I hate the game

Started by Legend, Oct 04, 2018, 11:05 PM

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Legend

It's so cool at times and really could be awesome depending on what things you do in the game, but I rolled a 1 I guess and saw all the issues.

No spoilers: didn't follow through with the experience that the game was promising/teasing. Lots of glitches. Lots of oversites. Lots of bad game design. Early on I was feeling like it might be an amazing game so I really invested time into it. Steam has me at 98 hours and that's a ton for me. Yet about halfway through I started getting mixed feelings. Up till the very end I still had hope the ending could pull everything together but it failed spectacularly. Some people will have loved the game but my specific playthrough sucked. The end battle was nearly impossible since the map was glitched/designed poorly and I couldn't do most of my ranged attacks.

Red Prince sidequest spoilers:
Spoiler for Hidden:
<br>I played as the Red Prince, a lizard king who was trying to reclaim the throne. He was cool and I liked his story and all the stuff with him till the halfway point. He had a special lizard girlfriend he needed to find so I focused on that and the general goal of saving my empire. I find the lizard girlfriend but find out she has a contract with the evil god king. She loves me but the contract can&#39;t be broken. Well I had a magic artifact that could break this contract and... nope. The dialogue option never came up. Instead the game wanted me to use the artifact for someone else. I thought I was being clever but instead the game ignored it. <span style="font-size: 1em;" class="bbc_size">Later on I get with the lizard girlfriend but it&#39;s such a stupid scene. She basically just has a couple lines and is written out of the game.</span><br><br>Weird side note, the game thought I slept with Sebille. She randomly just started talking to me like we were in a relationship.<br>

Xevross

Lol well I can't say I'm surprised. I did still really like the game but oh boy did it annoy me and do its best to make me hate it. You're right, there's a lot of bugs and bad game design. It does some things outstandingly well and others astonishingly badly, its a very strange mix. The ending was actually pretty good but mostly anticlimactic I thought and the build up to it wasn't very well done. How did it glitch at the end for you?

Similar thing happened to me, I had Ifan in my party and at one point in his quest it just bugged out and I couldn't continue it, so I never got to finish that.


Legend

Lol well I can't say I'm surprised. I did still really like the game but oh boy did it annoy me and do its best to make me hate it. You're right, there's a lot of bugs and bad game design. It does some things outstandingly well and others astonishingly badly, its a very strange mix. The ending was actually pretty good but mostly anticlimactic I thought and the build up to it wasn't very well done. How did it glitch at the end for you?

Similar thing happened to me, I had Ifan in my party and at one point in his quest it just bugged out and I couldn't continue it, so I never got to finish that.


I want to watch a few different endings online. The Church was cool but the trial of blood wasn't that cool.

Spoiler for Hidden:
<br>I&#39;m annoyed we never fight the god king. Early on I decided he was my main enemy yet nah, couldn&#39;t do anything. It was weird that the game ended on a cliffhanger in a sense and teased a sequel, even though that doesn&#39;t seem possible with all the different paths. Although I guess I should have remembered that this game itself was a sequel.<br><br>The big frustrating glitch/design was that Braccus Rex kept on fleeing to those distant platforms yet oftentimes there were invisible barriers that stopped me from reaching him or hitting him. I summoned a little dragon from the Red Prince and it&#39;d fly onto a platform and then get stuck because the game said &quot;path is interrupted&quot; for almost every direction.&nbsp; Also I finally beat the game, went to the ship, went to the final cutscene, and had to take a phone call. I had never tried pausing a cutscene before so I tried escape and that skipped the cutscene. After my call I went back to see if there was an autosave I could go to but nope. I had to return to a manual save during the final fight. I was really hoping to see some specific results of my playthrough so I forced myself through the fight a second time, only for Dallis to be glitched and immortally subconscious. I then had to redo the fight a third time&nbsp; <img src="https://vizioneck.com/forum/Smileys/default/tongue.gif" alt="&#58;P" title="Tongue" class="smiley"> <br>


I'd really like to formalize my thoughts on this phenomenon when playing a game. It's pretty similar to what I felt with Breath of the Wild at times.

I think it's something along the lines of all games need to get you to suspend technical analysis and think of them as breathing worlds instead of 1s and 0s. Sometimes your imagination is inlign with the 1s and 0s. It tends to be a pretty stress free experience. Rarely will you expect the game to support something it doesn't and when there is a mismatch between imagination and reality, the difference tends to be small. Extreme examples of this could be stuff like Tetris.

Other times, you imagine a world that the code can't live up to. Perception is reality so this can be a great experience but eventually the player will tend to notice mismatches that crack the illusion's foundation. The underlying code might be incredibly impressive but the stress and dislike caused by the mismatch is mostly dependent on how large the gap is between the imagined world and the 1s and 0s.

My playthrough of Divinity would fall into the later. The high meta score really harmed my experience since right out of the gate I was expecting something great. Breath of the Wild was somewhere near there too. It's an incredible game but the Tarrey town quest is like the embodiment of this concept. My mind went rushing with the possibilities of building my own town and instead it just ended with, ya know, a town.

Xevross

Oct 05, 2018, 11:01 AM Last Edit: Oct 05, 2018, 11:04 AM by Xevross
I want to watch a few different endings online. The Church was cool but the trial of blood wasn't that cool.

Spoiler for Hidden:

I'm annoyed we never fight the god king. Early on I decided he was my main enemy yet nah, couldn't do anything. It was weird that the game ended on a cliffhanger in a sense and teased a sequel, even though that doesn't seem possible with all the different paths. Although I guess I should have remembered that this game itself was a sequel.

The big frustrating glitch/design was that Braccus Rex kept on fleeing to those distant platforms yet oftentimes there were invisible barriers that stopped me from reaching him or hitting him. I summoned a little dragon from the Red Prince and it'd fly onto a platform and then get stuck because the game said "path is interrupted" for almost every direction.  Also I finally beat the game, went to the ship, went to the final cutscene, and had to take a phone call. I had never tried pausing a cutscene before so I tried escape and that skipped the cutscene. After my call I went back to see if there was an autosave I could go to but nope. I had to return to a manual save during the final fight. I was really hoping to see some specific results of my playthrough so I forced myself through the fight a second time, only for Dallis to be glitched and immortally subconscious. I then had to redo the fight a third time  :P


I'd really like to formalize my thoughts on this phenomenon when playing a game. It's pretty similar to what I felt with Breath of the Wild at times.

I think it's something along the lines of all games need to get you to suspend technical analysis and think of them as breathing worlds instead of 1s and 0s. Sometimes your imagination is inlign with the 1s and 0s. It tends to be a pretty stress free experience. Rarely will you expect the game to support something it doesn't and when there is a mismatch between imagination and reality, the difference tends to be small. Extreme examples of this could be stuff like Tetris.

Other times, you imagine a world that the code can't live up to. Perception is reality so this can be a great experience but eventually the player will tend to notice mismatches that crack the illusion's foundation. The underlying code might be incredibly impressive but the stress and dislike caused by the mismatch is mostly dependent on how large the gap is between the imagined world and the 1s and 0s.

My playthrough of Divinity would fall into the later. The high meta score really harmed my experience since right out of the gate I was expecting something great. Breath of the Wild was somewhere near there too. It's an incredible game but the Tarrey town quest is like the embodiment of this concept. My mind went rushing with the possibilities of building my own town and instead it just ended with, ya know, a town.
Yeah me and my friend had to reload in the final fight 5-6 times because it kept glitching, and we looked online and found what might have been the problem and then after fiddling around a bit more we eventually got it working.

Spoiler for Hidden:
I also thought the story with the end was weird. Like we spent the whole time wanting to track down Dallis but then suddenly she&#39;s been in cahoots with Lucian the whole time and they have a plan and actually want us to work with them. If so why was Dallis attacking us before? And yeah Braccus Rex turning up was fine and all but actually fighting the God King would make more sense. Also we read that there&#39;s three choices you can make at the end but we couldn&#39;t make one of them because ... reasons...? Yeah, lots of problems.


Seems like from your explanation its more a problem with your own mindset than these games, I'm never thinking about code or anything like that. I usually expect a game to just let me do basic functions; fighting, traversal, talking to other characters, tools to solve puzzles etc. I don't think I've ever been disappointed by a game not letting me do something, unless its just a really basic function missing in a poor game.

Legend

Yeah me and my friend had to reload in the final fight 5-6 times because it kept glitching, and we looked online and found what might have been the problem and then after fiddling around a bit more we eventually got it working.

Spoiler for Hidden:
I also thought the story with the end was weird. Like we spent the whole time wanting to track down Dallis but then suddenly she's been in cahoots with Lucian the whole time and they have a plan and actually want us to work with them. If so why was Dallis attacking us before? And yeah Braccus Rex turning up was fine and all but actually fighting the God King would make more sense. Also we read that there's three choices you can make at the end but we couldn't make one of them because ... reasons...? Yeah, lots of problems.


Seems like from your explanation its more a problem with your own mindset than these games, I'm never thinking about code or anything like that. I usually expect a game to just let me do basic functions; fighting, traversal, talking to other characters, tools to solve puzzles etc. I don't think I've ever been disappointed by a game not letting me do something, unless its just a really basic function missing in a poor game.
Spoiler for Hidden:
<br>I thought Dallis died when she went to one of the crypts and then the eternal took her place. Or maybe I misunderstood the timeline.<br>


That's what complicates this. It's 100% dependent on how the player perceives the game for that specific playthrough, yet the game should still be criticized for it. I think you missed the point though. No one thinks about the code while they're playing. When Mario jumps you don't think of him as a sprite with a moving background, you think of him as Mario jumping. Your brain personifies the sprite and attaches meaning to its actions.

To give you an extreme example of how this can cause problems, imagine a moment in a game with someone looking to the camera and saying "Hey Steve, striped shirts are out of fashion." Most players would just view it as a line and move on, but a young kid named Steve that's wearing a striped shirt would be blown away. They'd think the game was talking to them. Everyone else would be in group 1 with their perceived experience matching how the game worked under the hood, while Steve would be in group 2 with a perceived experience that's way better than what the code is actually capable of.

If the game ended there and Steve never looked into it farther, they'd say the game was amazing. The game really would be amazing from their perspective. However if the game kept going and had a line "Good to see you again Steve, thanks for changing shirts" and the kid was still in the same shirt, then they'd probably realise it was just a coincidence that the first line described them. Their view of the game would drop down to those from group 1. They'd be disappointed that the game didn't somehow know who was playing.


It's a completely different issue than knowing how a game works and thinking it'd be better if additional mechanics were included.