Character development is extremely slow and leveling up is very difficult. Naturally, you can't step into other parts of the map because you don't have enough levels. The turn-based battle system is extremely difficult and slow. I even had to install a mod to speed up the clunky animations in the game. There is an unfair system in dialogs. The results are randomly determined by the npc, usually with a rock, scissors and paper system. After reading so much dialog, researching the map, talking to NPCs, everything gets messed up. The main quest and side quests get mixed up. Even though what to do is indicated a little bit in the texts, this is very, very insufficient. You can't understand what to do and where to go. You just wander around the town. The section where you can look at the list of available missions in the game does nothing but confuse everything even more. I think it is very difficult to finish the game without any help from anywhere unless you look at the walkthrough and follow it. After all, what's the point of playing a game if you can't finish it by looking at a guide? You need to spend hours having fun without getting bored. I don't have time to waste my patience for this game. In short, the game has an unbalanced system within itself. It bored me so much that I couldn't continue any further. A game that started well became a hopeless case for me later on. When you compare this game to the second game, it doesn't feel like a sequel, nor do you realize if it was made by the same developer. The only similarity between them is their names and they have nothing else in common. It's a very amateurish job by Larian. They got over their inexperience when they were developing the second game, but I wish they would have released big updates later on that would have fixed the first game because I was really curious about the story. Even if I somehow finish this game, I can never consider it a successful game regardless of the terrible experiences it gives me. This is a really bad and unsuccessful game.

I'd played about up to the halfway point years ago with a housemate, but unfortunately we couldn't finish it before moving out. Since then I've played the sequel, which is honestly just a masterpiece, so I'd been interested to return to this one to finish the job for a while.

Playing Divinity: Original Sin in a post-Original Sin II (and post-Baldur's Gate III) world, it is best summarised as a deeply flawed blueprint for the style of RPG Larian would go on to develop two all-timers upon (going off reputation for BG3, I haven't played it yet). It's conceptually brilliant; an old-school RPG with tactical turn-based combat that uses the Elder Scrolls concept of every item being a physical object, then actually USES that concept to enhance both the role-playing and combat. This allows such a range of interaction with the game-world and theoretically opens up many ways to progress through the environment and complete quests.

Here in its inception, that range hadn't quite been accounted for, with characters often not responding in ways that quite made sense for my actions. There's a jankiness to the way everything works here, which means that often the most engaging way to utilise the brilliant interactivity on display is to cheese and exploit the fuck out of everything. In this respect it's got an Oblivion quality to it, where I'm not quite enjoying the game in the way I believe was intended, but because the developers were bold enough to not put checks and balances on their ambitious systems I still feel like I owe it to them for my enjoyment.

There are other issues: because a single resource must be invested in combat, stealth, and civil skills, the fact that combat is the only true progression-blocker strongly incentivises investment in combat skills to the exclusion of others, whereas the sequel did well to separate them and thus allowing combat, civil, and stealth specialisations to develop separately. The writing here is often fine but fails to treat its world with integrity, deliberately delving into goofy territory on the regular, a far cry from the sequel's balance of silly fantasy humour and well-rounded characters with strong personalities and emotionally resonant arcs.

Though comparisons are negative, the truth is that the formula Larian struck here is so fantastic that even this relatively weak iteration is still a banger of a game. I mostly had a fantastic time playing it, and would handily recommend it to anyone looking for a bright, fun RPG that can get a little wacky.

I wanted to play through these with my bf, we got about 75% through the main stuff here and had a lot of fun with the combat and some of the interactions together, but I think to enjoy the story properly with the way we play stuff, it just doesn't work as a co op experience for us personally. They're long and unwieldy, even if the Co-op feels good overall. The dialogue is pretty good, and it does drop some interesting events on you, but largely in our context it just felt like running back and forth with trivial objectives. The combat feels great and gives you some wonderful tools. Frankly I have no notes on the combat because it suits the game very well, is engaging and fun, and is the part of Co-op that feels good.


It's all a bit too generic, though, and the presentation is lacking. I'm not a huge straight up sword and sorcery style fantasy fan, there has to be some particular hook to make it more palatable to my tastes, or just be well crafted enough to keep me engaged. There arent any big hooks that appealed to me, and with the combo of problems we had with playing in this manner and knowing div 2 and baldurs are better, we decided to split from this and play those individually.

It's also so so sad that there aren't really furry races in their games. I'm probably a minority for all of Larian's ventures for this, but throw us a fox or werewolf or something. Dragons and lizards don't count.

This is about the 3rd time i've tried coming back to this game and every time the first town stops me. Apparently its really good, and i like all the concepts it has and combat, but that first town is such a brick wall before you can go out and do anything in the game that i've once again fallen off the game.

What feels like 300 random (talk to x person) quests with little to no guidance on what do to, some timed, and all pretty tedious before you can go actually play the game outside the walls.

Occasionally you'll get a map marker that tells you what might be the general area to go next in one of the 15ish quests you're supposed to keep track of with only a journal entry on them. I guess I'll give the 2nd one since this came in a bundle. Maybe that one has cleaned it up. I know baldur's gate 3 has definitely had to have fixed this issue with its 9.9999/10 average rating.

expect to spend at least 5 hours running around the first town if you decide to try and play this game.

6/10