Playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 a couple years back had me convinced that maybe CRPGs could be my kinda thing! That game was so good, it had me wanting to try out others of its kind - even though the general sentiment I hear online is that D:OS 2 is pretty much the pinnacle of modern CRPGs.
Yeah, certainly seems that way! CRPGs by-and-large seem to be designed with a very specific person in mind, experienced D&D players or people who grew up with similarly labyrinthine & complicated games like Icewind Dale or Planescape or whatever that I guess they figured out how to play through hours of sheer, laborious will. I want these games to be my kind of thing, but I don't think they do. Between this and Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which I honestly enjoyed slightly more than this for the brief time I played it before abandoning it also - it feels like these games make no real attempt to explain their mechanics; how to make certain characters lead the party, what the implications are of the 4 different types of defence, how magic and grimoires work etc. Pillars of Eternity tutorialises some very silly things early on like how conversation works but makes no real effort to explain any of the things I just mentioned without you taking it upon yourself to do copious amounts of reading. Again, if this game isn't made for people like me - then fine! But Divinity was able to ease me in and make things make sense to me to at least a reasonable extent, and it just seems a bit weird for a game to make so little effort to make new fans like most CRPGs do.
I'm in the keep at Caed Nua after about 12 hours and I'm leaving this one behind unfortunately. I'm sure it's good for the hyper-specific audience it wants to serve but I was really ready to give it a chance and go in with an open mind, and found largely uninteresting plot and characterisation, incredibly unwieldy mechanics and systems and worst of all - AMERICAN VOICE ACTORS DOING BAD BRITISH ACCENTS. STOP ALREADY. JUST BE AMERICAN YOU WEIRDOS. I KNOW THAT FANTASY IS WAY COOLER WHEN EVERYONE'S BRITISH BUT GIVE UP, JUST ACCEPT YOUR SAD, AMERICAN FATE.
Obsidian are responsible for my favourite video game of all time in Fallout: New Vegas so I wanted to give more of their works a look; but this feels surprisingly rote to me. Companions join you with incredibly flimsy motivation that somehow compels them to stick with you even when you're in mortal terror fighting off bears and dark spirits, (a classic D&D-style RPG trope that I really dislike - give my companions compelling reasons to join me please!!) dungeons are all dingy, samey and visually and textually uninteresting and learning that this game is apparently up to a 100 hour commitment just sapped all the motivation to continue from me completely, especially considering how uninteresting and yet frequent combat seems to be. Let's leave the 100-hour runtimes to JRPGs please! We're supposed to be better than this!
Yeah, certainly seems that way! CRPGs by-and-large seem to be designed with a very specific person in mind, experienced D&D players or people who grew up with similarly labyrinthine & complicated games like Icewind Dale or Planescape or whatever that I guess they figured out how to play through hours of sheer, laborious will. I want these games to be my kind of thing, but I don't think they do. Between this and Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which I honestly enjoyed slightly more than this for the brief time I played it before abandoning it also - it feels like these games make no real attempt to explain their mechanics; how to make certain characters lead the party, what the implications are of the 4 different types of defence, how magic and grimoires work etc. Pillars of Eternity tutorialises some very silly things early on like how conversation works but makes no real effort to explain any of the things I just mentioned without you taking it upon yourself to do copious amounts of reading. Again, if this game isn't made for people like me - then fine! But Divinity was able to ease me in and make things make sense to me to at least a reasonable extent, and it just seems a bit weird for a game to make so little effort to make new fans like most CRPGs do.
I'm in the keep at Caed Nua after about 12 hours and I'm leaving this one behind unfortunately. I'm sure it's good for the hyper-specific audience it wants to serve but I was really ready to give it a chance and go in with an open mind, and found largely uninteresting plot and characterisation, incredibly unwieldy mechanics and systems and worst of all - AMERICAN VOICE ACTORS DOING BAD BRITISH ACCENTS. STOP ALREADY. JUST BE AMERICAN YOU WEIRDOS. I KNOW THAT FANTASY IS WAY COOLER WHEN EVERYONE'S BRITISH BUT GIVE UP, JUST ACCEPT YOUR SAD, AMERICAN FATE.
Obsidian are responsible for my favourite video game of all time in Fallout: New Vegas so I wanted to give more of their works a look; but this feels surprisingly rote to me. Companions join you with incredibly flimsy motivation that somehow compels them to stick with you even when you're in mortal terror fighting off bears and dark spirits, (a classic D&D-style RPG trope that I really dislike - give my companions compelling reasons to join me please!!) dungeons are all dingy, samey and visually and textually uninteresting and learning that this game is apparently up to a 100 hour commitment just sapped all the motivation to continue from me completely, especially considering how uninteresting and yet frequent combat seems to be. Let's leave the 100-hour runtimes to JRPGs please! We're supposed to be better than this!