I had a weird situation this morning where I had all the things done I needed to do, my wife was out of the house and I wasn't behind on work or anything. I guess this is what a calm, peaceful life is supposed to be like. I tried Divinity: Original Sin 2. I have been meaning to do so for a long time. I forgot where I was in the game:
It's fine. I wish Larian would start their games faster and earlier. I am wandering around a ship trying to find keys and basically doing tutorial things. I read a forum post on Reddit yesterday that said when Psycho was in theaters, after the ending there was a short of Alfred Hitchcock asking the audience not to spoil the movie for others. They had to "teach" people how to live with spoilers in their brains. Psycho came out in 1960. I don't think it took people all that long to understand how movies worked. When do we get to that point in games, where the game can just START and not have a tutorial level?
It featured a sleeping guard that attacked me more or less on sight, and then a spellcasting jester that I freed from prison, and then tried to attack me.
What followed was at first fun - the captured Jester got out of the jail and cast a fireball at the guard, but then he attacked me and we traded kicks for 12 rounds. This company does not need my help with anything, but I will admit to thinking that the combat sucked when me and the other guy are just kicking each other for one hit point loss at a time per round.
What can I learn from this? Even at the lowest levels of combat, ya gotta give your players SOME options.
A good friend of mine not on the BBS told me how much he liked it, and we have similar tastes in games. I picked it back up again today and got a little farther. I am still on the initial ship with a slave collar. But I was able to see some plot go forward.
There was a snotty magician who was being a total rag about how the collar - which stops me from casting spells - was on me, and then another prisoner started a mutiny, knocking almost everyone else on this ship unconscious. I had a dagger somehow, so I ran back to where the haughty magician was and killed her. Ha! Ha ha! Now that is role playing.
When I was in high school or maybe before - during the time that maybe Da King and I were running warez all around town - I remember starting to play the game Ultima 6 when I got home from school until I had to go to bed. It was one of the fundamental memories of mine. (I had another one with X-COM, the original DOS version: started playing it in the afternoon, kept playing it until the sun came up the next day.) I realize that for like 30 years I have been trying to recapture magic like that. What sucks is that I have this bizarre sense of entitlement with the world and how it should work - so when I see things like another endless tutorial, I can't sit and focus and get through it. I've had Divinity: Original Sin 2 probably a year after it was published, so probably 2018. Maybe this is an ADD or ADHD thing, being able to just sit and get through the tutorial slog. Regardless, the game is getting good.
All games are about 80% too long, so my goal is not to finish it, but just sit down and play something and turn my worried brain off. This may do it.
This is a wonderful game of moving little dudes around on the screen. Turn-based, squad-level tactics, with people talking to you, which is enough to put it under the RPG genre.
There is a line in one of the episodes of the show The(?) Orville that I watched, where they are down on the planet for a while and Captain Ed laments something taking forever in a sarcastic way. I don't recall many other space captains being that sarcastic. I forget what he said. I am a bad storyteller.
The tutorial is STILL ONGOING, but I have things to do, combat seems interesting, I have leveled up, I helped a bunch of orphans get on a lifeboat, along with like a dwarf and reptile guy or something. It is soothing.
For whatever record there maybe, Baulder's Gate III is Divinity: Original Sin 3 - same company, same engine, the mechanics are obviously more mature, and they didn't garble their end game at release. Arguably Original Sin 2 is more accessible from a player perspective than BGIII (fight me!) but both are incredibly deep and worth a playthrough.
