Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Use more elements than Captain Planet!

Did you need the mod to play 3-player? If not, did you try it?

We started with 4 people but one dropped out. It doesn’t seem possible to remove his character, so we’re just lugging him around mostly just when we need him with us to advance to new areas. I wasn’t aware of a mod. It might be worth looking into.

I’ve heard it works pretty well technically speaking. We’re doing a group play through now on a different forum and there is one person who is playing three-way co-op with family members.

The hard part, I’d think, is the human part. Keeping a group together, interested, and organized for that long is a real challenge.

How long is a play through? 10-20 hrs, 20-30? etc. Esp MP, if there’s a significant difference.

I figure with the shelter in place, we can probably get 4-8 hrs/week in.

Um, it took me 160 hours to finish DoS:2 single player.

HOLY F*CK!

How long to beat has the average for the main story at 52 hours, but I can’t imagine cutting such a straight and narrow path. I bet I’ll be closer to 100-120 hours by the time I’m done.

I don’t know if it would be faster/slower via co-op. I’d guess about the same.

I only played through the game once and it took me 174 hours according to steam, so yeah, its a pretty long game. 52 Hours seems VERY efficient. Reckon you really need to know the classes & skills for that to play the game optimally and to not need to take on every quest to level up higher.

Steam says I’ve played 115 hours and I never even made it to Arx. I think Fort Joy alone took me 20 hours.

Humm. I might need to adjust my own estimates up some. I’m Level 7 now, on the island outside of Fort Joy. I’ll be at 20+ hours before I get off the island, I’d think.

I’m playing this for the first time right now and have come to the realization that save scumming is more than just encouraged, but an integral part of the gameplay. Half the battles you have to die a couple times to learn exactly what the enemy will do, and where to position each character to have a chance. I’m guessing half the reported length will be based on that.

The loads are fast (at least with my drive) and quicksave works perfect, so it’s a doable feature in single player. No idea how that would work in multi-player though.

Sing for me!

Question on the pacing of the game. I’m on my third attempt to get into this game, but I’m always put off by the start of the game (Fort Joy). It just feels like there’s piles of dialog and exposition with not much of anything going on, so I end up getting bored by the time I shut down the game and then never have much of a desire to load it back up and it gets forgotten amongst my backlog.

Is this pacing kind of the norm through the game, or is this a particularly slow starter? Or just not a game for me if I don’t enjoy spending most of my time talking to NPCs?

I personally think that the pace picks up a lot generally, but I also just started speeding through the dialog unless it seemed like a really important part of the game.

It picks up somewhat after you get through Fort Joy, but it’s never a fast game and like a lot of CRPGs you should expect a slowdown anytime you get to a new town. The beginning is the slowest though because they want you to pick your party in-world, but that means listening to them all tell you their life stories one after another.

After over 150 hours I finally finished this long slow ass CRPG. The first island is really just the pits. I probably spent 50 hours there alone dicking around, dropping this game several times to play other stuff for months on end.

Stuff I learned to hate:

-Chain movement. This can fuck off. I want more control of my party and this sabotaged me repeatedly throughout the run. It is optimal to always split the party and position everyone one at a time but that is a royal pain in the ass because…you can only select one character at a time! I would be forced to do this to win some particularly hard fights.
-Item level scaling. Just as bad is enemy level scaling. Replace all your gear on all characters every two, three levels or feel ridiculously underpowered. Also loved replacing my unique named sword with a non-magical vendor trash sword because it is higher level.
-The amount of stupid puzzles. I used a wiki a lot.
-Container opening simulator. There is skill in the game that gives you a chance to find great loot in every container you open…
-Inventory. Worst. Ever. Period.

And you better believe I used all the gift bag quality of life features. (Achievements disabled)

I powered through and started to enjoy it a lot more once I was about half-way through the second map in spite of the above.

My main was Fane (Pyro/Geo) + Ifan (Ranger/Summoner), Lohse (Hydro/Aero), and Beast (Two-handed melee). Once everyone had teleportation, adrenaline, and a actual real “teleport” skill for movement, combat became much more manageable and “fun”. Although still a pain sometimes because there are specific level zones if you don’t do in the correct order you’ll probably die, a lot.

Fane to my surprise is main character and central to the conflict in the overarching story, especially with the antagonist, which is a weird choice because you can totally not choose him in your party, let alone as your main.

Overall I’ll give it a B-, if you can tolerate some very annoying systems. It would probably work a lot better and be less shit if you didn’t manage 4 characters.

One thing that the game doesn’t explain well but makes such a huge difference is that you really need to accumulate a couple movement skills on your characters very early on (and you will keep them). I went into it thinking the combat would be more about like establishing a melee line with mages and archers in the back, but it’s more like Into The Breach where efficiently moving your characters around to finish enemies is key.

Early on you also want a lot of knockdown ability and stuff like chicken transformation powers.

I agree that you just need to play the game with a zone level guide, my playthrough didn’t really take off until I did that. I also would play through the acts organically and then before I went on to the next area check a walkthough and snipe a few extra quests that I missed that sounded fun.

Movement and positioning is so crucial I think they needed a separate AP for Movement vs Action. Actually moving characters during combat is for losers. Winners always teleport right where they need to be. I like your Into the Breach comparison.

I am actually fine with harder zones versus easy zones in principle, but not how it is implemented here, where a couple levels difference can be insurmountable and totally a one-sided ganking of massive overkill resulting in near-instant velocity complete party-wipe via the enemies opening alpha strike. Bloody hell.

Hmmm… perhaps say, a Move, Standard Action, and even a Bonus Action for example… ?