I just finished the game and I have to say
I’m happy I had the …
lava core scroll
for the final battle. Otherwise I don’t think I would have won. I failed my first couple tried before I realized I had the item.
While my initial impressions of Divinity were favorable, they started to wane by mid game for many of the reasons people have already mentioned above.
- I didn’t really enjoy the story.
- While combat was basically well done, I didn’t like the reliance on environmental factors. I also didn’t like the amount of summons (sometimes prior to combat) to increase the number of enemies. I rather have faced less numbers of more powerful enemies in many places.
- No real sense of exploration, gated by level. This was also true of many classic RPGs I think - Bioware, Gold Box, etc.
- I also didn’t like the puzzle design for most of the puzzles - find the switch, move the barrels, using the teleporters. I just didn’t have fun with them for some reason.
- Some UI annoyances, like hard to click on targets at times, not being able to rotate 360 degrees, crafting.
The strengths for me were that the visuals and music are well done, along with the action point based combat. I’m surprised with how little the game clicked with me after the honeymoon period wore out.
As an aside, I really enjoyed playing Dream Quest on the iPad during this time. A great simple game that you can play in small chunks or hours at a time.