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S2 Ep117: Divinity: Original Sin 2
88 Plays5 years ago
MINOR SPOILERS: Divinity: Original Sin 2
Join Dave and Jake, and guest Justin as they dive into their co-op experience with an instant classic RPG!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
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Join Dave and Jake, and guest Justin as they dive into their co-op experience with an instant classic RPG!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Hosts' Greetings
00:00:00
Speaker
Solora takes a slow, deep breath and lets it out in a rush. You feel it, don't you? It's so still, but there's something behind it, too, like a thunderclap waiting to fall. The Great Acorn is nearly here. Its servants are poised for impact. We've known this moment would come.
00:00:28
Speaker
ś ś
00:00:54
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going, Dave? It's good. It's going pretty good. But I mean, how about we address everybody in the room? How's it going tonight? Justin. Whoa. I'll give you that one for free. It's going good. How are you guys doing?
00:01:18
Speaker
I mean, good. Does nobody pay attention? Oh my God. Yeah. How is Jake doing? How about somebody ask Jake? Doing all right. I'm doing all right. So we're all doing okay to good to great. Marvelous. Yeah. Party check. Do you want to know why I'm doing good?
00:01:37
Speaker
No, not really. All right. Actually, yeah, we should be an auto. We could use the content.
Background Checks and Personal Stories
00:01:44
Speaker
So I got an email today. I'm going through some background checks for job stuff, one of which was like a child protective services thing. So now I have a document saying they have nothing on record for me abusing a child or being in a system.
00:02:02
Speaker
Oh, congratulations. That's pretty good. I already knew, but now other people know we were a good human being certified. You can put that as like your Facebook cover. Just have it up there. I just want to say hashtag BLM hashtag. Don't abuse kids. Hash. Look, I'm a normal person. Exactly. It should not need to be stated, but.
00:02:26
Speaker
Okay, it can't hurt. Although, I will be honest, if someone does state it, it's got like a little bit of... It's like, why are you bringing it up? It's like, don't protest too much. Yeah. Do it. You're like, no. Hi, I'm Dave. I've never abused a kid. You're like, what? Certainly the Wendy's.
00:02:47
Speaker
Yeah, that is good, though. I didn't realize they did they ran background checks for that. I mean, I know there's like the criminal stuff, the drug stuff. Oh, yeah, it depends on the.
00:03:01
Speaker
I want to say genre of the company, but I know that's wrong. Industry they're working in. Yeah, the industry, the field. Certain places might have different restrictions based on who they employ and what they need to filter on. I have a fun anecdote from working. Just one day, our HR rep decided that she was going to start using the public
00:03:25
Speaker
records system for that and just started looking up random people based on their name and see if they had a background. We had a slight background check when we started, which was like, hey, do you have a record? Do your family members have records? Like, why are you spending work time doing this? What goes on Facebook? Small businesses, man. You just got to Google people. It'll all come out. I don't know.
00:03:55
Speaker
That's weird though. Stuff sticks around forever. Yeah. It's always fun to Google yourself and find like some pictures like, Oh, I remember. Why does Google know that though? Yeah. Right. Back when I was in high school, I go to myself and I got a computer science teacher, uh, at a college. It was very foreshadowing, I guess directly, but.
00:04:17
Speaker
I was going to say, it'd be hilarious. It's just like an older looking version of you, like glasses and gray hair and stuff. You're like, wait. Oh, man. I don't think Google's quite there yet, but they're close. They're pretty close. Let it be cool if you could just find your doppelganger. If you found them first. You know, I mean, reverse image search is coming a long way.
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah. No, it's crazy what people can look up now.
Google Searches and Future Reflections
00:04:49
Speaker
We'll have to save some of that for the identification algorithms episode, where we talk about some of the software that's out there that law enforcement started using and stuff. It's crazy stuff. You mean Cyberpunk 2077? Yeah. We're not there yet. Hold on. A little ways out. But yeah, there's some other stuff. But then sometimes games, right?
00:05:13
Speaker
Yeah, sometimes games.
Gaming Experiences: Divinity Original Sin 2
00:05:16
Speaker
So this is something that I have been wanting to have an episode on for at least two years. Games? I may have heard it referenced a couple of times in the past. Oh, my God. So many times. Literally, when we started the podcast, we were like, all right, let's have a list of episodes we want to do at some point. So Jake and I kind of compared our Steam libraries. I was like, what about this one? He's like, I haven't played it. I'm like, will you play it? And he's like, maybe at some point.
00:05:42
Speaker
But I got him and I got Justin too. I got you fuckers and we finally played a full session of divinity original sin 2 over the course of
00:05:53
Speaker
How long? We started in May, and we finished it two weeks ago from recording time, which is... May 2018. Yeah. Yeah, 2018. We usually play for like a couple hours a week, so it got pretty spaced out. But it is a very lengthy, detailed game. It is a RPG, turn-based combat. Character RPG.
00:06:20
Speaker
isometric Baldur's Gate style, Neverwinter Nights, one of them made in the, not the future, the present past honestly, also made in the past. There you go. Sounds like the next X-Men title.
00:06:38
Speaker
Days of present. Today. X-Men today. Yeah. I fucking love this game. It has so many cool things in it. And one of the main reasons I love it is how much details put into so many aspects, which we'll probably talk about in more detail. But the amount of dialogue alone you have from seemingly useless NPCs is vast.
00:07:07
Speaker
It's true. They're useless. And it definitely falls in that category of you get out of it what you put into because it wants you to experience its world.
Playstyle and Game Mechanics
00:07:22
Speaker
Right. How would you say we experienced the world in our play through Justin? Justin was our party leader for this, so we followed his actions.
00:07:31
Speaker
It was definitely described as Murderhobo at least one time. My goal playing this because I can get stuck in a
00:07:43
Speaker
save reload loop a lot of times was to try to play through our failures. Unfortunately, that usually meant killing a lot of people. Yeah, there's a lot of failures. Also, we had like a, as soon as quests were completed, we tend to like wipe out the settlement or whatever.
00:08:03
Speaker
You have no new dialogue for me? Well, then you don't exist anymore. It's an easier way of crossing items off of a list by physically crossing them off of the map. Yeah. It's also got us a lot of money. I think that was mostly your skill choices and trying to funnel them to you. Yeah, I was the purse keeper for most of the game. Should we explain our roles briefly throughout the session?
00:08:33
Speaker
I played support. There you go. I did big damage by using a mod that turned me into animals and just hoping that I rolled a bear. Anamorph mod.
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah, there was some, some bullshit there. Justin, like, there was literally shitting out damage. My initial goal was to be a damage dealer, a ranger, decks based. Um, I still got some decent damage, but it really paled a comparison. So I just became another guy on the team. Yeah. For a lot of our run. I still think your damage is pretty high all the way to the end. You were one-shotting people.
00:09:11
Speaker
If I had high ground, it was much better. That extra bit of gravity on the arrow really, really does it. You could have added like one more point of damage to actually one shot people some more often. Oh, come on. No, shut up. It happened to you too. A little bit. There are a lot of times in combat where it would be like, oh, and then I have three health left. And then we'd always tease the other person be like, you could have put like an extra, extra point and just say, yeah, just use blood arrows. Just money. There you go. Um,
00:09:39
Speaker
So, yeah, I guess we could talk a little bit about how the system works as far as the skills are, because we've gotten a little bit into roles. And I think one of the one of the attractions to Divinity is how open the skills really are. There's like several different like elements and different skills like Hunter, like Necromancy, Aeroflurge, Pyromancy.
00:10:07
Speaker
But then rather than like a lot of games, it's just here's your range skills. Here's your melee skills. Divinity has a whole lot of hybridization.
00:10:17
Speaker
You're not locked into any one path for any duration of the game, especially with the ability to go back to the ship and respec. Oh yeah. Which is like a huge stress relief for me. Cause like Justin, you were mentioning that like you're saving and quick loading, you know, undoing mistakes, things like that. That destroys me in RPGs. I'm like, I did something slightly inefficient. I need to start over. Right.
00:10:45
Speaker
let no one die, don't do anything exciting or risky, even if I get the optimal reward and stuff like that. Yeah, but it's crazy because the way skills work is as you level, you can put points into mastery of a certain tree, like necromancy or warfare or pyrokinetic. And then you can read skill books, which require a certain level in that mastery to be able to learn.
00:11:11
Speaker
So once you've learned it, you can just put it onto your spell bar. Certain things might take more slots, but once you have it, you can just use it. And how many spells you know is limited by your memory, which you can also invest points in. But you could theoretically have pyromancy, hydro-sophist, which is more water and healing based. You could have everything. You could dabble.
00:11:37
Speaker
Oh, yeah. But usually certain abilities will scale off of a damage type, which then comes into your strength, dexterity and intelligence.
00:11:47
Speaker
Or for some of the casting elements that'll also scale directly off of that element, like hydro sophist, the heels get better. If you have more points in hydro sophist, they a lot of times have like low floors to learn the abilities initially. So you can get tons of abilities really easily by just putting a couple of points into things, but they scale much higher. If you're investing like 10% based per scale point was a lot of things with me. Um, and the stats.
00:12:17
Speaker
The damage stats were useful, even cross specs. So you would even take decks as a caster if you mix some traits that let you crit more and stuff like that. So there was a lot of cross play in there. You could take your options as you wanted.
00:12:31
Speaker
It's incredibly open for builds. We've played some other games in the past, like Path of Exile or Grim Dawn. Diablo 2. Diablo Titan. Titan's Quest. Yeah, Titanfall. These are all games that have skills. Yeah, Titan's Quest is...
00:12:59
Speaker
Titan Quest is another great example of a really open system, and Divinity is very much in that vein. Build it out however you want. Which is fun for me, because I like doing the supporty thing sometimes, like some dedicated supporty stuff. So I'm like, all right, we're going to have like haste aura totems.
00:13:20
Speaker
I did a whole bunch of transitions through the game. I was like, this is all vanilla. Now I'm using undead necromancy mod stuff. Here's some other buffs. I think the thing that really pushed you towards using word mods was the discovery of the metamagics that were implemented in the mod pack. Which are just straight ripped from D&D, which I love.
00:13:39
Speaker
And the mod we were using was Fenix's core mods plus his Polymorph pack, just to shout that out, I guess. And over the course of us playing, there were updates to the mods, which I'm sure we'll get into some discussion of issues that caused.
00:13:57
Speaker
But also there were balance patches applied to it so sometimes we spent three or four weeks not playing we would come back and Some things would be disallowed or different or other things which added some dynamism to it But not necessarily in the best way. Where are my icons for abilities? Yeah, we we did lose those at one point Yeah, that was an experience for sure the impressive thing to me was that
00:14:27
Speaker
This game is not super recent, so Definitive Edition came out in 2017, and those mods were being updated as we played.
00:14:38
Speaker
Which is kind of telling the primary reason why we had the mods was for some reason when we went to start playing I really wanted to play a shapeshifting druid and There's a polymorph tree Which I just assumed would be that and then I started looking into what like I could build towards and there was no direct Shapeshift there was like vanilla has add wings or add spider legs to your character
00:15:04
Speaker
or do like ranged attacks with tentacles that spawn, but it was more like being a jester type magic kind of thing with some nature elements to it. So it seemed like it was the least out of the vanilla trees, the least fully realized. And at least from my conception of what polymorphing would be. So.
00:15:30
Speaker
I suggested us play with the mod back, which I enjoyed, but it did also provide some limits that weren't necessarily the best for a full playthrough, especially with co-op.
00:15:42
Speaker
Are you talking about when the time is when the game would break? Because we'd fall upon a weird interaction? Yeah. There was a couple of those, but to be fair, the game's not perfect. I want to talk a little bit more about my gripes. The few gripes I have with the game, I guess toward the end. But yeah, we can blend it in too, because I did want to talk about actual combat.
00:16:07
Speaker
So it is turn-based. Whoever has the highest initiative essentially sets turn order for rounds. And like anything else, you have a certain number of action points to use for a given character. So you can move around and use your abilities, depending on how limited you are with your action points. Every ability has a range. You usually need line of sight.
00:16:33
Speaker
And this is where I was talking about blending in some of the complaints. There were times where it seemed like a clear shot from point A to point B, but you might have something in the way where it's not obvious and the game doesn't really tell you. So there were definitely some instances of that that caused some grief. But overall, there was also a submission. There were some instances of what almost seemed like desync for the multiplayer.
00:17:02
Speaker
portion to where you looked like you clicked something, it was highlighted on your screen, but for whatever reason, it was a ground shot instead. Yeah, that happened a lot too. Yeah, I shouldn't say a lot. It did happen though. You noticed that when it happened and it seemed fine most of the time, but those definitely stood out. Yeah.
00:17:20
Speaker
It stands out more it says the rest of the games pretty polished and how
Teamwork and Strategy in Combat
00:17:25
Speaker
combat interacts. Yeah, I really liked how we were able to Work together because usually when you have combat, it's not oh we're gonna stop them early game It's hey we have to synergize if I focus down on this guy Can you handle that guy and you're trying to limit down? Their players and actions the AI so you want to have like knockdowns and they're stunned so it takes a turn to get up, etc
00:17:50
Speaker
CCs are very powerful crowd control. But CC has to go through either physical or magical armor. And each ability will say like, hey, this is resisted by this. But every time I played the game, myself included, they'd always be like, oh, I'm going to steal their source point. Oh, they had full magic armor. That's on me. Yeah. That's 90% of the time I use that ability against a living opponent. Even though it's not a percent chance to succeed, it's just that they have magic armor.
00:18:22
Speaker
Do you guys like the combat of the game? I think.
00:18:26
Speaker
I think it's a pretty novel system. The only other system I've seen that uses armor like that was like Dragon Age Inquisition, where it would prevent CC as long as you still had armor. And it's definitely an interesting balancing aspect, because Justin was saying CC is incredibly strong. It's the difference between winning a fight and losing it in Divinity, for sure. Because if you get CC'd,
00:18:55
Speaker
As I was on the receiving end of plenty of times, it's just like, oh, you just got hit by like three things each round. You're not going to get a turn. You know, um, yeah, being frozen solid and then letting them shoot you kind of sucks. Wasn't that great? Which is why it's good to have other people on your team. Like, Hey, I'm frozen, but my turn's coming up. Could you unfreeze me, please? Fireball.
00:19:20
Speaker
We had some issues with conveyance on how to solve some of the debuffs. You needed to already have the thing that solved whatever CC that you were currently experiencing on your bar. The CC itself didn't usually tell you how to clear it. So in particular, knockdown, for some reason, we all thought that Bless would let you stand back up when really it's just rested. And I think there was one other mechanic that solved it for you. First aid picks you up.
00:19:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:54
Speaker
Oh, I was just going to say, yeah, a lot of it's like some of those interactions, though, are really at play. And there's there's a lot of interactions in the game. So I kind of understand why they can't give you like a. What I kind of wish this is minor improvement, I think, is like a button. Some some games do this. I think Diablo did this where it's like hold a button for detailed information about a skill that would be massive in Divinity, because sometimes that information is just would be really nice to know.
00:20:24
Speaker
And part of it is because we took so long between sessions, we may not remember how we handled a situation before with enough detail. So it's not completely on the game, but it's definitely it'd be nice to have those reminders when we came back to it. It's the reason why a lot of games recently have started putting the these buttons do these things in the top hand corner and you can turn that display on and off. That seems convenient.
00:20:53
Speaker
They could even like, I think do like a best of both worlds where you don't know that something cleanses until you see the interaction once. And they're like, Oh, I've now learned this. Yeah. I think that'd be cool to do it. But the point and click adventure of RPGs. Yeah. Rub cheese on me. See what happens.
00:21:11
Speaker
But we talked a little bit about how the CC could be overwhelming. And I think a big part of that is just because of the combo system, the surfaces, the air. It's trying to develop an emerging system out of elements, basically. Yeah. How do you guys feel about that? Because that's really one of the things that took D&D and other RPGs off and have a huge, wide, really diverse range of spells. And this one doesn't have
00:21:40
Speaker
quite that much, but a lot of interactions. How'd you guys feel about that? I thought I love it. It made some for some fun interactions. I think we made a door bleed at one point because of we put blood on it so that it could bleed.
00:21:55
Speaker
The door was not in combat, I want to point out. We just, we fuck up doors. There was one question in particular that caused us to kind of stretch what we were understanding from that system. The trees, the seasonal trees in the Druid area required
00:22:17
Speaker
to you have to essentially stack different area effects on top of each other to get other area effects. And we just didn't know we had some of those at our disposal at the time.
00:22:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Flaming air is pretty tough to get. Yeah. It's very situational because you're not usually in combat thinking I need flaming air, but it is nice as an option. So if you do have, I think it's just water. And if you light it up, you will get smoke.
00:22:49
Speaker
Mm-hmm. I think steam. Steam? What causes the smoke? Yeah, it was oil and fire. Oil and fire. Oil and fire, OK. But that would actually obscure vision. So if you did it next to somebody whose range, they're like, well, I'm kind of shit out of luck here. Yeah. Which was really amazing to do. Did we ever use it? No. We usually bit you when it happens. Yes. Yeah. Usually I'd be like, oh, I can't see through smoke. And everyone else is like, what's that?
00:23:14
Speaker
But it's just really cool the system like that exists in the same way if it's raining or if you move like a water barrel and then you throw ice on it, you can freeze it. And then anybody who walks over ice has a pretty high chance to just slip and fall, even if they do have armor.
00:23:30
Speaker
And then on top of that system, there is the cursed to blessed scale for all of at least most of the base element types, where if you kill an evil voidling on a surface, it will basically corrupt that surface and make bad things happen more. And if you bless it or something else caused blessed sometimes,
00:23:56
Speaker
It would make it good and usually heal you. And these also affected the enemies. Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah, it's a really intricate system that I don't know if we ever felt like we had a full grasp on it. I felt like we probably understood 85 percent of it. We usually could have abused it a lot. We usually forgot that we had a certain element beneath us because some of the texture overriding kind of got
00:24:26
Speaker
a little hard to read with all the visual clutter that could happen. Um, so we would just be like, Oh yeah, I'm going to walk here.
00:24:33
Speaker
and then slip on Cursed Ice, which was 100% change the fall. And while you're out of combat, the game was really good about trying to path around that stuff, but because of the limited walking in combat, it wanted you to path yourself better. If you wanted to get to a certain location on that turn, you better know that your straight line path is a safe one.
00:24:59
Speaker
Yeah. So like with oil, which is probably one of the more common ones, if you move through it, it'll slow you by 50%. So if you're clicking at max range for, I want to use all of my action points to move from point A to point B, but you move through oil. It's not going to show you and say, Hey, dumb, dumb. You're only going to go as this far. It's going to walk you there and be like, well, I'm being slowed and it's going to recalculate it. And then just be like, Oh, that was my turn.
00:25:25
Speaker
The slow is a status effect too. So that lasts like a turn or whatever. So if you just tap that oil, it's like, Oh, well, hope you weren't planning on going anywhere.
Modding and Game Mechanics Exploitation
00:25:35
Speaker
But that's why like relocation skills are really strong. So like, if somebody jumps on your shit, you can be like, I want no part of this. And you can kind of teleport away for usually an action point. So you can like reposition.
00:25:50
Speaker
There's an uncommon amount of relocation spells in the game. I think there's at least one per skill tree. And with the ability to cross spec, it was pretty cheap to get multiple ones when you needed them. Justin was jumping constantly. He didn't really contribute much in fights. He was just like, look what I can do. With really janky wolf flying animations. Oh, the T4 wolf made me smile.
00:26:15
Speaker
But that was actually vanilla. We thought it was like a stupid mod thing or it looked dumb at least. And then I was playing my single player and I saw the exact same animation. I was like, oh, I don't think the bear climbing the ladders in T pose was vanilla, though. It just ascends. I love it. Superiority thing. Yeah.
00:26:38
Speaker
No, it's it's pretty ridiculous what you can do. And like I said, I don't think we like really abused the elements a ton, but we did abuse some things, though. Yeah, like thieving.
00:26:51
Speaker
True. So normally if you if you're talking to an NPC outside of combat, essentially only one person is locked into dialogue. Everyone else can do whatever the fuck they want. So a lot of times, let's say I would talk to an NPC who is a merchant or NPC who had a cool item. Jake would use one of the characters to steal and then run off.
00:27:15
Speaker
Then the NPC after finishing dialogue would say like, hey, my shit's gone. Do you have it? And I would say, I don't have it. And then he'd go around to the other players asking. But before it got to the actual thief, Jake would send those items to somebody who he had already checked with. Yeah. Not just an example.
00:27:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think the other big example was if you started a story conversation with somebody that was going to end with causing combat, you could pre position the other characters that were not in that conversation. And also conversations stopped turn progression, even when out of combat, which means that your buffs that were applied to the character in conversation were just halted. So you can rebuff, wait for combat and then go in strong.
00:28:04
Speaker
There'll always be one person saying, hey, conversation's about to end. You'd hear like three casts and people go, I'm ready, as they start to listen to the conversation. It's like the hot fuzz scene where they're all like loading their guns repeatedly as they're approaching, cocking sounds over and over again. That was basically it. I actually think that's probably the most exploitable part of the game is the hard disconnect between characters that are in combat and characters that are out of combat.
00:28:30
Speaker
And some of the prep you can do there They solved it in some of the late game stuff when like we were changing zones very rapidly and it was immediately putting everybody into conversation But also a lot of it I think comes from us playing multiplayer I know Jake has a recent experience with playing as a single-player game and I don't know if it was as exploitable in that is that I
00:28:55
Speaker
I have a very exploitable example actually. So one of the things is high ground increases your range of your abilities dramatically. And there was a counter in the very last act of the game where I could just get up to a hill
00:29:12
Speaker
dump all of my two characters' action points, summoning things, doing damage, everything ridiculous. And then one of them would remain in combat. The other one would do tactical retreat, which is just jump like you're an anime character, really far away. And they would jump out of combat.
00:29:35
Speaker
the remaining one, use all their abilities, then I'd run the second one back into combat. And the way it works is when you join combat, you're at the end of the turn.
00:29:44
Speaker
And just with these two people, I could never let an enemy take a turn and just spam it out. Um, and it was actually like, yeah, now it took forever and I could have just beaten the enemies, but do you think you like the cheese and jank as an option or would you rather have like a very rigorous system?
00:30:08
Speaker
I mean, I think they could have just put some limits on it so that you still had a tactical advantage for preparing without having to get out of jail free card, basically.
00:30:19
Speaker
There were some combats that we had to rerun because of a straight party wipe that when we knew we were going into that combat and were prepared, it almost became too easy. So I don't necessarily know what the correct solution was, but it it could very easily jump back and forth from the play spectrum. I think in some cases.
00:30:43
Speaker
A lot of it is just do enable running away. Um, and if the answer is yes, then some of these are not going to be able to be fixed. I can see their option is like, you can never run away and they chase you until you're right. I'm back in town. I'm safe. I'm back in my house. Mom says you can't touch me.
00:31:05
Speaker
There was one modded buff I had that always cleansed itself when combat started, so I could never precast it. And that could be another approach you take. Just be like, hey, if you start combat, it's fresh. Yeah, it's going away. If they really wanted to balance it, but for the most part, like running the kind of like infinite turn exploit thing that I did, it took a while and it wasn't really necessary because you can optimize yourself to be very strong in divinity.
00:31:36
Speaker
It is fun to piece that together. Like I didn't really put any points into health. I put everything into how can I get damage on somebody? And then I also had a charm statue infused with a res scroll so that if I died, I would be revived immediately so I could still be in that combat. Day's reaction to getting that item
00:32:03
Speaker
and his reaction at the end of the game to that item were stark differences. So that res scroll thing comes from a spider bite quest that Dave was very excited for us to experience and determine which option we took. And he was like, I'm just going to do some weird options. He's like, why did I get a necklace that reses me? That doesn't seem good at all. And then he realized that he could refeed it with a res scroll for a single action point in combat. And he's like, well, I just can't die now.
00:32:32
Speaker
It's even better than that in two ways. It's not a necklace, so it doesn't take an equipment slot. You just keep it in your inventory and anyone could repair the res scroll.
00:32:42
Speaker
Maybe not in multiplayer. I think we tested that in multiplayer. You had to pass the item, I think, to be able to. In single player, anyone in your party can repair anyone's scroll. The initial thought was, oh, it's a one time use. This is your get out of jail free card. If you die, you'll come back. And he immediately died in the next combat after getting it, which really assaulted him. Yeah.
00:33:05
Speaker
I think there was like a couple Force PvP things. Is this the one you guys are talking about? That battle arena? It was a second battle arena. Another kind of buggy interaction.
00:33:17
Speaker
Dave and Justin were basically dueling here where I was like I'm not gonna fight or whatever so I'm standing in like the grandstands for this and For some reason the game allows me to just continually fire on them without joining combat So Dave and Justin and this it was against us a little bit sometimes, too We're stuck in combat whereas I was just up here spamming spells like killing Dave rapidly you killed Justin
00:33:42
Speaker
You told me as a bear, I'm chasing him down. I'm like, I just need one hit against Dave and I win. And I think you're you someone to pet on me, too. And it's just that they're whacking me the entire time or something. I laughed because I had bribed Jake weeks ahead of time. If it ever comes to it, I need you to be on my side. You'll be the sole survivor.
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah, that was that was probably the most frustrating bug, though, was just things being out of combat versus in combat, like the time I was standing in front of the fireball trap. And it's just like, guys, could you please pass your turns? Because this thing's just going to kill me in five seconds as I continually fireballs. Yeah, it's got a bit of jank, but it still makes up for it in other ways. I still love the combat overall. How about characters?
00:34:33
Speaker
They're all trash. OK. I liked Los. I played as the character that I picked was one of the story characters. So they had an option to make your own character, which was just basically based on your race. You got a storyline or picking one of their predefined characters, like one of the box art characters. The one that I picked was the.
00:34:58
Speaker
the mystic that was had multiple personalities and then the first thing that happens is that all of those personalities get silenced by a stronger personality and over the course of the game you figure out who this is and up to the very end of the game you're trying to chase down essentially a
00:35:21
Speaker
Eldreth horror that has been controlling stuff from behind the scenes. And the emotional payoff at the end, especially when I accidentally clicked her loot, because as a mystic, she was also a music player. And she just sat there for like a five minute rendition of her theme song singing with particle effects around was actually pretty cute.
00:35:43
Speaker
So I liked my character. I know that the NPC that we had tagged along, we kind of let her do her own thing. We didn't do that much of her story quests.
00:35:58
Speaker
Yeah. That's probably the big thing too. The story, the party member quests in this. If you played games like anything by BioWare, they have a whole lot of companion quests.
Character Depth and Storytelling
00:36:16
Speaker
That's kind of their thing. I think divinities are
00:36:18
Speaker
like on par or better than like some of the best stuff by where it's put out in that regard. Um, and just a lot of interconnecting pieces for each of these NPCs. So like, if you're not paying attention and you're not actually completing their quests, uh, that can come back to bite you later. There's no like easy makeup for things. Um,
00:36:42
Speaker
but they are really cool, really interesting. I probably played one of the slightly less interesting NPC in Binmezzed. And because it wasn't my character, I wasn't necessarily paying as much attention to his individual dialogue. Yeah. So I know it came off as that to me, but... I think it's true. I think it's basically true. Like, they all have something going on. There is kind of like...
00:37:08
Speaker
One downside to multiplayer is anybody who's a playable character is more or less silenced from a story perspective in a way. Like you can't interact with them and then have them respond back to you adversarily. We had some dialogue choices where there was voice acting to it. But when we had the NPC with us, she always got the final word, which that's right. And she'd cut my character off every time also, which was stupid.
00:37:39
Speaker
But yeah, if you're playing as that person, they can't have autonomy as an NPC, obviously, right? Yeah. It is cool, though, because you can kind of giraffe your party at the beginning of the game. So you obviously have we had our three people and we ended up picking up a fourth and killing the rest because we wanted to. Yeah, sociopaths, psychopaths.
00:38:05
Speaker
Yeah, both really. Murder, though. Yes. Yeah, it was just fun to see. Like, I still haven't seen probably three or four characters quest. I don't know if I necessarily care to, but it really goes throughout the entire game. It's not like, oh, it's act one. We got to put in one thing here for somebody. Yeah, it's like the whole time.
00:38:31
Speaker
Like each character is fully realized. Even the fucking animals throughout this game. Yeah. If you see a crab on a beach, that's not a crab on a beach. That's like a fucking sorcerer. That's in the form of a crab. He was the knight of honor. And because you killed this one thing at some point, he gave you his his shell as a legendary shield because you completed his goal from his little crab town out in the ocean.
00:39:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's what it's always to yeah all of the animals and it's adorable Yeah, and it's not just like oh, this is a squirrel voice. I'll be a human No, it's in like the form of what you imagine a squirrel would be hmm
00:39:18
Speaker
one of the animals that we talked to, well there was multiple skeleton cats and I was actually really upset with how we handled one situation. There was a little girl that was being imprisoned in the basement of a
00:39:36
Speaker
void research island and she had her cat, the cat ended up dying, but because of the strong source in the area, which is basically divinity is all encompassing magic magic. Yeah.
00:39:55
Speaker
the cat basically was protecting her and loyal through her death but the reason why the girl was imprisoned was that she was possessed by a demon and there's a lot of situations in the game where there's an external demon that is like manipulating internal so i'm like
00:40:16
Speaker
Is the cat actually the demon? And if we kill the cat, does it free the girl? It didn't. And I'm really sorry for killing the loyal cat. Yeah. Who are you apologizing to? Rachel.
00:40:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think something that screwed us over a little bit, we talked about like how murder hobo we were, if that's a term, is the game brings back a lot of NPCs for later acts, later chapters, and they'll have roles in the developing plot. And this is both a plus and a minus against it. The plus is that's really cool from a world building perspective. Consequences actually matter. Killing all the shopkeepers in one area might screw you over later.
00:41:03
Speaker
The negative was sometimes people just kind of came back anyways, even though we killed them and they should not come back, like, according to the universe's own, like, own structure and rules. And that never made any sense. So I don't think they really wanted us to go as Murderhope always they did, but for the most part, I think the game is on.
00:41:23
Speaker
I think it was mainly Alexander who refused to die throughout like three or four combats. It actually made sense in the universe once we learned about the source vampirism because the first time we killed him we didn't have source vampirism so he could have been resurrected because of other
00:41:43
Speaker
lore things. But then when we killed all of the people and sucked their source, and then they came back later, we're like, that doesn't work based on what you've told us up to this point. Being sucked of your source is supposed to be oblivion, like complete oblivious. We'll remove from dead body. Yeah, all those girls for immediately.
00:42:07
Speaker
Yeah, it struggled a little bit on that. Most of that, I think, came in in the last chapter, which Justin and I actually had a side conversation about this, actually. But I did a little bit of research on this as I was going through my single player. And I was like, some of this stuff seems kind of janky, like the frozen room, which I don't even have to give spoilers for. You guys immediately know what I'm talking about and how it can screw you over or softlock your game.
00:42:36
Speaker
And I found a Reddit thread that was just like, is it just me or is like this chapter really janky? And people were like, yeah, this is the worst. This is the worst part of it. Like they clearly didn't have time to finish a lot of this stuff. But when we were going through like the first two acts, they were solid, like very well done, but they almost felt like
00:42:58
Speaker
Again, part of it is how much you put in is how much you get out. We were we were trying to hit full map completion like we were essentially staying longer than our characters were motivated to stay there. And I think that that hindered my enjoyment somewhat of.
00:43:15
Speaker
how long we spent in some of those early acts. It was like, I don't care about this random farm that's being attacked because we're supposed to be villains. Why would we go save these people? But we would still go there and loot harvest everything because
00:43:31
Speaker
It's an RPG so we weren't playing our characters and I think the multiplayer affects that a lot too because there was the three of us and what we were all looking for out of the game. Dave was pretty much there as our chaperone I think. I would say more of like a sidekick because I had already played through the entire game with Mike a while back.
00:43:54
Speaker
So I had done my, I will follow the main character in their storyline. And so I know, remembered a lot of the interactions, forgot a decent amount, but I just wanted to let you guys experience it and I would just be along for the ride. Yeah, I know. I'm pretty breathtaking when I have these short tries.
00:44:16
Speaker
I mean, that's fair. I was also trying to defer to Justin a little bit more, although I hadn't played through most of the game.
Multiplayer Impact and Narrative Engagement
00:44:24
Speaker
You were actively working on a single-player playthrough, whereas I was pretty much leaving myself
00:44:31
Speaker
the Virgin for that run. Right. I mean, when I played through with Mike, we definitely did focus on a lot of the story more and then we'd talk about things as they happened. Like, oh, what do you think is happening here? And we play maybe a couple of times a week. So it grew and my investment for it was just through the roof at that point. So when you got to that late game, everything was impactful. Yeah.
00:45:02
Speaker
That really is it, I think. It's a game that builds on top of itself from a world building and character perspective. Like if they just dropped you into the last act and they're just like, here you go, here's some content. It'd get like a 70, I think, on Metacritic. People would be like, there's some cool combat systems here, but a lot of this doesn't make sense. But contextualized with everything else going on, that helps really carry you through the end.
00:45:28
Speaker
And I'm sure the internet can attack me all at once for this, but I don't think there's a lot in the same space. Like a lot of the games that we brought up were stuff like Neverwinter, the old Baldur's Gates, and stuff like that.
00:45:46
Speaker
this genre hasn't seen as many entrants into it. Like there are some long running series that kind of are around this genre, the Heroes of Might and Magic stuff, but that was there was even stuff that was
00:45:59
Speaker
A long time gap between those. What about like Pillars of Eternity or Dreadfire? I've heard about the resolution, but I haven't checked them out personally. Pillars is... I didn't beat Pillars. I love Obsidian, but sometimes they make kind of glitchy games. They always make kind of glitchy games.
00:46:18
Speaker
Then that kind of falls into the same category as this in some of our interactions that I know that it's a different level with some of that stuff. Because at least in this one, it felt like the mod was probably introducing a lot of stuff, which I know wasn't always the case based on your single-player playthrough discussion. But it was definitely easy to tell when the mod caused a crash rather than it being a vanilla thing that would have theoretically happened.
00:46:51
Speaker
I mean, I think we made a good point, though. There's not much else in this space that's still around. And, you know, like I said, didn't finish Pillars of Eternity. I did try to play this game like three times, probably before we got to this winning playthrough, where it really finally clicked with me. I think part of that's just like, these are slow games. Even when they're fast games, they're slow games.
00:47:18
Speaker
And so staying engaged can sometimes be tough.
00:47:23
Speaker
I think you talked about it a bit during some of the combat, where it almost felt like a D&D session, where if you were playing the straight fighter, it didn't matter what anyone else was doing. As long as there was still a target within range, you were going to do the same set of actions to kill it, basically. And the only time that... So you were essentially checked out during someone else's turn for a lot. And since you weren't making the decisions...
00:47:55
Speaker
Yeah, once you find something that works, it is hard to break out of that. Like for my stuff, it was pretty straightforward. A lot of times I would just shoot people from afar. Whereas Justin had summons upon summons. Jake had two turns and for a time, two characters. So there are a lot of times I would just attack something and then just kind of.
00:48:19
Speaker
mentally idle off for like a couple of minutes. Yeah. Go to second monitor, look up a YouTube. But it is out of the team comp. I wouldn't say that's an issue of the game itself. But maybe the approach.
00:48:35
Speaker
I think it's just a side effect of allowing as much crunch as the game does. Like you could easily compare this game to like Pathfinder or like 5th Division. There were no turn timers or anything like that and possibly having that as an option in multiplayer would have been good.
00:48:52
Speaker
Well, I know you can play with other people online. You can have straight up lobbies with complete pubs. And I would love for something like that. Like, oh, is this Tim AFK? Can we speed this shit along? Even if you lost the action, you could still have that progression throughout combat.
00:49:09
Speaker
Or if it's just white swing this thing because whatever. It had some really minor base action you could apply something, and we could have built the NPC around that instead of forcing it on one of us to control it. It mostly ended up being Jake. We put a lot on Jake. Jake, carry this. Jake, carry the game. Jake, do all of our vendor interactions for us.
00:49:35
Speaker
I was fine holding the money, but the NPC was probably a little bit too much. You can definitely optimize your characters to have like never ending turns. Not just like the exploit I mentioned earlier where you literally never end your turn, but there's just a lot you can do in combat and just like in D&D. If you haven't thought about what you're going to do in advance.
00:49:58
Speaker
take a while. But I don't think there's really a solution to that. I don't think that's a problem, per se. If that is a problem, then you should just be playing a different game. Yeah. I think it comes down to the party you have, really. Talk to each other like you're adults and say, hey, it's your turn. Can you please do this thing?
00:50:19
Speaker
So I wouldn't want to play it with pugs, is basically what I'm saying. Oh, definitely not. I agree. Like I said, I really like the strategy part with you guys. We're like, hey, who should we focus down and what should we do? Oh, this is on cooldown for two turn rotations. Do you have an option for knockdown? Could we have something defensive, et cetera, et cetera? Can you set me on fire? Well, I can set you on cursed fire. Does that melt ice? I don't want to melt cursed ice. What the fuck?
00:50:47
Speaker
That's definitely true, though, is like toward the end of the game, I made a pivot because most of the magic CC has to go through magic armor. But you guys were like exclusively dealing physical. I think they've literally had like chloroform as an anti magic armor ability, and that was it. And so I'm like, all right, I'm going to respect a lot of this stuff. We're going to get some of these like nature spells on here.
00:51:15
Speaker
And the only big magic nuke I still had was like Riptide, which was just literally caused the game to almost crash every time I cast it due to particle effects. But it was great in regards to removing buffs and debuffs from things too. So like there was added benefit besides just it doing crazy damage. Yeah, but everything else I went like physical so we could kind of just put all of our eggs in that basket. I know they've been sometimes.
00:51:43
Speaker
Yeah. Only, only sometimes it's pretty rare. We did a lot of physical damage to it until it died. Yeah.
Critique of Divinity's Plot and Ending
00:51:49
Speaker
It's very true. I want to tangent briefly off for the overall story, not necessarily specific character defined. What did you think of the overarching plot of the game?
00:52:04
Speaker
I think it was pretty strong. I think that I would have been a little more satisfied with it if some of the events at the end were portrayed a little bit more concisely or in a more satisfying manner, if that makes any sense, without going into exactly end of game spoilers.
00:52:29
Speaker
But as far as the actual plot and the development and like the, the sine waves of, you know, highs and lows and falling action, it hit the, this was a good story. Like I don't, I don't have any problems with it directly. The.
00:52:48
Speaker
It kept asking questions that it did provide answers to. Yeah. Um, which is both satisfying, but also didn't really, especially at the ending. I think it mostly comes down to how it left us is it didn't leave any questions for. Part three. Yeah. Especially with it, it kind of did the mass effect three color choice. A little bit. I did a little bit.
00:53:17
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I don't like necessarily having like a sweeping decision at the end for which ending do you want.
00:53:26
Speaker
I kind of wish they could make it a culmination of all of your sins. Maybe you did choose a good ending, but you were a shit person the entire game. Everybody raises their hand. Maybe that had some effect on it. I don't know. This town did fine. Yeah. Well, that's what's funny. I think the mass effect ending thing is a little bit apt. And if you come to the conclusion of your game and you're like, here's a binary choice,
00:53:54
Speaker
about how it's going to end. And nothing else you really did up to this point is going to impact that. We'll just we'll like throw you some like some concept art screens afterwards with like short voiceovers for what you actually did. That's kind of that's kind of less satisfying, I think. Yeah, I kind of chained them together. So I think that like a woven story, it's like, here's a card snippet.
00:54:20
Speaker
Exactly. It's like the fallout thing. It's like fallout, except sometimes fallouts pull that off, I think, a lot better than it was portrayed here. Also for how spaced out our game session was, I didn't remember half of the things we had done in the horrors committed along the way. Lots of deaths. Anything like that. Yeah. Well, we couldn't kill children.
00:54:46
Speaker
No, you'd attack them and they would save the children. Sonic run. Yeah. They were immune to combat, combat's entrancing effect that usually just freezes everybody till it's their turn. Kids are just like, nope, I'm out of here. Fucking passive first. Yeah. Then you get out of there.
00:55:11
Speaker
I think that the game was a little bit, it fulfills a lot of ambitions, but it has ambitions even higher than what it fulfilled. And that's probably the more disappointing thing at the end.
Character-Driven Narratives and Quest Freedom
00:55:22
Speaker
You can accumulate tags for like, oh, we got a villain tag because we kept eating innocent people, doing all this crazy psychopath stuff.
00:55:32
Speaker
But then Justin, I know your character also got a hero tag, so you could choose other people. But then by the time that you got to the end of the game, the game's just like, oh, well, you have the hero tag, so we'll have these people.
00:55:52
Speaker
Really like had priority over every other tag that you had basically you're like a scourge upon the land the walking calamity Yeah, but you saved the guy the one time so heroes welcome But I think that was just conflicting stuff like they could have had more nuance there if they had time I
00:56:15
Speaker
I liked that the universe existed, but I feel like it thought we cared a lot more about the universe than, like, I think its strength was the character stories, at least when we were actively pursuing those character stories, stuff like Malady and the individual character stories that we actually were personally involved in.
00:56:38
Speaker
and people that were like helping us that are like, you're kind of shitty, but I really need you to do this thing. So I'll help you. You are the protagonist, right? You're like, yeah, yeah. All right. OK. So where whereas the universe stuff we didn't because it was a binary choice option of how you solved it at the end, basically.
00:57:06
Speaker
It was fine. I think it was a good trapping device for getting there and it wasn't something I necessarily saw before. At least how they expressed it. But it was still kind of ended up in good versus evil. You decide. Yeah, the ending was not the strongest for that portion.
00:57:27
Speaker
But I did like having the options, at least early on in Fort Joy, of let's say you know you need to get a quest to get from point A to point B. You didn't necessarily have to solve it one specific way. Usually there's like, hey, you got to go through the guards. Maybe find a back entrance. Maybe find gloves of teleportation. And you abuse the fuck out of that. Lava's a thing. Lava's options is much less. Oh my god, lava. Yeah. Teleporting somebody into lava is an instant kill. Doesn't matter where you are.
00:57:57
Speaker
teleportation goes through magic armor for some reason but not if you're stone that's too heavy i don't know i i've always feel like i'm on the slightly defensive side just because i've played it twice and i've been so enamored with it i will definitely admit it has its faults
00:58:19
Speaker
a lot of like some of the jank interactions that we've talked about. But like I said, I'm just so in love with how detailed the world is. Because even if you're doing like a little dumb side quest, it somehow ties back into something. And the dialogue options you have for like seemingly random NPCs, I really love. Like fucking Sir Laura was in our party since day one. He is a squirrel riding an undead cat
00:58:48
Speaker
And he speaks like a chivalrous night throughout. And he speaks down to you. And like on his shield. And even as like you're playing through the game and you have dialogue options for either main story quest or side options, there is some really funny options. Like we just be like watching like Justin talking to somebody like, oh, that's pretty good. We should pick that one. Yeah. It's just really, really good jobs of writing.
00:59:17
Speaker
This is what the witty sociopath would say. So we should pick that one. Things I wouldn't expect in like a mainstream game for dialogue options, at least. The writing is straight up amazing. I think it surpasses the writing of like any of the top studios I'm following right now. The narration is also like the way that the narrator read a lot of the lines and the voice dialogue was also very good.
00:59:45
Speaker
Oh yeah. I think there's only like one point in the game where I had like a moment where someone switched voices like in the middle of their like lines because of a bug. And I think, so correct me if I'm wrong, Dave, but at one point they went back and they just redid voice lines for like a large portion of the game to improve the quality.
01:00:03
Speaker
there was a point after the initial game release where they went back and either redid or added like 100,000 to 150,000 voice lines. And it wasn't DLC. They're just like, yeah, exactly. So that gets huge points in my book. They've treated it like it's a game as a service and it's like a single to co-op
01:00:28
Speaker
RPG. But they've really been putting a lot of effort into it over the years. I was going to say real quick, it has a 93 on Metacritic. So like, even though we have this kind of criticism going on here, it's because the game was so good.
01:00:47
Speaker
that it made the lows, I think, stand out a little bit. Part of that is the people who would enjoy the game know they're going to enjoy the game before going in.
RPG Genre and Player Base
01:00:59
Speaker
If you're not somebody who is interested in RPGs, especially stuff like D&D and stuff like that, you pretty much know you're not going to necessarily care about this. I think it's good enough to potentially entice somebody into that space,
01:01:17
Speaker
someone that just plays video games for sports or FPS is probably not going to find the enjoyment in this game. And I think they didn't try making it that mainstream. Like they still left the chunkiness in there that brings people that enjoy this space out.
01:01:38
Speaker
Yeah, it is easier to get into than D&D though. I will say that as someone who runs. In that I played this and I stopped playing D&D. I liked the RPG itch. Itches. I don't know. For me, it's like a nice physical manifestation for an RPG world or something. It's D&D-esque without having to sit through and interact with as many other people. I don't know. People are the worst.
01:02:07
Speaker
I'm not as imaginative as I would like to think I am. No, I get that. I mean, sometimes having the game in front of you is all it takes. And it's hard to, like, overstate how important that can be. Divinity has all of that and more. So anyways, like, what? Four out of ten? Something like that? What are you guys thinking? I give it a solid.
01:02:34
Speaker
Nice. I give it a one solid roof. Giffy Moms, choose Jeff. Any closing thoughts you guys thinking of for
Anticipation for Baldur's Gate 3
01:02:49
Speaker
this one? In the same space, the developers from this, Larian, has that ever down said? Larian Studios.
01:02:57
Speaker
close to releasing Baldur's Gate 3. I'm terrible at keeping up with any of that stuff this year. I think it is coming out this year. I've seen them do some brief dev demos with one of the
01:03:17
Speaker
producers, and it looks good. It seems like it's going to fit into this space, but it's not going to be as action pointy. It's going to be more so D&D as far as actions from what I've seen. Yeah, they won't use like the action pips where you have between like four and six. It'll be the action bonus action stuff. So the release date is still slated as August 2020. So ranging between the past to any point within the next week or so when you listen to this.
01:03:46
Speaker
big squints on that, but I am looking forward to it. Yeah, that's kind of sketch. If it hasn't been locked down to a day the month of the announced release, then I don't know what's going on. But do you see them continuing the divinity line, I guess, since they are they're taking over the reins of a pre-established franchise that has been backburnered for quite a while? Do you see them touching their
01:04:11
Speaker
their child, basically. Right. Hopefully not. Well, weird ways. As much like Dave. This is not likely to happen. No, I mean, I hope that they're not splitting their effort, but it's going to come down, I think, to probably how successful Baldur's Gate is. 100% agree. If Baldur's Gate 3 kicks ass, Divinity is probably going to take a backseat or vice versa.
01:04:36
Speaker
It's going to like Larian's provided so much inertia to their hype as far as like the isometric RPG classic space that I think Baldur's Gate is going to get a lot of sales as long as like the early reviews aren't ripping it apart, which would surprise me greatly. And Wizards of the Coast has to be happy to have like some good games coming out from their IPs. So I don't know.
01:05:07
Speaker
I think it's a pretty big opportunity for them. It makes a lot of sense.
01:05:10
Speaker
Jake, what about you? Answer your own question of any closing thoughts on this? Any closing thoughts? I'll probably play Baldur's Gate. I'm a fan. I'm a fan of the D&D space, as people know. Oh, I'm in on divinity. I thought your question was for divinity. Yeah, I'm just saying. It's a closing thought for the... Yeah, my closing thought is I think it's a superb game and if...
01:05:39
Speaker
I mean, this isn't really the time to play if you're waiting for Baldur's Gate, because you'll get to the start of the first act. It took like 20 plus hours to get through the first act, so yeah.
01:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, but I'm hoping that some of the improvements, I mean, like the writing I have full faith is going to carry over. The engine already proves it can do everything they need to do. So as long as they can convert those core systems into like fifth edition, I think there's a lot of potential. And then actually, to be honest, I feel like the turns could be faster.
01:06:20
Speaker
in Baldur's Gate 3, because there's just fewer things you can do every turn with an action and a bonus action. So that thing that we spent time harping about how we're just like, oh, we'll like AFK or do whatever. It might have fixed it. So we'll see. But I'm looking forward to it.
01:06:40
Speaker
Dave, do you have any final thoughts for the game of Divinity 2 Original Sin Definitive Edition? You didn't like this game originally, right? Like I said, I've been mentioning it almost, I think it's like once or twice a month, it probably comes up in an episode. Because I can always tie it back to like, well, Divinity does a good job of this.
01:07:01
Speaker
I really love it. I love it a lot. Definitely has some jank issues, but it was nice to get drawn into a game. For me, other games that really did that well were when I first played Bioshock or Bioshock Infinite or Deus Ex, Human Revolution. Those for me were like game changers. I'm like, oh, I've never experienced anything that's detailed in this space. They did a great job of it. I'm into this world. I care what happens. And then it was fun mechanically.
01:07:32
Speaker
So it makes me want to push through and keep playing it. So if they do more things like that, also hype for Baldur's Gate 3 a lot. Yeah, actually, I realized that this was the perfect time to stop. But you mentioned something that made me think of something I want to say earlier is like for Deus Ex, the choices in an immersive sim that you have, that's one of the biggest things in Divinity. Like that's one of the things that carried me through all this is just like the
01:08:01
Speaker
number of ways you can screw everything up slash fix everything is so much fun. It's not even just like persuasion checks. It's sometimes you can just say something dumb and wrong and they're like, I hate you. And you're like, okay, we'll fight. It's fun. I love those dialogues as that was me.
01:08:22
Speaker
I was not persuasive. Justin was persuasive. Jake handled the money. I was there and I identified objects. Well, thank you to everyone listening. Thank you to Justin. Thanks for having me.
01:08:41
Speaker
You poor fool coming back and recording the episode with us. As always, people can send in their feedback or thoughts for new episodes to our Gmail at substonepodcastatgmail.com. Or you could join the discussion on the social media website Facebook, for some reason, at facebook.com slash substonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night. Have a good one, guys.