newtmonkey wrote on 2026-01-09, 14:25:

Who thinks this is fun or interesting?

Yeah not me. I loved 'Divinity II Ego Draconis' but haven't been able to get into a Larian game since. BG3 had me hooked initially but lost me at some point, I need to try that one again.

Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition
I finally got through that annoying desert area, and now I'm back to curb stomping every single encounter. It's unbelievable how powerful summons are, as even low-level summons seem to upgrade based on your level. You can have one summon on the field per character, and it's very easy to get a summon skill on each character (one skill point in almost any magic school is enough). Enemies will generally ignore you to focus on your summons, and they are resilient enough that you can simply re-summon them once they get killed.

That sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm not. I like when an RPG has a bunch of options available to you, even broken ones. It can be fun to slowly figure out what works and slowly master a game; indeed, that's one of the greatest things about RPGs.

I've sort of warmed on this one. It increasingly provides you tools to take on battles that are above your level and, after the first 10 hours or so anyway, you can often just skip tough encounters if you don't want to figure them out, and come back later. It's kind of addictive running around trying to find encounters around your level, and marking down tough battles for later on your map. Having said that, this is definitely not what I look for in an RPG. I'd rather have an actual open world containing areas of fixed difficulty with random encounters like the classics (the better Ultima and Might & Magic games, for instance), than this weird metagame stuff of fixed encounters of enemies just sitting around for eternity waiting for you to hoover up their XPs so you can find the next group of enemies to kill.

The story is also boring, and the writing is some of the worst I've yet encountered; maybe even worse than the ironic hipster trash of The Outer Worlds or the total nonsense of Torment: Tides of Numenera. Even skimming this garbage is a pain in the ass.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Legacy of the Forge DLC

This DLC has been a pleasant surprise. Only once so far have I need to forge something. Restoring the forge requires money, prestige, and happens instantly. You basically make your choices from dialog boxes. For example, a roof that is beyond your current prestige is greyed out. Choose from the available options. As you progress in the DLC, your prestige grows and more options become available.

I have recently joined the blacksmith guild and to gain prestige, you take quests from the various guild masters. Right now I am retrieving stolen documents from some bandits. You could sneak in their camp at night and steal them; you could sneak in and poison their wine and wait for them to die; you could charge in with sword drawn; or you could try to pick them off with a bow from a distance.

I chose to start with a surprise bow attack and try to take as many out as I could before they attacked. I was quickly surrounded and killed. I tried variations of this attack over the course of an hour or so. I'm so terrible at real-time combat that I will often accidentally hit the Windows key while going for CTRL, which gets my screen into a state where the enemies are beating me to a pulp while I'm helplessly trying to gain back focus of the game screen. Anyway, I noticed that if they see which direction the arrow came from, all five bandits tend to run towards me. If they *don't* see where the arrow came from, they tend to split up and search. So I'd fire and try to hit a sitting bandit, then immediately turn and run in a random direction that had lots of foliage between me and them. Eventually, I worked it out that only two bandits ended up in my direction and spotting me. I was able to fire an arrow into each before they got into melee range, which made the two-on-one combat easier. Plus, Mutt helps by distracting them. I took these two down and immediately saved the game. Then, it wasn't much harder to come across the other three searching for me and sneak another arrow or two their way. It still was tough defeating them in melee once they closed the distance, but I finally managed.

After retrieving the documents from their chest, I noticed their horse was very high level. I'd never tried stealing and selling a horse before in KCD I or II, so I thought why not. I searched the map for a horse trader, rode the horse there, but it was night by the time I got there. So I left the horse near a trough and found a place to sleep. Before I could even get to my bed, I saw the horse run off, gone, gone, gone. 😐

So, I abandoned that idea and am now about to return to the guild master to give him the stolen documents back.