Hello everyone I just finished having a great time with D2:DKS, thought I'd pop on over to the forums see if anyone was talking about anything interesting and I see there's a User Reviews - Customer Feedback thread that mods are copying new threads into... so maybe I'll hop on that?!?
Let me start off by saying I'm a pretty old school rpg'er at heart. Baulder's Gate (PC), Planescape (PC), Final Fantasy III (SNES), Sword of Mana (SNES), Evermore (SNES), just a small sample of my favorites.
Moving on,
I do have the original Divine Divinity for the PC and it has been so long I honestly can’t remember much about it, I remember when D2 was originally released and I was just kind of in a fantasy game funk... I blame anything Lord of the Rings related. Finally however I saw DKS and plunged in head first, telling myself I wasn't going to expect anything just try the game to have fun with it.
Around sixty hours later I've completed both games in DKS and I couldn't have been happier.
Game play wise it took me a bit to get comfortable. It did feel weird that some things are by default unbound, like target lock/cycle and target unlock. Those two for example are 100% necessary to playing a Ranger so you don’t have to constantly move the camera, just change targets. Also I turned off the crosshairs; it just got annoying seeing it on my characters head all the time. On the plus side of things once I got my settings how I liked them it felt great. The jumping mechanics felt good and I love the use of actual jumping puzzles, but didn’t feel like it was over done, which can get really old fast. I especially liked how your character at a certain point becomes able to jump further, I would of liked to see more of this as you gain in power but as is it was still fun.
After about 5 hours into a Ranger I realized I had made some pretty big mistakes and started over really making sure to focus hard on Exploration and only using skills that benefit my class and also really exploiting my ability to read minds. It took me a little bit but once I got my teeth cut I really got sucked into the world, its people, the comedy, and tragedy of the story.
Graphically I was a little worried when I picked the game up, I have a budget system that is already 5+ years old and my video card is actually under recommended specs, but I have two of them in SLI. While the game doesn’t seem to openly shout that it supports SLI, I still seem to get a good boost from the second card, while I didn’t run the game on max settings - mostly medium - I thought it looked great and ran at a great frame rate. Loved the cut scenes, armor design, and the atmospheric effects like heat!
Even with the ability to re-spec your character I feel like playing as the three different classes definitely warrants another play thru, after a nice break I just might start up a Mage or a Warrior.
Probably the best part of DKS (besides the armor graphics!) has to be the story and voice acting. It was just great to have so much spoken or narrated with a good, or in some spots, a great performance. I could write way too much about the story and acting but I'm already going a little long winded but just to reiterate, it's great. While I could potentially really see a big complaint with the original ending to Divinity 2, but having Flames of Vengence built into DKS makes that a non-point.
All in all I've really enjoyed my time with DKS and it felt like a great Action Role Playing Game with beautiful graphics, decent to good controls, great level design (lots of fun exploring and hidden items) and most importantly fantastic voice acting and a well written story.
Thank you so much,
Logan
P.S. Going to start looking for my Divine Divinity CDs.
Last edited by Hall0559; 07/01/11 06:23 PM. Reason: Bad Grammar.
