It might be the first time I’d ever mention “trying too hard” as a bad thing, but whoever wrote the dialogue for random NPCs inthis game should have been told he wasn’t being tested for writing Shakespearean plays. The writing is complex and flowery and sometimes even follows complex rhymes, but when the context is “Villager A talks about nothing of consequence” it feels like a lot of wasted effort, and a lot of wasted time on the part of the reader, too.
In any case, I was really pumped up for this game, but besides misguided writing, all it offered me was a trite excuse for a story and game-play that I figured how to break in a few hours: all I had to do was pump everyone with stun skills and have all of my enemies in all of my subsequent encounters perpetually stun locked. I might have ruined the game for myself that way, but before long it started feeling so repetitive I couldn’t bring myself to continue. Especially since there was nothing compelling in the narrative or anything else to keep me going, not to mention the game moved at a pace of a crippled snail.
| Positive: | Negative: |
| Some dialogue is actually pretty impressive on writing level | Overwritten, needlessly cumbersome dialogue |
| Fun and complex character customization | Boring characters |
| Challenging and fun game-play, as long as you don’t break it | Incredibly slow pace |
| Dull, generic story | |
| Game-play is easy to break | |
| Navigating trapped areas is a major pain in the ass |
Visual novel & other stuff impressions 
Did you play the original or Enhanced Edition?
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I played the Enhanced Edition.
I thought I’d love the game at first, but it kinda fell apart later, probably because I ended up breaking the system with four semi-mages. xD
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Well, Larian was never good at actual gamedesign. But they improved A LOT since their earlier projects.
A pity, really. There were times when I didn’t need to game to make sense as long as I’m hooked on it by the story or exploration. I’m glad I experienced Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity then, since they have amazing storylines and interesting worlds to explore, but quite unplayable nowadays.
As for other flaws of DOS you pointed out. Specifically, regarding the dialogues.
As I see it, the worlds of Divinity were never a legitimate settings, they are more like incomprehensible fairy-tale worlds in the same sense that Wonderland is.
You still get a serious story (it’s not as good in OS as previous games, I agree), but the point is making a world where anything could happen and you don’t actually know what to expect out of it.
So I don’t think that peasants talking like they are Shakespearean characters are something that is out of place here. Things like that I find one of, if not the main, charms of the series.
But I never liked classic fantasy. In my opinion, most of it is flawed exactly because they try to follow some ultimate formula that hasn’t changed much since Tolkien. There are all those rules: peasants should talk like that; Magic doesn’t work that way and so on. Trying to limit a FANTASY world with logical rules is what makes them boring. Or at least the fact that every fantasy for some reason thinks that it’s the only right way to do it, sacrificing so much potential for originality.
Divinity doesn’t. That makes it a mess of a fantasy, but that’s its main selling point.
And I can say the same about the story. Yes, it’s cliched prophecy thing and doesn’t have much in character department (though I found some of their stories to be quite interesting), but it successfully provides you with a path for a journey you can’t quite experience anywhere else.
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Well, if anything, I appreciate writing that has effort put into it. The problem I found with random characters being overwritten is that every single dialogue with them takes forever to conclude (they use twenty sentences to tell something that barely warrants one). At one time I just felt like I was wasting my time, and started skipping the damn conversations altogether.
Like, Pillars of Eternity has complicated and long-winded dialogue as well, but it’s always about something relevant and thus interesting.
Anyway, I was really disappointed with this game since it seemed so close to becoming something great, and yet didn’t do it for me. 😦
And I liked Divine Divinity too, played it just when it came out. 😉
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