My main complaint with Divine Divinity is that saving or loading a game takes a surprisingly long amount of time. I'd have thought that a fifteen year old game like this would have been lightning-quick about it. It makes me wonder what it was like to play the game back when it was new. If it takes 25 seconds to load a game on a 2015 computer, did it take several minutes to load on a 2002 computer? And did you have to go through that every time you died?
Because 25 seconds isn't that bad in isolation, but when you have to do it three times in ten minutes, it starts to add up. Which is to say that, even on easy mode, this game is kind of tough.
I think it comes as a consequence of two different factors - the first is that there does not appear to be significant level-gating. Once I left the safety of the starting town, it became all too easy to wander into an area where the enemies were too powerful for me. The first warning about such areas tends to be me dying and having to reload. The second issue is that your fights do not seem to be designed encounters.
In other words, sometimes you'll be wandering through orc country and you'll come across an orc. As a single foe, they're barely worth worrying about. But in maybe one out of every three encounters or so, it won't just be that single orc. As you're fighting the first one, a bunch of additional ones keep wandering out of the fog of war. Before you know it, you're fighting a half-dozen or more, complete with elites, archers, and the occasional spellcaster. It's rare that such a nasty surprise has failed to kill me.
My guess is that it's reflective of a particular design philosophy, one where the world is not necessarily designed with the player in mind. So the orcs ae wherever the orcs are, and you can either fight them or learn to accept it. Issues like line-of-sight and attracting aggro aren't even considerations, because you're not really having an encounter, you're making a discovery.
There are advantages to doing things this way. The world itself feels a tinier bit more real. The enemies aren't merely a challenge to be overcome, but participants in the world, with their own needs and agendas. You can't assume that just because something exists, the hero is going to find it, loot it, or make it their own.
The downside is that the player doesn't get to see it if they're dead, and if the player never sees it, then including it is kind of a waste of time. I guess the hope is that the player manages to successfully navigate the level curve with no help, and then admires your craftsmanship at the appropriate time.
I'm not quite there yet. The game is fun enough that I might stick around long enough to get there, but in the meantime, I once accidentally walked into a cave with a hostile Troll King I could barely hit, and repeatedly found myself near an orc encampments that ate me alive. So far, in all but one occasion, I've managed to survive, but always at a terrible cost in potions.
I wish there were a better story to keep me going. So far, I've learned that I'm something called a "marked one," and that there are forces at work that want to either kill me (as represented by John the Dragon Rider) or protect me (Zandalor the wizard, though I could not tell you a second thing about him). And I know that I am usually pretty useless in following these kind of stories, but in this case, there's nothing to worry about because this is literally all I know. In order to unlock more of the plot, I have to help the military defeat a bunch of orcs, even though, as I already said, they manage to eat me alive nearly every single time.
I think I'm going to make a conscious decision not to pursue Divine Divinity's plot any farther than I have to. At the rate things are going, it would take me forever to get to the end, and I'd rather just use my remaining ten hours to hang out and bop level-appropriate monsters on the head.
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