Divinity II: Developer's Cut - 3/20 hours

It's easy, sometimes, to be dismissive about the role of presentation in making a good video game. "Graphics are superficial" and "the only thing that matters is gameplay," and all that. But playing Divinity II so soon after the other Divinity games really puts those arguments into perspective. Seeing a 3-D animation of an airship floating into a dock did more to connect me to the setting and characters than any amount of text boxes. Being able to see the buildings from ground level and distinguish their unique architectural details at a glance has made navigating immensely easier. Hell, the relatively good voice acting of the NPCs has actually made me care about what they say.

Which isn't to say that Divinity II is necessarily great at presentation. It's still too early for me to say, given that I'm still in the starting town and have not seen anything but the typical faux-western-European fantasy pastiche that usually dominates rpg settings. I mean, Two Worlds did the same basic setting and looked almost as good (with the caveat that its voice acting and character design were much worse). I'd say that it looks about as good as an early Xbox 360 game. It's a little better than Oblivion, but not quite as good as Skyrim. It likely comes down to a budget thing. All of the graphics are crisp and clear, and it does some interesting things with trees and terrain, but you don't get that sense of obsessive attention to detail.

Divinity II isn't really all that much like its predecessors. The over-the-shoulder perspective is more personal than the god's eye view of the 2D games. Distant areas are obscured by terrain and obstacles, rather than fog-of-war, making it feel more open and expansive. And combat feels more like action and less like a series of abstracted dice rolls. And it's not like the Fallout series, which had a distinctive post-apocalyptic by way of the perpetual '50s aesthetic to give it identity. I actually don't have much handle at all on what makes these games part of the same series. There are a couple of familiar place names from the first game, but in the second, I never even interacted with the real world at all. Perhaps that's why this is game is the numbered sequel, despite Beyond Divinity being the second game in the series.

Nonetheless, I'm enjoying Divinity II quite a bit. The pacing of quests is much better (in that I'm only three hours in and I've already completed some!), the NPCs are more distinct and memorable, and your character's "gimmick" (being an elite mystical dragon-slayer) gives them neat abilities like being able to see ghosts and read minds. My only real complaint is that the mind-reading costs experience points to use. Every time I've read an NPCs mind, it's been fun and flavorful, but expending a permanent resource for a temporary benefit (let alone otherwise irrelevant setting color) just doesn't sit well with me. My hope is that the xp I earn from monsters will start to scale so high that the xp I lose from mind-reading will be trivial by comparison.

I guess what I'll do is keep plugging away. As long as the quests and the rewards keep coming at a satisfying pace, it doesn't really matter if I do things optimally or not.