IGN declares Divinity: Original Sin Feels Like A Modern Baldur's Gate. Really?
JuliusBorisov
Member, Administrator, Moderator, Developer Posts: 22,722
http://me.ign.com/en/feature/21247/divinity-original-sin-feels-like-a-modern-baldur-s-gate?mobile=1
To me, this is a rather audacious statement. Of course, another RPG that is somehow relevant to those who admire BG is a plus but still I can't say Divinity:OS looks like a modern BG to me from watching that video.
I'd like to know what others think.
Here's the official site: http://www.divinityoriginalsin.com/ and a wiki page: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinity:_Original_Sin
Personally, I'm waiting for the Pillars of Eternity and from what I've seen about this game it seems to be (feel) really like BG.
To me, this is a rather audacious statement. Of course, another RPG that is somehow relevant to those who admire BG is a plus but still I can't say Divinity:OS looks like a modern BG to me from watching that video.
I'd like to know what others think.
Here's the official site: http://www.divinityoriginalsin.com/ and a wiki page: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinity:_Original_Sin
Personally, I'm waiting for the Pillars of Eternity and from what I've seen about this game it seems to be (feel) really like BG.
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Comments
I am not sure if I like the option to roleplay within your party. I mean it's nice for custom characters and multiplayer, but I'd prefer Aerie, Minsc etc to have their own distinct and compelling personalities and respond to a Charname's actions and conversation choices, rather than allowing me to essentially choose their responses. I mean roleplaying a romance in that sense would feel... creepy.
Graphically it does look aright, kinda like Diablo, and the magic system sounds pretty interesting. My favourite part was probably how NPCs react to your actions, and how perception and charm/intimidate works. It seems like a more sophisticated implementation of just Charisma+Reputation reaction rolls.
It's IGN what do you expect? They probably think Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights are the same thing. Very likely they only even know what BG is because it's the greatest RPG of all time and they would get nerdlynched if they didn't.
What it reminds me of most is Dungeon Siege, not Baldur's Gate. I don't think it looked like the roleplaying system was deep enough to call it a BG clone. As @Heindrich said, choosing the responses of your own party members is a bit of a turn-off. The guy in the video did say they designed that with multi-player in mind, though.
I think I will still enjoy playing it, just to focus on developing my own character as the party leader and playing it like Dungeon Siege, as more of an action hack-and-slash loot game with some minor roleplaying added in.
I only watched enough of the beginning of the video to get the idea what the game is going to be. I thought that if that was the actual first chapter content being shown, that it was getting way too spoilery for my taste - I didn't want to watch somebody play through so much content before having a chance to play it myself.
Pillars of Eternity (aka Project Eternity) is the modern Baldur's Gate.
Though Divinity: Original Sin has a toolset and it's in full 3D.
It looks like fun, though. I'll check it out before saying anything bad about it.
No i dont think so. I looked at the screenshots from their page and the style is very rich in art.. their own style i mean. So whenever someone makes a "cartoony" look-a-like game (which is not bad btw) you will have a hard time trying to clone that somehow. From a technical point of view it should be the ordinary workflow involved as always.
It´s much easier to create anything for a game that focuses on photorealistic textures cuz of the millions of google images you can collect and just modify them...
Well, did they talked about an editor already?
But in all honesty, it's a huge business, and the fact is a lot of "reviews" are bought and paid for.
IGN isn't alone on this.
The problem isn't that reviews are bought, the problem is that the larger gaming "journalism" sites a staffed by and large by people who wanted to be IN the gaming industry but for whatever reason failed to make it. A lot of these "journalists" are in reality gaming fanboys who were and are Bloggers (not journalists) and have no journalism degree.
This results in the current situation where a good part of the gaming "press" forget that they are supposed to be press and get a little, shall we say, over-enthusiastic about things and thus do not come across as professionals (because they aren't lol).
This gives the very unfortunate impression that reviews are bought and paid for, which isn't entirely accurate.
That isn't to say that publishers don't employ sleazy and appalling tactics (like Jim Sterling being blacklisted by Capcom? Or was it SquareEnix? for a bad review) to force the "journalist" to "play ball" with them.
The gaming press is simply too friendly to the gaming industry to properly do it's job. And we the consumers of gaming news do not punish the gaming press for doing this by frequenting the sites that make a point of being more professional (The Escapist, Polygon, Destructoid) and not frequenting the appalling ones like IGN.
For a good comparison look at these different reviews:
http://www.ign.com/videos/2014/02/24/thief-review
and
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/video-game-reviews/10658395/Thief-review.html
While IGN's review is totally fine, the Telegraph review is FAR better IMHO. This is the sort of reviews I want. People who have a deep knowledge and in-depth critical view on the object. It kind of reminds me how some in-depth book reviews are in good newspapers - I want more book-reviewer types to review games!
http://www.ihatemmorpgs.com/
That dude has balls and is always spot on. He mostly destroys MMO´s but give his site a try when you really want to know how messed up the game industy is in the MMO sector. And dont miss the gamer types he describes without mercy and how ugly the truth really is. You dont need to be polite where no reason is to hold back the right terms.
About IGN, i like them. They host the NWvault... their reviews... i never cared. My own oppinion is what matters to me! But usually i visit metacritics and only read the negative ones. There you find what is boring, repetitive, the bugs and and and. Fanboys are like groupies of bands i dont like and i dont care about shiny happy people reviews...
But it´s no surprise that most gaming site reviews differ alot from the user written ones who have nothing to lose. The honesty is clearly left out in most cases for the benefit of whatever reason...
A backup of the whole NWvault was downloaded... can you imagine how many pages...???
Really credits to maximus there on IGN. He is a cool guy!