Video Gamers Podcast - Deep Diving Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Gaming duo Godwoken Paul and Voidwoken Josh are back, and this week we’re breaking down Divinity: Original Sin 2, one of the top RPG’s OF ALL TIME… that’s right, we said it in all caps. Don’t let the long name fool you, this masterpiece of gaming has just about everything you could want, and we’re here to break down everything that puts this into the gaming elite. Don’t miss this one! Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Instagram Subscribe on YouTube Visit us on the web Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, this is Josh with the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. Man, this intro is lame, guys. I'm gonna do my own. Hey guys, it's Josh. Listen, Paul and Todd, they're just not competition anymore. And honestly, they're immune to my trolling at this point, so I need your help. Head over to MultiplayerSquad.com, sign up for our Patreon, and come hang out with us. You get access to our exclusive Discord server, where we have an incredible community of gamers just like you and me. We've got memes galore! Plus, you can help me troll Paul and Todd on a regular basis. More importantly, you'll help support the show

and allow us to continue to provide amazing content twice a week. What's not to love? What? Hurry up. We're about to start the show. Okay, guys, do it. MultiplayerSquad.com. Go now.

Before the show starts. Hurry. Ah, it's starting! Royal lizards, talking crabs, playing hide and seek with young children. This game has everything, and that's literally just the couple first hours. Today we are talking about Divinity Original Sin 2, which moving forward, I'm just going to call Divinity for simplicity's sake. Hello and welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. On the pod today, we are going to break down one of the most famous RPGs of the last several years. We're going to talk about the characters, the story, the combat, funny moments,

and so much more. After that, we'll read some of our favorite reviews left by the combat, funny moments, and so much more. After that, we'll read some of our favorite reviews left by the community, play Make Love, Marry, or Murder, and then we'll finish up the show as always by ranking it on our leaderboard. But as always, we need some introductions. I am your host, Paul, the God Woken, champion of the seven gods and renowned sorcerer. And joining me, the Voidwoken, serving the God-King himself, bringing corruption everywhere he goes, it's Josh. I was gonna say, when you claimed Godwoken there, I was upset, but then you went and totally redeemed yourself, Paul.

Yeah, I'll give you the other side, the yang to the yang, right? There you go. Yeah. Alright, well, before we jump into Divinity today, we did want to give a shout-out to the uh the other side the the yang to the yang right there you go yeah all right well before we jump into divinity today we did want to give a shout out to some of our new patreon supporters we've had a couple of new ones lately so we definitely want to give a shout out to digital devil he's been posting a little bit on discord lately he's pumped for outriders yeah we're pumped for outriders oh yeah Hopefully we can team up with him

a bit. And he's also a big Heroes of the Storm fan. I think he loses us a little bit there, but it was a good try. It was a good try. Yeah. We're on board with Outriders. Let's just leave it at that. And then we've got SpaceGhostJoe, and they pledged on Patreon. They are not on Discord yet, but were you a Space Ghost fan, Josh? Dude, I loved Space Ghost for a while, so when I saw his username, I was like, I like this guy already, man. And then I understand you've got a couple of reviews that people have left about the podcast? I do. We are three reviews away from 200 reviews. And so to celebrate, I'm going to read three reviews tonight. All right.

And then that way, maybe, you know, that'll get our lurkers. We know you're out there. Just go and leave us a review. You know, we're so close. And then, as promised, we're going to read the review on the show word for word. So if you want to declare your grandma's cookie recipe to the world, you can do that. We're seeing a lot of emojis in the reviews lately. That seems to be a popular thing there. But all right, here we go. First one, short and sweet, but I like this one.

Best podcast to ever listen to comes in from manchomper42. And he says, please be the 200th. I love you people. Please do Darkest Dungeon and Hades. Now, here's why I like this guy, because number one, Darkest Dungeon is a phenomenal game, and Hades is a phenomenal game. So ManChomper, you are a gamer after my own heart there. These are Josh buzzwords. Yeah, you were not the 200th review, unfortunately. Next one comes in from a longtime listener. I don't know how we missed reading his review on the show so far. So this one is titled Amazing and comes in from Mamon1836392. That's also his locker combination, if anybody wanted to know.

So he says, I love listening to these guys talk and have fun as friends. Thanks for making my life better. Keep up the great work. You guys also, can you guys do an episode on planet side too? It's like battlefield, but on a much larger scale. Also,

in case you couldn't tell, I've been trying to get my review on the show since October. So it'd mean a lot if you read this one. Well, there you go, ma'am. I know you put more in your review for me to read, but you were not the 200th review. So I'm not reading all of this

additional stuff. Better luck next time. Wow. A whole half year of waiting. I know. Well, there you go. Better late than never. Sometimes we got to build up the suspense there. So and then last one for tonight. This one comes in from roscoe get good and it is titled informative down to earth and good clean comedy and he says i used to be a hater of minecraft until i just tried it next thing i knew i had reached ranking in the world top 100 list of total blocks mined in survival said i just heard I just heard your horror episode Fatal Frame for PS2, I believe, was intense and worth checking out. I also hit a crystal wall in Rocket League.

I feel you there, Roscoe. And then finally, keep it up, Team Paul. What? Ooh, really? Hey, it's been a while since I've had a shot i had to give you one you actually get a few of those but i tend to just you know read the ones with my name in them so i was gonna say we had a few josh shout outs lately so that's nice even the numbers a little bit i'll take it oh well roscoe you've got a new favorite also i'm team roscoe team Team Roscoe. Yep. All right.

Well, you know what? There is so much to cover about Divinity. I don't think we can dilly-dally anymore, but thank you for reading those reviews, Josh. To all you others out there, please leave us a review. Apple Podcasts is the best place to do it. Make sure to rate our podcast five stars. That'll really help us out a lot. And I think we're ready. Let's do it.

All right. Divinity. I've got a copy of the Steam description here. It's short and sweet. The critically acclaimed RPG that raised the bar from the creators of Baldur's Gate 3. Gather your party, master deep tactical combat, venture as a party of up to four but know that only one of you will have the chance to become a god so josh broad strokes how would you describe this game divinity uh is amazing i'm just gonna get right to it um but uh as far as the game itself goes, it is an epic RPG with very tactical combat that is turn-based combat. It's set in a very vivid fantasy world. It's got great characters. It's got beautiful scenery. It's got amazing quests. It's an RPG. It's an epic, epic RPG. I mean, that's the easiest way to describe it with really, really good tactical combat that's quite difficult. But what sets Divinity apart

from every other RPG out there is the way that it kind of takes itself. It doesn't take itself too seriously in a lot of aspects. So it's got some really funny moments and quests and stuff like that. But it's by no means a satire or comedy RPG. It's just got a little bit of everything, man. And I don't know that there's another game out there like it. Maybe Divinity 1, but I wouldn't know because I didn't play it. Yeah. But I would imagine yeah yeah it is yeah i think uh that divinity 2 is definitely like an old school tactical rpg it's

kind of like an rpg in its purest form there's not a whole lot of other stuff going on it's it just stays in its lane this game is not an action game. It's not a shooter. This is a good old-fashioned RPG, even to the point that I was a little surprised that the game actually does not even have a whole lot of cutscenes or animations. A lot of it is through really well-written dialogue. There's a narrator. There's fantastic voice acting in a lot of ways it's almost more like an rpg mixed with a good fantasy novel i would say that's kind of what divinity kind of feels like yeah yeah all right so when you hop into divinity for the first time i know that you have a longer

history with this game they now have the definitive Definitive Edition, which is what I played. I know you've played a little bit of the old school and the new definitive one. But when you first start the game, I was a little confused because they immediately hit you with how you want to play this game. And to me, these terms did not immediately stand out as being easy to understand. But they first ask you, are you going to be explorer, classic, tactician, or story? And I did not realize that you could click it and then hit next, and then it would give you a description. So immediately I thought, all right, I'm immediately going to a guide on Google. And I had to look and see what these

actually meant. But I ended up playing this game on classic mode. I figured that was the safe thing to do. Is that how you played it? I'm playing on classic as well, yeah. All right. So basically, yeah, Explorer is kind of like easy, classic is medium, Tactician hard, and then story, I guess, if you just want easy breezy combat, which this might not be the game for you. But you get to choose your main character. And this to me was when I first realized just how deep the lore and the culture and the backgrounds are in this game, because you get hit with six different characters that you can choose from as your main character. Although all the other characters will be along

for the ride. You'll run into them more than likely over the course of the game, and many of them will actually team up with you. But I thought that the characters in this game were so neat just in reading the little snippets about their backgrounds that I thought this would be a good time to maybe just break down the characters a little bit and talk about who they are and kind of who stuck out and who we liked the most. Yeah, the characters in this game are one of the things that make it. Like, in a lot of RPGs, you know, you're just this kind of, like, faceless person that's, you know, wandering around doing stuff. You know, in good RPGs, you become attached to the character that you're controlling but what i love about divinity and it's like you said it's right from the start as it's like you know which character do you want to be and then you're faced with like it's not your cliche

like hey you're uh you know a fighter or a cleric or you know you're not they're not using like the the standard classes it's like hey do you want to be the the red prince who's a giant like red scaled lizard dude or do you want to be fane who is an undead guy that's just a skeleton in robes you know do you want to be uh sybil who is a like an elf um but elves are weird in this game like they're like really kind of like almost like arboreal almost like i don't know it's kind of hard to describe the elves in this um lows is like possessed by a demon you know and it's like so you have all of these characters that have these huge backstories and very very unique um things about them and then if you're one of those people, you're like,

I like making my own character. Well, guess what? You can customize and make a character to your heart's content. The pre-generated characters I have always gone with because there are a lot of things in the story where their personality and like their backstories come into play. Whereas if you make a character from scratch, like the game doesn't really give you that same backstory. So you miss a little bit there. Yeah. And they've done such a fantastic job where even as you choose your character, you get to read a little paragraph about their background. You can even click a button where you get to hear the voice actor and they narrate their own background.

Were there any ones in particular that were your favorite? I mean, I like rogues and Sibyl is the rogue class. And then Fane. So I've played this game through, not completely, but I kind of mentioned it before, is I've played this game through almost twice. Right. The first time around, I went with Thane because I'm like, dude, this undead guy, this undead skeleton that's smart and can walk around the world and stuff is great. So I played him the first time. And then the second time, I kind of wanted to go with the old grizzled soldier guy.

So I went with Iphan the second time around. Gotcha. with like the old grizzled soldier guy so i went with ifan uh the second time around gotcha so let's talk about well actually let's put a pin in fane let's hit him last because he's kind of the least like the others so like you mentioned a little bit just a moment ago sebil and she's a female elf and her background story is very short and sweet, but it kind of tells you exactly how much mystery there is in this game. But it says that she is a slave no longer, but you still bear the living scar that your master used to dominate you. He turned you into an assassin, made you hunt your own kin. Now you hunt him. So there's a little bit of an element of revenge.

She's got a little bit more of an edge to her. And the elves are very strange in this game because they come along with a corpse eater tag. Oh, that ability's great. They actually can consume body parts to access memories from the dead. So over the course of the game, if you pick up a... Severed arm. A severed arm, then Seville's going to eat it and it might give you a new quest. It might give you some new info. I've never heard of elves having that kind of ability.

It's super cool. Now the, the elves view it as like honoring the past. So this is not like a gruesome thing where it's like, this game just wants to be like, you know, gory in the elves. It's like,

that's their, that's their attachment to the past and memories of people that have lived. So to elves, it's like, that's their, that's their attachment to the past and memories of people that have lived. So to them, it's like this cool thing. Um, but in the game, it's super cool because you can, you, you get to experience their memories, but then you can get things like, uh, skills. Like sometimes you can unlock skills through experiencing their memories or like you said, story snippets or quests or things like that. Yeah. And one of the other funny things is that her previous master was a lizard. And guess what? One of the other people that can be in your party is the Red Prince, who is a lizard.

And so that creates some complications because Sybil's got some thoughts about them. But the Red Prince I thought was such a funny character because he is like a fallen from grace prince who is dead set on getting his throne again. It's almost like a Game of Thrones kind of character that you can kind of picture in this world. And he's kind of funny because he's very much like greater than thou over everyone else and kind of rubs it in your face about how he's royalty and you're not but he's also very funny he acts very royal in the sense like you would think a giant red lizard guy would have like a gravelly voice but he's like very like proper and and like highbrow and stuff you know yeah um yeah so it's it's they they give them really interesting personalities that do not fit any kind of stereotypical like rpg trope which is great yeah absolutely so there's a couple other characters there's ifan that you mentioned he's a male human warrior you've got

beast who is a male dwarf, it did crack me up because you can customize these characters. And seeing a dwarf battle mage or a dwarf witch was very funny because you're just not used to seeing dwarves use magic. But this game is so customizable, they'll literally let you do whatever you want. Which is something that honestly I love about this game is the, you can pick these classes and, you know, they are, they kind of have a, hey, this is what I would default to. Like, you know, hey, he's a fighter, you know, or this one is a wizard or something like that. But you can, without any repercussion, change it. And what's great about this game, and I guess we can get into that here in a little bit,

is it's not, I mean, I don't even know how many different combinations there are between like, you know, you can have a witch, right? As a class, you can have, I mean, you can just go pure like rogue and fighter and stuff like that, but you can like multi-class almost any combination of all of the different skills like trees that they have i guess that's not that good word for because they're not trees in this case but yeah just different lists of skills and you can fully customize exactly what you want each character to look like and so there's also losa who you briefly mentioned her being uh possessed so she's got some voices that kind of take over her body.

Every once in a while, you got to attack her because she kind of turns bad. And she makes you promise that if she turns evil, you'll kill her. And I thought that was really neat to have in the party. But then lastly, you have Fane. So I thought it was really funny that you picked Fane as your main character the first go around, because that's who I picked. Because his background to me sounded the best. It says, you woke up and your world was gone. The last of your kind, you hide behind a charmed mask, searching for the truth about a history no

one knew existed. And I thought, oh, that's right up my alley. I want to find out more about this guy. The fact that he was an undead was really interesting but then if you choose him the game actually gives you a warning and says are you sure you want to play as an undead character because other people in the world are not so keen to meet the undead yeah and then they also tell you that you can't use healing potions or any healing or any healing because it'll actually harm you as undead however you are healed by poison and i just said yeah i'll take it i'll play as fane yeah it's it's the trade-off man because he's he's a very very neat character and i mean it makes sense if you think about it right if you go like classic dnd how do you how do you get rid of undead right

like you you bless them and you heal them and clerics are really good against them and stuff like that. And so it makes sense that like healing magic would not heal an undead person. And so instead, yeah, you have to like, you have to carry around like bottles of poison to heal yourself. And like, if you have a wizard or, you know, a sorcerer or something that's using magic, like, earth magic incorporates poison. So you could have your caster, like, hit this dude with a giant, like, poison ball. That's what heals the guy. So you can harm enemies and heal Fane sometimes at the same time. Yeah, it's very interesting.

And so as Fane, you have to be careful that you always have proper clothing on because if you don't have a hood or if you don't have your chest covered and of course i had to test this out and right off the bat i just removed all my clothing oh yeah and they and they just immediately yelled die undead and it says fight and then just immediately all the magisters will start attacking you so fane is kind of a goofy character to play you do get one other benefit he does not need any lock picking yeah because he uses his skeleton he uses his bones this bone yeah no i thought that was kind of a cool thing too yeah and it's funny too because a lot of characters are constantly trying to touch you in this game and so you have options like hang back and don't let them touch

you or let them and then they'll comment on the fact that they realize you're undead. So Fane is kind of an interesting one to play with. But very quickly, you end up recruiting teammates, they're running with you, they have unique dialogue with certain characters. So sometimes you'll start talking to someone and Beast will say, oh, actually, I know this guy, Fane, can I jump in and talk to him alone? And then you get some unique dialogue. So the game has a lot of replayability also, because all these characters interact in really interesting ways. Yeah. And one of the things about the characters, too, is that every character has a game-long quest that they are trying to do. So it's kind of like you mentioned, like, as you just play the game, naturally, your characters will progress their own like personal agendas as to why they're like actually grouping with you. And they'll come across characters where it's like, hey, I need to go talk to this guy. Like, is that cool? And then you can kind of be like, yeah, go for it. So you can actually, you can have that interaction with your party to where it's like, hey, I

support you. Or like, hey, no, like, do what I say. We're too busy for this right now. And it will affect like the outcome of the game. But on top of the overall goal of this game, which is to become Godwoken, like you had kind of mentioned in the beginning, every character has their own personal mission that generally doesn't wrap up until very, very late in the game. So it's really cool to just see them progress and each character kind of have that progression as well, independently of the main story.

Yeah, absolutely. There's mysteries being uncovered for all the characters. And then also, I imagine your second playthrough, it really encourages you to play with someone else because now you get to learn more about their backstory. Customization is good. But let me just tell everyone here, if you've never played Divinity, this is not a joke. This game has so many different stats that you have to manage. I'm used to most games, you might have a skill tree and you've got your stats, like strength, stamina, intelligence. Not in this game. This game, you have attributes, you have abilities, you have skills, you have talents, and you have tags. And you get to choose all of these from the get-go and then customize them for the other three people in your

team. And I legitimately probably spent two hours before I even started the game just in creating my character. And I didn't even touch the cosmetics. I didn't even care. That's how you know a really good RPG, man. And when you have that in-depth of a character creator, it's amazing. The only thing that they could have done to add to that would have been the random stat rolling thing that they used to do in the old days, where it's like you just click and then you just sit there for an hour just re-rolling trying to get like the perfect stat roll or something like that but yeah i mean it's a little overwhelming at first when you're making this character and you're going like i don't know what talent like what do these talents do but it does do a good job of like if you hover over them it'll say like hey this one does this and this one does that and in combat and blah blah blah And a lot of the, like the talents are really neat because like,

there's one that's called stench, right? Where it's like, it's like, Hey, everybody hates you, but in, in,

in combat melee characters will stay away from you. Yep. So it's like, Oh, that's kind of an interesting trade off is like interacting with the world. Like people are going to, you're stinky.

Yeah. Yeah. It immediately lowers everyone's disposition by like 25 because there's like a scale. Yeah. Up to a hundred and that one will take you negative. Yeah. That's a great one. I also thought that elemental affinity was a really neat concept. So in this game with the combat, every ability that you want to do has a certain number of action points or AP that it requires. And your character will only have a certain number of AP they can take on every turn. So moving requires AP, ability takes AP. And elemental affinity means that if you are standing

in the same element that you are casting, it reduces the cost by one. So like for me, Fane would do a lot of magic with blood, because if you attack characters that are not undead, they will bleed over time, and you can stand in those puddles, and then it reduces the cost of those abilities. And that to me made perfect sense. Like, of course, because you don't have to conjure the actual element, it's already there. It's cheaper to cast. Yeah, that's a great skill. There's so many good skills. And that's what I mean. One of the things, another thing that I love about this game is that customization. You can play this game any way you want to play. And I'm sure we'll get into some of the ways that you and I have kind of differed on some of our, you know, our playing and stuff like

that. But it's like you can even like there's a skill called Lone Wolf where it's like, you know, our playing and stuff like that. But it's like, you can even like, there's a skill called lone wolf where it's like, you know what, if you don't want to have a party and you want to just go this game alone, it will beef up like everything on your character to where you actually stand a chance. If you're solo, I think it'll actually let you have one companion, uh, in that case. And then it's like, Hey, you know, but it's like, there's no end to the customization for your characters, how you want to play the game. You know, one thing that's really neat too, is that if you, like you said, right, character paralysis, which I mean, I've had that problem, right? And it's like, dude, do I really want to be a ranger? Like, I don't know, are

rangers good in this game? Like, what if I get 20 hours in and then I realize rangers suck? What am I going to do? But this game does let you. Just look in the mirror, Josh. That's exactly right. All you got to do is look in the mirror. There's a mirror that lets you respec. And not only does it let you respec, but it lets you respec everything.

So you can change all of your attributes, all of your talents. You can change your class. You can change anything you want to do with that character. I think you can even change your appearance if you want at that point. So it does take that kind of worry out of it. Now, are you a... See, I'm a purist, right? The characters I pick are the characters that I'm going to go with through thick and thin, whether it's good or bad. Yeah. So are you like, would you re-roll if you were having like a hard time or is that? I did re-roll a little bit because I jumped into this game not really understanding anything and just playing.

So once I got to the point that I could re-spec, I did redo a few things because I did find myself with certain characters or certain skills that I did not care about. But also the combat in this game, whenever you fight a character, you have to break down their physical armor or their magical armor before they start to take damage. And I realized that my team was way too physical combat focused. And so I had to kind of balance things out so that way I would have enough abilities. That way I could break down one or the other. And so I had to balance things a little bit.

But I also swapped out Beast because I didn't care for him as a character. I never played with Beast, man. Actually, I take that back. The first time I played this game, I played with Beast and I made him a rogue because I thought a dwarven rogue would be kind of funny. And then I think I quickly dropped him from my party after that, though.

I didn't play with him very long. Yeah, I swapped him out for Iphen as a ranger because I needed a little bit more distance. I had three characters that all had to be in melee range and then one healer. So the whole game, I was spending all my action points running around and i said forget it i gotta re-roll a little bit all right so finally after getting past the character creation screen you jump into the game you start off as a prisoner on a ship the ship ends up sinking you quickly find yourself on a beach where you wake up and you are basically here spending a lot of time around Fort Joy. And I thought that we would have some spoilers here in this section.

Honestly, I do not think it would affect your gameplay at all because we're only talking about the first couple hours and the way you handle every situation. There's about 17 different options. The likelihood that this actually ruins anything is zero. It's zero. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, to be able to talk about the game and kind of give people like an impression that haven't ever played it, or for those that have to kind of reminisce a little bit, it's like we have to be able to talk about some of the quests and stuff. And these are your, Fort Joy is kind of your intro to the game.

And it's a long intro, like don't get me wrong. It's a heck of a chapter, but it is, I mean, there's really nothing spoilery about, you know, what goes on there in Fort Joy and stuff either.

So I think, I think we're safe. Yeah. So these first couple hours in the game running around Fort Joy, any quests in particular that stuck out or any funny moments, anything that you wanted to discuss? This is like this for joy is what gives you your first glimpse into the type of game that this is going to be like, you have this, you know, very serious, like you need to escape for joy. And there's these magisters that have source collared you.

So like source is like, it's like your essence basically. Right. And there's these magisters that have source collared you. So like source is like, it's like your essence basically. Right. And there's these sorcerers in the game that can use source to do things above and beyond just normal magic. Right. But they're, they're like considered evil because if you use source, they think that that summons the void woken and the void woken, you know, are the big bad guys in this game. So it's like you're being persecuted because you're you have the ability to use source. So they put the source collar on you, which blocks your skills and you're basically treated like hot garbage and thrown in jail. without getting in trouble unless you get yourself into trouble. I just remember, like I picked, there's a talent that you can pick in the beginning called Pet Pal that lets you speak to animals. And I mean, I was instantly like, I've got to go with that. Like, oh, this ability that lets me like stand in elements and use less abilities sounds really cool,

but I have to be able to talk to animals. And I just remember one of the first things that happened to me as I saw a crab just shuffling around on the beach. And I was like, oh, I can go talk to that crab. So like I go up and I talk to the crab and this crab is basically like, behold, mortal, you are in the presence of greatness. This crab is just going bonkerskers like telling you how you need to kneel before him and he's like the destroyer of worlds you know what it's just like like this crab's crazy but i mean that to me was one of, oh man, okay, this game's got a lot going on for it.

I don't know. What about you? Was there one that just made you laugh or stood out for you? Yeah. So I really love when the game has so much detail and thought put in that you can tell this game just took so much labor to do. So when I was running around the camp... Okay, so basically your

goal is to escape the prison right and in the beginning everyone says yeah there's no way out of this prison it's impossible and then it did kind of make me laugh because pretty soon 14 different people all say i'll tell you how to escape if you go do this quest for me yeah but one of them was an imprisoned elf and the elf elf says, I've been accused of stealing. I did not do it. Griff over there, if you can get him to free me, I'll get you away out of the prison. And so I talked to Griff. Griff says, look, he stole my citrus fruit.

But if you can find it, then I'll let him go. And then over the course of the game, I end up finding a guy. My character notices that he smells like citrus. And I basically persuade the guy to give me the fruit back. I return the fruit. Now, he was surrounded by other characters. So I start talking to them. And one of them is a woman named Butters. And I immediately get options to flirt with her. Now, I'm always interested in romance options in RPG games. I always like testing them out, whether it's Dragon Age or Mass Effect. And so I'm heavily flirting with Butters to where we make plans to hook up when we all get off of this island. Now, I go and I talk to Griff, and Griff's

like, hey, thanks for the fruit, but tell me the thief or else I'm going to fight you. And I say, no, I'm not telling you the name.'m not a snitch right so then he goes fight and then immediately butters draws arrows and starts shooting griff just because i sweet talked to her a few minutes earlier and so she ends up fighting on my side because she didn't care for griff and i thought that was immediately oh here's the replayability in this game there's gonna be hundreds of moments like that this is the kind of game I would play several times just to see all those interactions. And what's crazy about,

so for your example, right? The, if you save that elf, then he will tell you a way to a secret path that helps you get out of the prison. Right. Yep.

And there's a lot of other interconnecting quests. You meet another elf that's blind. That's like some scion elf that knows that elf that you're trying to save. And she's like, please help him. And, you know, then you can help the elves in general and blah,

blah, blah. But to give you an example, so you can just straight up fight Griff and kill Griff in his lackeys, which is a really hard fight, but it's doable. You can find the citrus and then give it back to griff and then he's like okay that's fine um he tries to demand you know who's who's the thief um you can actually find who stole the citrus and then you can kill that person and then take the citrus and then bring it back. You can actually lockpick the cage that the elf is in

and try to sneak him out. I mean, there's just any number of things. And then on top of all of that, on any one of those solutions, you can blame, for instance, with Griff, you can blame somebody that didn't even do it, then griff will get mad at them you know like this game has infinite possibilities and it's absolutely bananas that in an rpg like that that you can legit have like that many different solutions and then also like not to spoil or anything but griff's doing some shady stuff that Griff shouldn't be doing. So you can also try to involve the Magisters, who are like the Wardens, to try to get Griff in trouble with them. It's awesome, man. And that's only one way out of the fort.

You know what I mean? And there's like eight different ways out of the fort. So is that how you got out? You did the quest with Griff? No, I did that quest, but that's not even how I escaped. So I ended up finding a magister that was getting beaten by some other magisters, and I ended up rescuing him. And he says, hey, on the side, me and some other guys have been smuggling kids out on a boat. If you go show up at these docks, use this password, they'll smuggle you out of the prison. And what's funny is when I

did that, I used the code word and they said, how do you know that? And I said, oh, well, this other guy told me. And then they're like, well, that guy shouldn't have opened his mouth. And then they fought me. And so I reloaded my save. And then they said, well, how did you find out? And then I just say, hey, this divine that I'm serving is calling me. And then they're like, oh, we'll definitely take you, sir. Come on aboard. And so that's actually, I got myself smuggled out. What did you do? Did you go that way or a different route? No, I did the quest where there's a guy that you talk to in the fort that's like, hey, I heard rumor that there's these gloves of teleportation that somebody had, but he got eaten by crocodiles. And I can't fight these crocodiles.

So if you want to help me, I'll tell you where the crocodiles are and then you can go kill them. And then you and I can work together to use these gloves to teleport out of here. And I was like, sure, man. Who doesn't love hunting some crocodiles? So that's, that's what I did is I went, it's a hard fight, man. The Crocs are no joke, but you kill the Crocs, you get the gloves. And then you, you know, it's like anything else in this game, you can choose to like give the gloves to the guy and then trust him. You can go to the guy and talk to him, be like, yep, found the gloves. Thanks for the clue, sucker. Like, I'm out of here.

Yeah. You know, but I wound up using those gloves. I dissed the guy. I told him, hey, nope, thanks. Like, I'm out. So I dissed him. But then I used the gloves to actually teleport up into like the magister's like safe house, I guess.

And then it's like we're the lead magister. it's almost like the warden like of the prison and then i looted his whole office and then i snuck out like through this court hearing that they were having like around all the guards found the front door and like snuck my way out like out of the fort that way but you can't get up to that area without the teleport gloves. How funny. So, okay, so let's talk a little bit about the combat, because I feel like talking about the gloves of teleportation is a good segue. So I quickly learned in this game that it's very hard to fight if you're wasting AP moving and running and repositioning. A lot of the combat in this game comes down to figuring out how a fight is going to work, reloading your game, putting your guys in the right position, and then doing these fights. And you can use the gloves of teleportation

not just on one of your own members, you can even use it on an enemy and teleport them either towards you or further away. There's a whole lot of crazy things in combat. Anything in particular that kind of struck you? Dude, I love the combat in this game. Like, you know, I've said I'm a fan of like tactical, like turn-based combat, but the way that this game does combat is just second to none in my opinion, right? It's one of those things, like I'm going to tell you right now if you don't like like long combat like some of the fights in this game can legit if everything goes right can still take like 20 minutes to be a battle yep right these battles and that's only with like three enemies sometimes right yeah i mean not even big fights it's it's the battles

in this game are very tactical and they're very like centered i guess like they're meant to happen when they happen like it's not like an an RPG where you're just wandering across the world and a monster appears. There are monsters out in the world, but you can generally choose to engage in those battles. It's all scripted. Right, yeah, exactly. But I think the combat in this game is phenomenal.

It's got, hey, your initiative decides who goes goes first you have a certain number of action points like you said earlier anything you do whether it's drinking a potion moving climbing a ladder casting a spell attacking uses ap throwing a water balloon yeah yeah um dumping a cup of oil whatever it might yeah and so there's so many elements in this game come into, like, there's a ton of stuff with different elements and combining things. So if you throw a water balloon, for instance, and then you shock it, that creates, like, an electrified puddle,

which an enemy, if they're in it, they're going to get shocked and potentially stunned. Or, you know, like, there's just any number of things, right? Put oil down on the ground, it slows an enemy. But then you light that on fire and it causes an explosion and does a bunch of damage. You can make steam clouds. You can make electrified steam clouds. You can make ice surfaces.

You can make blood surfaces. The possibilities are honestly endless. And then what's even better on top of that, not to go on a rant here, but like you mentioned with the teleporting, you can teleport enemies. So if you've got a melee guy that's in your face, like teleport him way the heck away because the enemy has the same roles that you do. They have a certain number of action points. So it might take that guy two turns just to get back into the fight, which helps even the odds. Yes, exactly. Now, the one thing that did bother me is that this game is pretty hard on classic mode. It is rare to just destroy a fight on your first try because your characters will all be walking together. You talk to a character, all of a sudden they don't like you and they're fighting you and they do a big AOE that destroys your whole team. And then you kind of have to restart a fight.

Now, this part is one thing that I did not really like because I felt like with my team makeup, sometimes I would figure out how a fight was going to work. Now I know they're going to spawn characters here, here, and here. But since I don't have enough action points to go chase everyone.

And then by the time I get there, they actually teleport. So now I am splitting my group up. You're going to stand here. This other guy is going to stand up on this other Ridge. Cause I know that's where the guys teleport. And now I'm going to use the gloves on this witch. Who's trying to pick blood roses and

i'm not even going to talk to her i'm not i'm not going to even have any dialogue i've already seen all the flavor dialogue i don't want her to kiss me and shoot flies down my throat i'm gonna open this this dialogue up with me sneaking up behind her teleporting her in between my other people and then immediately opening up in battle. And so to me, it was almost like my characters had the benefit of foresight instead of being able to just adjust on the fly. Now, later in the game, when you have bigger and better skills, those fights did become easier. But especially in the beginning, I felt like the game was forcing me to cheese the fights. Combat is very difficult in this game, even on classic mode. There's people that play on tactician, and then apparently there's some mode called honor mode that's absolutely bananas to

try to beat. I can't imagine. For me, the combat's perfect because I like losing fights occasionally. If there's no challenge to it, then I don't enjoy it. But you and I were talking because you were getting frustrated, and rightfully so, because this game does not hold your hand, and it doesn't teach you very much either. And one of the things, I think, the way I always looked at the combat in this game is it's almost like a puzzle, right? You're going to have this hard fight. You're going to be outnumbered. Your enemies are likely stronger than you. They know, they have better armor, they have better spells, like all that stuff, but you can figure out ways to like game the fight. Right. And I think it expects you to do that. Like if you don't, and you try to just go like mano a mano, your tank versus their tank he's gonna lose you know crushed right exactly so i found that

you have to you have to figure out a way to isolate an enemy and then all four of your characters just pummel that guy into oblivion before the other characters can like really engage because things start to go south when your people get split up and they're starting to get like wrecked by the enemies and, and, you know, crowd controlled or frozen or whatever. And then at that point, it's just like, dude, this is not going to happen. My one complaint with the combat, like honestly, is that if you start to realize that the fight is not going your way, there is zero reason to try to finish that fight. Yeah, just reload, you know, because you're not coming back once you're down.

Yeah. So here's the thing. I don't mind combat being difficult. I don't mind losing fights and having to reload and do it again. My biggest issue is just how long the fights take. Like, every time that I quit this game, it was right as the fight started. And I'm like, nah, I'm not doing a 30-minute fight. I'm done. And so I love the lore and the characters in the story. Like, that's why I wanted to spend so much time talking about the characters. I thought they were so cool. The combat itself, I thought is fine. It's just so long. long like can't they just cut down all the stats like just give everyone smaller health pools let these fights be a little bit quicker and try to cut some of these fights because if you have to do a 30 minute fight three times in a row that's

my entire play session like I didn't get to see any advancement in the story. I'm just doing the one fight. And if one little thing goes right or wrong, it can totally change the tide for better or worse. And if you just have some bad luck a couple times in a row, it can be pretty devastating to the experience. I will say this. There was a fight that I was trying to do that was a very long fight. It was a 30-minute fight every time, and I could not beat it. And it's why I quit the game the first time around. And then I, the second time around, I realized that I was too under leveled to beat that fight. And I should have just abandoned that and come back later on, but I didn't, I was just smashing my head up against that wall because I wanted to beat it. But it's like, it really wasn't meant to be at the time. The one thing I'll say is that it does let you save at any given point in the fight.

So I have like multiple, like I call it like mid-fight one, mid-fight two, and mid-fight three. And I will save those as the fight is progressing like favorably. You know what I mean? Because I think like these fights are very big, like scripted fights. So, you know, I think it's meant to be part of the story and part of the game. I agree they can be a little bit long, and I get that if you don't enjoy this kind of combat, then the combat in this game is probably a big turnoff for a lot of people. Yeah, I'd say if you really hate turn-based combat, this might be a little too much to swallow. I am not a fan of turn-based combat to start with, and this game was barely keeping me interested

as much as I loved the story. Like, honestly, I have never in my life lowered the difficulty in a game, ever. And this might be the one game where I would put it down to Explorer, not because it's too hard, but just because it's so time and time intensive it just would be such long fights all right so a couple of rapid fire things since there's just so much

to get to in this game this game has 66 different negative effects that you can have on a character that includes things like warmed chilled source muteded, cursed, so on and so forth. There are 89 positive effects you can have, like shackles of pain, invisible, hasted, or blessed. Even my Red Prince, I got a full set of captain's gear, and he would actually charm anyone who came inside his aura because he just looked so dapper in his captain's suit. That was the bonus by having all three. I never got that armor. Yeah, that was a long quest, getting that armor.

But yeah, crafting is in this game. Do you care? I couldn't care less. The only thing I care about crafting is crafting of runes because they can seriously upgrade your weapons if your weapons have rune slots. There's a lot of crafting, but I don't craft in any game, man. Yeah, well, especially in this game, they don't really teach you very well how to craft things. They just kind of give you a list. Hey, what do you want to toss together and see what happens? Now, you can find books, like a crafting Bible, and then if you right-click it and read it,

it'll give you some recipes. But it's never easy. Like, you can't just see a list. Tell me everything I can craft right now. It doesn't work that way. It's just like, well, I have a—this is not a joke. In my inventory, I took a look before joining. I have a long rat tail in my inventory.

Now, is this going to help me craft something in the future? Should I sell it? Is it worthless? I have no idea. So, the game kind of makes it tough because you have hundreds of things in inventory, and sometimes you just don't know if something should be held onto or if you're safe to sell it. Pack rat it all, Paul. Yeah, pack rat. No, seriously. I can always control Fane until his inventory was full, and then I started walking around as Beast. And then his inventory got full, and then I started walking around as the Red Prince, and then finally I started clearing items. Josh, you did not even know about bedrolls in this game, and you've played hundreds of hours.

That's the beauty of this game, though, man. It's so deep. It's so deep. played hundreds of hours that's the beauty of this game though man is it's like it's so deep it's so deep there's i didn't know that paul found bedrolls right like he was like hey don't you use bedrolls and i'm like what are those like the little beds that your character lays on if you click them and you're like no man they're like portable bedrolls and i'm like well what are those i have 195 hours in this game and i was like what and then you were like yeah you just put it in your inventory. You click it. It heals all your people instantly and gives them the rested buff.

And I was like, I've just been using my healer to heal people. What are you talking about? Yeah. But that's because you've got hundreds of items. You don't necessarily know what things do. All right. So to kind of summarize stuff up, and we don't have to get too detailed because it's going to come out in the future segments here, but overall, as a summary,

what do you think works best in this game? The atmosphere, it's kind of like, I don't think we've touched on this enough, but everything in this game is voice acted for the most part. There's a couple lines that aren't like when you're just making a dialogue choice but then you're per the person you're talking to will respond like to that dialogue choice and stuff like that so the voice acting is amazing there's like a game narrator that is incredible that does really really well to like you know sometimes break the fourth wall but just kind of act like that in between, between your characters and the game that you're actually playing. The quests in this game are phenomenal, dude. Like some of them are hilarious, like the crab that wants to dominate the world. Some of them are very serious and, you know, like in depth and you have to make tough decisions.

So there's that, like your choice matters and are you going to save this person or save that person, and one of them is going to die? So there are the moral choice quests and stuff like that. There's a gajillion hidden things that you can find, little secrets that are just all over the place. And if you don't look for them or you don't talk to people, you'll never find them so like and some characters are better at finding those items than others right yes exactly and and the other thing is like sometimes like some of the dialogue choices aren't available unless you're playing a certain character so then in that case like you won't even know that this option exists unless you're playing that person um the the way that you can approach anything in this game, even combat. I've seen

videos of people that were teleporting lava pools into combat and then dropping the enemy characters into the lava pools. You know what I mean? There's any number of ways that you can approach that stuff. I don't know that there is an RPG out there that is so open to how you want to play it. Yeah, I think you are spot on with all of that. I think that the background and just the world building is fantastic. It's second to none, in my opinion. I think where the game maybe lacks a little bit is more of a personal thing for me the length of combat i've already talked about at large the inventory system is not very user-friendly and it's kind of hard to manage like i found myself having so many daggers i didn't know which ones to use or having so many stats that kind of run

counter to one another. It was very confusing. Like I did not have any headgear for the longest time, but I found out that you could equip a bucket over your head, but then it would literally say that your character was blind. And I was like, okay, well,

like what exactly does that mean? Cause the game doesn't really teach you what blind means. It just says you're blind. Okay. Does that lower my likelihood to hit? Does it make my likelihood to hit zero? Does it just mean my character doesn't move as fast? those effects are, which is maybe an unfair criticism because it would just be too much to explain. But I oftentimes found myself just being a little confused as to what was actually going on. Yeah, I get that. And I mean, honestly, that's a common complaint is that the game doesn't teach you a whole lot for a game that will literally let you do anything you want. You can kill any single character in this game. There is no character in this game that's off limits, right? That is story breaking. Like you, you kill that person, they're dead. There's ramifications for it. The, the, the journey continues and the journey

continues, but it's different now because you killed that person like 10 hours ago. You know what I mean? So it's there. That's a very neat aspect that I think is cool. And it was almost freeing for me at a certain point because I stopped worrying about what was going to happen. And then I just kind of went, the game's going to go on, man. There's no wrong move. There's no wrong choice that's going to ruin something. Maybe that closes a path or maybe it doesn't. But to me, that was a really cool thing to realize. I mean, I agree with you on some of your dislikes are on it. I would say one of my few dislikes are the pathing sometimes. Because you control all four of your people at once, right? You click the ground where you want to go. But sometimes they would go like a roundabout way or sometimes – Or get stuck. Or they would get stuck because they don't want to walk through like a danger – like they won't walk through fire, right? Like the character that you're actively controlling will walk through fire, but then the other three just stand there and go like, I don't want to get burned.

And so the movement a little bit can be somewhat frustrating. I mean, it's a minor gripe, but there were times where somebody would aggro something that I was trying to skirt around or something like that. You know, some of the stuff's convoluted. I didn't know about bedrolls 195 hours in, and I didn't know these bedrolls even existed. So that's like, you know, that's one of those things where they probably could do a little bit better job of introducing things to people. But I mean, it's a huge game, so I don't know. Yeah, and there's already so much reading.

By the way, talking about the voice acting, if you really want a treat, it's a little bit PG-13 content-wise, but go look up the romance scene with Losa, and that'll have you cracking up because they fully commit to the voice acting between the narrator and Losa. Oh, really? It is absolutely hysterical, them going for the romance scenes. There's a couple of those in the game where I won't say you are not a part of this romance that's happening, but you can kind of eavesdrop on that romance that's happening.

And the narrator starts like picking on you, like, you know, like, because you're like, no, really, I'm just checking to make sure they're okay. Right. And the narrator starts like, yeah, calling you out on it. And like, it's stuff like that. Like, I love the humor in this game. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's it's in full effect here. All right.

So this episode is obviously going to run a little bit longer than normal. There's so much more that we could still talk about, but I think we just got to move on to the next segment. So we've shared a little bit about what we think. Josh, you got a couple of Steam reviews that you'd like to read for us? I do. And I'm gonna be honest with you. I tried to find some negative reviews on this game.

And there are plenty. Don't get me wrong. But for some reason, when people don't like this game, they really wanted to write their life story as to why they don't like this game. So it's actually really difficult to find some kind of more concise negative stuff, but I've got quite a few here. So I'm going to just tackle some of these because some of these are short. First one is a positive recommended review. And it says Undead has a skill called Play Dead. Clap, clap, clap. Yes. So that gets you basically out of combat.

Like no one will attack you and they'll go attack another character. And then you pop back up as a skeleton and go back to fight, which I thought was great, man. The undead, like the fact that they have an undead character and how the world responds to that is amazing, man.

Yeah. So this one, because we talked about combat, this is recommended and they say teleporting 30 corpses into the boss room, then casting mass corpse explosion to instantly kill the boss is a perfectly valid way to play the game. Yeah, that's cheesing it a little bit. But you know what? It's a valid way. That's the thing.

You can. In combat, you can do any number of things you want to do. And if prepping everything is the way to go, then hey, man, that worked. You know? Yeah. If you want to carry barrels of oil that weigh 60 pounds, you can do it. Yeah. And then you can chuck them out and blow them up with some fire and watch the world burn.

Okay. So this one says not recommended. And they say, don't get this game. I spent over 100 hours trying to figure out what to do, and I never got off the first island. Which is for joy, by the way. Everything in this game is veiled in

complexity, hidden behind layers of convolution. Nothing in this game is straightforward, which isn't a problem, but the game doesn't explain anything. The wiki is just as bad. The wiki is just as bad. The wiki is not great for this game. There are some helpful tips, but it's not like you can go say, hey, I'm having trouble fighting Alexander. They'll give you a couple tips. That's what Reddit is for.

If you can surround Alexander, then you can usually kill him quickly. Yeah, there's not like a whole lot of helpful tips on there. Yeah. I mean, my thinking on this is this guy has 100 hours and he never made it out of chapter one. Yeah. You know, like, what were you doing, man? That's someone who thinks you have to do every quest. Right. Not realizing you just pick any of these ways to get off the island. And then you're still on the island, but you get out of the prison and then eventually you sail away. But that does take a long time. I probably played a good

20, 25 hours before leaving that Fort Joy area. It was a lot. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is a long game. I like this one. This one kind of resonated with me. This is our recommended review. And he says, my mom just came in while I was playing and told me it looked like art. I told her it was. It was. There you go. This game is, I mean, dude, this is a masterclass of a role-playing game and something we didn't

even talk about. To me, the graphics in this game are beautiful, man. Like the colors, the colors in this game are incredible. I don't know if you've ever zoomed in because it is an isometric game, but you can zoom. If you zoom in on a character, the detail that they have like in their armor and their actual appearance is staggering, man. Like most games that are isometric, if you zoom in, it's just kind of bland and muddied. But the clarity of this game is phenomenal. I am absolutely in love with the graphics and the. But the clarity of this game is phenomenal.

I am absolutely in love with the graphics and the colors and the music in this game. Like, I mean, music's phenomenal too. Uh, but that one, when he was like, I told her it was,

it was like, I was like, yeah. Um, okay. All right. Last two real quick. One more recommended.

Uh, and they say, I'll just finish one more fight and go to bed. And Star Citizen just released. Uh-huh, exactly. Yeah, there's a lot of games where that's kind of the joke, like one more turn. Yeah.

But man, yeah, Divinity will, there's no quick turns. No, there's no like, let me do this fight, I'll be there in five minutes. Unless you just pause the fight, I guess. Alright, and then last one. This is not recommended. And this says, These stupid bleeping source puppets

made me uninstall the game. I will never buy another Larian game. It was by far the stupidest fight I have ever encountered. I hope you go bankrupt. What fight? What is he talking about? It's a source puppets fight. That's a quest apparently that either one of you or I have done.

But this guy has, for the record, this guy has 610 hours in this game. Left a negative review because he couldn't beat a specific fight that drove him nuts. And that's the thing. If you don't realize I'm not supposed to be doing this fight, you will just, like I said, you'll just slam your head against the wall over and over and over again.

It's better to just go level up. It does have that aspect where if a fight is too tough, you probably need to go do other stuff and level up and then come back to that fight. And you can always see the level of the enemies. So if your enemy is level eight and you're level eight, you can probably handle that fight. Okay, Paul. And then I wrote down my guess as to what the overall review score for this game was. I did not cheat, even though you know I was tempted to. But all right. So what do you think the overall percentage rating of this game is? So I know this game's beloved by many.

I know that it won a lot of awards. I know it's going to be very high. I'm going to say 91% of reviews are positive on Steam. Okay, I love this game, and I think I was a little bit biased because I said that I thought percent positive was 97 and then i kind of went like oh man like but that was my guess so i had the you know um the actual is 95 positive yeah i believe it yeah and it's fantastically made this game has won a gajillion awards for being one of the best role-playing games for when it came out.

Larian Studios, tidbit, Larian Studios is actually the studio, because of how good Divinity was and how well it was received, they are making the next Baldur's Gate, which makes me very excited. I'm not shocked that it's in the high 90s. I figured it would be somewhere in that range. But yeah, good for them. So Josh, as the winner, you haven't won in a while. It's my turn. So why don't you introduce us to the next segment, Make Love, Marry, Murder.

Let's start that music. Hey, Losa. Why don't you show me your inner demon? Hey, Fane. Why don't you show me... Oh, be careful. No, never mind. Don't know where you're going with that, but I could take some guesses.

There's a few that'll get it. Anyway. Okay. I mean, it's time for Make Love, Marry, Murder. This is how we rank games or rate games, whether we would make love to them and we think

that they are great for a short period of time, whether we would marry them because we feel like this is a game that you can play forever, or whether we would murder them because really there's just is a game that you can play forever, or whether we would murder them because really there's just no benefit to this game whatsoever. I'll go first. For me, this is one of my favorite role-playing games ever. It ranks up there for me with Witcher 3. Legitimately, I don't know that there's many RPGs out there that can actually compare to Divinity Original Sin 2.

Divinity Original Sin was phenomenal. They made it even better with the sequel. It's an easy, easy Mary for me. I would go with Mary as well, but that's with a little bit of a caveat. That's more so the single-player experience. I think when we talk about it as a multiplayer game, that'll come out a little bit more during the leaderboard segment. But the game is an absolute Mary. This game is begging you. It literally begs you to play it multiple times.

You mentioned before that there's no wrong way to handle a quest. There's also really no right way to handle a quest either. You just play it for how it goes and then play it again with new characters, make some different decisions, pick a couple different tags. Even that'll change the game. Whether you're labeled a hero or a villain or a mystic or a scholar, all of those things give you different dialogue and can impact quests. This game, you could very easily play for a thousand hours. And I don't say that lightly. You literally could play it for a thousand hours and you'd still be learning new

things about it. Yeah. I mean, just to kind of give you some perspective, you know, Witcher 3, I've said is one of my favorite games ever made. I have more hours now in Divinity than I do in The Witcher 3. Like the replayability, and I have tried to play Witcher 3 again, but I only ever get six, seven hours into it. And then I'm like, I can't really go through all this again. I've gone through almost two full playthroughs of 100 hours each in Divinity, and I'm still discovering stuff that I never knew about in the game. Including bedrolls. Including bedrolls, which would have made life a lot easier, Paul.

So yeah, I think we're definitely in agreement there. This game is going to be a Mary. I think we would both recommend it to anyone. I mean, the game is not even a full 60 bucks. I think they could charge 60 for it, but it's $45 full price on Steam, and I think we would both give it a thumbs up recommendation. I can't recommend this game enough. If you don't like role-playing games, then this isn't the game for you. But if you are a fan of great story, great characters, great graphics, good combat, ultimate ability to make choices and do whatever the heck you want to do in a game. This is literally, bar none, one of the best out there. Agreed. All right. Well, let's go to the leaderboard and see where this game stacks up.

All right. So if you are a first time listener to the show, or maybe it's the first time you've caught one of our deep dives on Mondays, we have a leaderboard, which you can view at multiplayer podcast.com. It's right there on the main page, but basically we have 38 games that we have done a deep dive on and we try to rank them against one another,

even though oftentimes they are vastly different games. Totally comparing apples and oranges here, but that's part of the fun and part of the argument. We have at the top of our list games like Overwatch, Apex Legends, Rocket League, Rust, and Valheim. All the way at the bottom, we have the likes of Halo Reach, Left 4 Dead 2, Player 2 player unknowns battlegrounds sea of thieves and overcooked 2 that's a stinky bottom so stinky bottom so from 1 to 38 josh

keeping in mind this is the multiplayer leaderboard i know where are you gonna put this because this game does this game is a lot like what we've talked about lately with games like cuphead that just don't lend themselves terribly well to multiplayer. You can do it, up to four people, but you have to have one person as the host, and you have to continually join their game on their save. And especially for groups of dads like us, boy, that's hard to coordinate, keeping everyone together yeah the one thing that we did not just to full clarity they've built in a game designer on this game where you can run like full dnd campaigns using the using the game itself and i have heard that people that love dnd absolutely love using it and say it's phenomenal. We didn't touch that at all. I'll say this. I mean, if this was a RPG rankings, it would be in the top three for me of all time. Like, honestly,

it probably would be that that high. But if we're ranking it from a multiplayer standpoint and how fun is this game to play with friends friends it's going to rank kind of down kind of down there to be honest like you can do some really hysterical like trolly things to your friends you can take a poison bottle that will do a ton of damage and you can dye it red

so that it looks like a healing potion and then you can give it to your buddy and in their toolbar it'll look like a healing potion and then when they go to to your buddy and in their toolbar it'll look like a healing potion and then when they go to drink it in the middle of a fight it will kill them because it's actually poison which is hysterical you know you can take barrels like you've mentioned oil barrels and put them in your inventory and then sneak up behind your buddy in a fight and transfer those poison barrels into their inventory and now they're encumbered and they can't move.

You can fight your friends if you want to. In battle, you want to turn coat and start shooting arrows at your buddy. You can do that too. So there's a lot of hilarious moments. You can straight up just play the campaign through together and do it like that. But I mean, unless you just have a buddy that's really you know like you into rpgs and

can take it seriously and stuff like that i mean honestly for me it's probably gonna rank somewhere around cuphead man like it works but it's not great see i wasn going to go quite that low. I was going to probably put it somewhere in the 1920 range around the cycle. Keep talking and nobody explodes. I still think that this game would be incredibly enjoyable if you played all of it multiplayer. I just don't see it adding very much to the experience. Honestly, multiplayer is just taking some things off the table by removing some of that control and by the way if you're playing with four people and all of you take a turn goofing off every once in a while you're not going to get anything done no never so i feel like it would just be so

frustrating with a big group of people i still think it would be fun to go through but i yeah i guess both of us are somewhere there kind of in in the middle. Yeah, I mean, it's just like, I mean, the cycle has fallen from grace terribly. I mean, but that was such a fun game, and it makes for a better multiplayer game. It's just, this is the hard part, right? Because this game is absolutely bonkers incredible, man. Yes. But we can only rate it as a single-player game. So it's like, but we're rating the multiplayer aspect of it. And I think you could have a lot of fun,

but I think it's also a niche thing for specific people that love RPGs and want to play those with friends. So here's the thing. If I text you and said, Josh, let's hop in the cycle, what's your answer? No. Absolutely not. Right.

If I texted you out of nowhere and said, hey, let's start a Divinity 2 campaign, I feel like there's a chance you might say yes. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, I kind of feel like, to me, that's kind of the gauge I'm using when I'm looking at this list. So I think it's got to be somewhere a little higher than you were thinking, but where are you at this point? Put it above the cycle, man. I'd put it above the cycle or maybe- Put it below Vermintide 2.

Yeah, I was going to say, you could maybe go one more higher and say above Vermintide 2, but Vermintide 2 is such a fun multiplayer game if you're not burned out on that game. Yes, and Vermintide 2, but Vermintide 2 is such a fun multiplayer game if you're not burned out on that game. Yes, and Vermintide 2 works beautifully as a multiplayer game, even though Divinity is technically better. It's just the multiplayer experience. Yeah, put it there.

I would put it at 19, bump everything else down one. Totally fine with that. I'll go ahead and lock that in. It means that Halo Reach has now dropped to number 35. So that's good news. Can we just cut the list off there? Make it a top 34. Alright, so we have it locked in there. And that might look bananas if you just looked at the leaderboard and wonder why is one of the best games

ever rated solo? That's just simply from that perspective. We still recommend everyone check it out. And if we ever start the single player gaming podcast, then we'll revisit it and we'll put it a lot higher. We'll give it its proper due. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So to give you guys a little bit of a heads up, we will be doing our next deep dive two weeks from now, which will give us plenty of time to dive into the next game. This one we are very excited for.

The game is actually set to release here in 80 minutes. Yes. Josh, I know I'm going to be in it. I'm going to be in it with you, buddy. But it's Outriders. So we're recording this on March 31st. It's coming out tonight at 9 p.m. Phoenix time.

We are going to be locked and loaded, diving into this game big time. And there's a chance that we might have a third host with us, but not Todd. We, for the first time ever, are likely going to have a guest on the show. I will go so far as to say it probably will happen and barring some unforeseen circumstance. But yeah, we'll just we'll build up the intrigue a little bit. But we're gonna have our first guest, a third co host for one episode. It is not Todd. And we're pretty excited about it. Yeah, if you like fantasy football, oh boy, and listen to fantasy podcasts, then it might be someone that you're familiar with. Somebody that you should be very familiar with at that point.

So we'll find out. So we'll be back with a This Week in Gaming episode this Thursday. But for the next deep dive, that'll be two weeks from now. And then come check us out on social media. You can hit us up everywhere at MultiplayerPod. Josh would love to engage with you there. And then also you can check out our YouTube channel at MultiplayerPodcast, where Todd is currently mid-move across the United States.

So the YouTube content's a little bit on hold right now, but make sure to subscribe there and you'll get notified when he is able to upload the next content. And then I think that's it. Anything else on divinity before we shut this one down? No, man, there's, if you guys,

I'll be honest. If you guys have questions, if you have great divinity stories you want to share, I mean, hit us up, you know, this is one of those games that we could have spent three hours talking about. But yeah,

if you have questions, if you, you know, want to talk about your hilarious quest that you did to hit us up on socials join our patreon and you know chat with us over on discord it's really a great way to come hang out with us yep so thanks everyone for listening and we'll all right josh there's so much that we didn't even get to i didn't even talk about how often with losa i would create rain and then call in hail and then just continually trip over my own ice yes forgetting that it's on the ground dude Oh, dude. All those things like that. The worst thing ever is using lightning

and then stunning because it chains and then stunning your own people. Between all your characters. Oh my, I would get so aggravated, man. And I'm just like, don't lightning bolt your own friends, man. Come on. Know how to aim that thing.

Yeah.