I'm struggling with Divinity: Original Sin 2 (PS4 Version)

Like most gamers, I have a select group of friends (some of whom I have never met in real life) and we chat about our favorite gaming experiences and what we plan to buy next and things like that. This one friend of mine, who is Scottish kept going on and on about how awesome this game called Divinity: Original Sin 2 was and how he was currently on his 3rd playthrough because it was that great.

I neglected to purchase it for quite some time because it was never on sale and generally I refuse to pay full price for a game. The only game that I have paid full price for in the past year was the Final Fantasy 7 remake and I was incredibly disappointed in that - lesson learned.

Divinity was on sale for something crazy like $12 during I think it was the Black Friday sale so I picked it up after years of being told by my pal that it was the best game since gaming was invented - Ok, he didn't really say that but I would bet it is in his top 10 of all PS4 games.

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When i first booted the game up it was annoying me immediately because it had one of the longest load up times of any game that I have ever played on PS4. This is a great way to get on my bad side right out of the gate. Then there is a massive character selection area that I guess some people love - I once dated a girl that would spend hours on making her character just so only to start from scratch in the game because she didn't fully like the way it looked. I am not like that, so I just chose some stock standard look in the ones that already exist. I also didn't pay much attention to what the attributes were. I just wanted to have a look at the game.

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Right out of the gate you can tell that this game is absolutely massive and it isn't going to appeal to everyone that is for sure since it uses and older turn-based type of system that anyone who has ever played Baldur's Gate will find very familiar. I truly loved the BG games so at first I was thinking to myself "oh cool, a BG game with better graphics and sound!"

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And then I started to wander, and wander and wander some more. Look, I'm not saying that I need a game to hold my hand in order to get through it but honestly, I don't know if there is a huge audience out there that truly enjoys wandering into a town and then talking to every single person in said town before they can get some meaningful dialogue out of them in order to know what the hell we are supposed to do next. So this part of it was a bit annoying to me but at the same time it was this very sense of realism that drew me to the original similar games.

For me, and this is completely subjective, games like this kind of BELONG on PC's and are not terribly conducive to playing on a PS4. My friend who recommended this to me has never been a PC gamer so I can understand why it wouldn't bother him. I don' t think he even owns a computer to be honest. For me though, I remember the ease of play of massive RPG's with tons of dialogue and multiple characters to control all of whom have their own inventory stocks because you could easily click or form hotkeys to get from one to the next.

This is not the case when you are using a controller and you will quickly find that every single button is going to be used in this game. This is not a good sign for someone like me that only plays about 2 or 3 hours a day (and plays multiple games in that time.) Nothing will make me quit a game faster than not being able to remember what the controls are and then opening up the options to look up said controls only to have your brain scrambled by the immense amount of options that there are.

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I'm not saying that this is a bad game, because I definitely don't think that is the case. However, I feel that there are certain games that just weren't meant to be played with a controller and believe that this game is a case in point. There is a reason that it was released on PC more than a year before it ever made its way to consoles.

To make matters worse, I have a tendency to be in a more relaxed position when I am console gaming and this normally means sitting a reasonable distance from the screen (like where my sofa is.) Since there is a tremendous amount of dialogue in this game, most of which is written on screen, I have to strain my eyes in order to read it and well, I am already not digging that and find myself skipping a lot of the interactions because of this. I am almost certainly making a terrible mistake by doing that since Divinity is not going to hold your hand as far as knowing what it is that you are meant to do next.

So what is going to happen here is I am likely going to abandon playing this on the PS4 and go and buy (maybe steal) the PC version to play at my desk. While I am sure this game is great, I just don't think that it "should be" played with a controller. I feel the same way about all RTS games. It's just my opinion and while I am sure my friend really does love this game I think that a lot of his affection may come from the fact that he has never experienced how great a turn-based strategy RPG can be with the correct tools.