After 15 hours I was informed by an important NPC that my adventure was only just beginning, and it’s true the game’s story can easily last 80-100 hours with many offshoots and storylines that you can easily miss. The Definitive Edition has made additions and tweaks to many parts of the game, but in particular the third act to help better lead into the climactic battle with the final boss, something which many felt lacked impact in the original release. The length of the game is frankly absurd. The difficulty can be adjusted mid-game to suit your tastes. Given the immense scale of the game, I chose progress over attrition, and could have turned the difficulty down further to the new Story difficulty, which adds new resurrection and flee skills and give you more flexibility. After struggling for the first few hours – with a few clumsy deaths – I dialled the difficulty down a to Explorer in the interest of seeing more of the game, but battles were still often far from walkovers.
Thankfully there are a range of scalable difficulties, so it is possible to make the encounters as challenging as you wish. When you add to this the fiendishly difficult AI and often overwhelming numbers of enemies, you get an experience where the combat is an integral part of the game rather than a distraction from the narrative. While the series’ combat has clearly been heavily inspired by the likes of Baldur’s Gate, the far more sophisticated environmental and status effects add an almost incalculable degree of strategy to confrontations. And adjust you will have to, as the scale and complexity of the battle system takes some getting used to.
There are lots of different skill paths to follow, and the welcome ability to respec your character later in the game means that you can adapt and adjust once you have more of a feel for the combat. Even once you have chosen your character you are not restricted to a linear progression.
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