Tobold's Blog
Thursday, May 20, 2021
 
Divinity Original Sin 2 on iPad

Hats off to Larian Studios, who managed to put their complete Divinity Original Sin 2 onto the iPad this week. I considered for a moment to buy it, just to see how it runs and then write about it, but then thought better of it. Because I already wrote about playing DOS2 on the Switch. The fundamental issue will remain the same: Divinity Original Sin 2 is a great game, but it has some rather fiddly parts, like inventory management and crafting, which you really need a mouse and a keyboard for.

Personally I kind off stopped playing Divinity Orignal Sin 2 after 80 hours somewhere at the start of Act 3, level 16 out of 20. The game has a lot of different skills, but over time you learn which ones are better than others. If you make any custom main character instead of taking an origins one, you will have the Dome of Protection source power, which restores both physical and magic armor to everybody under the dome for 5 turns. And as this armor protects you both from damage and from spell effects, this is extremely powerful. Which means that the dome goes up for every non-trivial fight for me, especially since I now have 3 source points and can regain source easily. The dome also combines nicely with Terrain Transmutation, which switches the surface effects on two circular ground spots. That counters all those battles where the enemy covers half of the battlefield with necrofire. The downside is that all my characters sit under the dome and mostly use ranged attacks. Not much battlefield mobility, and all fights end up playing a bit the same. But giving up that strategy makes the characters far more vulnerable. So I grew bored and stopped playing.

Besides still keeping up with Shop Titans every day, I am currently playing Founders' Fortune, which is a nice little game on building a village on an island. It has elements of The Sims, where you need to fulfill the wishes and expectations of your limited number of colonists. You can assign them jobs like farmer, forester, or miner, and you manage the resources they produce, the crafting, and the building.

Which brings me back to the iPad. My question is, why it is possible to bring a very complex game like Divinity Original Sin 2 to the iPad, but not much simpler colony sim games like Founders' Fall, Before We Leave, or Foundation? There are a lot of city building games on the Apple app store, but they are all PvP, Free2Play, build a city and then pay us real money for a shield that prevents you getting looted by your neighbors. Anyone know a good single player colony sim game on iOS?

Comments:
I find it really interesting how different are the games offer on mobile/tablet VS computer/ console. It is expected that the control input and form factor would lead to different game type ( similar to how RTS game does not really exist on console), but the pricing strategy is also so different.
The Apple M1 + Rosetta, available on both Ipad Pro and iMac further highlight the discrepancy : both a computer and a tablet share the same hardware, and both can accept a keyboard. But the available SW and pricing strategies are so different.
 
I (re-)bought and played through KOTOR on my iPad. One of the main complaining points in the comments seemed to be "good game but expensive". That's crazy to me as €17 for a 40 hours game is a bargain.

So can you simply port your game to an iPad and sell it? Or do you have to adapt it to a f2p model?
 
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