Playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 after Baldurs Gate 3 gave me a deeper understanding on the trajectory that Larian Studio’s games have taken over the years. This is a fine RPG with a deep, engaging storyline and complex systems, but in my tastes it had too many rough spots that could’ve been sanded out a little to make it truely shine. Perhaps the way I’ve played it - multiplayer co-op - didn’t lend itself perfectly to a first experience as well, but that was the way the cookie crumbled!
I really enjoy the idea of free-form character creation, where instead of picking a class you select some skills and abilities and that defines what your character can do. DOS2 goes that route, so instead of making a ‘paladin’ I chose fighting and healing related abilities. There are a lot of options so you can create a character of more or less any archetype easily. You level up fairly often and get more stat points to place, combat skills - that boost your abilities - social skills - to haggle, talk and the like - and talents, which have wide ranging effects that can change the way you play the game.
The story is engaging enough but it reminds me a bit of the tadpole conundrum from Baldur’s Gate 3, where you have some greater power (here, it’s Source) but it’s not obvious whether the power is good or not, and the game seems to go the same route of “It might SOUND bad, But Thou Must” which didn’t leave me enough space to roleplay (at least in Baldur’s Gate 3 I could decide never to use the illithid powers, for example). But this is only a small blemish on a much larger canvas where godly intrigue, competing factions, compelling characters and a world in danger kept me interested the whole way.
The battle system is amazing; You get abilities from books on the skills you’ve invested points in and they are used on cooldowns, and everything uses AP, which regenerates every turn. (I’m not a huge fan of how movement is super granular and you can use a whole AP by mistake because you’ve moved a few centimeters too far) Various elements deal either physical or magical damage, which is then blocked by physical or magical armor. Once an armor type is depleted, you deal damage to the enemy’s health and you can start inflicting status effects of various types. Each damage type has its own status effects, impacts on the environments and the like - which usually means everything will go up in flames - and besides specific encounters, enemies are not immune to any of that, so you can transform them into chickens, stun them, freeze them, and make fights manageable that way. They can get very hectic and difficult otherwise, but you really have a ton of options.
That being said, the gear situation is really rough. This game does itemization like a Diablo, with level-based equipment that needs to be changed constantly or become obsolete, with stats and bonuses that get difficult to compare, with a ton of merchants that get new stuff constantly that you’ll need to mull over and switch to your character with a good bartering skill to buy. Set items, legendary items, gems to socket in things… It’s fun when you find something really good, but all the cruft in-between is just busywork.
The quest design is also very intense, you’ll get a ton of poorly explained quests in a journal that doesn’t seem to track your progress very well, on a large map with very similar icons (like red and yellow flags) that don’t mean the same thing, so you can’t really use them to check where to go next. This felt a lot like the kind of game you’d need a guide open to know where to go next.
Some narrative systems are also a bit baffling, like the persuasion mechanic. In some role playing game, you would get a roll, with a chance of success when you try to persuade someone, but here it’s a hard pass or fail, even more strange is that you use other stats to do persuasion checks and these other stats aren’t useful at all. You could have an option to do a Strength Persuasion check or a Wit Persuasion check, but it doesn’t matter what your stats are in Strengh or Wit, it’ll just fail if your persuasion is too low. Very strange!
Ultimately, I had a good time with DOS2, but I kinda wish it was purely battle-focused, at this point, because it’s one of the systems I enjoy the most in the game. Everything around is pretty interesting, for sure, but there’s just a bit too much friction in getting around, figuring out what to do, and making decisions that might ultimately not amount to anything that I would rather spend more time improving my character and putting more surfaces on fire!
