I’ve been playing little else besides Divinity: Original Sin II for the past few months, and before I get into a list of criticisms of it, I want to stress that I still think the game is good; it’s just that everything about Baldur’s Gate 3 is better by comparison. Like Original Sin 1, D:OS2 is becoming a slog toward the end of the game. The solutions to so many quests are either unintuitive or purposely hidden. I don’t like to play with a walkthrough open while I play games, so there are a lot of quests left undone, and every quest matters in this game, because each level scales so hard. I’m frequently one level under where I ought to be, and that’s the difference between a fight being a cake walk or being just challenging enough that it takes me 3 or 4 tries to get through it, which is lengthening this playthrough substantially. Even things I initially liked about their RPG systems, like the action point system in D:OS2, are starting to wear on me, as I’m now finding it doesn’t solve problems as well as D&D5e. In fact, after finishing Baldur’s Gate 3, I was confident that Larian’s next game will also be just as great regardless of the D&D license, but now I’m wondering how much of BG3’s brilliance was Larian getting better at their craft after D:OS2 and how much of it was D&D rules doing a lot of heavy lifting. Surely Larian got better at writing, both characters and plot, after D:OS2 when building BG3, but will they still fall back on so many tedious RPG systems when left to their own devices, like the D:OS2 armor, cooldown, and source point systems? Will they still make each level scale so hard, and have so many of them that it incentivizes you to kill every NPC you can? I hope not. Hopefully they come up with something better for their next game.
I’ve been playing little else besides Divinity: Original Sin II for the past few months, and before I get into a list of criticisms of it, I want to stress that I still think the game is good; it’s just that everything about Baldur’s Gate 3 is better by comparison. Like Original Sin 1, D:OS2 is becoming a slog toward the end of the game. The solutions to so many quests are either unintuitive or purposely hidden. I don’t like to play with a walkthrough open while I play games, so there are a lot of quests left undone, and every quest matters in this game, because each level scales so hard. I’m frequently one level under where I ought to be, and that’s the difference between a fight being a cake walk or being just challenging enough that it takes me 3 or 4 tries to get through it, which is lengthening this playthrough substantially. Even things I initially liked about their RPG systems, like the action point system in D:OS2, are starting to wear on me, as I’m now finding it doesn’t solve problems as well as D&D5e. In fact, after finishing Baldur’s Gate 3, I was confident that Larian’s next game will also be just as great regardless of the D&D license, but now I’m wondering how much of BG3’s brilliance was Larian getting better at their craft after D:OS2 and how much of it was D&D rules doing a lot of heavy lifting. Surely Larian got better at writing, both characters and plot, after D:OS2 when building BG3, but will they still fall back on so many tedious RPG systems when left to their own devices, like the D:OS2 armor, cooldown, and source point systems? Will they still make each level scale so hard, and have so many of them that it incentivizes you to kill every NPC you can? I hope not. Hopefully they come up with something better for their next game.