Divinity: Original Sin 2 is a great RPG with a stunning amount of depth to its gameplay that is hard to learn and hard to master. I will highly recommend it if you are the type of gamer who enjoys and appreciates putting a lot of time and thinking into: character builds, strategic battles, juggling multiple allies with different skillsets, and how all of your different items and equipment can be used to give you the edge. I will recommend against this game if that doesn’t really sound fun to you, or aren’t looking for a pretty long game. DOS2 is a very long game, with a ton of stuff to get through before you end up seeing the credits. IMO the story is pretty generic, but very solid throughout the whole game. The characters aren’t anything that great, but a lot of the dialogue you can have with the different members of your party can be great and quite funny at times. And I did find myself more and more invested in my companions' arcs the more stuff we got through together. The game is also FULLY VOICED(yes!) and has a great soundtrack, both of which add to immersion when playing.
One of DOS2’s greatest strengths, besides the very in depth combat system, is its collection of quests. Each area of DOS2 is quite large, and somewhat intimidating to explore. But I found it extremely satisfying to poke around town, striking up conversations with NPCs, jotting down little notes in my adventurer’s log, and watching my map expand following leads given to me by these NPCs. Then eventually watching my adventurer’s log dwindle down to a couple little things as I slowly kept completing quests and knew I was ready to move on to the next area of the game. Yes, this is a pretty generic feature of an RPG, but I thought DOS2 did a really good job of making it extra satisfying by making each area of the game an isolated box from the rest of the game. Once you decide you want to move on to the next area, you can’t go back to the previous ones. This forced me to play differently from how I normally do, and really made me want to soak in each area and really felt like I’d taken it all in, since I couldn’t just jump ahead on the main quest then run back and do some of the side quests I skipped earlier. The game does a really good job mixing self-containing quests in each act, as well as quests that deal with longrunning plotlines, and ends up giving you the epic feeling of having done something really grand in the later acts of the game. Even if the story beats are, like I said earlier, fairly generic.
In many RPGs, it’s often helpful to have the attitude, “If I feel too weak, I’m probably too low level for this fight, I’ll come back later” but in DOS2, it’s helpful to also ask yourself, “Am I thinking of the best possible way to use the terrain and my full team’s abilities to make this fight as easy as possible?” before you determine yourself underleveled. DOS2 is a challenging game, and expects you to be the correct level while also very intelligently using the game’s mechanics to your full advantage. It also becomes fairly obvious that DOS2 expects you to go through each area doing quests in a certain order, as some quests will be balanced around the lower levels of an area, while others will be balanced around the higher levels of an area. While this makes sense, I often found it quite challenging to tell which quests are on which end of the spectrum. There are also not really enemies you can “grind” for xp if you feel stuck, most of your xp will be from doing quests. This proved to be fairly frustrating at times for me, especially at the beginning of the game when I was still learning how the mechanics of the game worked on top of not really being sure which order I was supposed to do stuff in, and led to me spending a lot of time wandering around the map finding different enemies to get dunked on.
DOS2 has some mechanics that are awesome in theory, but end up feeling kind of weird when put into practice. The game has a “rest” mechanic that just feels kind of weird because it lets you be full health all the time, instantly, when you’re out of combat. You can even slap a bedroll into your hotbar and mash the hotkey while you’re running through a tunnel filled with traps to just top yourself off as you’re frequently taking damage. While, yes, I liked being able to rest up after every difficult encounter in this game, it felt like a weird system with no cost for using it when compared to Larian’s more recent CRPG, Baldur’s Gate 3, where you had to spend resources to do a long rest, and could only do so from your camp. The fact you could get better reputation with a trader was a cool idea, but the fact that it’s PER CHARACTER makes you be very careful which character you’re using to talk to the shopkeeper, and limits you to have a specific “trading guy” to get the best trades possible. I have somewhat mixed feelings on the ability to completely respec your character at the hub, as many times as you want, and for free. I definitely liked the idea of being able to do it, but I disliked the idea of feeling obligated to do it to respec into a certain social skill. You can quickly find yourself locked out of entire questlines if you don’t have high enough persuasion combined with a certain attribute. Or find yourself locked out of a really cool item if you don’t have enough “loremaster” points to identify what it is. Failing a persuasion or lockpicking check in a tabletop game works because the game master can still find a way to move the story forward. But in DOS2 I would find myself having to reload saves or respec characters just to not gate myself out of content. It would also be nice if you could adjust how quickly the computer played the animations in combat. Combat encounters frequently got to be large groups of NPCs, and you could find yourself talking a very long time just to do a few attempts on a fight if you’re struggling with it.
While it looks like I spent more time talking about stuff I didn’t like, I can definitely assure you that these complaints didn’t bother me nearly enough to detract from having a great time in this game. I felt like time was FLYING by as I was playing, even if I had a decent amount of mechanics I wasn’t a huge fan of, and found the beginning of the game very frustrating. I will definitely be back to do another run to challenge myself on high difficulties, as well as try new builds, and explore different companion characters questlines. I highly recommend if the game looks fun to you and you don’t mind sinking a lot of time into an epic adventure :)
One of DOS2’s greatest strengths, besides the very in depth combat system, is its collection of quests. Each area of DOS2 is quite large, and somewhat intimidating to explore. But I found it extremely satisfying to poke around town, striking up conversations with NPCs, jotting down little notes in my adventurer’s log, and watching my map expand following leads given to me by these NPCs. Then eventually watching my adventurer’s log dwindle down to a couple little things as I slowly kept completing quests and knew I was ready to move on to the next area of the game. Yes, this is a pretty generic feature of an RPG, but I thought DOS2 did a really good job of making it extra satisfying by making each area of the game an isolated box from the rest of the game. Once you decide you want to move on to the next area, you can’t go back to the previous ones. This forced me to play differently from how I normally do, and really made me want to soak in each area and really felt like I’d taken it all in, since I couldn’t just jump ahead on the main quest then run back and do some of the side quests I skipped earlier. The game does a really good job mixing self-containing quests in each act, as well as quests that deal with longrunning plotlines, and ends up giving you the epic feeling of having done something really grand in the later acts of the game. Even if the story beats are, like I said earlier, fairly generic.
In many RPGs, it’s often helpful to have the attitude, “If I feel too weak, I’m probably too low level for this fight, I’ll come back later” but in DOS2, it’s helpful to also ask yourself, “Am I thinking of the best possible way to use the terrain and my full team’s abilities to make this fight as easy as possible?” before you determine yourself underleveled. DOS2 is a challenging game, and expects you to be the correct level while also very intelligently using the game’s mechanics to your full advantage. It also becomes fairly obvious that DOS2 expects you to go through each area doing quests in a certain order, as some quests will be balanced around the lower levels of an area, while others will be balanced around the higher levels of an area. While this makes sense, I often found it quite challenging to tell which quests are on which end of the spectrum. There are also not really enemies you can “grind” for xp if you feel stuck, most of your xp will be from doing quests. This proved to be fairly frustrating at times for me, especially at the beginning of the game when I was still learning how the mechanics of the game worked on top of not really being sure which order I was supposed to do stuff in, and led to me spending a lot of time wandering around the map finding different enemies to get dunked on.
DOS2 has some mechanics that are awesome in theory, but end up feeling kind of weird when put into practice. The game has a “rest” mechanic that just feels kind of weird because it lets you be full health all the time, instantly, when you’re out of combat. You can even slap a bedroll into your hotbar and mash the hotkey while you’re running through a tunnel filled with traps to just top yourself off as you’re frequently taking damage. While, yes, I liked being able to rest up after every difficult encounter in this game, it felt like a weird system with no cost for using it when compared to Larian’s more recent CRPG, Baldur’s Gate 3, where you had to spend resources to do a long rest, and could only do so from your camp. The fact you could get better reputation with a trader was a cool idea, but the fact that it’s PER CHARACTER makes you be very careful which character you’re using to talk to the shopkeeper, and limits you to have a specific “trading guy” to get the best trades possible. I have somewhat mixed feelings on the ability to completely respec your character at the hub, as many times as you want, and for free. I definitely liked the idea of being able to do it, but I disliked the idea of feeling obligated to do it to respec into a certain social skill. You can quickly find yourself locked out of entire questlines if you don’t have high enough persuasion combined with a certain attribute. Or find yourself locked out of a really cool item if you don’t have enough “loremaster” points to identify what it is. Failing a persuasion or lockpicking check in a tabletop game works because the game master can still find a way to move the story forward. But in DOS2 I would find myself having to reload saves or respec characters just to not gate myself out of content. It would also be nice if you could adjust how quickly the computer played the animations in combat. Combat encounters frequently got to be large groups of NPCs, and you could find yourself talking a very long time just to do a few attempts on a fight if you’re struggling with it.
While it looks like I spent more time talking about stuff I didn’t like, I can definitely assure you that these complaints didn’t bother me nearly enough to detract from having a great time in this game. I felt like time was FLYING by as I was playing, even if I had a decent amount of mechanics I wasn’t a huge fan of, and found the beginning of the game very frustrating. I will definitely be back to do another run to challenge myself on high difficulties, as well as try new builds, and explore different companion characters questlines. I highly recommend if the game looks fun to you and you don’t mind sinking a lot of time into an epic adventure :)