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TL;DR: I did not like this game. Get ready for a negative review, with lots of pictures.

Context

If you’ve read any post in this blog for the past year, you know that I’ve developed a fascination for Baldur’s Gate 3. I’ve gushed over the quality of its story, and praised the design decisions made by the game’s publisher, Larian Studios. My only major reservation was its use of the D&D system.

Before BG3 was released in 2023, Larian Studios released Divinity Original Sin II in 2017. As I indulged in my fanboy fascination with BG3, I couldn’t help but notice many game reviews comparing it to DOS2. The general consensus seemed to be that BG3 told a better story, but the DOS2 game system was better.

Heading into the 2024 holiday season, I decided to take a break from my 12th BG3 playthrough (still in progress!) to see what DOS2 was like.

My initial verdict: I disliked the game almost from the start. In fact, if I’d played DOS2 before BG3 was released, I never would have purchased the latter. I would have been convinced that Larian did not know how to make a good game.

I know this is a minority opinion. That’s OK; the world is all the better for folks having a different perspective than mine.

I’m going to share why I feel the way I do. You should absolutely feel free to disagree with me. If DOS2 sounds like a game you’d enjoy, try it. If you like it, 7.5 million people would agree with you.

So tell us, Bill, what did you really think?

I’ll start by defining an abbreviation: HCG for “hard-core gamer.” I don’t mean any disrespect by this; the hard-core gamers drive much of the video-gaming industry. However, like many physicists, I hate to type a long phrase like “charged-current quasi-elastic scattering” and just type CCQE instead.

(In a physics paper, I’d also define that DOS2 is short for Divinity: Original Sin 2, and BG3 is an abbreviation for Baldur’s Gate 3. But you’re smarter than the average physicist.)

Here’s to the HCGs out there! You’re great… but I’m not one of you. While I play many video games (or, in the case of BG3, one video game for a long time), I’m not interested in challenging game-play that angers me enough to make me fling the controller across the room.

It’s a recurring theme in my video-game reviews: I always play a game on its easiest difficulty setting.

Here’s another recurring theme: If a game gives me a frustrating challenge when I select its easiest difficulty, I’m going to give it a negative review. I did this for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Batman: Arkham Knight, and Jedi: Fallen Order for example.

I played Divinity Original Sin II on its Story setting.

That’s one level lower in difficulty than its beginner’s setting.

You’ve already put it together: Even on its easiest difficulty setting, DOS2 was frustrating, annoying, and repetitive.

Am I talking about the game mechanics or the story?

Both.

It’s “Show, don’t tell”

Let’s get the story out of the way first. I agree with the HCG reviewers: The story is nowhere near as good as BG3.

I didn’t find it engaging at all. In BG3, I cared about the characters almost from the beginning. The characters in DOS2 all seemed like variants of classic stereotypes I’d seen before. The plotlines were equally familiar.

Part of the problem was the presentation. The dialogs in DOS2 are presented as text, with voice actors reading the lines. If you’re lucky, the camera is oriented so you can see characters’ lips move. Otherwise, the scenes are static.

The voice actors do the best they can. Indeed, some of the voice actors in DOS2 also had roles in BG3. For example, the character I played, Lohse, was voiced by Tamaryn Payne, who also supplied the voice of Mizora in BG3.

But even the most emotive voice acting can’t make up for stilted writing and limited presentation.

There were games that came before DOS2‘s publication in 2017 that included motion capture and could create dramatic personal interactions; for example, Mass Effect was published in 2007, Witcher 3 in 2015. However, I’m willing to concede that Larian before DOS2 might not have had the production resources that it did afterwards, in the years leading to release of BG3.

I recognize that I’m being terribly unfair. The likely reason why they didn’t have fully-animated scenes is that they couldn’t afford it.

I’m also willing to concede that, in their own way, the characters in BG3 are no less stereotypical than the DOS2 characters. In DOS2 pretty much every playable character except Lohse is a disgraced leader of some sort; in BG3 we have the bold warrior, the angry barbarian, the verbose wizard, etc.

Although I’m not a writer myself (this blog post is evidence for that), one thing I did learn in my one semester of writing in college: Know the limitations of your medium.

As an example (and another of my classic tangents), consider old SF TV shows such as Star Trek and Doctor Who. The budgets and available technology greatly limited what they could present. Yet, thanks to the quality of their writing, they crafted some stunning stories that have survived the test of time better than their modern incarnations.

As a measure of my own engagement with the story, I’ll use a bizarre metric: Did I feel it was worth listening to the voice actors recite their lines fully, or did I feel like clicking rapidly to get to the next line of dialog?

When I play BG3, even after 12 playthroughs, I find that I still want to listen to the dialog in the animated scenes, even for those scenes I’ve experienced many times before. In various YouTube videos, I see gamers rapidly click through Gale’s dialog to get to the point. I listen to Tim Downie as he voices Gale, because I feel for the kind of character Gale is and what he’s trying to do.

When I play DOS2, I know after the first three words of each sentence what the character is going to say. The voice actors worked for hours to record their lines, and perhaps I should appreciate their effort more. But if neither the presentation nor the story is engaging, I find no reason to keep listening, or even reading the text. I clicked through the text rapidly to get to the next plot point, which I can predict all too well.

I get that Larian was limited in their presentation. I argue that if the writing had been better, it would have suited those limits. Instead of telling us “the characters have sex” or whatever, incorporate into the story what you’re able to show.

A cinematic maxim is “Show, don’t tell.” If you can’t show, then “tell” better.

On last critique of the story:

DOS2 has storylines with multiple branches, like BG3, Witcher 3, and similar games. As I played, I could see various storylines presented and slip by me, as I made one decision or another.

Much of the time, that decision was to ignore a particular branch of a story. The environment puzzles in DOS2 are often difficult, with almost no hope of solving them unless you look up the answer on the web. Given my lack of engagement in the story and presentation, even near the beginning of the game, I missed a lot.

One thing that did not become clear until near the end of the game: Given a choice between choosing side A or side B in a particular conflict, the game’s optimal solution is to kill off everyone on both sides. Only in this way might you have enough levels to face the final challenges of the game.

I’m in the middle of my 12th playthrough of BG3. I finished a single playthrough of DOS2. I don’t ever want to play it again.

More on that later.

Both an example and an exception

There’s one high story point I’d like to show from my DOS2 playthrough. My character, the witch-bard Lohse, was possessed through most of the adventure. She finally earned her freedom. Among the benefits is that she could finally sing again. Here’s what it looked like.

(Warning: The two videos embedded in this point include big swinging camera movements to make the images more interesting. If you have vertigo or other sensitivity to rapid movements, please feel free to look away; this is (mostly) about the audio, not the video.)

The music is by Borislav Slavov, who also wrote the music for BG3. I think the performer is the same as the one who supplied Lohse’s spoken voice: Tamaryn Payne.

It’s a great song. The triumph in the song is accompanied by graphic effects that are found nowhere else in the game. It’s the most beautiful moment in DOS2.

A shame that it was obscured by those mandatory dialog boxes covering half the screen. I could not suppress them.

If you saw my post Barding it, it turns out that at least three of the songs in that post originally came from DOS2: the DOS2 main theme, The Queen’s High Seas, and an instrumental version of “Sing For Me”.

Once I heard “Sing For Me” performed in DOS2, I had a better sense of when the song was supposed to begin and end. I decided to get the BG3 Undecimo Ludo Ensemble back together for a better performance of the song:

Of course, for this song, the DOS2 version is better. It demonstrates the value of really good singer.

Ominous Crafting

I’m not a fan of crafting systems in computerized role-playing games.

The problem is that it results in complex inventory management. If you don’t know if a given item will be required for crafting something important, you can’t throw it away.

That means your equipment inventory becomes crowded with junk. In some games (including DOS2 and BG3), characters have a limit to the total weight of objects they can carry. This can turn the game into a speculative logistics puzzle that involves a lot of scrolling through screens filled with icons.

I have an informal rule that seems to work across all the games I’ve played that include some form of inventory management: Multiply the weight of item by 10. If the result is greater than its value in gold, dump it.

There’s a crafting system in BG3, but it’s not onerous. It’s all about alchemy. If you pick up an item that’s useful in an alchemical recipe, it’s automatically placed in an Alchemy Pouch that’s part of every character’s initial inventory. Although there are recipe books scattered about, you don’t need them; you automatically learn any recipe once you acquire the items for it.

Also, although you may not learn this in one’s first playthrough of BG3, there are only a few recipes that matter: Speed Potion, Bloodlust Elixir, Battlemage Elixir, Viciousness Elixir, and the Giant Strength Elixirs. There are a few others that have some situational utility, but those are the key ones. Once you learn the recipes, you can sell anything that isn’t involved in making the key elixirs. Or you can just buy the potions at vendors.

In DOS2, you have no such guide. You only learn a recipe by finding a book, or by tedious experimentation from randomly combining ingredients. I accumulated a large number of useless recipes (a Knife on a Stick! Yay!) and few useful ones (two small Healing Potions = one medium Healing Potion).

OK, crafting in DOS2 is boring and BG3‘s system is better. Larian learned something and improved on it. Or did they?

As you walk through the world in DOS2, you find piles of crates and barrels. Most of them are empty, but you have to look anyway, because you never know.

Occasionally a barrel, crate, or sack will contain a recipe component, like a tong or a rope. Those two in particular can be combined with a stick to make a trivial weapon whose only value is to sell it.

Why is this ominous?

In BG3, as you walk through the world you’ll also find crates and barrels and sacks. Most of them are empty as well. But occasionally you’ll find some rope, a tong, or other items similar to the crafting ingredients in DOS2. They’re not crafting ingredients in BG3. They’re not worth picking up to sell (too heavy for the gold value).

Why are they there? I can think of a few reasons:

• Larian used the same algorithm for distributing containers and their contents in both games. To me, this is a practical thing to do.
• It’s a homage of some kind. DOS2 and BG3 are part of a chain of games that goes back over two decades. Perhaps an earlier incarnation of this type of game included scattering crates, barrels, and sacks all over the place, filled with tongs, ropes, and similar trash. As a ritualist, I understand the concept of tradition.
• The option that has me worried: Perhaps Larian originally intended to have the same crafting system in BG3 as they did in DOS2, populated the game environment accordingly, then dropped the idea.

I’ll revisit this idea at the end of this post: I had hoped that Larian’s next game would be equal or better than BG3. I don’t want to see them repeat the design elements of DOS2 that made it a tedious slog for me.

The System

Let’s start with something that I said before, and that I’ll say again:

I played Divinity Original Sin II on its Story setting.

Please keep that in mind as I continue my ranting.

I also said that the general consensus of game reviewers seemed to be that BG3 told a better story, but the DOS2 game system was better.

You’ve already guessed my opinion: No. The DOS2 game system is not better. I make this statement despite all my reservations about the D&D system.

The DOS2 game system is more complicated than that of BG3. For me, that doesn’t make it better.

Let’s break it down.

Character system

The character system in BG3 follows the standard D&D formula: Determine your attributes, pick a character class, pick skills within that character class. You also pick a character background, which gives you a bonus to some skills (e.g., if you pick a background of Urchin you’ll be better at Sleight of Hand). You gain additional skills as you go up in level, and a Feat (basically a “super skill”) every four levels or so.

A superficial glance at the DOS2 system would suggest I’d like its system better: There are no character classes. The existence of character classes are one of my gripes about D&D.

But in avoiding character classes, DOS2 goes overboard and overloads the player with choices:

If you’re an HCG, you’re drooling. You’ve already stopped reading this post and rushed out to purchase the game. (This assumes a bizarre chain of circumstance that would lead you to read to this point; to you this post must seem like a whiny rant.)

If you’re like me, your head is spinning. You’d only get the game if you felt the story was worth it, or all these options didn’t matter much in Story mode. As you’ve already guessed, I did not know that the game would fail on both counts when I purchased it.

And we’re not yet done.

Equipment

In both DOS2 and BG3, gear is extremely important. Going up in level helps, but finding better gear helps more.

In BG3, the item locations are fixed. If you’re looking for The Graceful Cloth, it’s sold by Lady Esther. It can’t be found anywhere else. None of the important items are randomly generated. (It might be that trash items like rope and tongs are randomly placed, but I’ve never checked; run-of-the-mill vendor items like arrows and potions are randomly generated within the vendor’s inventory.)

In DOS2, while there are some unique items at specific locations, the vast majority of gear is found through random-item generation during searches. That’s why you have to search every crate, barrel, and sack. It’s also why the Civil Ability Lucky Charm is useful, as it increases the chance of finding gear when you open containers. You can also find randomly-generated gear being sold by vendors, but that’s expensive.

That’s good, right? The more gear the better, yes?

In practice, it opens up yet another complicated decision tree.

Let’s take a look at Lohse as she was geared near the of the game.

The first complexity is that there are two different kinds of armor: Physical Armor and Magic Armor.

In D&D, the amount of armor a character wears affects the chance that a character is hit with a weapon attack. When the attacker hits, the damage done is subtracted from the defender’s Hit Points.

In DOS3, the chance that someone is hit with an attack depends on the attacker’s Accuracy and the defender’s Dodge (and perhaps other factors as well; I didn’t research the details). When the attacker hits, damage is initially done to either the defender’s Physical Armor or their Magic Armor, depending on the nature of the attack. Only when the corresponding type of armor is gone does the attack damage the defender’s Vitality.

This means every time you get a new piece of gear, you have to ask:

• For which character, if any, is this gear an improvement? This is not as simple a question as it sounds. Some items may have a higher value of one stat and a lower value of a different stat compared to a character’s existing gear. I often found myself testing a new item for all four characters.
• How does this new item affect the amount of the character’s Physical and Magical Armor? Is it worth sacrificing one type of defense to do more damage?

  As a general rule, ranged character tend to take more Magical damage while melee characters take more Physical damage. Sometimes. Maybe. There’s a couple of screenshots below that show counter-examples.

• What about the item’s other stats?

  As an example, the Adamas armor in the above picture gives Lohse +2 Huntsman. That increases the amount of damage that she does when she’s at a higher elevation than her target. I spec’ed her to be an archer, so she’ll usually try to maneuver to be higher than her targets. But is that worth it? The +3 Intelligence improves the damage of attack spells, but Lohse rarely casts those; would the armor be better on Beast instead? But does Beast have 14 Strength?

  The answer to that last question is yes. I found that to give the greatest flexibility in assigning gear, I had to spend Attribute points to make sure that every character had enough Strength, Finesse, and Intelligence to be able to wear the gear being randomly generated at the party’s character level.

• Does the item grant a useful skill that would otherwise difficult or inconvenient to get? Remember that skills granted by items don’t use up Memory slots. I often kept a lower-level item so the character could keep the skill it granted… which of course made the character more vulnerable.

Discovering a new item therefore became an exercise in multi-variant analysis, flipping between Equipment and Inventory screens as I compared every combination with every other.

I played Divinity Original Sin II on its Story setting.

I found this analysis to be necessary. Should it have been?

We’re done with equipment, right?

Nope. I haven’t mentioned Runes yet.

From my perspective, I’ve never played a game in which item sockets improved the gameplay. They add to the inventory problem and to the equipement decision tree. It’s even worse when the decision is not reversible.

In DOS2, some items have sockets that can accept Runes.

Scroll up a bit and take another look at the picture of Lohse’s equipment. The white dot in the lower left of her chest-armor icon means the item has a Rune.

Oops… it looks like her bow Heartseeker doesn’t have a Rune in it. We have to fix this, don’t we?

Typically, Runes are found as part of the treasure in chests and whatnot, or sold by vendors. You can try to Craft Runes, but it’s a frustrating experience.

The point of that chain of pictures is to show how complex it is to create and upgrade the individual Runes. Now suppose we want to improve the Runes themselves.

All of the issues associated with equipment apply to Runes as well, especially since they’re permanent. For example, note that the Giant Frost Rune of Power gives +3 Intelligence. Should I have inserted the Rune into Beast’s equipment instead? It’s too late now!

Combat

This is the part where my patience wore out. I only forced my way through the later combats solely to write this blog post. I actually gave up for a bit, as I’ll describe below.

As I said above, I found DOS2 to be repetitive and frustrating. The main reasons were surfaces and Action Points. Let’s take a look at each.

Surfaces

Both DOS2 and BG3 make use of surface effects in combat.

An example of such an effect is an icy surface. When a being tries to walk across an icy surface, there’s a chance that it will fall down and lose the rest of its turn. If you hit an icy surface to with flame, the ice will melt leaving a wet surface. If you hit the wet surface with a lightning spell, it will become electrified and damage anyone standing on it.

In BG3 (at least in the two lowest difficulty settings), enemies don’t make much use of surfaces. There are a couple of fights in which the enemy will toss a Grease Bottle (characters can slip and lose their turn; can be set aflame) or something like that, but it’s not a feature of every combat. If the enemy sets up a surface, they’ll usually do so on their first turn, then move to other tactics. The player can usually move off the surface or walk around it.

In DOS2, every combat opens with the enemy casting some kind of surface on your location. In the majority of combats, the enemy will go before you. (There’s a stat called “Initiative”, but unlike BG3 this seems to matter a whole lot less for DOS2 characters.)

The practical result is that you start every combat with some kind of disadvantage. You have to waste Action Points (we’ll get to those below) in order to overcome it.

That’s not all. Unlike BG3, the enemies in DOS2 will often cast “create surface” spells every combat round.

Are we done yet? Nope. In DOS2, the surfaces synergize. I alluded to one synergy in BG3 earlier: ice + fire = water. In DOS2, there are myriads of synergies.

This got me more than once:

• Fire can be Cursed (aka “Necrofire”). It looks the same as regular fire.
• I foolishly cast Rain on the Fire to put it out.
• What I fail to notice that instead of converting Fire into Steam, I’ve converted Necrofire into Cursed Steam.
• A fun property of Cursed Steam (which looks identical to plain old Steam) is that it applies Decaying to a character standing in it.
• Among the nifty properties of Decaying is that any healing turns into damage.
• All I see visually is that the Fire has been put out. My character is low on Vitality, so I drink a Healing Potion
• But to a Decaying character, a Healing Potion becomes a Poison Potion.
• My character drops dead.

The only hope to avoid this is to constantly check every surface that a character is in or might enter, and constantly check each character’s status.

The need to constantly check the environment and status slows down combat a lot.

I played Divinity Original Sin II on its Story setting.

Should this level of detail be required in Story mode? Evidently Larian thought so.

Action Points

In D&D, you have to keep track of five things during a combat round: Action, Bonus Action, Reaction, Concentration, and Movement. I agree that can be complex. It’s one of my check-marks against D&D.

DOS2 uses Action Points instead. I acknowledge that it’s simpler. But it’s also painful.

Everything you do in combat costs Action Points (AP): Using a skill, drinking a potion, movement, etc. For example:

• It costs one AP to move a certain distance. The amount you can move depends on your stats (I never figured out the formula), but it’s safe to assume that it’s never enough. You want to move one step more than what 1AP allows you to move? That’s 2AP!
• To use most basic skills costs 2AP. Advanced skills tend to cost 3AP or more.
• Drinking a potion, equipping a weapon, or some other basic task costs 1AP.

How many AP you get can vary (you can “bank” AP from one combat round to use later), but basically you get only 4AP per round.

This means that every combat round turns into another level of logistics analysis. For example:

• I want to shoot my bow at that enemy, but that costs 2AP.
• To get close enough to the enemy so I can shoot it costs AP. The game’s interface will tell me how much AP it will cost to go a given distance.
• What the game’s interface won’t tell me is if, having moved that distance, I’ll be within range to shoot the enemy.
• If I expend all my AP for that one bowshot, I won’t be able to drink a healing potion.

Every combat round is like this for every character: a cost-benefit analysis for every potential action.

This might be fair if the enemy had to obey the same restrictions. But they don’t. Your characters get 4AP, the enemy gets 6AP or more.

I played Divinity Original Sin II on its Story setting.

Should this level of detail be required in Story mode? Evidently Larian thought so.

Are we done yet?

I wish we were.

Some combats are preceded by a dialog of some sort. It’s usual “You can’t defeat me, bwa-ha-ha!” (I’ve already complained about the story.)

Once that prologue is over, the combat begins.

But…

Perhaps you’ve looked around and inspected the battlefield before the combat. Perhaps you’ve placed your characters to take advantage of terrain; e.g., move your ranged characters to higher ground to take advantage of the combat bonus. Perhaps you’ve used Sneak so your Rogue-like character will be closer to the enemy to strike.

These are standard tactics in BG3, but it won’t work in DOS2.

Because after the “bwa-ha-ha” and the combat begins, your party is relocated to ground zero of the battlefield, perfectly positioned for the enemy’s repeated area-of-effect surface attacks to pound your party.

I played Divinity Original Sin II on its Story setting.

Should preventing strategic positioning be a part of Story mode? Evidently Larian thought so.

That’s got to be enough, Bill

Just a couple more things.

Delays

Most skills and spells require a delay before you can use them again (see the “2” comment above). This opens more decisions:

• Do you use this ability now, on an enemy that’s not crucial, or do you want until you get closer to the Big Bad Boss?
• But if you hold onto the ability, that lesser enemy might still do damage to the party.
• And if the Big Bad Boss keeps moving out of range, it might be that you would have been able to use that ability on the BBB anyway, because it would have taken that many rounds to catch up?

Hotbar

You’ve seen the hotbar in the above pictures. What you can’t tell from the pictures is that the hotbar is tricky to configure. Ideally you’d like your more frequently-used skills to be in a convenient position.

But any new skills you acquire are automatically placed in the first blank spot in your hot bar. There’s no simple way to move or swap their location.

What this means in practice is that, if you remember that you have a particular ability that might be useful, you have to search for it in the hotbar, swapping through sets of randomly-placed icons.

OK, with this complaint I’m just being cruel:

• The clumsiness of the hotbar is due to the fact that I played the game on my PS5 using a controller. I’m sure the desktop version lets you trivially drag-and-drop icons. If I’m being even more fair, the reason why Lohse’s song in the video above is half-obscured by dialog boxes is probably also due to playing the game on a console.
• This is a problem Larian recognized and fixed in BG3.

What combat is like

• You’re thrust into combat, perhaps as the result of an ambush or a cutscene.
• Your position is changed so it’s bad from the start.
• You’re pounded over and over again with area-of-effect spells and surfaces.
• The enemies stab at you over and over again, seemingly without the limits that you must obey.
• You sit there and twiddle your fingers, waiting for it to be your turn.
• Perhaps one of your characters is killed before it’s even your turn.
• Your turns are slow and tedious, as you:
  • analyze the environment for all surface properties;
  • confirm the status of all your characters, to see if (e.g.) drinking a healing potion will kill them;
  • check the status of all the enemies, so see if (e.g.) attacking them with poison or fire will heal them (I forgot to mention that in my list of complaints, didn’t I?)
  • review all your skills using the hotbar, to do see what’s available and is not on cooldown;
  • check the movement limits of the character to see if you can be in range of the enemy to use your skill;
  • balance the action-point cost of everything you might want to do.

Once more, in caps and bold this time:

I PLAYED DIVINITY ORIGINAL SIN II ON ITS STORY SETTING.

If this is what it’s like in its super-easy mode, I can’t imagine what it must be like in its harder modes.

Again, if you’re an HCG who’s had the patience to read all of this, you’re more anxious than ever to take up the challenge. My complaints must seem like glorious praise.

Me? I felt angry frustrated, irritated. At first I was putting in a lot of effort to see the story. Then when I lost interest in the story, I was only putting in the effort to write this blog post from what I loosely hoped was an informed perspective.

The final battle

There’s a big final battle in DOS2. This is fine. Almost every game of this sort has a grand conflict to culminate the the story.

(Though, as I’ve griped about above, the story was so unengaging that I had no idea what was going on.)

Despite my litany of complaints above, I’d managed to grind my way through all the earlier combats in the game. I didn’t have to repeat any of them more than once, though in a couple of cases I avoided a repeat defeat by skipping the battle entirely.

To get to this final battle, you have to solve two difficult puzzles. I had no idea how to solve either of them. I had to look up the solutions on the web.

It was only while organizing the screenshots for this blog post that I learned that I’d seen a clue to one of the puzzles before, but it had seemed irrelevant at the time and I didn’t remember it when I found the puzzle.

When I got to the final battle, I tried twice.

Both times, after a long tedious slog, my party was wiped out.

This was not fun. It was just tiring, annoying, frustrating.

Again:

I played Divinity Original Sin II on its Story setting.

This was not the experience I was looking for.

When I used the web to look up advice on this final battle, I realized:

• Despite doing every quest I could find in the city of Arx, at level 19 I was still low-level for this battle. I should have been level 21 or higher.
• There were key items that I never discovered.
• That one should respec all of their characters just before this battle to optimize them for the challenge.

My reaction to learning this: No way. I’m done. It’s over.

I starting writing this blog post. As I did so, I realized that there were some screenshots that I didn’t have.

I started up the game from my most recent save, from just before the final battle. I got screenshots of the skill lists and so forth.

Then I thought “What the hell” and started the final battle again.

I got through it.

I got the screenshots of victory. I can’t say it was worth it. That final battle was a long uninteresting slog. I got through it only because the enemies had taken sides against each other. I could try to stay out of their way as they killed each other.

Even so, it was a defensive battle. I had to continually resurrect fallen party members, chug armor and health potions, and use teleport scrolls to try to stay out of the enemies’ range.

I didn’t feel triumphant at the end. Only hollow.

It’s reasonable for you to ask: “Wasn’t this the same for you when you played BG3 for the first time?”

No, it wasn’t.

I played the game in Explorer (easiest) difficulty, with only a dimly-remembered knowledge of the D&D system. I got through almost all the combats on the first try, even the big battle at the end. I was engaged with the story enough that I was more concerned with failing to have sex with every Origin character than I was with the combats.

Wrapping it up

If you’re looking for a game with one challenging battle after another, with a forgettable story to act as connective tissue, Divinity Original Sin II is the game you’re looking for.

For me, the game removed some of my enthusiasm for Larian.

In my first post in my BG3 series, I wrote:

The game’s publisher, Larian Studios, has stated that BG3 will be the only game in the “D&D universe” that they’ll publish. If a Baldur’s Gate 4 is ever released, it won’t come from them.

For my part, unless this hypothetical BG4 can match Larian’s skill in design and storytelling, I won’t be interested. On the other hand, I’m very much looking forward to whatever game Larian releases next, though I know it will be many years before that happens.

Now I’m not as confident in what Larian might do.

Will their upcoming games emphasize complex systems and battle mechanics over story? Will they have complicated crafting and rune systems that make inventory management a drudgery?

Will they design a game for HCGs and forget that there’s a reason why some folks choose Easy Difficulty?

Will sculpting an engaging story remain a priority?

I still love Baldur’s Gate 3. I plan at least two playthroughs after my current one.

However, the experience of DOS2 has left me with the bitter feeling that Larian will create another complicated mess, only this time with animated cutscenes.

I have my fingers crossed. With Sylvanus’ and Selûne’s blessings, Larian will learn the right lessons from BG3, and not follow the HCG assumption that better = more complicated and more difficult.