Thoughts on Divinity: Original Sin 2?

[patrick bateman gaming]

Just wanted to know your opinions of that game mechanics/story/gameplay, etc., since it seemed to be (before BG3) the oh-so-great saviour of the cRPG genre, and the entry point to the genre for a lot of people. Sadly its subreddit is just a complete circlejerk where you can't discuss/critique the game's mechanics, and it's mostly about farming upvotes by praising the game.

Personally, I think that at the end the game is just a turn based action-RPG (a bit of an hyperbole, I know, but hopefuly you get my point). Everything you do and every skill is either combat focused or supports combat. The amount of meaningless dialogues and story plots that just end in combat is exhausting. There's even Persuassion checks that tease you with avoiding combat, just to still make NPCs go aggro at you.

DOS2 doesn't come close to the player agency level offered of the original Fallouts, where you can progress through the main quests by different ways depending on the skills of your character. Sure, in DOS 2 you can approach combat in sooo many different ways and with so many different tools, but it still almost always forces you to fight.

 

[eissa]

I like it in gameplay wise. It was so too in DoS1. Compared to similiar game in this NuCRPG, like Pillars of Eternity and Wasteland 2/3, it got clever enviromental destruction and interaction so much you can also treat it as puzzle game. Combined with the much pretty graphic than it's competitor, it's basically the Trine of CRPG.

Because such features are more advertised, ever since the kickstarter phase, other stuff might be lacking and tbh, Divinity doesn't seem to take itself rather seriously until recently. So things would be lacking in storytelling and choice.

But for me I would say every RPG have right to be innovative in certain aspect. DoS utilized the strength of 3D graphic in CRPG unlike no other game back then. Not sure about now, but compared to Wasteland 3 I am not as impressed as back when DoS2 and DoS1 were at release.


Hopefully someone can combine all those key strength into one epic game.

 

[Chromevod]

It's very linear and the places that have the most branching comes from how you go about origin character/companion quests. There's a few places it seems contrived that their stories are progressing in that particular place and time, for sure. The 3rd major location in particular feels so contrived it kind of kills my enthusiasm whenever I go there during a playthrough.

That said, the actual plot beats of the character stories are ones I do enjoy. The fact that you have to make choices on which origin characters will survive does lend itself to multiple playthroughs as well just to see the stories of the characters you missed. The final part of the story in Arx also got tidied up massively after Larian went about fixing what was originally a buggy mess.

I think I've played DOS2 maybe three times total? Once through when it first came out, a second time with friends in co-op, and another time more recently just because I felt like it. It never reaches the highs of something like the original Fallout in my opinion, but I definitely have fun. As Patrick said, most situations often resolve with violence. It helps if you enjoy it as a combat system though.