Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition

Absolut RPG experience! Highly recommended.

This game was clearly made with an incredible amount of ingenuity, experience, creativity, labour, and love. Writing tends to be a bit over the top sometimes like with most older Larian titles and the lore is admittedly all over the place in Divinity series but the unique flavour and the richness of it's flexible systems more than make up it. This is when Larian still had a fool's hat on but had already proven that they are dead serious about making great games that would last for decades.

- Can be played without knowing anything about the previous games - Solid gameplay + story, companions + characters are interesting and combat is fluid and well handled - worldbuilding is top notch, and exposition is gradual with very few tedious infodumps - crafting system is unnecessary and can feel like a chore, at best. Quests requiring its use feel shoehorned in, and the game can be played without using it outside of those moments. - the ending (without spoilers) is a deus-ex-machina "choose what you want to happen" kind of deal. You will receive the same set of "pick a button" options regardless of how you played.

The game is rough to start as it doesn't adequately explain how combat works. Once you figure that out, it gets a bit easier.

Perhaps if I had played this series BEFORE Balder's Gate 3, I would have liked it more. Or if I play DoS1 first. But after playing BG3 this game is like a somewhat crude sandbox version of BG3. It's over course very similar all the way around. However, after a few weeks of playing and making decent progress through the story, I just couldn't get into the story. The story felt just kind of vague and not very compelling. The NPC companions just seemed very hollow and unlikeable. One thing I decidedly did NOT like was how everything in the world was flammable and ALWAYS catching fire. Every combat encounter turned into a raging inferno, every time. It kind of got ridiculous. I think there probably is a lot of good content in this game and again if you play 1st version and haven't played BG3, there's probably a decent game here. It was on sale very cheap so I rolled the dice on it. I've given up playing it and probably won't go back - but I tend to be picky with CRPGs. If you love RPGs and can get it on sale cheap, it's maybe worth giving it a shot.