Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition

I really liked DoS1 and somehow can't keep playing the sequel. I approached the game so many times, I lost the count and gave it more than a fair shake. So what happened? The good: Visually the game is leagues above the first title. Sadly it's also much more damanding on your hardware. Many simple effects and animations are overblown and that's design decision I'm not fond of personally, but many might find appealing. Music got much more budget and you can hear it. It's definitely on the lighthearted which is fine. The quality and variety is just right and never made me feel like switching it to my personal playlist. Mod Support. The ease of installing and using many useful mods is heartwarming. Sadly 95% of those mods are just some mechanical and QoL improvements. The bad: DoS2 is trying to be far more of a P&P simulation rather than cRPG. It's not only in the mechanics, but something as essential for an RPG, as writing. It's written for co-op, with singleplayer being clear afterthought. It's not a your personal journey, but rather a tale of a group of pre-written characters with a player being just an outsider pushing the pawns. For example the way that dialog is written clearly separates character's vision from player's perspective, leaving you nearly numb to the any plot occurrence. If you choose to create a custom char, you basically don't exist within the plot. The impact of your choices during and after character creation mirrors that sentiment. The "origin characters" strip NPCs of unique feel and their own will. They always seem like another skin to wear, rather then people you want to know. The combat also suffered big change with lazy armor system designed to simplify difficulty scaling process. It encourages the player to choose either physical or magic damage and go 100% into it for entire party instead of using creativity to achieve CC and surprise advantage. Fundamentally DoS2 feels just wrong and goes down the way I can't follow or support.

The game in most areas is an absolute masterpiece and if you have any interest in RPGs you'll find yourself glued to the screen for hours on end. However there are some very key areas where the game blunders and it might make for an infuriating first playthrough. These cRPGs are usually very long. I oftenly felt very annoyed and almost disrespected by the devs when in an already insanely long game they're adding confusing puzzles in front of main questlines and fights that encourage you to reset over and over, especially if you get ambushed out of position (and it's not like the loading screens are instant when you reload). I understand that in a tactical rpg strategy is key, however there are some quirks Larian added to the game in an attempt to balance the power creep of the first DOS that just make the experience less enjoyable: - the armor system - the low amount of action points you have compared to your enemies - the plethora of ambuses - the stupid amounts of teleports and repositions the enemies have that nulify whatever tactical positioning you had in mind. However, once you stumble through the game once, you learn all the solutions to the damned puzzles (seriously Larian give it a rest with the puzzles already), you see the fights and you start to learn more about the combat mechanics, the game becomes INSANELY enjoyable as character building has a lot of depth and there's many effective ways to build your party The story, while nothing original, is good. On top of the main story you have the companion questlines which this time around are really great and the companions themselves are complex and fleshed out. The dialogue system is good, however I felt the need for more options at times (especially during the ending). The world is beautiful and the atmosphere is a lot more consistent and dark this time around even if there are some light moments as well. Overall a must have if you're a fan of the genre, but you will need a lot of patience.

Used to be 5/5 with great mechanics and interesting story, but I need another launcher like a pineapple in my ass. There is no obvious way to disable the obnoxious launcher and it can only be disabled by lanching the game with --skip-launcher parameter, however it still opens in the background. Really low Larian.

Unlike with Divinity: Original Sin, I keep losing interest and/or wanting to restart. I'm on my 3rd playthrough now and have just hit point where I want to start over yet again - and I've not once completed even 75% of the game. It's finally dawning on me that it's simply not that fun a game. 3 major drawbacks: * They've added in a status-effect preventing armour system (stopping sleep, slow, poison, shock, etc). To make things worse, armour is generally higher than HP, so by the time you deal with the armour, you no longer care about status effects - it's time to finish them off. So, where D:OS emphasised strategic use of status effects, D:OS 2 emphases pure attack damage. Over time, I've realised this has had the most significant (negative) impact on my experience. * Things are often a bit *too* open. I understand that 'open world' is all the rage now; but along with the chapter style approach, it feels like: Intro: Have no idea where to start; spend ages reloading after entering regions that are beyond your level; cut off a bunch of quests by doing things in the wrong order; eventually get on track and start enjoying it. Then, oh, time for Chapter 1A with no idea where to start again. And again at 1B, and again at 2, and again at 3... * Too many quests rely on starting choices. You get 25% of the way in before discovering you needed pet-pal. Restart. Now 30% of the way in, oh, it would've helped to have an undead character. Restart. 35% of the way in, oh, you unluck a mirror that lets you change things like pet pal. 40% of the way in, oh, I need a SCHOLAR!!! Arrgggh... sick of it. In short, you might love it if you: * Prefer damage dealing over status effects. * Want an RPG to be different for the sake of being different. * Are crazy about open worlds. * Are going to play through multiple, multiple times, so don't mind quests being blocked in individual play throughs. Not for me, though. :(

Side Note: the launcher this game comes with doesn't require you to actually sign in, create an account, or authenticate the game in any way. GoG's version of DOS 2 is still DRM free for me at least. Divinity Original Sin 2 is a perfect sequel and will remain as once of the best modern RPGs for a good while. It improves upon the first game in every regard. The story is much more engaging and we get tons of entertaining NPCs with huge backstories. The romance features are fleshed out very well. Conversations between the main character and your party members are fun distractions from the main story. In particular, romanced NPCs evolve quite a bit and display a lot of fun character development I think you'll enjoy a lot. The combat, spells and abilities, and skills come across as very polished. Each skill have meaningful purposes in the game and give us an incredible variety to combat. Experimenting with builds and the numerous status effects gives tons of flavor to an already addicting gameplay loop. While the visuals are very impressive, I'm particularly happy with how well this sequel performs and how stable the game engine is. I crashed once or twice in the 150+ hours I spent on my heavily modded playthough. Additionally, framerates are always consistently high. I think Larian Studios already have a really good track record of developing well optimized games, but I'm very happy they're still maintaining this reputation. If you're itching for an RPG that checks all the boxes and does everything right, Divinity Original Sin 2 has you covered.