Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback My Second Impressions

Welp, I finished the game a second time, and here are my insights. I doubt anyone of Larian actually reads this, but perhaps they do and it proves useful...

Let me start by saying that, if it weren't for Sir Lora and the loading screen, I wouldn't even know this is a "definitive edition". I thought it was going to be like the Enhanced Edition. I'm so naive sometimes. I made another thread during my first playthrough: http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=638931#Post638931. Every single problem adressed there is still present in the DE, so it's pointless to discuss them again.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!



Oh boy, DE has plenty of them. How the hell things that worked before now are broken is beyond me. I don't recall them all but the firsts bugs that come to my mind are the following:

* Sebille not giving me her Scar Song, forcing me to cheese the fight against the Shadow Prince by approaching without her anywhere near the place. And yes, I had 100 Attitude with her, it seems like you have to talk to her first when Act 3 starts, otherwise it bugs out.
* My inventory getting greyed out, like when it does when you're talking, but pemanently. Only resolved by reloading, and it happened like ten times.
* Random crashes, I had like three.
* At the end of the game, Sebille told me how special she felt when we slept together. It was funny because we never did, I chose Lohse this time.
* Toymaker Sander had a mental breakdown after I tried to sneak into his house. One of his puppets saw me, started to scream, and he came into the room, not before I hid myself again. He just stood in the door saying something like "it seems like it was a false alarm" over and over, he never moved from that position. At least it allowed me to keep talking to him and proceed with the quest.
* Random quests are broken, like Count Your Chickens.



The cheeseness is strong as always. Many fights require you to had previous knowledge of it beforehand unless you want to be instantly fried by Source spells before you can even react. The constant browsing of shops is still there, and still shitty. This time I played the game without stealing from vendors, and it was pure hell. It wasn't until Arx that I had enough money to buy anything I wanted.
I had a problem that didn't found during my first playthrough. While it was probably an epic fail of my part, I seriously don't know what I did wrong. What happened? I couldn't find more experience in Arx, and was stuck at lvl18. Pretty much every fight was lvl19 and onwards, and in Tactician is nearly impossible to beat let's say Isbeil at that lvl. It took me a great deal of time but I eventually managed to level up to 19 by killing the traitor dwarf at the wedding and doing some other random stuff, after that everything went smooth.

The weird part is that I actually completed plenty more quests than my first time. In fact, I obtained a lot of new achievements, and yet I ended up being weaker. Was the experience nerfed somehow?



According to the changelog, the game had a huge rework in terms of dialogs and texts. I honestly couldn't find anything different, maybe they were way too subtle. To be honest I never had any issues with Arx, many people said it was lifeless but I thought it was ok.
I only encountered a single new fight, perhaps two. They weren't very exciting. The Kraken fight was beyond stupid, the tentacles couldn't reach me at all and I just shot them to death with Ifan from across the screen.

The epilogues are still the same and have no mention of your romance with the rest of the characters. Every single ending my friends did the exact same thing, how exciting. Why not add something different?



Dear God, why? At first I hated the squirrel because it was nearly impossible to keep him alive, specially in fights like Blackpits. Eventually they added magic armor to him, which was a step in the right direction, but he eventually managed to die by stepping into lava during the fight against the remaining gods.
I kinda grew fond to him after that fight, where he told me about his past. I don't know, something about the way he said "they killed him... my friend" gave me shivers.
I'm sorry Sir Lora, I failed you and allowed you to die. We did stopped the Great Acorn tho!

In all seriousness, he should've just been invulnerable, untargeteable, or a summon like the Black Cat or Vulture, instead of having to look out after him. It's annoying and provides nothing but headaches. And feels.



I haven't noticed anything different regarding armor or power of certain spells. In fact, it felt exactly the same - sometimes extremely cheap, sometimes extremely easy. I actually killed the Doctor in my first try this time, when the first time I played it took me like ten reloads. On the other hand, Isbeil took me like three reloads because every time she went first, had 6AP, and melted my whole party with Source spells.



I just reinstalled DOS1:EE and started a new game. It's amazing how superior that game is. Like, 99% of its features are better than the sequel's. How did that happened? If DOS3 is on the way just copy the first one and forget about this mistake, please.

Welp, that's all for now. Sorry if I sound too agressive, but this game has an unique way of pissing me off. Frustation is a word that describes it perfectly.

I don't find this aggressive. Honestly if I were the one writing a feedback, chances are I'd sound way more aggressive. In fact, in this particular case, our aggressiveness would be perfectly understandable because as you pointed out, a lot of things broken now used to work fine in classic. On top of that are many new problems shipped with the DE. I try to overlook most of the technical issues though, as this is the first time Larian ported their game to consoles.

About the Arx part, I also had trouble trying to catch up to the levels of encounters in Arx. I was level 18 when getting to Arx, and had to scour the entire city to get to level 20 while trying to avoid fighting major fights being underleveled. After fighting through the Dream World (didn't have Red Prince so I just killed everyone for the XP) I was level 19 and had only Isbeil, Doctor, and final fight left, and hit 20 during Isbeil fight. But, I did skip a few major fights on Nameless Isle, so I'm not too sure if something's weird about encounter levels in Arx. I had to progress in a fairly tight route to make sure I didn't have to fight too many overleveled encounters.

I didn't have a whole lot of trouble with combat in general, it's just that I kept having the nagging doubt that I was missing something major. In comparison, in Act 2, you just need to be a bit mindful about where to go and whom to fight and you won't have to fight any overleveled fight. Whereas in Act 4, you are forced to fight a bunch of fights while being underleveled, because there's just not enough stuff for you to do to keep up in terms of experience. The level 20 demon ambush being thrown at my level 18 party while I was just casually strolling about was one of the biggest WTF moments (and questions) in my playthrough. While I eventually managed to kill all of them, I couldn't shake off the feeling that that encounter was just... not right.

I for one can't see the real point of the whole "Sir Lora" bit. You can't control him, and he doesn't help you in combat in any way, yet he gets killed easily by pretty much anything, and he also blocks your pathing both in and out of combat. Why was he not made invulnerable then? Is he supposed to just provide an extra little story as flavor? If so, the extra dialogs with him are too few and far between it's absolutely not worth all the trouble of keeping him around. You can get a bunch of skill recipes from him, but what's the point? If this is your first playthrough, you find all that out by yourself eventually anyway. For players who have already played the game like me, this is completely useless. After the conversation with him just before the final fight, I was hoping something "cool" would FINALLY happen. Nope. Nothing. And in the epilogue, I found myself asking myself that question again: "What was the point of this character?" If he's really supposed to just add a bit of flavor, then the real problem here is that he is extremely poorly implemented for that purpose. You can safely assume that no one in the development team spent any time playing the game at all with this character, just to see if there's any problems. From a principle perspective, this is just... not acceptable.

They did decrease the armor values (and HP progression too?) on equipment and damage output in general, but that's about it. The overall balance is the same. How weak or strong something is compared to everything else, is the same. In this playthrough I had my main focus on Geo and I finally got to see how ABSOLUTELY BROKEN Pyroclasic Eruption is. Compared to other ultimate source skills, it has virtually no RNG factor to it (it can't "miss" like other ultimates), costs 1 less AP, requires no aiming, and has an insane damage potential. Since it throws a small AoE at every enemy in range (which is huge), if several enemies are close together, each of them will be hit by all of the small AoE's, for an absurd amount of total damage. A short example: I killed a non-weakened full HP full armor Adramahlihk in one single turn, without being Lone Wolf, by stacking 3 enemies on top of him before using Pyroclastic Eruption.

All that said, there is still a lot of the "experimental" aspect in Larian's formula. I have no problem with them wanting to try out new things when going from the first game to the second game, although I don't like all the simplifications in combat mechanics (talents, attributes, skills). For their next iteration, I hope that they would focus more on what makes a single-player game great. Combat-wise, I hope they would design their mechanics in a more focused and systematic manner. Combat is rather "all over the place" in DOS2. If they still stick with the party-based thing, my suggestion is that they play one of the Dragon Age games, as they have very good writing for companions.