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

Hi everyone! I finally managed to get the money to buy DOS2 and I've been playing it a couple of hours already. Here are some of my rants; it's going to be a pretty long post so be warned. For the record, I'm right now in the swamp after the fort, just past the flaming pigs and some imprisoned dragon. I'm at lvl5 if memory serves, not in home right now. My party is tanky Beast with sword n board, fire + earth mage Red Prince with wand and shield, water + air Lohse with a staff, and rogue Sebille with two daggers (kitchen knifes, because I haven't found a single better weapon yet).

Let me start by saying that I absolutely adored DOS1. I played the original in all it's buggy and imbalanced glory, including the incoherent plot that made no sense. DOS1:EE was like a totally new game to me, and I completed it both Classic and Honour mode. While I did had some troubles finishing it with the latter, the worst parts were mostly cheesy ones, like Air Elementals teleporting my characters into the lava (isn't that fair?).

DIFFICULTY

All right, let's begin with the most annoying issue I've encountered, the difficulty. Holy crap, this game is hard. I started in Tactical mode since I was experienced with the game already, but this one is just a pain in the ass. The fact that crowd control is pretty much useless at the beginning of the fights means that all my previous tactics are now worthless, and I have to develop new ones. That's fine by me, but the sheer amount of advantage the enemy has borders cheating. Why they all have like 80 armor without a shield, yet when I kill them they only drop 20 gold coins? I assume they're packed with magical items, but nope, they seem to be just thick skinned.
The most obvious problem for me is that there isn't room for mistakes. A wrong turn in a fight means instant death, since the enemy just runs across the battlefield and aims for your weaker characters, obliterating them in two hits. Healing now seems to be quite bad, and that pissed me off since I always loved playing healers. My old combo of water + electricity is now useless because I can't manage to destroy their magic armor fast enough to lock them down, forcing me to also have a character with offensive spells, and that's just lame.
My "tank" is anything but that. The enemies just ignore it and run towards my other characters, and even when I do manage to attract their attention, they just melt me with spells faster than I can power up my shield. And since I can't charge them down, I find myself surrounded by enemies in a blink. Staying behind is not an option, because every single fight has archers or wizards who won't hesitate in AoE me down instantly.

It seems that there is a proper way to play the game in order to advance. If you leave the fort at lvl3 you're pretty much done for, because you can't return to it to farm guards since they will all attack you at the same time. I had to restart the game twice already, once because of this and another because I didn't picked Pet Pal, which seems to be mandatory to obtain the most xp from quests.
I'm trying to power up my characters but there isn't any gold lying around, and most of the books and items costs a fortune. I'm slowly progressing but damn, it's not smooth at all. I've quickloaded the game like a hundred times already because every step seems to be an impossible encounter with monsters showing up from thin air. Yeah, that's another problem, the fact that you engage one guard and they just magically summon three friends to destroy you for no reason. I should be able to decide if a battle is worthy or not, not every encounter has to be an ambush you know.

CONVERSATIONS

This should've been included in the previous section but I wanted to divide it. First of all, thank you for removing that R/P/S crap. That was some bad design right there, but now it's much more fluent, intuitive, and logical. I'm a stronk, bad tempered dorf, I am supossed to bully people into doing my will, and now I can do just that. Well, a couple of times at least.
Now that I had that out the way, let's go with the bad part: the fact that nearly every conversation ends up in a fight. Yeah, so far I only found two instances in which I can avoid a hard fight by talking: the dogs in the prison, and some Magisters attacking a Seeker (not their four friends tho, those are mean). The rest of the situations play like this:
- *Let the man knows that you come in peace*
- DIE YOU SWINE!
That's basically every conversation. No matter what I say, the conflict seems to be inevitable, and most of the times I just bump into them.
Ran into a captain torturing some fella? Yeah, it's a fight, and I won't stand a chance since he somehow summons extra guards and dogs that just go into a frenzy and chew on my mages.
Found some guards in an unusual place? Yeah, I don't even try to talk my way out. They will attack no matter what, and they will have three times my armor and damage.
Found a crazy guy in the beach eating people? Reload, I'm dead because I didn't had the item he wanted, which I had to know beforehand to pick it up.
Found some neutral turtles? Yeah, they're evil. And they will only transform when they're surrounding you. Reload and cheesy it by sending the tank first.

It's like every step has to be taken with extreme caution, and that is just not fun. I understand I'm a half naked prisoner, but couldn't just be red NPC in those areas so I can know where I can actually walk, instead of making them yellow for no reason but to forcing me to reload? The whole idea of making NPCs neutral by default is to give me the option of getting past them somehow, you know, like a roleplaying game. I can try to bribe them, seduce them, trick them, whatever. But no, it's like "OMG TRESPASSER!" every time I walk into a new room.

INTERFACE

These complains are more like nitpicking, but I may aswell take them out of the way. First of all, I'm having real troubles with the camera. Somehow I find myself moving it constantly because there's always, always some foreground object blocking my sight, especially in fights. That never happened to me in DOS1 and I don't understand why it's happening now. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but I honestly find it extremely annoying.

My companions are beyond stupid. The Red Prince gets stuck in the ladders constantly for no reason, he just stands there and never climbs them up. They just walk over hazzards when my main character clearly goes around them, and step on mines when I can see them. In most fights, since they seem to happen after a conversation, my companions are just scattered and end up stacked together when the combat starts, of course getting me instantly killed by the insane amount of AoE. They rarely position themselves the way I told them to, except when I slowly walk into a fight against red NPCs.

And last, something that may have a solution but I couldn't find it: having to press Alt all the time to highlight things. I don't remember if DOS1 had this feature, but I just want a way to permanently toggle every object, much like in Pillars of Eternity. Can this be done? Otherwise having to press Alt every step to see if I can find a stupid herb is a pain in the butt. Not to mention, I can't right click the popup box to send an item to wares or read a book without picking it up - why not?

MUSIC AND EFFECTS

This should've been my first issue but it's more personal than anything. The first thing I do when I come to my workplace is put some Kirill Pokrovsky music, particularly from DOS1. That man was a god among insects and his death made this world shittier. I was expecting DOS2 to have his music recycled, but no, instead it has one of the most bland and boring soundtracks I've ever heard in a RPG. Sometimes I barely know it's there, not even the combat music is entertaining.
Even worse, not having Kirill music makes me feel that this isn't even a Divinity game, it just doesn't feel right. I wish there were a mod to modify the internal music into the DOS1 one.

And that's not the only thing: the voices of the characters are just lame. In DOS1, every skill had a particular warcry. When you used Encourage they would go "For Rivellon!", or using a charge attack was "Ramming speed!" (which I loved). Now it's just "I yield to none!" every time I cast something, even when I just create rain or heal someone. Yeah, very creative. They really got lazy on this area.

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Welp, that pretty much covers most of my complaints. Overall, the game is quite nice: the story is kinda interesting, I liked how they managed to put all of the main characters in the same place without making it look stupid. I like how it feels almost like DOS1 but with minor differences, so it's not just an expansion.
Still, I think it requires a lot of polishing, and I expect this thread to be filled with fanbois screaming "OMG GIT GUD" and things like that. It's ok, I can handle it. While the game is hard, that's not what it bothers me: it's the fact that there's a right way to play it, and a RPG should never have that problem. I should be able to complete it anyway I want to, not being forced to cheese my way to victory, or knowing beforehand every step to take in order to not getting stuck. There should be a place to grind my levels up in case I missed a couple of quests, not being forced to restart the game because of it.

That's all for now. Have a nice day everyone.

After level 5 it should get much easier with some decent equipment acquired. There are a lot pictures and other stuff in the fort to give you some additional gold income.

Otherwise most of the points regarding combat we are pretty much pointing out since day 1 of early access. Tactician is mostly a stat bloat of 50%. Not sure, if it was in the first much different in the first, but because of the Armor system this time it is extremely obvious and makes fights extremely tedious.

If you know, when and where you fight, the game can be pretty easy, if you don't know it, at least the first few levels are awefull.

The only thing you kind of missed or left out: attributes and skill leveling got made extremely basic and 0815 like, with focus pretty much purely on increasing damage. Also initiative is kind of broken, because of a round robin system, that forces enemies always to go at least second, forth and so on.

and yeah, that every neutral will fight you for death about worthless shit is really immersion breaking.

I noticed it. It's reaaaally dumbed down now. You pretty much don't need any stat besides Damage + HP unless you want to equip a particular piece of gear, or just boost Wits a little.
That's just terrible IMO, but well, I guess it's easier to balance or something.

Tonight I'm going to keep playing but I think I'll just start over and try to complete every single quest in the fort because I'm only finding lvl6 monsters, and my lvl5 party gets obliterated instantly against those.

So did you already kill every magister in the fort?

HP in general is pretty worthless, your armor matters far more. If you lose your armor you much likely get perma-cc'd.

At current state:
- physical >>> magical
- physical CC >>> magical CC
- fire & earth >>> water & air
- curse >>> bless

When you start over, you should play on Classic your first time through. That would be a better choice than trying to struggle through on Tactician.

In case you missed the big locked gate with the guards in front of it, you are a prisoner, and you are not allowed to roam free inside the fort. Of course the guards will attack you on sight. You are not allowed to be there.

What he means is, that every magister turns hostile as soon as you escaped the fort.

Some quests are undoable after this point, if you did not do them before, like Yarrow & her dad or the source dogs.

Pretty much all the individual problems you mention in here - not being able to cc enemies well enough, not being able to properly tank, enemies being too tough - stem from one main problem: picking on someone your own size. If you're having such problems, it just means they're beyond your current level and equipment. It's as simple as that.

Like many other players, I struggled in Fort Joy during the first 4 levels or so. I figured I was just not doing it right. This game generally requires "street smart" to avoid things getting messed up and frustration, in general. But I'm sure you know that, since you're a veteran of the first game. It's just that this game is very different from the first one, so I'd say you just need some time adjusting your approaches. I believe the game gets easier and easier for most people. It never gets *really* hard anymore after a certain point which is quite early.

As a side note, enemies ignoring your tank completely all the time is actually a bigger problem with the entire game. There isn't a reliable way to manipulate the targeting of enemies in this game. Unless you're sending in one single character while everyone else stays outside of combat. Later on in the game, when everyone has a teleport-like ability, you're just going to forget all about the idea of "having a dedicated tank so that he can soak up damage".


I admit, at certain points, I would be like, "but we both know it always ends the same", while clicking through the dialog, not really caring exactly what either party is saying. Dialogs in such encounters are probably there to give you some extra depth to the experience. They're meant to end in bloodshed.


If you think about it, while you're inside Fort Joy in particular, you're prisoners in a very restricted area. Tension is high. Also, pretty much no one in there really cares whether you're right or wrong, or whether you're dead or alive. So the fact that most encounters end badly, or one single misstep messes everything up, does make sense. Later on in the game, there are in fact many encounters that can end either way depending on your approach.


I literally had to rotate the camera nonstop. I had to "experiment" with keyboard control quite a bit to make my life easier. I ended up assigning Q and E to clockwise and counterclockwise rotation. Luckily for me, I adapted quickly.


But you *can* do that, though. At least reading something without picking it up.


As far as music goes, all I'm gonna say is, the kind of music that Kirill Pokrovsky made is simply otherworldly. No seriously, I wouldn't bat an eyelash if I found out he actually went to some sort of alternate universe to compose his music. I've been listening to Divine Divinity's OST for years ever since I managed to get my hands on it in 2009, and certain tracks always give me chills every single time I listen to them. While D:OS2's music is alright on its own, there isn't much point comparing it and previous titles' music. This is pretty much a given.


It won't be quite the same thing, but what you can do is muting music in game while playing DOS1 music in a media player outside the game.


Yes, those get repetitive pretty quickly. Just learn to ignore them.

D:OS2 hard game...that's news to me...
Just wait till you chain cc till you puke or one shot entire parties in a turn.

He is only at the start, and the start is pretty though before all, if you are new to it and don't know already what you will have to fight at which stage and were you will find certain items to stronger a little bit faster. The start is hard if you go in casually, even more on Tactician.

You can't objectively rate the difficulty, if you already have all the necessary informations.

Exactly. You have to WAIT till then. Word.

Thanks for the advices everyone, this place is surprisingly more friendly than the Steam forums, haha.

So I started the game over, again. This time I changed my party a little bit, ending up like this:

Beast: warrior with shield + Geomancer for fortify. I also picked Lucky Charm as my first skill, and it's paying off like crazy. Getting greens out of barrels which helps a lot.
Red Prince: two handed warrior + Pyromancer for haste n stuff.
Lohse: same, water + air with staff, mostly to heal and clean bad stuff from the ground.
Sebille: rogue again, but with Necromancer for lifesteal.

This time I made sure to complete quests that I wasn't even aware they were there and give tons of XP , like the one that requires playing with the kid in the cave (not to mention, a very powerful spear also). I hate kids, I sent him away instantly when he started yelling nonsense - turns out, I had to play with him if I wanted to progress properly. Kinda lame if you ask me. Not to mention, if you want his reward, you need the Teleportation Gloves which are inside a Crocodile (?).
It's like playing a completely different game. Now that I know the "order" of how the fort must be completed things are much, much smoother. But that's not the mark of a good game, isn't it? A true RPG shouldn't punish you for following the path you like; in fact, it should reward you more. Not here, sadly.



What I meant is that I can't right click the popup box, the one that appears when I press Left Alt. I have to search for the item lying around, which is usually small and annoying, and right click it. Since the camera appears to be drunk, this task becomes extremely annoying, so I just pick the item and use it, then drop it.

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Well, for now my journey continues with less bumps, but it demanded me many restarts, which is not good. I hope the devs can learn from the experience I had, which seems to be repeated in many other players.
Keep the comments coming tho, I like reading the experiences of the rest.

PS: Sebille uses Flesh Sacrifice - "Glory is mine!". Eerrr... ok? If you say so.

It's one of the issue of this game and the heavy handed scaling system, which is said to be getting worse during the mid- and endgame.

For the spear you should not need Teleport-gloves, just enough strength.

In my opinion, the way how they start the story is the core issue of the difficulty level. You start with nothing while facing of kind of the elite team of the Magisters. There fore those Elites have to be weaker than the logic would demand and still they are harder than the stage of the game progress should offer.

You need STR 12+ to remove Braccus Rex spear.

This is not true. I sneak out of the fort pretty much every time I play through the game. Then I come back and do the little quests I missed. Yarrow is the only magister that is not hostile when you return.

Is she? As far as I remember Yarrow and her father turned hostile, after we left the fort. Perhaps because the quest is finished, but that makes it just much more odd, because they should feel thankful for the help and not hostile.

I've never had them turning hostile, at least not once their quest is over. Maybe just part of OS2's general randomness.

Perhaps some patches changed it? We left the fire snails cave trough the trapdoor and they were red, but was long time ago. ^^

Welp, I've been advancing a lot in the game lately, and have some more issues to point out.

CRAFTING

It's worthless. So far I haven't crafted a single item beacuse it's so tedious and useless. The gear gets changed every fight pretty much, the potions are underwhelming compared with abilites with the same effects, and since the AP cost to use them is almost the same, I don't even waste my time with them.
While reading recipes was a part of DOS1, I always considered a silly idea because you'll end up reading them in a website anyways, so what's the point? Just let us know all the recipes right away.
Having to organize the materials for crafting is an absolute pain and one of the main issues for avoiding the system altogether. It really, really needs an overhaul.

UI

The inventory is extremely annoying and slow, even putting runes in gear is a hazzle.
The fact that I can only use a single hotbar and have to cycle through them goes against any sense of gaming I have. With the insane amount of skills certain characters have, why not have multiple hotbars? It simply makes no sense, it's an outdated feature that has no place in modern games.

And that's coming from someone who pretty much only plays old games.

ECONOMY

If you read my first post, you'll know the troubles I had to pass the first strecht of the game, eventually solved by remaking my party into something more useful (read, Warfare everywhere, no imagination involved). One of the main problems was the lack of gear, something that went out of control after escaping Fort Joy.
Like, damn - as soon as you meet the undead guy outside the Fort, the gear just start raining from the sky. Everything drops rares and uniques, and the vendors just sell legendaries like candy.
This wouldn't be such a problem if it weren't for thieving. Regardless of the NPC, I can use my rogue to steal all their money (usually thousands of pieces) and any extremely expensive item they have, without any consequence whatsoever. Yes, they do come to ask me about the deed, but a single succesful conversation and it's over. So far, I've never failed a single time.

I have insane amounts of gold right now and every item I can get my hands on it thanks to this "system", and it's broken beyond belief. It's hilarious how poor old Gareth is all like "OMG SAVE THE WORLD!!111" only to, minutes later, ask me about his empty backpack without any luck. This needs to be balanced somehow because it's almost gamebreaking.

STATS AND ABILITES

Some users warned me about this, but now I can see it firsthand: Stats are a no brainer. Putting points in any other than damage or Wits is a waste of time, and serves no real purpose whatsoever (maybe Memory to expand your skillset but that's it). Not to mention, the fact that I can freely respec anytime I want makes any form of decision meaningless, completely going against any RPG I've played in my life so far. Even DOS1 required a sacrifice in order to respec.

Why they decided to change the Stats from what they were in DOS1 is beyond me. This issue was adressed in the awesome thread "The Problems with DOS2", and I fully agree.

The customization of the characters is almost non existant. There's no point in expanding in anything else than your main magic school and, if you're a fighter, your weapon of choice. Defence is totally useless and Leadership has such a short range that I can barely take advantage of it.

Civil skills has so little points to put into that I can only expand upon a single one for each character, and they'll always be the same. Persuasion in your main character is mandatory.

ENCOUNTERS AND AI

While now I'm much stronger and can take on an enemy part of my level, sometimes the ambushes are just stupid. Going outside of Driftwood to the "wrong" path means you'll get attacked by invisible assasins three levels higher than you, who will probably oneshot you instantly. This means that that side of the map is, at the moment, forbidden. Yay for choices.

The boss fight before capturing the Lady Vengeance was a pain in the ass and required for me to cheese it, mostly because the enemy was lvl9 and I was lvl8, having exhausted every quest and monster to train upon.
I asked Gareth for help and he gave me the most useless NPC I've ever seen, who always, always wasted their entire turn throwing... water ballons. Yeah, the enemy just rained crap all over me, and they were focused on making them wet. They even used their ranged attacks to destroy a water barrel. I'm not even kidding.

I don't know, perhaps they thought they were going to Mardi Gras or something. Needless to say, they didn't survived the fight. Nobody seemed to care tho.

The AI sometimes it's just plain retarded. In the bar encounter after you, ahem, "had a chat" with the lizard gal, an enemy rogue was focused on one of his own companions. He deliberately attacked him until he was dead, and another actually casted heals on my own party.
Maybe it's just me, but the AI problems seem to be more common with dwarves for some reason, I've been noticing it a lot in the possesed fights too.

CURSED GROUND AND SOURCE ABILITES

Fighting against Volatile Voidlings or things like that means you'll be walking over cursed stuff all the time. Since I haven't expanded upon my Source powers yet, I barely have the chance to cast a single Bless in the entire fight, which gets dispelled almost instantly and it's beyond useless.
Not to mention, the Source abilities add more to the frustration of having only a single hotbar. I simply don't have space to put all that crap there, and cycling is awful.

Bless should NOT cost Source points, period. Spirit Vision works like this, why not Bless?

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I can't wait for the Enhanced Edition, hehe.

You have 5 hotbars already but you have to CYCLE among them, which I don't like at all.

I use the keyboard shortcuts - R and F - makes it easier.