The following is a review that I wrote for Divinity: Original Sin 2 and posted on Steam some months ago.
I decided to post it here to hopefully draw Larian's attention to some of the issues that marred the experience for me, in the faint hope that some of them might be looked at for the Enhanced Edition.
I really enjoyed the first Divinity: Original Sin, so when the Kickstarter for this one came around, I immediately backed it with a collector's edition pledge, expecting the game to be more of the same, but better.
Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out like that. Some apsects of the game are certainly improved over the previous one, but other areas feel like a large step backwards instead.
Overall, I was rather disappointed in Divinity: Original Sin 2. It had a lot of improvements in terms of the setting and characters, the story and the skill trees, but there were so many major issues with its systems that the game just wasn't really fun for me. I actually had to really force myself to fight through to the end of the game, as the mechanics had just got so tedious by the time I reached the third chapter.
Of course, all of this is my own personal opinion, but I know of at least one other backer who just couldn't bring themselves to get through the game at all because of the same issues.
My summary of the game would be:
"Great worldbuilding, writing and attention to detail marred by bad and often frustrating game mechanics and poor design decisions."
With that preamable out of the way, here's the review itself:
Worldbuilding
As we've come to expect from Larian games, it's clear that a lot of love went into crafting the world of Divinity: Original Sin 2. It is packed with small details; hidden corners, small side-quests, interesting NPCs, readables, and item descriptions. They also thought of almost everything, with the game often reacting to and acknowledging unusual or unexpected behaviours (such as defeating an enemy who is expected to be unbeatable at that point.)
The quests are usually well-written and the companion characters each have their own distinct personality and unique storyline, which adds a lot of depth to the game.
The main story also has good writing, though the plot itself is a bit meandering and, without giving too much away, most of the game's endings don't really resolve many plot threads.
Mechanics
Unfortunately, where Divinity: Original Sin 2 really starts to come apart is in its mechanics, and especially in the changes made to its combat systems since the original game.
Armour
The main problem comes from the introduction of the new armour and status effect system.
Every character has a value for physical and magical armour, which can be damaged by attacks of the appropriate type, and are generally immune to most status effects while their armour holds (with magical armour blocking magical-based statuses, such as Stunned, and physical armour blocking physical-bases statuses, such as Knocked Down.)
This does a number of things.
First of all, because attacks of one type do not affect the armour of the other type, the most effective party composition is one where all of the charaters deal the same type of damage.
For example, if you have three physical and one magical damage dealer, then the mage will very often feel useless because she has to wear down the enemies' magical armour by herself before she is even able to deal any damage, while the three physical characters can help each other knock down their opponents' physical armour. She probably won't even bother attacking enemies because by the time she has worn through their magic armour on her own, her allies will probably have killed them already. That leaves the mage mostly relegated to a support / buff role.
Second, the fact that most elemental effects are blocked by magic armour relegates the first first game's unique elemental system to a much more minor role. Surfaces are mostly meaningless against enemies because they won't break through their magic armour, and the combination of elemental effects (such as water + lightning to stun) are also far less prominent when the game is all about breaking down opponents' armour.
Third, enemies tend to have a lot more armour than player characters (even more so on Tactician difficulty, which mostly just turns enemies into damage sponges), so that means that your team will be struggling to get through the enemy armour in order to apply some of your skills to them, while they will easy burn through your armour and apply their negative effects to you.
Items
Another problem is the item system. Items gain stats as you level up, and the rate of difference becomes exponential at later levels, so you have to constantly swap out your items for new ones to stay relevant, while the randomly-selected item stats make it very hard to find a really good item even when it is the right level.
You spend a lot of time comparing item statistics and swapping out loot, made more awkward by the fact that any items sold to merchants are randomly mixed in with their new items, making it almost impossible to find good items from anyone you've sold items to.
By the final chapter, the stat escalation has become ridiculous, and for some reason the merchants don't even have much stock, so you'll almost never even find any decent items for sale.
You also can't get around the problem by using crafting, since the crafting system in DOS2 has been completely gutted. You can only craft the most basic of weapons, can no longer craft magic items, and can no longer upgrade your items throgh crafting (other than by using one fairly rare late-game item). For the most part, crafting is only useful for creating skill books, spell scrolls, and potions.
Skills
On the plus side, the skill trees in DOS2 are very well crafted, with each having a plethora of unique and interesting skills in it. You can play a viable character by specialising in any one (or mix) of those skill trees - though you are somewhat limited in your choice by the armour system and the desire to have only one damage type in your party.
Your characters can no longer use every skill that they know automatically - instead, they can only use skills which are memorised, and the number of spells that can be memorised at once is based on the new Memory stat. This helps prevent that problem in DOS1 where a character had multiple skillbars all full of different skills. There are also fewer skills which are very similar to each other.
The game also introduces Source Points. These are rare points that allow you to use powerful Source skills. Your characters all start off with 1 maximum source point, and can get up to 3 during the course of the story.
Because Source points are rare, especially in the earlier parts of the game (and the main method of acquiring them is kind of evil), they often feel "too valuable to use".
The game introduces new "blessed" and "cursed" statuses, which affect surfaces in interesting ways (such as blessed water surfaces healing people standing on them.)
Bless and curse also cancel each other out.
Your characters gain the ability to bless surfaces fairly early on, but it uses a Source Point, making it incredibly costly to use. The enemy, on the other hand, have no shortage of Curse spells, which lead to two of the most annoying effects in the game - cursed blood (which is extremely common, as one of the most common enemy type bleeds it) makes anyone standing on it take damage from healing, and cursed ice surfaces have a random % chance of freezing anyone who walks over them.
What this means is that you are often fighting in frustrating combat situations where you either don't have access to some of your abilities (healing), or where you can randomly lose fights because of a % chance of being frozen solid. You can use Bless to remove these cursed surfaces, but that costs a rare Source point, and the enemy can often just cast more Curses (or just bleed more cursed blood) to negate your use of that costly spell.
The most powerful skills in each tree are Source skills, which cost source points, and also use 2 or 3 points of memory, so not only are they extremely expensive to cast, they also take up as much Memory as multiple other skills. This makes getting the highest skills in each tree extremely disappointing because you almost never get to use them and are probably better off not even bothering to memorise them and to instead use the slots for basic skills.
Overall the Source point system just makes any abilities that require it annoyingly costly to use, effectively removing some of your options for no particularly good reason, and doesn't really provide anything interesting or positive to the gameplay.
Conclusion
Divinity: Original Sin 2 certainly isn't a bad game, but it's still disappointing compared to the first game.
If you are on the fence about it, I would recommend waiting for further patches or an enhanced edition to hopefully fix some of its myriad flaws.
