Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Thoughts after first play-through. [SPOILERS ofc]

Ok so firstly a bit of a disclaimer- I did this on Explorer setting. I've had a heavy cold and a short temper this week, so it was precationary. This leads to my first observation, in that there's not an explanation on the screen where you select it as to what the difference is. AFAIK it makes the combat easier, but it's not made clear and it should be.
I should also preface this by saying that despite most of what's below, I think the game's looking promising.

My overall impression is that it's a bit... vague. The original D:OS (1 from here on) makes it pretty clear from the start who you are and what you're trying to do. D:OS 2 (2 from here on) pretty much just dumps you. In particular, I felt it would have really benefited from a character-specific prelude, like Dragon Age: Origins does, so that we'd get to know who our character actually was. As it was, I was mere minutes in when Lohse just decided on her own to kill an innocent elf, and the Red Prince just went along with it for no real reason.

This leads on to another point- the game seems very eager to have you kill everything in sight. By the time I left the prison camp, I must have killed just about everyone in there just for saying something they didn't like. The thing was that the things I was fighting were often my level or higher, so I was loathe to reload and look for a peaceful solution knowing that mobs were only going to get tougher. As it was, I was level 8 at the end and the game was giving me messages suggestion I should run away, and that's with killing everything in sight.

The collars thing makes no sense. They don't do anything significant other than prevent you from wearing amulets, and the game gets in a terrible muddle when you get yours removed for winning the cellar fight- talk to the NPC there with a collared character and she says you should see the tinkerer to get it removed, but she doesn't want to know. Meanwhile you're killing every guard in sight.

This ties in to my biggest overall problem, which is that I don't find Fort Joy remotely believable. Apparently we're very dangerous prisoners who are being turned into expendable assault troops, but the guards don't seem to care if we leave the camp, openly carry weapons, know lethally dangerous spells or kill each other- unless of course we remove a collar which despite making us no more dangerous suddenly makes us Public Enemy #1.

Many of the quests and puzzles seem poorly thought out. The quest with Gavin and the teleport gauntlets is an early example- by the time he'd finished his 'later losers' speech the Red Prince was standing right next to him because anyone who's ever played a Divinty knows how to pass teleporting items between characters. Of course he then proceeds to vanish, somehow getting past the entire complement of Magisters before ending up dead in the forest. Overall, the island seems to be full of a truly baffling amount of off-the-wall things, from the inexplicable flaming pigs to multiple magical mazes which range from the infuriatingly obtuse to the trivially easy and are often rendered irrelevant by teleport anyway. Then there were the elemental flowers, which despite my reading the book about them cheerfully ignored being attacked by their supposed weak element and just filled everywhere with elemental mess, which I teleported past.

It all comes back, I think, to that 'vagueness'. Too many quests don't end, or end in ways that make you wonder if anything actually just happened. I only found Gareth by looking it up because the map had filled in the area he was in despite my having been nowhere near it, and no-one in his camp had the faintest idea where he'd gone. I freed the dragon by bashing pillars he could easily reach himself, only to find I'd already done the quest he was going to give me whilst looking for the soul jars of the imprisoned Necromancers, which turned out to be in the opposite direction to where they said they were. He then proceeded not to turn up at any point despite claiming he would. I ended the level with all three supporting characters still collared and no idea if this was meant to be the case. Frequently, I would win fights despite the entire enemy party going first and spamming debilitating attacks all over the place, only to wonder what the hell I could have done on Classic mode.

Onto general design thoughts: Durability is really, really irritating as implemented. There's a shortage of hammers which are one-use-only and repairing at vendors means faffing around unequipping the damaged item first. I don't know what it's meant to add beyond a minor gold-sink. Having no indication of lockpicking success chance just encourages save-scumming. Inventory organisation in general remains a weak point, and frequently I got given items by NPCs and had no idea what they were or where they'd gone. Quest logging also needs work, the current Journal updates record far too little information and the archived dialogues don't go back far enough to compensate- for example, by the time I thought I was ready to tackle Lord Withermoore's quest, all the clues he'd given me were long gone.

I appreciate the 'hide helm' option staying since I know it has some inexplicably vocal opponents, even though someone muffed the coding on it. (It seems the game doesn't render the hair of a helmeted character, even if it then also doesn't render the helm). Weapon and armour designs in general are interesting (love the Red Prince's look) though mage robes on humans seem to be in the 'boring dress' school again at the moment.

The characters really, really need voice acting. With such small models to work with they have barely any personality at the moment. The game overall feels very quiet.

Overall, well I think it needs a lot of work, but that's what Early Access is, after all. I really feel the island needs to be a bit less dense and more navigable, and some of the madder concepts need more room to breathe. The characters also really need more than a paragraph of history if you're going to push the inter-party roleplaying as much as 2 seems to- I felt I really didn't know who these people were or why they put up with each other.

Please bear in mind that this is intended as honest criticism- if I didn't care I wouldn't have spent this long writing all this!