First things first, I'm absolutely loving the game.
I was already fond of D:OS 1, despise its occasional flaws, and by the end of Act 2 seems like this sequel is topping it in almost any conceivable way.
I'm having mixed feelings about the armor system, because while I'm growing used to it, every time I stop to think about its ups and downs I come away thinking it's probably NOT the most elegant solution for the goal Larian wanted to achieve.
Still, it doesn't bother me too much.
What I'm mostly disappointed with, on the other hand, is itemization.
It's baffling that the game is importing this issue straight from the first title without addressing most of its problems.
1 - Items scale in power way too quickly.
This has several downsides.
Two levels up from when you get a powerful item, it's usually becoming trash that needs to be replaced.
Now, I should be upfront with it and stress I've never been fond of compulsive loot swapping even in games like Diablo.
Well, it works even more poorly in a party-based game with a finite number of encounters and an entire group to dress up at any level up. The amount of loot you'll have to "juggle" almost at any given time is more pace-breaking than rewarding, and it really doesn't help the game in an area where it's already fairly messy, which is inventory bloat.
2- Randomization is YET AGAIN another weak point.
While I commend the effort Larian put on inserting more hand-placed loot in the game, it seems to me that they overlooked the major issue with it: a hand-placed item is meaningful when it stands out as remarkable, not when it's drowned in a sea of randomly generated ones which are more or less comparably powerful.
It's weird to me that everyone keeps trying to reinvent the wheel in this area when we already have a game that perfected this art: Baldur's Gate 2. A game that had over-abundance of loot without getting bloated by it, where items ranged in power from "common" to "legendary artifact" in a meaningful way but without too much spread in stats between the two extremes, where equip could easily serve the most diverse builds and where an useful finding could be useful for several hours before something else could be considered a net upgrade (rather than a "sidegrade") over it.
Not to mention a game where every single reward felt valuable in the long term and at times even memorable, to the point some people (ME, for one, but I'm not alone) planned entire additional playthroughts (or even speedruns) planning in their minds an entire roadmap of what to get, when and how.
Also, if you really feel like you need a ramp up in stats to give a vibe of "epicness" (spoilers: you don't) there's another game that handled it in a fairly intelligent way: Might & Magic X with its golden Artifacts that leveled up with the player.
With that expedient you could get a good item even early in the game and see it improve over the hours as it "gained more exp".
I'm really really struggling to understand the stubbornness Larian is showing with its commitment to randomized itemization when it has been broadly pointed as the weakest point of the game even in D:OS1.
If they are ever going to revamp things for an hypothetical Enhanced Edition in the future, this is (in my opinion) where they should start from.
Last edited by Tuco; 30/09/17 02:35 PM.
