Originally Posted by Tuco
It’s weird because from an abstract standpoint I’d be tempted to claim that the two DOS are in many ways very high quality games. High production value, loads of unique, non-repeated content, some fun and engaging combat dynamics, high reactivity, high environmental interaction, flexible quest design where multiple approaches work...

Those are actually very important to me, I hold reactivity/flexible quest design in high regard. Regarding environmental interaction - is it really... well, "true" environmental interaction or just "create puddle, electrify"? I was very excited when I first heard Swen talking about "Larian systemics" because I love systemics, but what I had in mind was something more akin to immersive sims or BotW, yet it seems all that big talk was hyping up Larian cheese... That is, shallow interactions that are glued on top of the game world (surfaces?) and make it feel more gamey rather than more immersive.

Originally Posted by Tuco
But once you start to go into specific mechanics and subsystems almost everything about them breaks down very quickly and turns into a mess. The itemization is downright bottom tier in the genre, the progression curve is terrible, the perk system is incredibly uneven (few very good ones, almost unmissable, while the rest is garbage) balance is a thing of dreams, gimmicks are over-used to the point of suffocating the rest, positioning becomes quickly meaningless because twenty different teleport/warp skills trivialize it, etc, etc.
And don't get me started about the armor system, for Christ's sake.

The problem with the armor system in DOS 2 is that it makes hardly any sense in principle and it creates way more problems that it solves.
Discouraging mixed sources of damage (which it factually does, it doesn't matter if you can work your way around it) is only the tip of the iceberg. There's also the fact that makes a certain amount of utility skills/spells utterly useless (not "unreliable" as much as literally 100% pointless to even attempt) until a certain threshold of damage has been passed, etc.

Basically it's a system of HP bloat (now in three different flavors!) that favors direct damage dealing above any other strategy. And conversely once that threshold of damage is surpassed the exact opposite becomes true, and some of these crowd controls become 100% reliable.

I mean, sure, you can learn to live with that. We all did.
But holy fucking shit if it doesn't go straight in the bottom tier among all the countless attempts at "simulating damage mitigation" I've experienced across the years in different rulesets.

Oh yeah, I've heard about the infamous armour system... Yikes. So basically you need all-magical party or all-physical party?

Originally Posted by Tuco
...See? This is what I meant.
Every time I stop to think about it too much, at some point I almost need to stop and ask to myself "Wait, is it ACTUALLY a good game in the end or am I just forgiving too much to it?".

And I'm just wondering that; there's this supposedly interesting world with nice, flexible quests, good production values and all, but... What about the rest? Perhaps this is an impression that's far from reality, just based on random things people said, but there's a whole bunch of stuff in D:OS2 that's... not that great. All those broken systems, as you say; underwhelming story and characters(?), weak writing; underdeveloped, "meh" worldbuilding. And probably some other problems. I'm even pretty sure I personally wouldn't enjoy the "good" parts of combat, as I hate TB, so for me to (begrudgingly) tolerate TB in a game, it has to be very strong in most other aspects.

All in all, I'm kind of afraid it's going to be somewhat like Inquisition. Good production values, some nice ideas, some actually cool stuff that works... But oh gods is the whole game not worth the 150+ hours you waste on it. Many of those hours spent on things that are frustrating and decidedly not fun.

Originally Posted by Tuco
Incidentally I also think CP2077 is right there with DOS 2 and Oblivion as one of the worst itemizations I've ever seen in the entire genre.

I would say in Oblivion the itemization itself wasn't that bad. It wasn't great by any means, but items, to my memory, were pretty consistent, so an elven sword would have the same stats each time. Well, plus enchantments. But no looter-shooter levels of random junk. I may be misremembering, but I think Skyrim was worse in this regard. I'm still disappointed by "Axe of Whiterun, a cherished relic for our hero and saviour!" which was just some random crap best used as a paperweight.

The problem with Oblivion was the utterly absurd approach to level scaling (which I'm not a fan of in general), where bandits eventually figured leather and iron are passe and dressed exclusively in glass and daedric, wolf populations were mysteriously replaced by bears and minotaurs started frolicking across the countryside (or, you know, main roads) en masse...

Originally Posted by Tuco
But what's really interesting about CDPR is that this isn't an "inexperience" issue on their part: their system got progressively worse at each game.

That's pretty much why I was surprised. Itemization in TW1 may not have been amazing, but it was made under good design philosophy, only executed as one would expect from a janky first entry. TW2 was... okayish, I guess, though the game as a whole, while I did very much like it, showed a concerning move towards "trending" mechanics/design. (My first impression of TW2 was "Whoa, it looks AAA! ... Urgh, it feels AAA...") And then the crap loot shower of TW3. If it's not green or at least brown, don't bother picking it up. Though maybe that's not the problem, having tons of crap "loot" is okay in the sense that a bandit can drop his low-grade sword, but for the items intended to be treasured by the player to be looter-shooter/MMO/Diablo-style... No. Just no.

Originally Posted by CJMPinger
I'd ultimately recommend DOS2, it is a good experience on its own. And one of the grab bags did a lot to fix itemization to where a unique set of armor or weapon can stay relevant the entire game. However, I think it is very different from what BG3 should be, both are good but wildly different properties with wildly different bases.

Ah, thank you, armour system fix will be great if I do play the game. And yeah, Larian seemed to understand that BG3 should be an entirely different beast, but it appears they either don't care about the feel of the game or lacked proper perspective to see that it's too similar as it it now...