Nay, act2 was humongous. I do feel that act1 was by far the best, but size wasn't an issue for me. Of anything I found it difficult to slog my way through chapter2 and it was where my first playthrough ended.
Huh, you too? In fact I’ve not gone back to D:OS2 after abandoning my first playthrough in act 2. One of these days I will. It took me three goes to get through the first one and I was glad I did in the end. One of the fears I *don’t* have about BG3 is that the same will happen and that I’ll struggle to continue playing, given I’ve already managed to spend more hours playing and replaying just EA than I’ve spent on D:OS and D:OS2 combined!
Originally Posted by Tuco
I still think Act 2 of DOS 2 was reasonably good in terms of amount and variety of content, but especially in its second half is exactly where all the sub-systems started showing their worst aspects to the player. The "forced linearity" of following a certain path to keep up with level gating, the steep increase in stats, the super-tedious and busy randomized itemization, the armor system reaching just the amount of numeric bloat to a bane on the encounter design, etc, etc.
...But we are on the path for going aggressively OT now.
Yeah, trial&error discovery in which direction enemies won't slaughter you wasn't funny - also underlying issues in gameplay started to become apparent. Early into act2 the characters stop meaningfully develop with majority of the skills that you will be using for the rest of the game being acquired by this point. Though, probably story is where D:OS2 died for me - while sloppy as far as worldbuilding and storytelling goes, there was something appealing about act1. Act2 is just all over the place, sending us after McGuffin source masters, who conveniently are all grouped within the same patch of land, with people in the city unaware of massive magical earthquake that is happening a short stroll north from them. At this point the game already retconed some of the potential player choices, so I lost any illusion that anything I do in the game has any weight.
I enjoyed individual sequences (kidnapping and escape from mines is probably my favourite bit in whole D:OS2), but the game completely lost any momentum. Unlike Baldur's Gate2, I didn't find the individual "adventures" compelling enough nor seperate enough to satisfy on their own.
I do worry how Larian will continue BG3 - will our choice to save grove/side with Minthara have any repercussions, or will it be all swept under the rug rendered irrelevant, or retconed if Larian deems certain characters or items mandatory for the story? Will Baldur's Gate city any good, or will we get bunch of McGuffins to chase over another massive overworld full of disconnected and contradicting zones?
