I disliked the hard caps on spells for one. Nothing like entering a big boss fight, eating a massive AOE, and saying well now I need to use one of the two castings of my major heal spell and I haven’t even tried to damage the boss yet. Might as well just reload.
I think both PoE games had a problem also inherent in DAOrigins that wasn’t present in Baldur’s Gate and other D&D games: all of the characters have too many abilities. In older D&D games, non casters don’t do much besides auto-attack and chug a potion now and then. This made them not a lot of fun to play in table top, but it’s great design if you are controlling a party of characters. Tanks tank, DPSs flank, so you are mostly microing casters. In Pillars of Eternity they decided to give every class a while set of abilities. It meant I spent a lot more time baby sitting my entire party, pausing, queuing up skills, unpairing, and immediately repausing in more difficult fights. Not fun. I found this especially true in 2, but it was a problem in both games.
Because POE2 has a per encounter spell system, I eventually found myself starting every fight the exact same optimized way, meaning I was making less interesting decisions in combat.
POE2, also makes a strident effort to be super balanced, but a big part of the fun of Infinity Engine games was that they weren’t balanced, and finding ways to break them was a lot of the appeal.
That’s all I can think of off the top of my head, but I had a big old list of grievances that hampered my enjoyment, and I retire really hard to like it, too. I’ve started three games, progressed relatively far, but never beaten the game.
It really makes a lot of sense to me that POE2 underperformed to such an extent that Obsidian had to abandon their much valued independence and allowed themself to be bought out. To me that game just wasn’t fun.
