Larian Studios Forums Divinity General Discussion General feedback from BG3 -> DOS2 new player

Hey, so I started Larian games with the newest entry of Baldur’s Gate 3. I absolutely love it. I’ve probably played through it with 8 different characters now. I recently decided to give Divinity Original Sin II a playthrough after how much fun BG3 had given me.

It was a mistake to do so.
Now hear me out as to why I say that, because I mean it in a very good kind of way.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is unique, amazing, and I absolutely love it. But after playing DOS2 I’ve argued internally a lot over which game I genuinely enjoyed more. It’s been a strong internal debate and I’ve had a lot of points of contention over it, but I firmly think I want to say that despite its flaws, I genuinely enjoyed DOS2 so much more than Baldur’s Gate 3. Seeing there will be a new Divinity game and that the sentiment is “moving past mistakes from DOS2”, there are certain things I absolutely loved about DOS2 that I desperately hope aren’t overlooked or overshadowed by changes & adaptations to Baldur’s Gate 3.

The key takeaway is this: What I hope for Divinity 3 is not that it runs with Baldur’s Gate 3 as a standard, but instead takes the lessons learned & improved aspects over DOS2 and works to keep DOS2’s extremely strong sense of identity, more tactical decisions, and willingness to make the player think rather than hand them the information they need.
Put simply: I don’t want Divinity 3 to be “DOS2 but better”, I’d hope for it to be a culmination of the best of both games, rather than overcorrecting from the loudest criticisms of each.

Let me start with some general notes of what I think was absolutely amazing about DOS2, and then break down what makes them so good to me compared to Baldur’s Gate 3:

• The story, narrative progression, and how everything kept you guessing
• Turn cooldown combat
• The strong physical, visible, and gameplay difference between all the various races in the game (lizards, elves, humans, and so on)

The Story
Without getting too much into spoilers for any BG3 players reading this who haven’t given the game a play & might still want to, the story admittedly feels like it jumps across several different narrative interpretations as the game goes on. This is clearly the intention, but it could have probably been handled a little more cleanly. Each act feels more like the theme/idea being presented about the gods suddenly changes with each one. It’s all building to an ultimate point in the story about them of course, but it’s more like several disconnected narratives of trying to figure out the truth going on only at a given time rather than a more natural web of information the player needs to decipher. What I mean by this is that the story is extremely well written, but there’s like a case of whiplash about what the game is trying to nudge you towards at the start of each Act with near zero transition.

There are of course some criticisms about the story. Namely every faction is weirdly black & white, very face-value. Even characters who early on give the impression of being reasonable will later be seen as very biased & deeply into a “me & my people first” mentality. This was clearly because of world events after the events of DOS2, but it does feel kinda off regardless. But anyways; as a direct comparison for what I meant earlier by “It was a mistake to do so”: over in BG3 the story is still an amazing one, but it feels very watered down compared to the complexity of ongoing elements in Divinity 2. As a direct example of this: BG3 makes basically zero attempt at hiding the true nature of The Emperor. It also so strongly throws you into the narrative that the Absolute is nothing more than a fanatic cult abusing mindflayer parasites that once you end Act II & are suddenly thrust into “oh yeah that was all a lie btw” with VERY little inclination or hint towards this, it can be a little offputting to say the least. When BG3 does eventually reveal that the Absolute’s apparent nature is a complete lie I felt the transition from the cult as a primary driving threat into the larger political conspiracy was far less enjoyable than the way DOS2 makes the player think with hints here & there which makes them gradually change their interpretation of the plot. I would have greatly enjoyed BG3’s primary plot a lot more if it had made me slowly question the Absolute’s legitimacy overtime rather than how it tries to hammer home repeatedly that the Absolute just is what it is at face value, but there’s very little to none of this. For myself and I imagine many others the Absolute was just a cult being mislead through the abuse of mindflayer “technology” if we can call mind altering parasites a technology. Hitting Act II’s ending can potentially (and probably was for most players) feel like it hits completely out of left field as the idea of the Absolute is completely shattered. This is what I meant earlier about “DOS2 was willing to make the player think, but BG3 seems to prefer just handing the player information”.

Spoilers for DOS2 ahead, I would like to describe my first time playthrough assumptions of how I interpreted the developing main story through each act:
The Combat System
First, let me get one point out of the way: the source point system SUCKED. It was especially awful how, spoiler alert:
Cooldowns & Limiters
That out of the way however: Cooldowns over limiters is so much more fun for enjoyable combat. AP gained per turn also adds a very interesting tactical consideration dynamic to your positioning, how & when you should attack, and especially having to be considerate of your party’s capabilities. After more than half a dozen playthroughs of Baldur’s Gate 3, I would still take it over D&D’s short/long rest limiters, spell slots, action vs bonus action, etc. Having to consider my positioning, opponents capabilities, if it’s really worth it in the encounter to use a 4-6 turn cooldown ability at any given moment, and so on are MUCH more enjoyable than entering combat and realizing “gdi I forgot to long/short rest and now I can’t use a lot of my abilities because my rest ones are used up and I’m out of <x> slots". This is compounded by Baldur's Gate 3 often making you feel like long resting is a massive risk of churning a world event you might miss out on, or something you've forgotten to do. I don't think it would be a world ender if Divinity 3 kept move speed as a separate resource from your action points, but I strongly respect the vision DOS2 was going for here.

Difficulty, Progression, and Exploration
All of that glazing being said, it is far from without flaws. DOS2's combat is BRUTALLY UNFORGIVINGLY EVIL. Shout "skill issue" all you want but I genuinely could not beat DOS2 on its standard difficulty without enabling the gift bag feature for bedrolls to heal outside of combat. Unless you cheese the trading system Act I felt basically unplayable since there were no viable healing options out the gate and I was regularly running out of revive scrolls. Hell, it basically took until mid-late Act III for healing potions to become readily available. The game is ripe with absurd difficulty spikes & level gates without even warning you at all or giving you any real indication. You can be walking along a path and 20 steps later suddenly be assaulted by an enemy 2-4 levels higher than you, which is more often than not a death sentence. The area layout, especially in Act II, is far from good. The entire region is a huge open map, but isn't structured in a way that encourages the player to approach levelled enemies in an order that the player can actually face. My first time playthrough had me skipping past Driftwood thinking "Oh, this place is controlled by Magisters, I probably shouldn't go here yet" which was actually the exact opposite of what the game intended. So I ended up continuing North to find what else to do only to immediately be humbled by literally everything else past that point. Then as far as level progression goes, I've noticed several things:
1) Even when trying to absolutely maximize my XP gain, I am constantly underlevelled for most encounters.
2) The class balancing is very not balanced. For my custom character I was doing a fighter greatswored melee build the entire game and it basically took me until the final moments of Act III for it to finally become somewhat useful, and towards the latter half of Act IV it just skips straight into overpowered territory.
3) Trying to "multiclass" is more often than not just screwing yourself over. Even within the same class trying to level up multiple types of skills (air vs lightning or fire vs earth as two examples) will often just be ruining your ability to do anything because the level of enemies & their sheer amount of health & armour means if you aren't maximizing your potential into a specific line you WILL struggle heavily to actually do anything to them.

Physical/Magical Armour
Let's talk about the physical & magic armour system. It's not great, but after a lot of thinking I think I do prefer it over D&D's Armour Class system. I would hope for something new in Divinity 3 that is neither of these two things. Armour Class to me always felt like a very lazy "my number is higher so you're more likely to miss or your attack does nothing", and that sucks. DOS2's physical & magical armour system was far from greatness, but being able to still actually do something to your enemy even if they had resistances was a huge breath of fresh air after countless "Missed!" rolls of absurdity in BG3 as well as actual D&D.

If I would be given the chance to, I'd suggest a middleground of the two where we keep physical/magical armour but instead of them being an immunity to status effects just have them be a damage resistance from that damage type. You could use this as an opportunity to introduce an inverse counter to it instead of DOS2's direct counter (sword kills physical, magic kills magic). DOS2 does a straightforward "These armour types are just extra health against this type of attack", and that is frankly kinda lame. Have physical armour be weak to magical attacks instead, and magic armour weak to physical attacks. This will transform the playing field into a game of cat & mouse where rangers present the middleground capable of equalizing the field from how their bow/crossbow abilities are already a hybrid of physical & magical attacks. Melee fights become duels of tactical attrition, magic vs magic becomes epic scale magical showdowns; and mixing the two on the same battlefield means one can either go after the other, or hold the line for everyone else. Rangers in this idea would become the universal threat (much like DOS2 already has them be from the absurd damage they can output) to both physical & magical combat types as well as other rangers. DOS2's physical/magical armour served as an exclusionary mechanic, rather than approaching combat as "This person has x, I should do y" it was "This person has x, I can't do y". When you make everyone uniquely deadly but equally capable of dispatching one another, it becomes a character driven choice of what you do rather than a system-limited one. A character's armour & combat style should reflect the character, not be driven down what the system design dictates & create what feels like wasteful combat. I recognize my suggestion is far from bulletproof, but it would still probably create a much better user experience overall than either DOS2's sponge system or D&D's Armour Class miss system which both create the same problem under different conditions.

Surfaces, Materials, etc
I've been pretty negative towards Baldur's Gate 3 so far so let me switch it up: Here is something it does better than DOS2: Surfaces, materials, and physical elemental interactions. Baldur's Gate 3's surfaces & materials are… better in almost every aspect compared to DOS2. I think the only thing I would say DOS2 was more interesting about was the sheer variety of surfaces, mists & fogs, and transformative surfaces. The most you really got out of this in BG3 in practical use cases was water -> ice, but you really had to go out of your way to get weaponized water to begin with, ice spells were more common anyways. But in terms of practical gameplay application the surfaces of DOS2 were so abundant they worked against the biggest factor of combat: Movement & positioning (OH MY GOD EVERYTHING IS CONSTANTLY ON FIRE OR NECROFIRE). BG3 heavily learned from this, instead making surfaces, barrels, and etc either well placed setpieces or obvious things to be interacted with or aware of to steer clear from.

A footnote I can’t figure to fit anywhere else, another clear lesson learned & massive improvement in Baldur’s Gate 3 over DOS2 was simply the physical space for movement & combat. It was a constant frustration in DOS2 how many clearly open sightlines were blocked, or how a prop took up a padded space around it that it clearly didn’t visibly take up, harsh cornering, and etc making some encounters absolute agony to deal with. This is also coupled with physical interactivity being a much stronger core of Baldur’s Gate 3 over DOS2. Pushing/shoving, jumping, verticality, and generally much better navigation & ability sightlining are all amazing over DOS2. I missed these severely when playing it.

AI fairness, cheating, and cheese.
This is an area Baldur’s Gate 3 HEAVILY improved upon, but if I’m going to be completely honest, it may have been an OVERcorrection from DOS2. DOS2 AI regularly cheats via impossible ranged attacks, scripted encounters where something MUST happen, attacking through fog, occasionally being given more AP than physically possible, and absurd spamming of teleport-like abilities which make it an absolute aggravating chore to play for melee builds. There’s also many encounters, especially in Act IV, which have clear scripted behaviours for the entire combat encounter. Virtually all of this was solved with Baldur’s Gate 3 and I have a high expectation that Divinity 3 will keep this trend. But that being said, it also feels like the AI awareness & decisionmaking was severely dumbed down in Baldur’s Gate 3 compared to DOS2. After completing DOS2 with my girlfriend, we went back to a new playthrough on Baldur’s Gate 3 and it’s just… too easy now, even on the highest difficulty we just fly through the game. DOS2 was an absolute meat grinder that required us to learn so much more and completely changed how we approached the game in almost every regard. Even with less predictable AI compared to DOS2, BG3’s AI is remarkably… well unremarkable. The only enemies to give us trouble now are the area & act bosses. I really hope for Divinity 3 to de-overcorrect in this regard. I want to lose for making bad combat choices, not because the game decided or was designed for an enemy to have an unfair advantage which breaks the rules I am bound by.

I’d also like to acknowledge a MAJOR improvement Baldur’s Gate 3 made over DOS2 in this category: Encounter placements & initial layouts. DOS2 was constantly actively designing basically every single encounter in favour of the enemy AI. The player had near zero hope of getting an advantageous position before a combat encounter in DOS2. This was basically entirely fixed in Baldur’s Gate 3. There are still encounters where the player explicitly starts at a locational disadvantage, but they are much more fair about it and include believable pathways to solve the issue. There are no more issues of “the enemy has rangers & mages we cannot reach and have no hope of killing so we have to pull back to a choke point & force the enemy to stupidly walk into a bad position we can abuse”.

Physical character differences
This is admittedly one of the largest areas of concern I have for Divinity 3 after seeing the grotesquely horrifying announcement trailer. I can see the lizards still have their usual digitigrade legs, elves are still tall & slender, but everything is so much more homogenized. The lizards have very humanoid proportions, more human body height, and the elves even have much more human-like faces. Baldur’s Gate 3 was a very strong disappointment in this field despite its very in-depth character creation. The creatures & beings of Faerûn vary WILDLY in physical proportion. This was achieved in DOS2 but was very neutralized in Baldur’s Gate 3 despite the tech being there. I REALLY hope for the races to regain their physically defining characteristics like seen in DOS2. These characteristics were beyond purely visual, they affected how the game was played and that was awesome. It was also heavily embedded into the world & how the people interacted which was somewhat absent from Baldur’s Gate 3 barring the Githyanki having a huge presence in the plot. Each physically distinct race having their own skeletons, animation sets, body shape, silhouette, and so on was HUGE to me and was a core aspect of what made Divinity so much fun.

A Conclusion & Summary
I absolutely love both of these games. Baldur’s Gate 3 was absolutely amazing to the point I replayed it more than half a dozen times. But having played DOS2 I can now see the exact points where criticism came from that lead to both extremely good corrections but also strong overcorrections within BG3. DOS2 was so good despite its flaws that it had me looking up more about the game, its development, ambitions, reading about what was cut from it, and so on. There was just too much overambition for what Larian wanted to do with DOS2, but they’ve very clearly learned from the experience and it shows. My only hope is that fear creating overcorrection to criticism doesn’t define future titles. You guys are already on the right path, don’t trip and fall over right before perfection because of very vocal criticisms. The systems of DOS2 were flawed, but there was a very strong vision and I can see it. I genuinely hope for Divinity 3 to be a realization of a lot of the stuff you guys were working towards but weren’t able to iron out or fit into DOS2 while getting it out the door with the lessons learned from DOS2 -> BG3, and now BG3 -> Divinity 3.