The simple tl;dr is that the hype is real - objectively, D:OS2 is probably the best modern CRPG. It has something for everyone. It's chock full of content; you'll probably spend 100 hours if you try and hit most of the side quests on Classic difficulty.

That doesn't, however, make it a perfect game. D:OS2 is a very consistent game; it frequently hits above average marks on just about everything it does. And that feels great. For a while. But the more you play D:OS2, the more you realize that for every good feature it has, there's usually an accompanying frustration or nagging deficiency that becomes increasingly more glaring the longer you spend with the game.

The best thing D:OS2 does is get rid of the "adventuring day." CRPGs, by and large, were born from efforts to emulate the tabletop roleplaying experience of D&D. Part of D&D's mechanics revolve around managing resources during a dungeon delve; you only have a certain amount of spells you can cast before needing to rest. CRPGs have never handled this well. They're littered with save scumming to avoid random encounters, or wasting time backtracking to safe resting places, or boring trash mob encounters to expend your resources, or annoying time limits, or artificial limitations on the amount of times you can rest... No matter the implementation, it always sucks.

D:OS2 throws that concept of an adventuring day out the window. Once you're out of combat, your armor regenerates, your cooldowns quickly reset, and it's relatively easy to heal yourself. This is awesome. It means that every battle is meaningful.

Act 1 of D:OS2 is brilliant. It is 20 hours of curated, cutthroat open world tactical RPG fun. This initial section of the game feels perfect in every way. You're criminals sent to a horrid, squalid prison for dangerous people called 'sourcerers' who have the ability to tap into eldritch magic. You're meant to labor, rot, and die. Nobody has ever escaped Fort Joy, but your mission is to defy expectations. It's miserable in all the best ways. They nail the tone perfectly. You start in rags with few abilities. You have to cut your teeth scrambling together gear. Every new ability you can buy from a vendor feels like a triumph. As you mix together potions and bake food items and craft new arrows, each new recipe you learn helps you edge out your opponents and make fights go that much more smoothly. There are four or five ways to actually get out of the fort, and you can take any one of them. When you inevitably do get out of prison, it feels like a hard earned victory. As someone who bounced off the first Divinity: Original Sin game, I was ecstatic.

But then, after Fort Joy, I started to see the cracks in D:OS2's veneer that made me give up on the first game.

D:OS2 doesn't use classes. You have various Combat Abilities that you can put points into as you level up; putting those points in various skills, like Aerotheurge or Geomancer for spellcasters or Huntsman and Warfare for physical attackers, lets you use Skillbooks you get off corpses and buy from vendors to give your characters access to new abilities. Defenders of D:OS2 will tell you that this lets you flexibly build your characters in a wide variety of different ways - more options, more freedom!

But then you get into Act 2 and suddenly you have too many skill points. And you realize that adding another point into Huntsman isn't really doing anything for you. Why not put it into a different skillset? One that would open a whole suite of new abilities? And then you ask yourself why everyone doesn't have 2 points of Aerotheurge, because that gets you Teleport, which is probably the best crowd control skill in the game. And, actually, why don't all of your characters have Necromancy? Your characters are much more powerful if you a dip a little bit into most of the skillsets. And now all of your characters are extremely homogenized save for a few key skills.

Around 40 hours into D:OS2, I started to wonder how much of the game was tactical and how much revolved around understanding and exploiting its obtuse systems. You don't notice these things in Fort Joy because you're just trying to eke out an existence; trying to survive, trying to get small advantages where you can find them. Once you have a plethora of resources, the gameplay turns into a monotonous... checklist of tiny advantages - most of which are outscaled relatively quickly.

You start to realize that despite purporting to be something of an open world game, D:OS2's level scaling system is extremely unforgiving. Encounters a level above you are deadly. Encounters a level below you are a breeze. So you have to play the role of Goldilocks, searching for quests and dungeons and areas that feel "just right." And it's so easy to fall behind on experience if you aren't meticulously exploring areas, leading to situations where you're desperately searching for some smidgen of experience so that you don't have to cheese an encounter a single level above you.

There are tons of revelations like this throughout the game.

Equipment scales on level, so you have to hunt through vendors every time you gain a level of experience to make sure your gear is up to date. Your "Gauntlets of the Ancient Godkiller" quickly become outright useless after you level up once or twice. With 10-11 slots of gear to keep updated, this is a constant nuisance.

As you get further in the game, you have to spend time before every encounter carefully separating out your party members and pre-positioning them before shooting at the enemies, because if you just walk towards them and listen to the dialogue, they're going to bombard your characters with area of effect abilities immediately.

I haven't even touched on the Physical and Magical armor system, which feels like a really bad design choice to try and circumvent the issue D:OS1 had with everyone constantly being stunned, knocked down, or otherwise CC'd.

The writing is actually really good. D:OS1 has a problem with not taking itself seriously and being too tongue in cheek, but D:OS2 does a really phenomenal job of balancing serious storytelling with beats of comedy and levity. The worldbuilding feels unique and interesting. The individual characters you can recruit are much improved from D:OS1; they're genuinely charming. The overarching narrative and subplots both have a lot of bite to them. It's too bad D:OS2 doesn't seem to want you to enjoy any of these things! You're ferried from one plotline to the next by a rotating cast of irrelevant, quickly killed off NPCs. Bafflingly, your characters don't acknowledge each other exist. Even if you are intrigued by what's going on, the game inundates you with a scatterbrained drip feed of new story content inbetween dozens of hours of side quests. By the end of Act 2, I literally couldn't remember what I was doing or who was on my ship because it had been nearly 20 hours since I even heard a whiff of the main plot.

There's just too much. Everything gets muddied after Act 1. Too many sidequests, too many areas, too many ideas stuffed into one place. It's not that D:OS2 is a bad game. It is, however, a game that proves too much of a good thing can be bad, though. That's the rub with D:OS2 - it's a good game, but there's just so much thrown at you without any sense of organization. It's like they were rushing towards a playtime milestone first and trying to create coherency and pacing as an afterthought.

D:OS2 is a wicked good CRPG. In spite of all my criticisms, I'd still say it's probably the most commercially approachable game out there. But I'd probably go back and play Pillars of Eternity or Baldur's Gate long before I considered giving D:OS2 a second look.

The simple tl;dr is that the hype is real - objectively, D:OS2 is probably the best modern CRPG. It has something for everyone. It's chock full of content; you'll probably spend 100 hours if you try and hit most of the side quests on Classic difficulty. That doesn't, however, make it a perfect game. D:OS2 is a very consistent game; it frequently hits above average marks on just about everything it does. And that feels great. For a while. But the more you play D:OS2, the more you realize that for every good feature it has, there's usually an accompanying frustration or nagging deficiency that becomes increasingly more glaring the longer you spend with the game. The best thing D:OS2 does is get rid of the "adventuring day." CRPGs, by and large, were born from efforts to emulate the tabletop roleplaying experience of D&D. Part of D&D's mechanics revolve around managing resources during a dungeon delve; you only have a certain amount of spells you can cast before needing to rest. CRPGs have never handled this well. They're littered with save scumming to avoid random encounters, or wasting time backtracking to safe resting places, or boring trash mob encounters to expend your resources, or annoying time limits, or artificial limitations on the amount of times you can rest... No matter the implementation, it always sucks. D:OS2 throws that concept of an adventuring day out the window. Once you're out of combat, your armor regenerates, your cooldowns quickly reset, and it's relatively easy to heal yourself. This is awesome. It means that every battle is meaningful. Act 1 of D:OS2 is brilliant. It is 20 hours of curated, cutthroat open world tactical RPG fun. This initial section of the game feels perfect in every way. You're criminals sent to a horrid, squalid prison for dangerous people called 'sourcerers' who have the ability to tap into eldritch magic. You're meant to labor, rot, and die. Nobody has ever escaped Fort Joy, but your mission is to defy expectations. It's miserable in all the best ways. They nail the tone perfectly. You start in rags with few abilities. You have to cut your teeth scrambling together gear. Every new ability you can buy from a vendor feels like a triumph. As you mix together potions and bake food items and craft new arrows, each new recipe you learn helps you edge out your opponents and make fights go that much more smoothly. There are four or five ways to actually get out of the fort, and you can take any one of them. When you inevitably do get out of prison, it feels like a hard earned victory. As someone who bounced off the first Divinity: Original Sin game, I was ecstatic. But then, after Fort Joy, I started to see the cracks in D:OS2's veneer that made me give up on the first game. D:OS2 doesn't use classes. You have various Combat Abilities that you can put points into as you level up; putting those points in various skills, like Aerotheurge or Geomancer for spellcasters or Huntsman and Warfare for physical attackers, lets you use Skillbooks you get off corpses and buy from vendors to give your characters access to new abilities. Defenders of D:OS2 will tell you that this lets you flexibly build your characters in a wide variety of different ways - more options, more freedom! But then you get into Act 2 and suddenly you have [i]too[/i] many skill points. And you realize that adding another point into Huntsman isn't really doing anything for you. Why not put it into a different skillset? One that would open a whole [i]suite[/i] of new abilities? And then you ask yourself why everyone doesn't have 2 points of Aerotheurge, because that gets you Teleport, which is probably [i]the[/i] best crowd control skill in the game. And, actually, why don't all of your characters have Necromancy? Your characters are [i]much[/i] more powerful if you a dip a little bit into most of the skillsets. And now all of your characters are extremely homogenized save for a few key skills. Around 40 hours into D:OS2, I started to wonder how much of the game was tactical and how much revolved around understanding and exploiting its obtuse systems. You don't notice these things in Fort Joy because you're just trying to eke out an existence; trying to survive, trying to get small advantages where you can find them. Once you have a plethora of resources, the gameplay turns into a monotonous... checklist of tiny advantages - most of which are outscaled relatively quickly. You start to realize that despite purporting to be something of an open world game, D:OS2's level scaling system is extremely unforgiving. Encounters a level above you are deadly. Encounters a level below you are a breeze. So you have to play the role of Goldilocks, searching for quests and dungeons and areas that feel "just right." And it's so easy to fall behind on experience if you aren't meticulously exploring areas, leading to situations where you're desperately searching for some smidgen of experience so that you don't have to cheese an encounter a single level above you. There are tons of revelations like this throughout the game. Equipment scales on level, so you have to hunt through vendors every time you gain a level of experience to make sure your gear is up to date. Your "Gauntlets of the Ancient Godkiller" quickly become outright useless after you level up once or twice. With 10-11 slots of gear to keep updated, this is a constant nuisance. As you get further in the game, you have to spend time before every encounter carefully separating out your party members and pre-positioning them before shooting at the enemies, because if you just walk towards them and listen to the dialogue, they're going to bombard your characters with area of effect abilities immediately. I haven't even touched on the Physical and Magical armor system, which feels like a really bad design choice to try and circumvent the issue D:OS1 had with everyone constantly being stunned, knocked down, or otherwise CC'd. The writing is actually [i]really[/i] good. D:OS1 has a problem with not taking itself seriously and being too tongue in cheek, but D:OS2 does a really phenomenal job of balancing serious storytelling with beats of comedy and levity. The worldbuilding feels unique and interesting. The individual characters you can recruit are much improved from D:OS1; they're genuinely charming. The overarching narrative and subplots both have a lot of bite to them. It's too bad D:OS2 doesn't seem to want you to enjoy any of these things! You're ferried from one plotline to the next by a rotating cast of irrelevant, quickly killed off NPCs. Bafflingly, your characters don't acknowledge each other exist. Even if you are intrigued by what's going on, the game inundates you with a scatterbrained drip feed of new story content inbetween dozens of hours of side quests. By the end of Act 2, I literally couldn't remember what I was doing or who was on my ship because it had been nearly 20 hours since I even heard a whiff of the main plot. There's just too much. Everything gets muddied after Act 1. Too many sidequests, too many areas, too many ideas stuffed into one place. It's not that D:OS2 is a bad game. It [i]is[/i], however, a game that proves too much of a good thing can be bad, though. That's the rub with D:OS2 - it's a good game, but there's just so much thrown at you without any sense of organization. It's like they were rushing towards a playtime milestone first and trying to create coherency and pacing as an afterthought. D:OS2 is a wicked good CRPG. In spite of all my criticisms, I'd still say it's probably the most commercially approachable game out there. But I'd probably go back and play Pillars of Eternity or Baldur's Gate long before I considered giving D:OS2 a second look.