Divinity Original Sin 2 if you don’t know the acronym.
My biggest problem with DOS2 is that it each battle felt a little too punishing and always ended up needed cheesing. I never got off the first island. At level 5 I thought I was soft locked out of progressing because my build choices couldn’t get through a battle. Every fight felt like the whole kitchen sink is thrown at me and I don’t have the tools necessary to survive any of it. As hard as I tried to like the game I ended up giving up on it.
My biggest blocks were Radeka and Gareth. Radeka I cheese off to the side but ended up getting chewed apart by the zombies and spit to death by the beetles. Trying to save Gareth is just futile as it’s too many men who can whittle me down to one party member in a matter of a few turns while I struggle to do anything. Don’t even get me started on the ambush battle that just wipes the floor with me by turn 4. I even went back to Fort Joy and finished off some battles that I left there. I really felt like I needed to kill every last NPC on the island to gain any progression in that game though. The sad part is, I like a challenge. But try after try after try after try after try of the same battle over and over again made the game go from a challenge to it’s just cheap. So I gave up.
Is the combat on that same level in BG3?
DOS2 is way harder. BG3 relies a lot less on environmental effects(though they still exist) and I feel that there is a lot less movement abilities thrown at you.
I felt like every time I made a plan in DOS2 the enemies would just cast fly and get out of it. There’s a lot less of that in this game.
DOS2 felt like a puzzle game after a certain point where you had to have the right spells to manipulate the battlefield in a specific way but this game is a lot more free form with the encounters.
Been playing on medium and while it was difficult at first I feel right after you start act 2 the game gets a lot easier with all the abilities your party has at their disposal.
I’ve had the same experience as others here. Played DOS2 until I got to a point there was no way to progress. Stuck on one fight, tried 50 times using every possible strategy I could think of. That was on Normal Difficulty. Playing BG3 on Normal (Balanced), I’ve never ran into a wall like that. There’s so many possibilities in any one battle. Through ACT 1, there’s a couple few times I had to retry using different methods and strategies, but never so hard that I had to give up.
From reading walk-throughs and such for DOS2, it seems you literally have to cheese your whole group make-up to get through it. I.e. Make your whole group DPS. Perhaps easy on that game should have been normal…
So from my experience, I feel like BG3 combat is a lot more manageable than DOS2. I had to crank DOS2 down to easy to get through the game. I’m playing normal difficulty in BG3 and so far it feels really good. Granted I’m only like 2 hours in, so we’ll see after the first act. But there’s a lot more mobility and options in combat in BG3 compared to DOS2. I’ve been able to maneuver opponents and party members into favorable positions more easily
I thknk DOS2 was an interesting difficulty, it was very punishing the first time but in subsequent playthroughs it became easier. It was interesting to come up with ways to do an encounter or even cheese it. My first playthrough I gave up, I simply couldn’t do an encounter and a ran out of money for potions/revive scrolls. The second playthrough the encounters a breeze.
I haven’t played much if bg3, mostly because my power went out right after the nautiloid. I did playthe early access though and my biggest issue was the hit rates. It felt like every fight I did I had a 30-50% hit rate. Missing an 80% chance to hit was really annoying for melee users. At least I can pretend for ranged. But the hit rate thing is a long standing dnd rule, it’s just one that I find personally annoying to deal with no matter what format it’s in.
I kind of wish I had the two action thing like dos:2. Having a main action and a bonus action I feel isn’t quiiite enough in a video game format. Again I know its from dnd but I think that rule works better on pen and paper than in a game like this. I wouldn’t mind if health was doubled as a result. Again: this is just my opinion. I just feel like turns are too short in a video game format.
I do kind of miss the silly things you can do and the cheese. In dos2 every object in the game was something you could potentially use. In bg3 I have a harder time thinking that way. Silly things like teleporting an annoying mob off a cliff, or making a wall of stools was really fun and it was interesting to think of ways you could make a fight different. But there are fewer of these tools in bg3. I’m sure with the more I familiarize myself and see other people doing sillier things, I’ll learn of ways to do similar things. It was one of the things that made DOS2 special and memorable. There was no other game you could do stuff like that with. But i can see a DM IRL cringing at seeing their party collecting every single stool in the prison to make a wall so they can cheese Dalis.
There isn’t anything as broken as the Infinite AP Ice Knight or Unkillable Summoner, but high lvl Wizard and Sorcerers will be able to quickly end encounters late game in one or two rounds if you run a metabuild like Tempest Cleric/Storm Sorcerer.
I’ve been playing on tactician mode and it’s quite a bit harder than DOS2 due to the more limited action economy, but much easier than some other CRPGs like Pathfinder:WotR.
