Video game review: Divinity: Original Sin II (2017)

NB: this is about the "Definitive Edition" which brought a welcome amount of polish.

Finished this a month ago I reckon, and it was pretty much a blast. It wasn't perfect by any means, but the good was such that it wasn't too hard to forgive the bad.

In those "good" parts, you can find an incredible attention to detail and world interactivity, almost tailor-made for people like me who always open everything, read every document and talk to the most insignificant NPC; it felt like they were personally rewarding my obsessive behaviour.

Another element is the almost complete lack of retarded fetch/kill quests. The opposite, actually, the secondary quests really help weave the general lore.

A third I can think of is the viability of a lot of builds and abilities; no real lemon skill school. Though some are stronger than others, of course.

Fourth? Maybe the care put into designs and their execution. Be it the pretty decors and mesh work, fun dialogues delivered by enthusiastic voice actors (with various charming UK accents instead of the usual US over-the-topness) and interesting characters, everything felt like a lot of people genuinely cared to make something to be proud of.

There are two (somewhat related) parts where it falters significantly, in my opinion. First is the difficulty curve: it starts with a quite hard portion that ends with a borderline unfair fight (against Alexandar) then mostly tapers down until the final battle. This curve made Tactician mode (aka hardest difficulty) too punishing if you don't want to spend your time optimizing (or worse, "cheesing", something I absolutely loathe) while Classic is too easy if you know your left from your right.

These few unavoidable difficulty spikes really ruin an otherwise highly desirable baseline challenge because Classic really was a walk in the park in comparison; I was walking over way too many important enemies ROAD ROLLER DA style all along while hoarding my consumables, really.

The second point is very simple: various "pass turn" effects (usually termed "crowd control") existing and being that easy to inflict/suffer without cooldown was a massive mistake, they should have been replaced by softer AP reductions/impairments. Really a shame, it made only one strategy really viable; other than killing stuff fast, of course.

How do you rate that really? That Tactician mode being much more unfair than in its predecessor and crowd control still being the combat system's Quad Damage are shameful black marks since they don't seem that hard to massage into something better. Yet I had fun. A lot of it. Between 8 and 9 seems fair.

I guess I now have to try Baldur's Gate 3… once it's sold for peanuts on Steam, heh.