Divinity: Original Sin 2

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Spoilers follow for Divinity: Original Sin 2.
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Five years ago I tried Divine Divinity and I have yet to finish its first act. Despite passable visuals, good music and slightly more freeform character advancement, it was still at its core an unimaginative, endlessly repetitive Diablo clone and nothing more.

A couple of years ago, news of Chris Avellone's marginal involvement in D:OS2 got me interested in the Divinity series' relaunch as party-based, story-based linear RPGs in the Baldur's Gate vein. My completionist side gave me no choice but to play the first D:OS beforehand. It boasted some refreshing game mechanics but was hampered by an utterly failed attempt at setting a dramatic roleplaying campaign in a childish, whimsical fairytale world. As for the sequel, it tries and largely fails to shore up its narrative side of things while saddling itself with a slew of half-implemented features.

Like Pillars of Eternity 2, D:OS2 decided to record full narration for all its descriptive text. Though at least the narrator they hired is less prone to breathy over-emoting than the "Ms. Piggy" impersonator whose endless chatter poisoned every god meeting interlude in PoE2, this pervasive intrusion still comes across as more immersion-breaking than immersive. On the more abstract game-playing angle, D:OS1 made a name for itself not least because it re-implemented puzzles and riddle-solving into a genre which sadly has largely lost its nerdy roots. Divining the correct sequences of pressure plates and colored symbols to open a series of doors, that sort of thing. Unfortunately it also came with a lot of moronic 1980s-style pixel-hunting. Predictably, that was the only puzzle-solving element which made it into the sequel, albeit with an added "glow" to newly-discovered items.

The writing did improve slightly... but only slightly. The blandly generic medieval setting is jazzed up considerably by the addition of elegant elvish... cannibalism... and snooty imperialist lizardfolk. D:OS2's basic plot is also quite intriguing if you stand back and take it all in, more so than even the overall better-written Pillars of Eternity. Conceptually, this could've been the best RPG to hit the virtual shelves, possibly ever. Unfortunately, all secrets are out by mid-game and individual scenes vary wildly in quality from engagingly fresh to droning monotone or perfunctory "here's a troll, kill it." Too much immersion was sacrificed for the misguided aim of shoehorning half-assed multiplayer into a single-player sub-genre. In terms of game mechanics, the interplay of ground AoEs was actually rendered less interesting by the addition of "cursed" surfaces which cannot be removed by normal means, and are less satisfyingly implemented than in the first game. Any remaining potential for tactical depth is ruined by nonsensically giving teleportation abilities to each and every single enemy you encounter, with the effect of homogenizing the class system rather than letting the player's personality determine a playstyle.

And that previous sentence encapsulates D:OS2's biggest problem.

No, I didn't shoot all those deputies. I'm only here to shoot the sheriff. Yet there they are, all conveniently laid out for me to loot. Sure, all similar games have random loot containers. Treasure chests are intrinsic to the D&D derivative experience. D:OS2 however introduces a "luck" passive ability which triggers upon opening crates and barrels, and places endless numbers of these all over the map. Meaning the way to get rich is not to deliberately undertake challenging endeavors, but to obsessively loot every single thing you find.

Not that money will do you much good. Vendor items are auto-leveled, meaning that aside from buying a couple pieces of vastly overpowered loot at the very beginning of each act (MMO fans should be familiar with all their loot becoming instantly obsolete with every new expansion) you'll find nothing worth investing in or saving for. I reached the last act with over a hundred thousand gold, found four or five items worth buying... and was still left with over a hundred thousand gold.

Like the first D:OS, you'll have access to an extensively coded and varied crafting system, but where you used to at least be able to craft a few decent items (or at least use crafting to improve your loot drops) it's now utterly useless. Aside from potions and a few rare skill books whose recipes are so counterintuitive you'll have to look them up online, the only items you can craft are vendorable trash loot. Also, since using potions or scrolls take up one or two of your exactly four action points per round, even consumables are not worth investing in. Either your enemies will one-shot you or your party's hydrosophist will juice you back up to full in a single round. Combine this with a level system so stringent that enemies even one level above you can easily teleport to and one-shot your back row casters, and an encounter two levels above you will usually wipe your whole party in the first round of combat. Meaning that at any particular time, you'll likely face only one or two tasks which you can realistically accomplish.

Top this off with a sad over-reliance on having enemies simply pop out of the ground at you, and D:OS2 resolves to an incredibly annoying first playthrough. You have no real chance to plan out your course of action beforehand. Just wander around the map looting hundreds of containers and trigger every encounter to see which are actually doable, then reload endlessly until you find the weak links in the leveling chain. While this overall pattern does result in a pleasingly elevated reliance on exploration compared to most single-player games, it kills every other game element.

Your crafting is irrelevant.
Your buying low and selling high is irrelevant.
Your tactical positioning is irrelevant, since all your enemies teleport every round or two.
Your choice of story progression is irrelevant.
Your scouting is irrelevant, since you can never tell beforehand how many adds will jump out of the ground.
About the only strategic or roleplaying choice the game offers you is ensuring you can cover all the different types of magic to clear certain ground or status effects. Aside from that, it plays all too much like an MMO-inspired gear grind.

I can certainly see why both the Original Sin games made such a stir. They're something fresh, and cRPG fans have long suffered seeing the promise of the genre betrayed, until the recent revival of Torment: Tides of Numenera and the like. But in all honesty I can't see Larian's efforts have entirely outgrown their initial 2002 offering of perfunctory "Action"RPG drudgery. It is not unreasonable to expect games to be gameable systems, driven by player choice and decision-making. OS2 pushes you into making a party of four high-constitution, teleporting, self-buffing battlemages (and, as usual in such games, summoning spells are stupidly overpowered) and it relies entirely too much on trial and error on a first run instead of prediction and careful resource management.

That being said, while your playing style is certainly cramped, you do get a pretty constant stream of roleplaying choices to make as you quest, choosing which NPCs to execute, recruit or ally with. Some characters like Meistr Siva come across as amusingly trenchant, and the basic story of the gods' true nature as "shepherds" is long overdue to replace traditional fantasy divinities. The lizards, dwarves and elves all receive interesting canonical revamping. Even the basic gameplay retains the opportunity to play around with status effect combos, something none of the product's competitors have offered so far but which we're likely to start seeing more of after these two proofs of concept. The implementation of different race relations in NPC reactions is impressively detailed and extensive. The physical / magic armor system lets you build some synergy among your party members. Overall, D:OS2 is a good, if slightly overhyped game. At the very least there's room to grow for a third installment.