Recently I’ve discovered the joy of CRPGs, having previously only dabbled in them without spending any significant time on the genre.
With Baldur’s Gate 2 just around the corner, which I’m sure many of us are hyped for, I wanted to try a similar CRPG to get a feel for whether I’m going to want to play it. Enter DOS2; this game is made by Larian Studios, the same studio making BG2, and is an absolutely incredible game.
From the graphics, which are stunning even 6 years on from release, to the combat which makes you think about your moves in a manner similar to how you might do in a game like chess, and best of all stories which are for the most part genuinely interesting. I frequently found myself surprised at events / characters / quests I found throughout the world, even small things like hearing someone screaming nearby then discovering they had been torn to pieces by voidwoken.
I recently just finished Act I and just started Act II but wanted to share a bit of love for this game as it is an absolute masterpiece with a well deserved 95% positive rating with 144k reviews on steam.
Please share your experience with DOS2 and whether or not you have fully completed the game!
One of my favourite games and the only reason I purchased the Early Access of Baldura Gate 3.
Wish I could play it for the first time again. Have fun!:)
Same here
DOS 1 is also good but obviously the second one is better
I wanted to like this game but I found the combat to be really tedious and the story felt dull. I hope BG3 takes it to another level.
Having just finished DOS2, and played a ton of early access BG3 as well, I think BG3 really does take it to another level. It does a better job with immersion, I think, which engages you more in the story and characters. Based on what I’ve played so far, they’ve managed to do that without sacrificing any of the complexity of DOS. We’ll see how fleshed out the rest of it is soon, but I’m uncharacteristically optimistic.
I’m one of those who doesn’t get the praise.
It’s probably just me, but I’ve always felt like if you’re not going to hold the player’s hand, then it’s important to be intuitive. DOS2…is anything BUT intuitive; not only is the game open-ended, the way forward isn’t always clear. Some early fights are difficult enough that you might assume it’s a beef gate, when it’s actually required to proceed and you just need to cheese it.
For me, it might be because the RPG mechanics aren’t familiar to me. I picked up Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous and fuckin’ loved both of those games, but Pathfinder is a game system I’m familiar with. Maybe since Baldur’s Gate 3 uses a variant of 5th edition D&D, it’ll click for me.
I share your opinion about DoS2 being not intuitive and also not holding hands. I also agree that the way “forward” is often unclear when relying on the built in dysfunktional quest journal. However I disagree with your statement that there would be fights that you have to cheese to win in DoS2. The game seems to promote cheesing but it does also not require it.
I feel the exact same way you do about DOS2. I switched to an easier difficulty soon enough. Baldur’s Gate 3 feels like I finally get to be a player as a forever-DM, but also makes me feel like scolding the non-existent DM for some stupid encounter and quest design. I play with a full party of friends, so maybe it’s because we fuck around too much.
That said, it is early access. Hopefully the final product has better intuition so that you don’t have to save-reload all the damn time because you didn’t mindread the devs.
I haven’t played a lot of games like this but from all of the games I’ve played in the past 20-ish years, this one shot up to near the top of my list. I must have dropped at least 200 hours on this game on my first playthrough, just appreciating every little detail there was and doing all of the side quests.
The gameplay itself is already amazing, but to me what really shone was the brilliant, brilliant writing. I have never read such intensely hued writing in a video game.
I could never get into it, tbh.
Me and my partner at the time figured it’d be amazing for a couch-co-op thing, but it was so chaotic around NPCs due to the spam of random interactions flying off from two interacting characters, we just gave up on it. Breaking combat was a lot of fun though.
I really ought to get back into it and just play it solo. 🤔
I think my most uttered phrase during couch co-op was «opps, sorry!» as I electrified/curse fired yet another surface by accident.
I liked the game but I was a bit disappointed that nearly every fight ends up with everything covered in necrofire. I bet that if you were to just spec into a build that likes being on fire you’ll probably be super overpowered.
The problem is that loot is random, and it takes a lot of gear support to get to the point where a character isn’t getting hurt by fire, even with the relevant perk.
Cursed surfaces in general were just a massive pain, considering how precious Source was by default. Using a mod to get Source back on rest makes things a lot more reasonable, particularly in the first half of the game.
Source on rest should be the default tbh since you can farm it after every fight. I think they added them to the game as an option in the loot bags that they introduced later on.
It’s great but too big and sprawling for me. I got drowned in side AND main quests in the second act and couldn’t get back into it. Probably a me problem but still.
The single big complaint about DoS2 I have is the horribly dysfunktional quest journal. Instead of giving the player a sense of what to do and where to go next, it just outright confuses me and makes me feel super lost. That quests don´t have a recommended character level makes this mess even worse. I worked around those issues by using Quests by Levels Guide and it worked very well - never felt lost again, always knew what quest to do next.
Thank you, that looks great. Might help me back into the game.
500 hours in and a couple of play throughs. There’s so many different ways to progress it’s wild. Every time was different.
Trompdoy forever
Only problem I have with the series is that the average battle takes around half an hour. Wish there was a way to speed that up. But fun games with awesome graphics no doubt.
I typically play video games for an hour a night. This can be woefully inadequate for DoS as all I may accomplish is a single battle.
A friend and I tried this game and enjoyed it up to a point, a particular fight we could not get past.
Finally looking online for a guide, we discovered that every guide we could find suggested cheesing the fight in various ways.
We both decided that any game that required the player to both know a fight was about to happen (when it was impossible from context to predict) and cheese the fight to win was a bad game. Even if this was only one fight, it was a fight that blocked all progress. We quit and neither of us have wanted to play the game again.
Note: We have, either together or on our own, completed other games - like BG 1-2, NWN, PoE, DOS1 - without resorting to guides, cheats, foreknowledge, or cheese.
We were, and remain, very disappointed with DOS2 because of this, and we’re “suspicious” of BG3 because of DOS2 (but, charitably, perhaps Larian made a mistake in DOS2 and won’t repeat it in BG3).
EDIT: Please don’t ask me what fight this was, because I really don’t remember as it was now years ago. We were pretty deep into the game, bopping along pleasantly and thinking we were succeeding. As I recall, we had no side-quests to do (so no way to level IF we were under-leveled - I remember looking to see if we had missed some corner and needed to quest there). We basically entered a room in some dungeon/temple with no other direction on the map to go and experienced TPK. Over and over until we finally gave up. Looking at Steam, it says we were
93.3118 hours into the game.Without knowing what fight you stopped at it’s hard to really talk about your experience, but I promise you don’t need to know a fight is coming or cheese the fight. There’s a point where the fights just click for you and become easier. There’s also plenty of content you can go to instead to level up, if you’re under leveled.
There’s only 1 fight I can think of that’s balls to three weeks nuts (the Blackpits) and my brother and I still beat it legitimately, just took like 6 attempts.
See EDIT.
Fair. All things considered though, my friend who couldn’t get through DOSII has been begging me to get the BG3 early access with him. So without playing it, it seems more approachable!!!
You are wrong, you can cheese in DoS2 but you don´t have to. It is an option, not a requirement. Source: I (as probably many others did too) finished the game without using any cheese once.
I suspect you reflexively cheesed the game, mainly because I absolutely recall that when we gave-in and looked up guides for this fight, every single one of them that we found at the time advised us to cheese the fight. Not one simply presented a strategy or alternative. They were all like, “Oh, yeah, that fight. You gotta cheese it.” We both found the idea of having to cheese a fight to win distasteful, so we just quit with a shrug.
That was our experience. It was a bad game for us because of that, and I thought I had made that clear.
I respect your individual experience but please believe me that cheesing is not necessary to beat DoS2.
Which fight was this?
I knew getting into the game that the combat was punishing - especially in Act 1 before you built your team. But I don’t recall having to cheese a fight to get pass it.
See EDIT.
I found that lowering the difficulty was just required. The early game, you have a LOT stacked against you. When you level up, get more abilities, better gear - then you don’t have to pull them behind a doorway or something.
It made sense that you were completely outgunned in the start, but as you progress, it’s a little easier.
However, the emphasis on surfaces was bad. It was way too easy to make necrotic fire that was 2 turns to dispel a small portion of. And in the beginning, it’s very hard to get rid of it. Late game, you can turn it into a healing fire.
But other than those gripes, it was a fantastic game. Well with the time invested to learn it. Just, lower the difficulty.
I liked the first game more. The introduction of armour bars in DOS2 made each fight a huge slog; I understand the intention of promoting strategic thinking, but it just felt un-fun to me. Also, I liked the light hearted nature of DOS1’s story more.
For me it was the other way around, I liked the combat in 2 a lot more, because 1 felt way more random. In DOS2, status effects are more predictable, in 1 you can get really lucky or unlucky with status effects hitting or missing, leading to more reloading and “save-scumming” (or maybe we were just bad lol)
It’s an incredible game, but it took me something like 20 hours just to finish the first act, and I just don’t have the patience anymore for a 100+ hour long RPG. The combat is really good overall, but I didn’t like that movement and attacks use the same pool of AP. Compared to something like XCOM, this forces you to be very static since moving is basically wasting an attack, or it makes movement abilities like jump and the likes extremely OP.
Speaking as someone who really enjoyed DOS2, I do have plenty of issues with its mechanics, with the movement ability problem you mention right in the thick of it.
Once you learn the game systems a bit, you will always gravitate towards a similar set of skills. Mobility is so important in the game that you will frequently find yourself in situations where your character’s survival depends on it (and the AI abuses these skills constantly). So everyone gets a jump skill, two if it fits the build - and many of the jump skills are just teleports with rider effects, so everyone’s teleporting around. All builds tend to gravitate towards more damage, because you can’t apply CC without nuking their armour down first, and CC trivialises fights when it comes into play. Optimisation isn’t straightforward, and skills aren’t really on an equal footing. Maximising Warfare is how you become the best Necromancer, and the best Rogue, and the best Warrior, and the best Archer. Meanwhile, all the other skills (with the notable exception of Summoning) you can generally just leave between 2-5 to unlock their respective abilities, regardless of your build.
The ultimate end-game of this is that loads of characters end up feeling very similar, even if they appear to do very different things on the surface. Once you get past much of Act 2 there’s very little variation in how you play the game and approach combat, and the story becomes the main driver for completion even as the core gameplay loop stagnates. I think I completed the game on my fourth attempt, but that was largely through my stubbornness rather than other factors.
Quite slow paced and inventory management is a mess, but a very good game otherwise!
I heavily recommend the Explorer difficulty if you aren’t familiar with CRPGs, on Classic the game is quite hard even in Act 1 if you don’t know how to play them.
Wife and I couldn’t even finish act one. Hated it, don’t get the praise.
DoS2 is a truly outstanding RPG - many CRPG nerds say the best ever - but that is ofc only after getting into the game. Unlike most games that are developed today. DoS2 is not at all a casual game, on the contrary, it´s pretty complex and to make it worse for new players, the game also does not explain much. The consequence is a relatively high threshold to get into the game and an extremely steep learning curve, that can be truly overwhelming for new players, especially those who are not familiar with “hardcore” CRPGs - like me before playing DoS2.
The fact that you could not finish act 1 simply means that you didn’t get over the threshold to get into the game, otherwise finishing act 1 would not have been a problem. It took me 2-3 attempts to finish act 1, because there was still so much to learn after the first try. What I mean is that you are missing out on one of the greatest RPGs of all times and that you should consider giving yourself another chance to actually get into the game. I very much recommend using guides, at least on your first playthrough.
To not gimp your chars, use class guides by this guy (DON`T use fextralife builds!) https://steamcommunity.com/id/teesinz/myworkshopfiles/?section=guides&appid=435150&p=2
The one big weakness of Dos2 is the dysfunktional quest journal, it regularly leaves the player without any information about where o go next. To not get lost, simply use this quests by character levels guide (thank you Lost Sinner, you are amazing <3) https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1139237003
I highly recommend using a two person party and giving both the lone wolf talent on your first run. It is significantly easier to learn (and beat) the game this way than with a full four person party.
Another key factor for a successful first play through of DoS2 is to not split your damage imo. This might be counterintuitive but the dual armor system in DoS2 heavily rewards parties that deal only physical or only elemental damage. I recommend a phys dam only party for the first playthrough.
tldr: Yes, the game has a high threshold to get into - that is naturally the case because it is a deep and complex game - it is very much worth to get into - don´t make yourself miss out on it.
I didn’t say we were bad at it mate, I said we didn’t like it. A game shouldn’t have a “threshold” to get into it. It should just be fun. We stopped playing because it wasn’t fun.
Each to their own, fun is different things for different people. Naturally every game has a certain threshold to get into. The more complex a game is, the higher that threshold becomes. Some games have a threshold that is so low you wont even notice it. Enjoy what you like best and glhf mate!
I mean, you did say you hated it and “didn’t get the praise”. I don’t know how else to interpret that than calling it bad.
But also, I disagree that games shouldn’t need a threshold to get into them. Some games simply have depth that can’t be instantly expressed as soon as you start playing.
Speaking of CRPGs, I just played Baldur’s Gate 1 for the first time, funnily enough. It was a great game which is not exactly a controversial opinion but I wasn’t expecting it to be so fucking funny also. It was very very very hard though.
I also downloaded DOS2 but it felt like I needed a breather after BG so I’ll get to it when I can commit some time to it.
Have you tried BG2 yet? It’s on another level entirely. BG1 is more of an action RPG. BG2 takes same amount of action and throws on a great story, much more developed characters, and some of the best side questing in any CRPG
I like BG1 and all, and it has some great moments, but in my opinion it pales in comparison to the second. Just don’t be put off by the length of the starting dungeon.
Irenicus is one of the best video game antagonists ever and David Warner put in an all-time great VA performance, too.
I haven’t! I’m going to get to it before I get BG3 for sure.
