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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
I wish I would love it. It is a really great game but I cannot make it click for me. Looks great, sounds great, feels great.
But somehow it doesn’t work for me. Half the time I feel I have no control and have no idea of how to get it, other half I’m steamrolling things. Worst part is winning fights and it feeling undeserved, like a sloppy brawl.
Still a great game.
I really wanted to like this game. But Man it was too linear for me and also too hard. I had to google every quest to know where the fuck is X to finish it. It was just too daunting. And I like hard games. But this one was frustrating for some reason.
Otherwise its probably an awesome game. Not for me.
