Let me start off by saying that we like Divinity: Original Sin 2’s setting and characters. Early on, I found myself charmed by the handful of party members we recruited (Red Prince, Lohse, Sebille), and I enjoyed learning about the world and its lore. If you’ve read or watched any fantasy media before, or played a tabletop game, it certainly isn’t doing anything mind-blowing with its execution of tropes and archetypes. The game has personality to back it up, though, and while we didn’t get too far past the initial area—Fort Joy, for those in the know—it felt massive.
So let me address the elephant in the room, and I hope you aren’t disappointed in us for dropping the ball on the first entry. Divinity: Original Sin 2 is a hard game. If you have played a number of CRPGs or turn-based strategy games in general before, it might not look so hard, but we all know why I’m here. We struggled quite a lot during the Fort Joy segment, dying numerous times and occasionally losing 40 minutes to an hour at once (our fault, I know, for relying too heavily on the game’s autosave; still, frustrating). We waffled a bit on whether or not to play on Story Mode, eventually deciding that, no, the point of this project was to meet the game on its own terms, so there was no sense in defanging it for our own comfort. Nothing wrong with Story Mode, obviously, but that just isn’t what we’re going for. So, how do you meet a game like this on its own terms?
You get someone else to show you the ropes.
After looking up a handful of guides to DOS2, we realized the game’s sort-of-open secret: many of the combat mechanics and skills can be ignored in favor of a grand strategy: don’t let the enemy hit you. The actual way to speak the game’s language is to bone up on skills that stun or slow your opponents and speed up your allies, because (as we found out early on), your armor can be dented in one hit, or two if you’re lucky. The other side of this coin, of course, is that you’ll need to hit hard in a short timeframe, since the enemy can only be stalled for so long. That means you’ll need to put most of your party’s points into their damage-dealing stats.
As it turns out, once you’re speaking the game’s language, it’s fairly satisfying. We’d already put about 15 hours into it (basically all in Fort Joy, yes) before discovering that we just didn’t know how to play, which meant that we spent some time reallocating our party’s stats (a quality of life feature the game graciously provides) and purchasing the skills available that could help this strategy along. With some perseverance and a generous amount of resets, we were able to win a handful of fights.
So, did it feel good to start speaking the game’s language? Yes! Were we having fun? Not… really. We spent about 10 more hours exploring the first formal town, Driftwood, and its surrounding area. And while a lot of fights were now possible with a new understanding of the game, it was still difficult. I honestly think, having thrown ourselves at the game for so long, we just got burnt out on it. The process was slow-going for us, and we frequently dreaded returning to the game. Probably not a good sign for developing a healthy appreciation for a piece of media. Sometimes you really do need to know when to fold ‘em. Honestly, we may have held them for a bit too long.
This isn’t a total loss, I suppose. Lesson learned, we’ll probably be using a guide for this type of game in the future. I’m not really devastated; there are other Larian games to try further down the list. Maybe we’ll even return to this one.
In a decade or three.